Broecker was awarded the Prize with this motivation:.
Broecker was born in Chicago in 1931
and grew up in suburban Oak Park.
Climate scientist Wallace Smith Broecker, who popularised the term“global warming” has passed
away in New York.
Broecker's projected warming was reasonably close to observations for a few
decades, but recently has been considerably higher.
This is mostly due to Broecker overestimating how CO2 emissions
and atmospheric concentrations would increase after his article was published.
Broecker used a simple energy balance model
to estimate what would happen to the Earth's temperature if atmospheric CO2 continued to increase rapidly after 1975.
Broecker brought“global warming” into common use with a 1975 article that correctly
predicted rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would lead to pronounced warming.
The first available projection of future temperatures due to global warming appeared in an article in Science in
1975 published by Columbia University scientist Prof Wally Broecker.