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Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements (2010)

Chapter: Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
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Appendix E
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members

Stephen W. Pacala, chair, is Frederick D. Petrie Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and director of the Princeton Environmental Institute. He also co-directs the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a collaboration between Princeton University, British Petroleum, and the Ford Motor Company to develop strategies to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions. Dr. Pacala received his Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University. His research focuses on ecology and modeling, with an emphasis on the interactions between greenhouse gases, climate, and the biosphere. He was a coordinating lead author of a chapter on the North American carbon budget in the 2006 assessment The First State of the Carbon Cycle Report: The North American Carbon Budget and Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle (CCSP, 2007). Among his many honors are the David Starr Jordan Prize and the George Mercer Award of the Ecological Society of America. Dr. Pacala is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.


Clare Breidenich is an independent consultant with more than 12 years of experience on climate change policy in general and on the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in particular. From 2002 to 2006, she was a senior program officer at the UNFCCC Secretariat, where she managed the review process for national greenhouse gas inventories of 40 countries and directed activities related to data systems and procedures for the Kyoto Protocol’s reporting, review and compliance procedures. This experience, as well as work for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the State Department has given her extensive knowledge of the technical and policy options for greenhouse gas mitigation, including market mechanisms, and methodologies and protocols for estimation, reporting, and verification of greenhouse gas emissions and reductions. Ms. Breidenich has an M.S. in environmental science from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.


Peter G. Brewer is an ocean chemist and senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. His research interests include the ocean chemistry of greenhouse gases, the geochemistry of gas hydrates, ocean acidification, and the evolution of the oceanic fossil-fuel CO2 signal. He has devised novel techniques for measuring and extracting the oceanic signatures of global change. Dr. Brewer has served on many committees associated with ocean trace gases, including the Joint Global Ocean Fluxes Committee, the National Research Council (NRC) Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse Gas Warming: Mitigation, and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research’s Working Group 75 on Ocean CO2 Monitoring. He was a member of MEDEA. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Geophysical Union, serving as president of the Ocean Sciences Section for 2 years. He received a Ph.D. and a B.S. from Liverpool University in England.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
×

Inez Fung is a professor of atmospheric sciences and founding co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the interactions between climate change and biogeochemical cycles, particularly the processes that maintain and alter the composition of the atmosphere. Her research emphasis is on using atmospheric transport models and a coupled carbon-climate model to examine how CO2 sources and sinks are changing. She was also a member of the science team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO). Dr. Fung is a recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s Roger Revelle Medal and appears in a new National Academy of Sciences biography series for middle-school readers Women’s Adventure in Science. She is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her B.S. in applied mathematics and her Ph.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).


Michael R. Gunson is an atmospheric scientist and the chief scientist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Earth Science and Technology Directorate. His research interests focus on understanding the physical and chemical processes of the Earth’s atmosphere using space-based instruments. He is the deputy principal investigator of NASA’s Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer, which measures the radiance emitted by Earth’s surface and by gases and particles in Earth’s atmosphere. The data are used to study air quality and transport of pollution around the globe. Dr. Gunson was awarded several NASA exceptional service medals for his leadership and scientific achievements associated with space-based instruments that measure atmospheric radiative transfer, chemistry, and physical processes. He received a Ph.D. and a B.S. in chemistry from Bristol University.


Gemma Heddle is the carbon management adviser with Corporate Health, Environment, and Safety at Chevron. She is responsible for managing the development and deployment of Chevron’s new energy and emissions inventory system, for revising Chevron’s greenhouse gas emissions reporting protocol, for leading the European Union and U.S. focus areas of the company’s carbon markets team, and for managing Chevron’s internal carbon trading registry. Prior to joining Chevron in 2005, she worked as a technology policy analyst at the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) in Australia. Ms. Heddle holds a dual M.S. in technology and policy and in civil and environmental engineering from MIT, an M.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney, Australia, and a double B.S. and B.A. from the University of Adelaide, Australia.


Beverly E. Law is a professor of global change forest science in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University. Her research focuses on the role of forests, woodlands, and shrublands in the global carbon cycle. Her approach is interdisciplinary, involving observations and models to study changes in climate, management, and other land-use changes that influence carbon and water cycling across a region over seasons to decades. Dr. Law is the science chair of the AmeriFlux network, which provides continuous observations of ecosystem level exchanges of CO2, water, and energy at more than 100 research sites in the Americas. She is a member of the Science Steering Group of the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program and the Science Steering Committee of the North American Carbon Program. She also serves as the U.S. point of contact on scientific exchanges in carbon cycle science for State Department bilateral agreements with Italy, Canada, and the European Union. She received a Ph.D. in forest science from Oregon State University and a B.S. in forest resources and conservation from the University of Florida.


Gregg Marland is a senior research staff member in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In addition to research on the sources of greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation options, he helped define the methodologies and emissions coefficients now used to estimate CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. Dr. Marland served on the NRC Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming and has been a lead author on several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has spent recent sabbatical years as guest professor at Mid Sweden University in Östersund and as senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. Dr.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
×

Marland received a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. from Virginia Tech.


Keith Paustian is a professor of soil ecology in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a senior research scientist in the Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. His main fields of interest include agroecosystem ecology, soil organic matter dynamics, and global change. He is currently leading projects to assess soil carbon sequestration in several states and to develop national inventories of carbon emissions and sequestration. His research also involves the development of ecosystem and economic assessments to advise policy makers on climate change mitigation. He is a leader on the IPCC and the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology task force on agricultural mitigation of greenhouse gases. He is an editor of a recent book Soil Organic Matter in Temperate Agroecosystems: Long-Term Experiments in North America (CRC Press, 1997).


Michael J. Prather is the Fred Kavli Chair and Professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. From 2005 to 2006, he was a Jefferson science fellow at the State Department. His research focuses on simulation of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that determine atmospheric composition, including global chemical transport models that describe ozone and other trace gases. Dr. Prather has played a leading role in international assessments of ozone and climate change. He has served on numerous NRC committees and chaired the Planning Group for the Workshop on Direct and Indirect Human Contributions to Terrestrial Greenhouse Gas Fluxes. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Dr. Prather received a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Yale and undergraduate degrees in mathematics from Yale and physics from Merton, Oxford.


James T. Randerson is a professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Randerson uses trace gas observations from ground- and space-based instruments and models to study the global carbon cycle. He is currently investigating pathways of rapid carbon loss from terrestrial ecosystems, including fire emissions and permafrost degradation. He is a member of the science team for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and co-chair of the biogeochemistry working group for the Community Climate System Model. Dr. Randerson is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal. He received a Ph.D. in biological sciences and a B.S. in chemistry from Stanford University.


Pieter P. Tans is senior scientist at the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. His research interests focus on inverse models and data assimilation, atmospheric chemistry and transport, carbon cycle, and global climate change. His group maintains the world’s largest global monitoring network of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and provides reference gas mixtures to calibrate high-accuracy greenhouse gas measurements worldwide. Dr. Tans has served on several advisory committees related to the carbon cycle and climate. He has received several medals from the Department of Commerce and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He received a Ph.D. in physics and a doctorandus (roughly equivalent to an M.S.) in theoretical physics from Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands.


Steven C. Wofsy is the Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at Harvard University. His work focuses on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, using data analysis and modeling to understand sources, sinks, transformations, and transport of atmospheric trace gases. His research group also develops airborne sensors to make accurate measurements of CO2, CH4, CO, and N2O. He has chaired or been a member of several carbon cycle and NRC advisory committees. Dr. Wofsy is a recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s James B. Macelwane Award and NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard and a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
×

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
×
Page 105
Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
×
Page 106
Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
×
Page 107
Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2010. Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12883.
×
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The world's nations are moving toward agreements that will bind us together in an effort to limit future greenhouse gas emissions. With such agreements will come the need for all nations to make accurate estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and to monitor changes over time. In this context, the present book focuses on the greenhouse gases that result from human activities, have long lifetimes in the atmosphere and thus will change global climate for decades to millennia or more, and are currently included in international agreements. The book devotes considerably more space to CO2 than to the other gases because CO2 is the largest single contributor to global climate change and is thus the focus of many mitigation efforts. Only data in the public domain were considered because public access and transparency are necessary to build trust in a climate treaty.

The book concludes that each country could estimate fossil-fuel CO2 emissions accurately enough to support monitoring of a climate treaty. However, current methods are not sufficiently accurate to check these self-reported estimates against independent data or to estimate other greenhouse gas emissions. Strategic investments would, within 5 years, improve reporting of emissions by countries and yield a useful capability for independent verification of greenhouse gas emissions reported by countries.

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