Richard B. Alley was awarded the 2016 Climate Communication Prize at the AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony, held on 14 December 2016 in San Francisco, Calif. The Climate Communication Prize is funded by Nature’s Own, a purveyor of fossils, minerals, and handcrafted jewelry in Boulder, Colo. The prize honors an AGU ­member-­scientist “for the communication of climate science” and “highlights the importance of promoting scientific literacy, clarity of message, and efforts to foster respect and understanding of ­science-­based values as they relate to the implications of climate change.”  

Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, is a global leader with a phenomenal record of accomplishments in science communication. He is lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I report The Physical Science Basis (2007) and has also authored public and general education books, including Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future, and Earth: The Operators’ Manual. Publishers Weekly referred to Time Machine as a “brilliant combination of scientific thriller, memoir and environmental science” and recognized Earth: The Operators’ Manual as a book that “thoroughly explains the dynamics of global warming” with a “lively and positive” approach. He is also author and coauthor of numerous interpretation and overview articles in Science, Nature, Scientific American, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and education journals and supplements.

Richard has also made more than 800 nontechnical presentations to interest groups, the public, industry, and museums and has responded to an estimated 4000 media inquiries and taught a global online course on climate science. In addition, he advised the U.S. president’s science office, the U.S. vice president, the U.S. Senate, and congressional committees and senators and provided advice and briefings to many levels of government.

He provided text to the National Science Foundation that was incorporated into a speech by the president of the United States. And he is the author of 335 publications, including 241 in ­peer-­reviewed scientific journals!

Tom Wagner of NASA characterized Richard Alley as an “exceptional researcher…an outstanding communicator…a central figure in policy discourse…. His audiences at scientific meetings typically overflow the room, and he is enviably comfortable speaking to eight-year-olds.” He has traversed the continent to share the climate message with audiences, often riding those red-eye flights to make tomorrow’s lecture and then share a science discussion in a local school. Search YouTube for “Richard Alley scientist,” and thousands of videos that feature Richard’s congressional testimonies, public and science presentations, and humorous science music videos appear; his presence goes on and on. In the YouTube video “How to talk to an OSTRICH: ‘IT’S US,’” Richard makes carbon balance and isotope geology interesting and enjoyable to everyone.

Richard speaks to all audiences, sharing science, impacts, and wonderful discussions of solutions. He leaves people with greater understanding and confidence that we can address the biggest challenges of our time. How does he do all these things so well and remain our kind, humble, and generous colleague? I cannot imagine anyone more deserving of this AGU Climate Communication Prize.

—James M. Byrne, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alb., Canada

This honor is deeply humbling. My thanks to Jim Byrne, himself a brilliant climate communicator, to so many colleagues, and to AGU. I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from the best, and I thank them, especially Geoff ­Haines-Stiles. Thanks to Kerry Emanuel. Particular thanks to my wife, Cindy, and daughters, Janet and Karen, a wonderful family who all are outstanding science communicators who helped my efforts. Climate communication is almost always painted as doom and gloom. But, ultimately, our field empowers, using knowledge to make people better off. Suppose we were forced to summarize the entire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change output as a sound bite. That’s impossible, but a scholarly attempt might be, in passive voice, “There is a significant social cost of carbon.” Humanity gains good from the energy released by burning fossil fuels, and the price reflects that good, but the carbon dioxide released causes net harm that is not in the price. We could rephrase that as “Society subsidizes fossil fuels.” But we could also say, “The economy and the environment will be better off if society uses our knowledge of energy and climate wisely.” I believe all of us understand that living for today and planning for tomorrow involve trade-offs. But even if we calculate with a typical economic “pure rate of time preference,” essentially assuming we are more important than our grandchildren, ignoring climate science is still economically inefficient. In some sense, the social cost of carbon is profit waiting to be made, profit we will throw away if we reject science. People have a history of burning through energy sources far faster than nature makes more, suffering shortages, and then finding something else to burn. We did it with trees, and whales. Now we’re doing it with fossil fuels, burning in a few hundred years what took nature a few hundred million years to accumulate. But we are the first generation that truly knows how to build a sustainable energy system. Delaying that transition will lead to damaging climate changes that persist for millennia and beyond; making the transition smoothly may be one of the greatest material accomplishments of humanity. Our knowledge on climate and energy, used wisely, really can bring more good to more people. Climate communicators have an unfinished, central role to play in helping people see the good, and to reach it. I thank you for including me in the effort. —Richard B. Alley, Department of Geosciences, and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Richard B. Alley was awarded the 2007 Roger Revelle Medal at the AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony, which was held on 12 December 2007 in San Francisco, Calif. The medal is for “outstanding contributions in atmospheric sciences, atmosphere-ocean coupling, atmosphereland coupling, biogeochemical cycles, climate, or related aspects of the Earth system.”  

I can’t think of anyone on the planet more deserving of the Roger Revelle Medal than Richard Alley. He’s not only a brilliant climate scientist but also a highly gifted communicator.

Let me first say a few worlds about Richard’s science. It centers on glaciers and branches out from there to many aspects of climate and paleoclimate. To me, Richard is the “answer man.” When I’m puzzled about something I read or hear, I call or e-mail Richard. Nine times out of 10 he gives me a well-reasoned, easily understood explanation, and if it’s not on the tip of his tongue, he’ll get back to me. Traditionally, his papers deal with the movement of glaciers over their substrates and how ice shelves influence this motion, but with the advent of the central Greenland ice core program, he has immersed himself in the read-ing of these records and what they have to tell us about the relationship between climate and ocean circulation.

Of all the people I know, Richard puts the greatest effort into doing something concrete about the ongoing increase in atmospheric CO2 content. As his expertise is in glaciology, he focuses his scientific atten-tion on the response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps to global warming. He considers the IPCC estimates of melting rates to be gross minima and points to a host of processes that are likely to speed the influx of meltwater into the sea. He is not content to limit his comments on this subject to fellow scientists and students. Rather, he eagerly donates his time to reporters and congressmen, and because of his contagious enthusiasm and articulate explanations, they flock to his doorstep.

One of Roger Revelle’s great strengths was his ability to get the attention of people with influence. We dearly miss Roger and need people who can do what he did. Unfortunately, there aren’t many. But in Richard, we have such a person. Hence, I know that Roger would be pleased to no end that Richard is receiving the medal bearing his name. Hail to Richard Alley!

For those of you who are not acquainted with Richard’s career, he did his Ph.D. research at the University of Wisconsin under the direction of Charles Bentley. After receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1987, he stayed on as a postdoc for 1 year. Then he took a teaching job at Penn State, where he remains today. As of the year 2000, he was appointed the Evan Pugh Professor. Along the way, he married Cindy and together they raised two daughters who are now in college. Despite many offers to move elsewhere, including several from Columbia, he and Cindy have chosen to remain in “Paterno” land.

—WALLACE S. BROECKER, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, N.Y.

Thank you, thank you. To hear such wonderful words from the great environmental scientist Wally Broecker, in the name of the “grandfather of the greenhouse effect” Roger Revelle, is humbling indeed. We are all woven together in this wonderful enterprise. I never knew Roger Revelle, but he helped create the International Geophysical Year, in which Charlie Bentley (who overlapped with Wally at Columbia) was one of the heroes, and Charlie advised my Ph.D. and introduced my name to Wally. We members of the American Geophysical Union are never more than a step or two apart, so all of you share in this award. Our science of the Earth has always been useful as well as fun, the venue where the vast sweep of time and space meets the bottom line of natural resources and hazards. But more and more, we are engaged in something even bigger. What I do really does affect you, no matter who you are or where you live. The realization of our connectedness has grown over the millennia to become clear for all who will look, in all its frightening beauty. From air quality to fisheries to the ozone layer, we matter to each other, with high scientific confidence. The most obvious manifestation of this interconnectedness may be the dominantly human cause of recent climate change. The most compelling challenge of this interconnectedness may be that our deci-sions will determine whether or not future human-caused changes are much larger than those of the past. The choices really are ours, and they really will be made by people informed by your discoveries, guided by your assessments, and inspired by your educational and outreach efforts. We have to get it right; the world is counting on us. The North Atlantic is looking a little more stable than we once feared, but the reality of past abrupt climate changes there and elsewhere, and the possibility of such changes in the future, still drives many of us in this field that Wally founded. I believe that the IPCC was completely correct that we know too little about ice sheets to provide either “a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.” The joy of the discoveries to be made in filling that knowledge gap is tempered by the embarrassment that we are so far behind in making those discoveries. I thank my colleagues in ice core science, the flow of glaciers and ice sheets and their influence on landscapes and biogeochemical cycling, and the coupling of ice with ocean, air, and land. The communities investigating abrupt climate change and ice sheet collapse are percolating with the brilliance that is absolutely essential to predicting the almost unpredictable. Penn State has been a welcoming home for me, and I thank my friends there. To have Sridhar Anandakrishnan, Dave Pollard, Todd Sowers, and so many others just down the hall, and Byron Parizek and Dave Reusch in the same office suite, is a gift indeed, as are the present students and those who have generously remained in touch after graduating. I thank my dear wife, Cindy, and daughters, Janet and Karen, for love and kindness and cheerful acquiescence to the incessant demands of the science. And I thank you of the AGU for this honor, and Wally for his guidance and inspiration. The lovely tapestry of our science is a central part of the far vaster picture of the planet, and I’m eager to see what else we can learn. —RICHARD B. ALLEY, Pennsylvania State University, University Park