Thomas F Malone

Editor of the 1300-page 1951 Compendium of Meteorology assessing research and educational opportunities in this field, Malone was a prominent member of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Meteorology that recommended a doubling of meteorological research and education in 1958 and creation of an interdisciplinary research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to be under the auspices of universities and funded by the National Science Foundation. He then led preparation of the “Blue Book” outlining a multiyear research agenda for NCAR. Later, he later became Chairman of NCAR’s Board of Trustees and was inducted into NCAR’s Founders’ Circle at its 40th Anniversary in 2003. President of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, Malone was one of the advisors to President Kennedy who in 1961 proposed an international research initiative in weather and climate in a speech to the UN. Malone and Sweden’s Bert Bolin convened an international meeting in Stockholm to plan the Global Atmospheric Research Program that ultimately evolved into the World Climate Program. Malone was instrumental in linking the scientific strengths of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) with the institutional capabilities of the World Meteorological Organization, thus laying the groundwork for currents global efforts to address “global warming.” As Founding Secretary General of SCOPE, the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment established by ICSU in 1969, Malone addressed the issue of global warming in a keynote speech to a conference at the California Institute of Technology in 1970. He urged initiatives in building the necessary knowledge base, institutional innovation, and development of moral principles to guide human behavior. He also warned that continued human use of fossil fuels to produce energy constituted “a threat to the human species” (Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, October 19, 1970, p A-13). This warning emerged again in the 1977 report of the NAS’s Geophysics Board, chaired by Malone, that remarked: “the nations of the world [need} to act with wisdom and in concert before irreversible changes in climate are initiated.” In 1984, as chairman of the NAS Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, he testified before Congress on the NAS report Changing Climate and called for the existence of “an international network of scientists conversant with the issues and of a broad international consensus on facts and their reliability.” An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established several years later. As Foreign Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, Malone foresaw the threat of a global climate catastrophe from a major exchange of nuclear weaponry. He initiated the Academy’s Committee on International Security and Arms Control and arranged for consultation with a counterpart committee in the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was instrumental in establishing and supporting SCOPE’s international scientific study of the environmental consequences of a nuclear war – ENUWAR – with Prof. Sir Frederick Warner and Prof. Gilbert White and numerous colleagues around the world. Later, he served on a UN committee that summarized these studies which concluded, “such a conflict would produce climatic and severe long-term socio-economic consequences that are unprecedented, even when compared with the most tragic natural disasters and conflicts in history.” As national president of the 70,000-member Scientific Research (honor) Society, Sigma Xi, Malone organized a Symposium on Global Change and the Human Prospect: Issues in Population, Science, Technology, and Equity to prepare for the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. His forward to the proceedings of that Symposium noted, “The overarching need is to bring to bear on these issues the expanding storehouse of knowledge about the world in which we live and our role in that world.” Response to that need would bring within reach success in the pursuit of a vision for world society he described later as, “… a society in which all of basic human needs are met and an equitable share of life’s amenities are enjoyed by every individual in present and succeeding generations while maintaining a healthy, physically attractive, and biologically productive environment.” In academia Malone was a tenured associate professor at MIT, then a professor of physics and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Connecticut, and ultimately a University Distinguished Scholar at North Carolina State University. In business, he was a senior vice president and director of research for The Travelers Insurance Companies and economic commentator for the Greater Hartford Chamber of Commerce. In government, he chaired the Motor Vehicle Safety Advisory Council and the U. S. National Commission for UNESCO, both by presidential appointment. He was named Connecticut Conservationist of the Year in 1966 for his leadership of a pioneering 100-member Clean Water Task Force. He was awarded the International St. Francis Prize for Environment in 1991 – nominated by twelve scientists from eight countries. Both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Meteorological Organization honored him, “for contributions to international programs.” At its 175th Commencement in 2007, Wesleyan University awarded 90-year old Malone with an honorary doctor of science degree for “your tireless efforts as a steward of Mother Earth are manifestations of your personal commitments, as a man if science and as a man of deep faith, to making life on the planet sustainable for all people for all time.”