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.
The global warming controversy concerns the public debate over whether global warming is occurring, how much has occurred in modern times, what has caused it, what its effects will be, whether any action can or should be taken to curb it, and if so what that action should be. In the scientific literature, there is a very strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view, though a few organizations with members in extractive industries hold non-committal positions, and some have tried to persuade the public that climate change is not happening, or if the climate is changing it is not because of human influence, attempting to sow doubt in the scientific consensus.
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.
There is a strong scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that this warming is mainly caused by human activities. This consensus is supported by various studies of scientists' opinions and by position statements of scientific organizations, many of which explicitly agree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis reports.
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.
Hockey stick graphs present the global or hemispherical mean temperature record of the past 500 to 2000 years as shown by quantitative climate reconstructions based on climate proxy records. These reconstructions have consistently shown a slow long term cooling trend changing into relatively rapid warming in the 20th century, with the instrumental temperature record by 2000 exceeding earlier temperatures.
Tom Victor Segalstad is a Norwegian geologist. He has taught geology and geophysics at the University of Oslo, Norway, and at Pennsylvania State University, United States.
Major environmental issues caused by contemporary climate change in the Arctic region range from the well-known, such as the loss of sea ice or melting of the Greenland ice sheet, to more obscure, but deeply significant issues, such as permafrost thaw, as well as related social consequences for locals and the geopolitical ramifications of these changes. The Arctic is likely to be especially affected by climate change because of the high projected rate of regional warming and associated impacts. Temperature projections for the Arctic region were assessed in 2007: These suggested already averaged warming of about 2 °C to 9 °C by the year 2100. The range reflects different projections made by different climate models, run with different forcing scenarios. Radiative forcing is a measure of the effect of natural and human activities on the climate. Different forcing scenarios reflect things such as different projections of future human greenhouse gas emissions.
This is a list of climate change topics.
Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The climate of Svalbard is principally a result of its latitude, which is between 74° and 81° north. Climate is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as the average weather over a 30-year period. The North Atlantic Current moderates Svalbard's temperatures, particularly during winter, giving it up to 20 °C (36 °F) higher winter temperature than similar latitudes in continental Russia and Canada. This keeps the surrounding waters open and navigable most of the year. The interior fjord areas and valleys, sheltered by the mountains, have fewer temperature differences than the coast, with about 2 °C lower summer temperatures and 3 °C higher winter temperatures. On the south of the largest island, Spitsbergen, the temperature is slightly higher than further north and west. During winter, the temperature difference between south and north is typically 5 °C, and about 3 °C in summer. Bear Island (Bjørnøya) has average temperatures even higher than the rest of the archipelago.
The Wegman Report was prepared in 2006 by three statisticians led by Edward Wegman at the request of Rep. Joe Barton of the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce to validate criticisms made by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick of reconstructions of the temperature record of the past 1000 years, in particular the reconstructions by Mann, Bradley and Hughes of what had been dubbed the hockey stick graph.
The North Report was a 2006 report evaluating reconstructions of the temperature record of the past two millennia, providing an overview of the state of the science and the implications for understanding of global warming. It was produced by a National Research Council committee, chaired by Gerald North, at the request of Representative Sherwood Boehlert as chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science.
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 late Cenozoic to recent, 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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