John W. Birks | |
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![]() John W. Birks | |
Born | John W. Birks 10 December 1946 Vinita, Oklahoma, United States |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley University of Arkansas |
Known for | Research in atmospheric chemistry, co-developer of the nuclear winter theory and development of air pollution monitors |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | [ escholarship |
Doctoral advisor | Harold S. Johnston |
Website | twobtech |
John W. Birks (born 10 December 1946, in Vinita, Oklahoma, USA) is an American atmospheric chemist and entrepreneur who is best known for co-discovery with Paul Crutzen of the potential atmospheric effects of nuclear war known as nuclear winter. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] His most recent awards include the 2019 Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award for his contributions to atmospheric chemistry and the 2022 Future of Life Award for discovery of the nuclear winter effect.
As an entrepreneur, Birks co-founded the two technology companies, 2B Technologies and InDevR. At 2B Technologies he served as president during 2005-2020 and currently serves as Chief Scientist. [8] [9]
Birks received his BS (1968) degree in chemistry with high honors from the University of Arkansas. [9] He carried out his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley where he completed his MS (1970) and PhD (1974) in physical chemistry under the direction of Professor Harold S. Johnston, being co-directed by Henry F. Schaeffer III and William H. Mille r during his final year of graduate studies. [9] During a 1970-72 break between his MS and PhD studies at Berkeley, he performed alternative service as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War as a research assistant at the Kansas University Medical Center.
Birks began his academic career in 1974 when he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry. [10]
In 1977, he accepted the positions of associate professor of Chemistry and Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder where he could collaborate more closely with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. [9] He was promoted to full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at CU Boulder in 1984 and served as chair of the department during 1995–1998. [9]
Birks received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1979 and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.
Birks co-founded 2B Technologies, a company specializing in the development of instruments for environmental and atmospheric measurements, with Dr. Mark Bollinger in 1998. [9] [11] After twenty-five years of service, he retired from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2002 and joined 2B Technologies as vice president. [9] In 2005, he assumed leadership of 2B Technologies as president.
Since 2002, he has been Professor Emeritus of the Department of Chemistry [7] and Fellow Emeritus of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. [12]
In 2003, Birks received the ACS Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology from the American Chemical Society "for his measurements of the rate coefficients of chemical reactions key to understanding stratospheric ozone depletion, co-development of the nuclear winter theory, and invention of new analytical instruments for environmental analysis." [13]
In 2009, he founded the Global Ozone (GO3) Project, a non-profit middle and high school outreach program for ground-level ozone measurements. [10] The AQTreks educational outreach program, an outgrowth of the GO3 Project that allows students to perform mobile monitoring of air pollutants along treks of their own design, was founded by Birks and his colleagues in 2017. [10]
In 2019, Birks received the Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award, also known as the "Nobel prize of air pollution and climate science", from the California Air Resources Board (CARB). [14] The award was given for having "advanced our understanding of Earth's atmosphere through more than 40 years of research, teaching and technological innovation." [14]
In 2022, John Birks received the Future of Life Award from the Future of Life Institute "for reducing the risk of nuclear war by developing and popularizing the science of nuclear winter." [15]
Birks' early research focused on discovering new reactions that are important in controlling ozone levels in the stratosphere. He and his research team at the University of Illinois and later at the University of Colorado Boulder published some of the first measurements of the temperature-dependent rate coefficients and product distributions for important stratospheric reactions. Some notable works were introductions of the species chlorine nitrate (ClONO2) [16] and hypochlorous acid (HOCl) [17] to stratospheric chemistry via measurements of the rates of reactions forming those species.
In 1977, the rate coefficient for the reaction ClO + NO2 + M → ClONO2 + M was first reported by the Birks research group. [16] Although the formation of chlorine nitrate reduces the effect of chlorine on stratospheric ozone at mid latitudes, it was later discovered by Susan Solomon that chlorine nitrate plays a key role in the formation of the Antarctic "ozone hole", reacting in the Austral spring with HCl on the surfaces of polar stratospheric clouds to produce catalytic forms of chlorine. [18] The Birks group also was among the first to report temperature-dependent rate coefficients and branching ratios for catalytic reactions involving bromine (BrO+ClO and BrO+BrO reactions), which were found to contribute ~20% of ozone depletion in the Antarctic ozone hole. [19] [20] [21] [22]
During his 1981/82 academic sabbatical at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany, Birks worked with Paul J. Crutzen (Nobel Laurette, 1995) [23] and wrote the first publication introducing the subject of what became known as nuclear winter: The atmosphere after a nuclear war: Twilight at noon (1982). [24] Their calculations showed that fires in cities, forests and oil production and storage facilities resulting from a major nuclear war would produce enough smoke to block as much as 99 percent of sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface throughout the northern hemisphere. [25] This work, published in 1982 in a special issue of the Swedish journal Ambio as part of a larger study of the environmental effects of nuclear warfare commissioned by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, was followed by a paper by Richard Turco, Brian Toon, Thomas Ackerman, [26] James Pollack and Carl Sagan (TTAPS) in the journal Science in 1983. [27] These two papers resulted in multi-year studies involving numerous government agencies and laboratories and evaluation reports by the National Academy of Sciences (1985), [28] the World Health Organization (WHO), [29] and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU/SCOPE) [30] [31] on the environmental effects of nuclear war.
In 1998 Birks co-founded 2B Technologies with Dr. Mark Bollinger to develop and commercialize a new generation of miniature air monitoring instruments. At 2B Technologies, Birks led the development of more than 20 different models of highly portable and highly accurate instruments for trace-level monitoring of the air pollutants O3, NO, NO2, NOx, mercury and black carbon, and portable calibrators for O3, NO and NO2. [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] Seven of the instruments, including the pocket-sized Personal Ozone Monitor (POM), [33] have been designated as EPA Federal Equivalent Methods (FEM). [40] In 2020, 2B Technologies received a Tibbetts Award from the Small Business Administration for development of many of these air monitoring technologies through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) federal research grants program. [41] Birks served as Principal Investigator on the 15 SBIR grants awarded to 2B Technologies by the Department of Energy (DOE), National Science Foundation (NSF), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIEHS/NIH). [42]
In 2009 Dr. Birks founded the Global Ozone Project or "GO3" Project, a middle and high school outreach program where students at more than 100 schools around the world measure ozone using a FEM ozone monitor (2B Tech Model 106-L) along with meteorological parameters using a Davis weather station. [43] In that project, data were continuously uploaded to a database for display on Google Earth and online graphing along with participation from schools around the world, including 30 international schools. More than 12 million ozone measurements and associated meteorological parameters were uploaded by these student-run monitoring stations. [44] This fixed-base monitoring program was replaced by a mobile monitoring project, AQTreks, in which students explore the concentrations of air pollutants (PM1, PM2.5, PM10, CO, CO2) in their communities along "treks" of their own design. Approximately 20,000 students at more than 250 U.S. schools have participated in the GO3 Project and AQTreks over the past 10 years. [44]
Some of Birks's honors include the below:
Ozone is an inorganic molecule with the chemical formula O
3. It is a pale blue gas with a distinctively pungent smell. It is an allotrope of oxygen that is much less stable than the diatomic allotrope O
2, breaking down in the lower atmosphere to O
2 (dioxygen). Ozone is formed from dioxygen by the action of ultraviolet (UV) light and electrical discharges within the Earth's atmosphere. It is present in very low concentrations throughout the latter, with its highest concentration high in the ozone layer of the stratosphere, which absorbs most of the Sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
The ozone layer or ozone shield is a region of Earth's stratosphere that absorbs most of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation. It contains a high concentration of ozone (O3) in relation to other parts of the atmosphere, although still small in relation to other gases in the stratosphere. The ozone layer contains less than 10 parts per million of ozone, while the average ozone concentration in Earth's atmosphere as a whole is about 0.3 parts per million. The ozone layer is mainly found in the lower portion of the stratosphere, from approximately 15 to 35 kilometers (9 to 22 mi) above Earth, although its thickness varies seasonally and geographically.
Ozone depletion consists of two related events observed since the late 1970s: a steady lowering of about four percent in the total amount of ozone in Earth's atmosphere, and a much larger springtime decrease in stratospheric ozone around Earth's polar regions. The latter phenomenon is referred to as the ozone hole. There are also springtime polar tropospheric ozone depletion events in addition to these stratospheric events.
The stratosphere is the second layer of the atmosphere of Earth, located above the troposphere and below the mesosphere. The stratosphere is an atmospheric layer composed of stratified temperature layers, with the warm layers of air high in the sky and the cool layers of air in the low sky, close to the planetary surface of the Earth. The increase of temperature with altitude is a result of the absorption of the Sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation by the ozone layer. The temperature inversion is in contrast to the troposphere, near the Earth's surface, where temperature decreases with altitude.
Peroxyacetyl nitrate is a peroxyacyl nitrate. It is a secondary pollutant present in photochemical smog. It is thermally unstable and decomposes into peroxyethanoyl radicals and nitrogen dioxide gas. It is a lachrymatory substance, meaning that it irritates the lungs and eyes.
Ground-level ozone (O3), also known as surface-level ozone and tropospheric ozone, is a trace gas in the troposphere (the lowest level of the Earth's atmosphere), with an average concentration of 20–30 parts per billion by volume (ppbv), with close to 100 ppbv in polluted areas. Ozone is also an important constituent of the stratosphere, where the ozone layer (2 to 8 parts per million ozone) exists which is located between 10 and 50 kilometers above the Earth's surface. The troposphere extends from the ground up to a variable height of approximately 14 kilometers above sea level. Ozone is least concentrated in the ground layer (or planetary boundary layer) of the troposphere. Ground-level or tropospheric ozone is created by chemical reactions between NOx gases (oxides of nitrogen produced by combustion) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The combination of these chemicals in the presence of sunlight form ozone. Its concentration increases as height above sea level increases, with a maximum concentration at the tropopause. About 90% of total ozone in the atmosphere is in the stratosphere, and 10% is in the troposphere. Although tropospheric ozone is less concentrated than stratospheric ozone, it is of concern because of its health effects. Ozone in the troposphere is considered a greenhouse gas, and may contribute to global warming.
Chemiluminescence is the emission of light (luminescence) as the result of a chemical reaction. There may also be limited emission of heat. Given reactants A and B, with an excited intermediate ◊,
Chloromethane, also called methyl chloride, Refrigerant-40, R-40 or HCC 40, is an organic compound with the chemical formula CH3Cl. One of the haloalkanes, it is a colorless, sweet-smelling, flammable gas. Methyl chloride is a crucial reagent in industrial chemistry, although it is rarely present in consumer products, and was formerly utilized as a refrigerant.
Mario José Molina Henríquez was a Mexican physical chemist. He played a pivotal role in the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, and was a co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in discovering the threat to the Earth's ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases. He was the first Mexican-born scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the third Mexican-born person to receive a Nobel prize.
Dinitrogen pentoxide is the chemical compound with the formula N2O5. It is one of the binary nitrogen oxides, a family of compounds that only contain nitrogen and oxygen. It exists as colourless crystals that sublime slightly above room temperature, yielding a colorless gas.
Atmospheric chemistry is a branch of atmospheric science in which the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere and that of other planets is studied. It is a multidisciplinary approach of research and draws on environmental chemistry, physics, meteorology, computer modeling, oceanography, geology and volcanology and other disciplines. Research is increasingly connected with other areas of study such as climatology.
Paul Jozef Crutzen was a Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his work on atmospheric chemistry and specifically for his efforts in studying the formation and decomposition of atmospheric ozone. In addition to studying the ozone layer and climate change, he popularized the term Anthropocene to describe a proposed new epoch in the Quaternary period when human actions have a drastic effect on the Earth. He was also amongst the first few scientists to introduce the idea of a nuclear winter to describe the potential climatic effects stemming from large-scale atmospheric pollution including smoke from forest fires, industrial exhausts, and other sources like oil fires.
In atmospheric chemistry, NOx is shorthand for nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, the nitrogen oxides that are most relevant for air pollution. These gases contribute to the formation of smog and acid rain, as well as affecting tropospheric ozone.
1,1,2-Trichloro-1,2,2-trifluoroethane, also called trichlorotrifluoroethane or CFC-113, is a chlorofluorocarbon. It has the formula Cl2FC−CClF2. This colorless, volatile liquid is a versatile solvent.
Paul O. Wennberg is the R. Stanton Avery Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is the director of the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science. He is chair of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network and a founding member of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory project, which created NASA's first spacecraft for analysis of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He is also the principal investigator for the Mars Atmospheric Trace Molecule Occultation Spectrometer (MATMOS) to investigate trace gases in Mars's atmosphere.
SAGE III on ISS is the fourth generation of a series of NASA Earth-observing instruments, known as the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment. The first SAGE III instrument was launched on a Russian Meteor-3M satellite. The recently revised SAGE III was mounted to the International Space Station where it uses the unique vantage point of ISS to make long-term measurements of ozone, aerosols, water vapor, and other gases in Earth's atmosphere.
Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts is a Canadian-American atmospheric chemist. She is a professor in the chemistry department at the University of California, Irvine and is the Director of AirUCI Institute. Finlayson-Pitts and James N. Pitts, Jr. are the authors of Chemistry of the Upper and Lower Atmosphere: Theory, Experiments, and Applications (1999). She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2006 and is the laureate for the 2017 Garvan–Olin Medal. In 2016 she co-chaired the National Academy of Science report "The Future of Atmospheric Chemistry Research"
The chlorine cycle (Cl) is the biogeochemical cycling of chlorine through the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. Chlorine is most commonly found as inorganic chloride ions, or a number of chlorinated organic forms. Over 5,000 biologically-produced chlorinated organics have been identified.
Anne Ritger Douglass is atmospheric physicist known for her research on chlorinated compounds and the ozone layer.
Bromine mononitrate is an inorganic compound, derived from bromine and nitric acid with the chemical formula BrNO3. The compound is a yellow liquid, decomposes at temperatures above 0 °C.
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