Raymond S. Bradley is a climatologist and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also research director of the Climate System Research Center. Bradley's work indicates that the warming of Earth's climate system in the twentieth century is inexplicable via natural mechanisms.
Ray Bradley is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He did his undergraduate work at Southampton University (U.K.) and his post-graduate studies (M.S., Ph.D.) at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder. He also earned a D.Sc. from Southampton University, for his contributions in paleoclimatology. In 2015, he received the Zuckerberg Leadership Chair from the University of Massachusetts Foundation, and he was a visiting professor at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Bradley received the Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union and honorary degrees (D.Sc honoris causa) from Lancaster University (U.K.), Queen's University (Canada) and the University of Bern (Switzerland). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Arctic Institute of North America. He was also elected as a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and Academia Europaea, the European Academy of Science.
Bradley's research focuses on climate variability over recent centuries and millennia, using instrumental and proxy records of past climate, making major contributions to our understanding of climate change over the last century. He has made it clear that these changes are well outside the envelope of natural variability that the earth has experienced over recent millennia. His research on natural forcing factors has helped to clarify the factors that caused climates to vary in the past. He has shown the critical importance of well-calibrated paleoclimate proxies for placing recent changes in a long-term context, thereby clarifying the important effects that humans have had on climate in recent decades. This led to him becoming the target of political attacks by global warming deniers, to which he has responded, in terms that provide a clear explanation of the issues involved for the public at large, in "Global Warming and Political Intimidation", 2011, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, also available in a Japanese translation [2012] by Kagaku Dojin, Tokyo.
Bradley has written or edited thirteen books on climatic change including "Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary" (3rd edition, 2014) [Elsevier/Academic Press, San Diego; ISBN9780123869135, which won a 2015 Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association. Other books include, "The Hadley Circulation, Present, Past and Future" (eds. H.F. Diaz, and R.S. Bradley, 2004. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht); "Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future" (eds. K. Alverson, R.S. Bradley and T.F. Pedersen, 2003; Springer, Berlin); "Climate Change and Society" (R.S. Bradley and N.E. Law, 2001, Stanley Thornes, Cheltenham, U.K.); "Climate Variations and Forcing Mechanisms of the Last 2000 years" (eds. P.D. Jones, R.S. Bradley and J. Jouzel, 1996. Springer, Berlin), and "Climate Since A.D. 1500" (eds. R.S. Bradley and P.D. Jones, 1995. Routledge, London). In addition, Bradley has authored/co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles on climate change, covering a wide range of topics. He has a particular focus on the climate of the Arctic, and of mountainous areas, reflecting his long-standing interests in those regions. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in the Arctic and North Atlantic region (Canadian High Arctic, Greenland, Svalbard, the Faroe Islands and northern Norway). Bradley's research has been supported primarily by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NOAA and the National Geographic Society.
Ray Bradley has been an advisor to various government and international agencies, including the U.S., Swiss, Swedish, Finnish, German and U.K. National Science Foundations, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Research Council, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the US-Russia Working Group on Environmental Protection, and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP). He has given many TV and radio interviews, and is a speaker on climate change and global warming, and global environmental changes. He has given talks at venues in China, Japan, Dubai, England, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada, Chile, Argentina and the United States.
Interests and activities
Bradley's research interests are in climatology and paleoclimatology, with a particular focus on how climate has changed since the last ice age. He has worked in the Arctic—Ellesmere and Cornwallis Island in the Canadian High Arctic, southern and southeastern Greenland, the Faroe Islands, northwestern Norway and Svalbard. He has given lectures on climate change, global warming and climate impacts to a wide range of audiences at various venues around the world, and is often available for public speaking engagements.
Related Research Articles
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, longitude, terrain, altitude, land use and nearby water bodies and their currents.
In physical geography, tundra is a type of biome where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons. The term is a Russian word adapted from the Sámi languages. There are three regions and associated types of tundra: Arctic tundra, alpine tundra, and Antarctic tundra.
Paleoclimatology is the scientific study of climates predating the invention of meteorological instruments, when no direct measurement data were available. As instrumental records only span a tiny part of Earth's history, the reconstruction of ancient climate is important to understand natural variation and the evolution of the current climate.
The temperature record of the last 2,000 years is reconstructed using data from climate proxy records in conjunction with the modern instrumental temperature record which only covers the last 170 years at a global scale. Large-scale reconstructions covering part or all of the 1st millennium and 2nd millennium have shown that recent temperatures are exceptional: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 concluded that "Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years." The curve shown in graphs of these reconstructions is widely known as the hockey stick graph because of the sharp increase in temperatures during the last century. As of 2010 this broad pattern was supported by more than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, with variations in how flat the pre-20th-century "shaft" appears. Sparseness of proxy records results in considerable uncertainty for earlier periods.
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Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.
The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), Climate Change 2001, is an assessment of available scientific and socio-economic information on climate change by the IPCC. Statements of the IPCC or information from the TAR were often used as a reference showing a scientific consensus on the subject of global warming. The Third Assessment Report (TAR) was completed in 2001 and consists of four reports, three of them from its Working Groups: Working Group I: The Scientific Basis; Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; Working Group III: Mitigation; Synthesis Report. A number of the TAR's conclusions are given quantitative estimates of how probable it is that they are correct, e.g., greater than 66% probability of being correct. These are "Bayesian" probabilities, which are based on an expert assessment of all the available evidence.
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Edward Wegman is an American statistician and was a professor of statistics at George Mason University (GMU) until his retirement in 2018. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and past chair of the National Research Council Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. In addition to his work in the field of statistical computing, Wegman contributed a report to a Congressional hearing on climate change at the request of Republican Rep. Joe Barton. Wegman's report supported criticisms of the methodology of two specific paleoclimate studies into the temperature record of the past 1000 years, and argued that climate scientists were excessively isolated from the statistical mainstream. Subsequently, significant portions of Wegman's report were found to have been copied without attribution from a variety of sources, including Wikipedia, and a publication based on the report was retracted.
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This is a list of climate change topics.
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Ole Humlum is a Danish professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, Department of Geosciences and adjunct professor of physical geography at the University Centre in Svalbard. His academic focus includes glacial and periglacial geomorphology and climatology.
Eystein Jansen is a Norwegian professor in marine geology and paleoceanography at the University of Bergen, and researcher and former Director of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (BCCR). He is also the vice-president of the European Research Council (ERC), as the scientific leader of the EU's commitment to basic research in the fields of physical sciences and engineering.
Julie Brigham-Grette is a glacial geologist and a professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she co-directs the Joseph Hartshorn Quaternary Laboratory. Her research expertise is in glacial geology and paleoclimatology; she has made important contributions to Arctic marine and terrestrial paleoclimate records of the late Cenozoic to recent periods, the evolution of the Arctic climate, especially in the Beringia/Bering Strait region, and was a leader of the international Lake El’gygytgyn Drilling Project in northeastern Russia.
Samuel George Harker Philander is a climate scientist, known for his work on atmospheric circulation and oceanic currents, particularly El Niño. He is the Knox Taylor Professor emeritus of Geosciences at Princeton University.
Bette Otto-Bliesner is an earth scientist known for her modeling of Earth's past climate and its changes over different geological eras.
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