Alan Robock Wins 2022 Future of Life Award

Distinguished Professor Alan Robock ’70 (meteorology) received the 2022 Future of Life Award from the Future of Life Institute on August 6, 2022, “for reducing the risk of nuclear war by developing and popularizing the science of nuclear winter.” Prof. Robock teaches and does research in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University. He shares the award with John Birks, Paul Crutzen, Jeannie Peterson, Carl Sagan, Georgiy Stenchikov, Brian Toon, and Richard Turco. Each awardee received a plaque and $50,000. The Future of Life Institute is a nonprofit organization seeking to reduce extreme, large-scale risks from transformative technologies. It also aims for the future development and use of these technologies to be beneficial to all life.

“The current geopolitical conflict discourse is absurdly cavalier about nuclear war risk,” said MIT physics Professor Max Tegmark, the president of the Future of Life Institute. “The latest nuclear winter research confirms that Reagan was right when he said that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The award ceremony took place on the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the U.S., and against the backdrop of states meeting to review the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the cornerstone of the nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime. With this in mind, Tegmark added, “in these turbulent times, the more decision-makers understand about nuclear winter, the less likely they are to make reckless decisions that may cause it.”

Prof. Robock has been working on the climatic impacts of nuclear war for the past 40 years, along with his related work on the impacts of volcanic eruptions on climate and on climate intervention (also called geoengineering). Funded by the Open Philanthropy Project, he leads a new six-year research effort with Prof. Toon from the University of Colorado, to use state-of-the-art climate models, computer programs that simulate the response of the atmosphere, oceans, and agriculture to the injection of smoke from fires ignited by nuclear war. Their work has resulted in many journal articles that show that nuclear winter theory is real, that a nuclear war between new nuclear states, such as India and Pakistan, can produce severe global impacts for a decade, and that the current U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals can still produce nuclear winter. In 2017 the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons” based partly on the work of Profs. Robock and Toon.

Previously Prof. Robock received the Cassandra Award on January 17, 2018, “for his warnings on the climatic consequences of nuclear conflict,” and the Chancellor’s Award for Global Impacts from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, on September 24, 2020.