Elmer Robinson (October 3, 1924 - April 24, 2016) was an American

atmospheric scientist Atmospheric science is the study of the Earth's atmosphere and its various inner-working physical processes. Meteorology includes atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric physics with a major focus on weather forecasting. Climatology is the study ...

. He was one of the first scientists to recognise climate-change risks in fossil fuel burning, co-authoring, with R C Robbins, another

Stanford Research Institute SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...

(SRI) researcher, reports warning the industry in 1968 and 1969.

Early life

Robinson was born in Los Angeles, California, to Homer Henry Robinson and Mary Luella White. He attended Hoover High School in Glendale and went on to take BS and MS degrees at

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

(UCLA).

Career

Robinson joined SRI as a climate researcher in 1947 and continued on there until taking up a professorship at Washington State University in 1972 where he remained until 1985. In his capacity as leading environmental scientist at SRI in 1968, his report on global warming entitled ''Sources, abundance, and fate of gaseous atmospheric pollutants'' was presented to the

American Petroleum Institute The American Petroleum Institute (API) is the largest U.S. trade association for the oil and natural gas industry. It claims to represent nearly 600 corporations involved in extraction of petroleum, production, oil refinery, refinement, pipeline ...

(API). In the report, he warned that rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere "may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes", a warning elaborated on in a 1969 supplement to the report. Also while at SRI, Robinson carried out ice-core studies of historical atmospheric concentrations on cores taken in Greenland and surveyed the ozone layer depletion over Antarctica. He was director of the

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) is an American scientific and regulatory agency charged with Weather forecasting, forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, Hydrography, charting the seas, ...

's Mauna Loa Research Observatory in Hawaii from 1985 to 1996, a role in which he was interviewed for ''

National Geographic ''National Geographic'' (formerly ''The National Geographic Magazine'', sometimes branded as ''Nat Geo'') is an American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. The magazine was founded in 1888 as a scholarly journal, nine ...

'' in 1987.Noel Grove,
Air: An Atmosphere of Uncertainty
, ''National Geographic'' (April 1987).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robinson, Elmer American atmospheric scientists National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration personnel SRI International people University of California, Los Angeles alumni Washington State University faculty 1924 births 2016 deaths