William A. Nierenberg

Memorial Tribute

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla CA
28 September 2000

Jesse H. Ausubel
The Rockefeller University and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

"They will think we're detectives."

Bill stated this to me as unarguable fact as he and I set off for the
South Bronx one spring day in 1990.  The neighborhood police station,
known as Fort Apache, had recently been the subject of a bloody
popular movie in which gangs warred outside and against its doors.
The streets were still giving birth to rap and hip-hop culture.

Bill was a regular visitor to New York City, of course, enjoying the
Metropolitan Opera, the museums, and an eclectic selection of
restaurants.  After sifting through new results of my environmental
research at The Rockefeller University, an ivory tower even within its
fancy Upper East Side neighborhood, Bill and I would often set off on
cultural and culinary excursions.

During the 1970s and 1980s, I put many hours into a never-ending
project to walk or bicycle down every street in the five boroughs of
New York.  I covered dangerous neighborhoods cautiously, avoiding
Friday nights in July, which have crime rates 20 times higher than
Tuesday mornings in February.  Anyway, I had been reporting to Bill on
the Bronx, and my gaps that remained there, which included the
crackling streets where he had grown up.  He announced that rather
than visit the Bashford Dean Collection of Arms and Armor at the Met,
we would visit the Bronx addresses where his family and his wife Edith
had lived, the schools, synagogues, and movie theatres he had
attended, and the parks where he played.  After all, one of the great
presidents of The Rockefeller University and a patron of Bill's career
had been Detlev Bronk, from whose family farm the Borough derived its
name.

My first reaction was, this is not sensible.  Here is a man about 70
years old, with a family, important duties, and a head full of
military secrets, heading for one of the most violent places on Earth,
in my custody.  Bill was wearing his characteristic khaki outfit, with
a pocket protector lined with a rainbow of pens.  My expression
betrayed my misgivings, and he responded simply, "They will think
we're detectives.  We're absolutely safe." Absolutely was a word
Bill liked.  So off we went.

Some of the addresses were piles of rubble, and some were standing but
looked like burnt toast.  The present owners of Edith's house had
kept it neatly intact.  We tramped around, Bill blurting out his
characteristically exact recollections: prices of particular candies,
titles, authors, and publishers of books he borrowed from the public
library, movies that showed in different theatres.  Occasionally we
stopped to talk with people on the street to ask about the fate of a
business or to take a photo.

Bill also wanted to visit a small park where he and his friends had
hung out.  On my map of the Bronx it had a name Bill did not
recognize.  Anyway, we strode into the park, where a new gang of
teenagers was hanging out, skipping their high school physics class, I
guess.  To the surprise of the gang, Bill walked directly over to them
and started speaking in his gruff voice.  They lowered the volume on
their boombox, which was, I recall, playing the rap group Public
Enemy.  In actuality, Bill competed easily with Public Enemy.  He
asked "What do you guys call this park?" They answered with the same
name that the Jewish kids of the 1930s had used.  Very, very pleased,
Bill got into an animated discussion about the neighborhood.  With
Public Enemy chanting "Fight the Power" in the background, the rangy
youths shared with us some of the features they liked, such as streets
ending in stairs where cars could not follow.

The day turned out great, typifying Bill's style: bold, curious, and
focused on the essential.  I had come to appreciate these qualities
during 1981-1984, when I worked basically full-time for Bill on
several of his Washington-centered projects, most importantly, the
first-ever soup-to-nuts assessment of the issue of human-induced
changes of the climate, a National Academy of Sciences study the
Congress had mandated from the White House.

Usually NAS committees only review and synthesize existing literature.
But Bill informed me in no uncertain terms at the outset of the study
that most of the investigations to date were wrong and that there were
big gaps in the story.  Therefore, we should prepare, in the style of
the JASONS, to define and solve the problem ourselves.  Beginning at
the beginning, Bill cleverly challenged one of the committee members,
William Nordhaus, to do a new and better projection of future
greenhouse gas emissions.  Nordhaus did a brilliant job, which
Chairman Nierenberg praised effusively in front of the other committee
members, thereby initiating a competition inside this talented group
to display their analytical prowess.  My pleasurable job was to keep
the little creative orgy going.

At the end of 2 ½ years the report, titled Changing Climate, was
complete and a landmark, the first "integrated assessment," to use the
present jargon.  The report also contained a fistful of original
components, including the first proposals for the so-called
"fingerprint" for detecting human-induced climate change, the first
estimate of possible sea level rise incorporating both lost ice and
thermal expansion of the oceans, a thorough consideration of the role
of greenhouse gases beside carbon dioxide, an analysis of possible
release by warming of methane hydrates from the slope sediments, the
first modeled estimates of effects of climate change on US agriculture
and water resources, and the first history of studies of the
greenhouse effect.  Although Bill did not warm to the idea, the report
was also the first to analyze carbon taxes.

In a way, I believe working with Bill on the NAS climate study made me
Bill's last student.  And after I learned to connect the dots of
Bill's conversation, he was unfailingly generous to me.  He gave me
hard, authentic problems to work on and abundant credit when I did
something well.

During the past three years I had the good fortune to have Bill's zest
and practical help in bringing together researchers to launch the now
likely worldwide Census of Marine Life.  Bill and Richard Rosenblatt
organized the very first meeting of the Census, here at Scripps in the
spring of 1997.  Bill was fascinated at the prospect of identifying
thousands of new species of fishes, and discovering and assessing
marine populations that models of animal behavior and energy flows
suggest must exist, such as squids in the midwaters of the open ocean.
The challenge of constructing the entire ocean in this case its
biology from our ridiculously few clues never ceased to excite Bill.

In the end I came to realize Bill Nierenberg was at bottom a
detective, one with a tough New York style, hungry for unsolved cases,
independent and sometimes shockingly direct in his mode of
investigation and seizure of evidence, and a knack, like that day in
the South Bronx, for reasoning fearlessly to the right answer.