Passing of John Firor - Glider Guider and ex NCAR Chief

Ex-NCAR chief an early climate-change scholar
By Virginia Culver
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 11/12/2007 11:14:41 PM MST


The studious John Firor had his lighthearted side. He made up bedtime
stories about a cowboy named Henry Hardbottom and built sailboats.
(Courtesy of the Firor family)John Firor, former head of the National
Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and an early scholar
studying the effects of humans on climate, died Nov. 5 in Pullman,
Wash. Firor, who suffered from Alzheimer's, was 80.

Firor called attention to the effects of humans on the environment
when that was considered almost a "radical idea," said Richard Anthes,
president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a
consortium of universities that supports the NCAR.

"He was a one of the most thoughtful and broad scientists, and one of
the most articulate, I have ever known," said Anthes, of Boulder.

Firor's first book was "The Changing Atmosphe A Global Challenge."

"He had a wonderful way with words," said his daughter Susan Firor of
Moscow, Idaho, and was able in either writing or speaking to explain
things in a way nonscientists could understand.

The gentle, soft-spoken Firor also had his lighthearted side.

He made up a series of bedtime stories for his children, all about the
central character, a cowboy named Henry Hardbottom, Susan Firor said.
He built sailboats for his children and took up the banjo, a gift from
the family.

"It was kind of a joke, and he wasn't very good, but he loved
bluegrass music and practiced hard," Susan Firor said.

He also was a supporter of the Colorado Music Festival.

John William Firor Jr. was born in Athens, Ga., on Oct 18, 1927.

He started college at the Georgia Institute of Technology, but that
was interrupted for service in the Army. Part of the time, he guarded
plutonium at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The experience led
him to change his major from engineering to physics. He earned his
physics degree at Georgia Tech and his doctorate at the University of
Chicago.

He married Merle Jenkins in 1950, and they had four children. She died
in 1979. Later, he married Judith Jacobsen, an expert on global
population. They wrote the book "The Crowded Greenhouse." She died in
2004.

John Firor studied terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie Institute in
Washington, D.C., and measured seismic waves at copper mines in
Argentina and Bolivia.

He also once flew in a glider at the edge of a hailstorm. The glider
pilot had quit, and Firor volunteered to do the job. That flight was
later chronicled in a PBS program called "Creativity," hosted by Bill
Moyers.

He came to Colorado in 1968 to take a job at the High Altitude
Observatory in Boulder, part of the NCAR, and then became executive
director of the NCAR.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by another daughter, Kay
Firor, of Cove, Ore.; two sons, Daniel Firor of Seattle and Jim Firor
of Hotchkiss; three grandchildren; his sister, Anne Scott, of Chapel
Hill, N.C.; and one brother, Hugh Firor, of Cincinnati.