Wallace Broecker; geochemist coined ‘global warming’

Wallace Broecker, a geochemist who issued early warnings on global warming – a term he helped popularize in the 1970s – and later developed a sweeping, widely accepted model for how the oceans circulate heat and affect the earth’s climate, died Feb. 18 at a hospital in Manhattan.

He was 87.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Cynthia Kennedy.

Raised in an evangelical Christian family in suburban Chicago, he grew up in a home where modern geological thinking was dismissed and where Earth was believed to be only a few thousand years old. But he eventually abandoned that false view of the planet’s history and became a grim prophet of its future, serving as one of the first researchers to predict rising temperatures as a result of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Sometimes described as “the grandfather of climate science” and the “dean of climate scientists,” Broecker spent more than six decades as a student and professor at Columbia University, based at the school’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, about 15 miles north of Manhattan.

Although he was often credited with putting the term “global warming” into scientific circulation, through a 1975 research paper that featured those words in its title, Broecker was probably best known for his research on the chemistry, history and grand structure of Earth’s seas and oceans.

Far from a vast and relatively unchanging body of water, he found that the oceans formed a delicate system, highly susceptible to changes in climate.