Climate Vulnerability: Understanding and Addressing Threats to Essential Resources

Climate change has been the subject of thousands of books and magazines, scientific journals, and newspaper articles daily. It’s a subject that can be very political and emotional, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction. The vast majority of research, studies, projections and recommendations tend to focus on the human influence on climate change and global warming as the result of CO2 emissions, often to the exclusion of other threats that include population growth and the stress placed on energy sources due to emerging global affluence. Climate Vulnerability, Five Volume Set seeks to strip away the politics and emotion that surround climate change and will assess the broad range of threats using the bottom up approach―including CO2 emissions, population growth, emerging affluence, and many others―to our five most critical resources: water, food, ecosystems, energy, and human health. Inclusively determining what these threats are while seeking preventive measures and adaptations is at the heart of this unique reference work.

He is currently a Senior Research Scientist in CIRES and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder (November 2005 -present). He is also an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and has a five-year appointment (April 2007 - March 2012) on the Graduate Faculty of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Pielke has studied terrain-induced mesoscale systems, including the development of a three-dimensional mesoscale model of the sea breeze, for which he received the NOAA Distinguished Authorship Award for 1974. Dr. Pielke has worked for NOAA's Experimental Meteorology Lab (1971-1974), The University of Virginia (1974-1981), and Colorado State University (1981-2006). He served as Colorado State Climatologist from 1999-2006. He was an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina (July 2003-2006). He was a visiting Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona from October to December 2004.

He has served as Chairman and Member of the AMS Committee on Weather Forecasting and Analysis, and was Chief Editor for the Monthly Weather Review for 5 years from 1981 to 1985. In 1977. Dr. Pielke received the 1984 Abell New Faculty Research and Graduate Program Award, and also received the 1987/1988 Abell Research Faculty Award. He was declared "Researcher of the Year" by the Colorado State University Research Foundation in 1993. In 2000 he received the Engineering Dean's Council Award from Colorado State University.

He authored a book published by Academic Press entitled Mesoscale Meteorological Modeling (1984) with a 2nd edition in 2002, a book for Routledge Press entitled The Hurricane (1990), a book (co-authored with W.R. Cotton) for Cambridge Press entitled Human Impacts on Weather and Climate (1995; 2nd Edition 2006), a book (co-authored with R.A. Pielke, Jr.) entitled Hurricanes: Their Nature and Impacts on Society published in 1997 by John Wiley and Sons, and was Co-Chief Editor (with R.A. Pielke, Jr.) of a book entitled Storms, published by Routledge Press in 1999.

Roger Pielke Sr. was elected a Fellow of the AMS in 1982 and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2004. From 1993-1996, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the US National Science Report to the IUGG (1991-1994) for the American Geophysical Union. From January 1996 to December 2000, he served as Co-Chief Editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Science. In 1998, he received NOAA's ERL Outstanding Scientific Paper (with Conrad Ziegler and Tsengdar Lee) for a modeling study of the convective dryline. He was designated a Pennsylvania State Centennial Fellow in 1996, and named the Pennsylvania State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences Alumni of the year for 1999 (with Bill Cotton). He is currently serving on the AGU Focus Group on Natural Hazards (August 2009-present) and the AMS Committee on Planned and Inadvertent Weather Modification (October 2009-present). He is among one of three faculty and one of four members listed by ISI HighlyCited in Geosciences at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, respectively.

Dr. Pielke has published over 370 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 55 chapters in books, co-edited 9 books, and made over 700 presentations during his career to date. A listing of papers can be viewed at the project website: http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/pielke/pubs/. He also launched a science weblog in 2005 to discuss weather and climate issues. This weblog was named one of the 50 most popular Science blogs by Nature Magazine on July 5, 2006 and is located at http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/.