George Kukla

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George Kukla , actually Jiří Kukla (born March 14, 1930 in Prague , Czechoslovakia , † May 31, 2014 in Suffern , New York , United States ) was a Czech paleoclimatologist and researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University .

Life

He was a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences . In 2003 he was awarded the Milutin Milankovic Medal.

Kukla believed that all ice ages in Earth's history were preceded by warming. He believed that current global warming is largely natural and will end in a new ice age.

Kukla was instrumental in setting up a national climate program in the United States of America in the 1970s. In January 1972 Georg Kukla and Robert Matthews met for a conference at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. 42 of the top researchers from Europe and America at the time took part. The topic of discussion was “The Present Interglacial, How and When will it End?”. The conclusions were summarized in two 1972 publications.

In a letter dated December 3, 1972, Kukla and Matthews gave their opinion to the office of US President Nixon. In the letter, they warned of the possibility of massive global climate deterioration and its effects. While maintaining the pace of that time, they expected "Ice Age temperatures in about a century".

The White House forwarded the Kukla Matthews letter to the State Department's International Scientific and Technical Affairs Office. This in turn forwarded the letter to the most highly charged, interdepartmental body, the Interdepartmental Committee for Atmospheric Sciences (ICAS), in order to review the matter and take appropriate action. The ICAS then put together an ad hoc committee. Since the greenhouse effect was being debated in science at the same time, the need for a so-called Climate Diagnostics Center soon became apparent to investigate the causes and effects of climate change. Meanwhile, in the face of a cold winter in 1976/77, Kukla publicly warned against talking about a new ice age just because of "a few meters of snow". President Carter finally signed the National Climate Program Act on September 17, 1978. The Climate Diagnostics Center became part of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration .

In interviews over the past few years, Kukla took the position that the scenario he described in the 1970s could be expected in the next five thousand years and that the alternation between the Ice Age and the Interglacial Age has always happened in the same way in the past.

The title of his last most important publication, co-authored with JF McManus, D.-D. Rousseau and I. Chuine reads: G. Kukla: How long and how stable was the last interglacial? . In: Quaternary Science Reviews . 16, No. 6, 1997, pp. 605-612. ISSN  0277-3791 . doi : 10.1016 / S0277-3791 (96) 00114-X .

literature

  • G. Kukla, RK Matthews and JM Mitchell, Jr., The end of the present interglacial. Quaternary Research 2 (1972), pp. 261-269

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In Memory of George Kukla - Obituary
  2. ↑ Milutin Milankovic Medal Award
  3. ↑ Origins of a 'diagnostics climate center', Robert W. Reeves and Daphne Gemmill, PDF 468.45 kB
  4. ↑ The Nation: FORECAST: UNSETTLED WEATHER AHEAD, Time, January 31, 1977
  5. ↑ When will the next ice age come ?, Bild der Wissenschaft, February 18, 2000 ( Memento from July 13, 2004 in the Internet Archive )


personal data
SURNAME Kukla, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kukla, Jiří (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech paleoclimatologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague , Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH May 31, 2014
Place of death Suffern , New York , United States