William Ruddiman

William F. Ruddiman (born January 8, 1943 in Washington, DC ) is an American paleoclimatologist and marine geologist . He was a professor at the University of Virginia until his retirement .

William Ruddiman studied geology at Williams College with a Bachelor Accounts in 1964 and in 1969 at Columbia University doctorate in marine geology. He was then Senior Scientist and Oceanographer at the US Naval Oceanographic Office in Chesapeake Bay ( Maryland ) until 1976 and at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University from 1976 to 1991 , from 1984 as Doherty Senior Research Scientist and from 1982 to 1986 as Deputy Director . In 1982/83 he was head of the CLIMAP (Climate Long range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction) project of the National Science Foundation . From 1991 he was Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, where he was head of the Faculty of Environmental Science from 1993 to 1996 and was retired in 2001.

He has participated in 15 oceanographic expeditions, including as co-leader of 2 expeditions for deep-sea drilling. He was best known for research on the earth's climate in the past . In the 1980s he published the theory that the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas due to increased chemical erosion and the associated reduction in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributed to the cooling of the world climate in the last Ice Age. He also argued that the regular monsoon cycles in South Asia resulted from the rise of the Himalayas.

In particular, however, he is known for his thesis put forward in the 2000s ( early anthropogenic hypothesis ) that anthropogenic warming of the world climate did not only begin with the industrial revolution from the 18th century, but with the emergence of intensive agriculture around 7000 Years. This caused early greenhouse gas emissions , through deforestation emissions of carbon dioxide by wet rice cultivation and livestock those of methane . Without these climate-warming influences, according to Ruddiman, the earth would again be on the way into a new ice age cold phase.

In 2010 he received the Lyell Medal . Ruddiman is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union . In 2012 he received the Distinguished Career Award from the American Quaternary Association and in 2013 the Coppock Research Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society .

Fonts

• Editor: Tectonic uplift and climate change. Plenum Press, 1997.
• Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton University, 2005 (with a popular science presentation of his thesis of early human climate impact).
• Earth's Climate, Past and Future. Freeman, 2nd edition 2008 (academic introduction to the topic of climate history).
• Earth Transformed. Freeman, 2013.

Some essays:

• with JE Kutzbach: Plateau Uplift and Climate Change. In: Scientific American. Volume 264, 1991, pp. 66-74.
• with Maureen E. Raymo, PN Froelich: Influence of late Cenozoic mountain building on ocean geochemical cycles. In: Geology. 16, 1988, pp. 649-653.
• The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago. In: Climatic Change. 2003 (here he first presents the hypothesis of the early anthropogenic climate influence).

Web links

• Homepage