John Firor, 80, Early Voice On Environment, Is Dead

John Firor, an environmental scholar and former director of the National Center of Atmospheric Research who was an early voice linking climate change and human activity, died last Monday in Pullman, Wash. He was 80.

The cause was complications of Alzheimers disease, said his daughter Susan Firor.

Mr. Firor became director of the center, in Boulder, Colo., in 1968 and was named executive director in 1974. While there, he called attention to the importance of human impact on the environment, when such a connection was still considered a fairly radical idea, said Richard Anthes, president of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research.

In Mr. Firors first book, The Changing Atmosphere: A Global Challenge (Yale University Press, 1990), he used laymans language to explain climate change and ozone depletion, among other global concerns. The book was called about as agreeable as a dose of ipecac, in a review in The New York Times, for generating a sense of astonishment that human intelligence could have permitted us to reach this predicament.

Mr. Firor was also an expert in public-policy issues concerning the atmosphere and environment. He traveled extensively, lecturing to audiences and testifying before Congressional committees about global problems.

John William Firor Jr. was born on Oct. 18, 1927, in Athens, Ga. He interrupted his studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology for a brief enlistment in the Army, spending time at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he guarded radioactive materials and talked with scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. When he returned to college, he changed his major to physics from engineering, and he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1954.

He worked at the department of terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie Institution before joining the staff at the atmospheric research center as director of the High Altitude Observatory. When he stepped down as executive director in 1980, he was directing the advanced study program at the center.

Mr. Firors first wife, Merle Jenkins Firor, died in 1979. In 1983, he married Judith E. Jacobsen, an expert on global population with whom he wrote The Crowded Greenhouse: Population, Climate Change, and Creating a Sustainable World. Ms. Jacobsen died in 2004.

In addition to his daughter Susan, he is survived by another daughter, Kay; two sons, Daniel and Jim; a sister, Anne Firor Scott; a brother, Hugh; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Firor was chairman of the board of the Environmental Defense Fund (now Environmental Defense), based in Manhattan, from 1975 to 1980. He was also a trustee and founding board member of the World Resources Institute.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?