Wallace Smith Broecker

American geophysicist who popularized the term global warming when he published a paper entitled “Climate Change: Are we on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” in 1975. Broecker authored over 450 journal articles and ten books.

He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker received the Crafoord Prize, the Vetlesen Prize, the National Medal of Science in 1996 as well as many other awards.

He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University.

Broecker had six children with his first wife, Grace (nee Carder). She died in 2007. They were together for 53 years. Broecker married Elizabeth Clark in 2009. He died in New York City on 18 February 2019, aged 87.