HENRY LANSFORD

One of the things I always admired most about Walt was his deep and genuine interest in people. Not all physical scientists have that quality--a lot of them went into research because they would rather deal with concepts and phenomena and numbers than with people. But Walt was always as interested in people as he was in science.

Back in the 1970s, Walt was a mentor to a whole generation of young scientists who are now well along in distinguished careers of their own. His support and encouragement were not reserved just for other scientists, however. He played a major role in nurturing my career as a science writer. In 1966, when NCAR moved into the new lab on the mesa, he gave me the job of setting up and running a public information program for the center. For a writer who was not trained as a scientist but who had always had a deep interest in the subject, this was a tremendously challenging and satisfying assignment. In the mid-70s, when everybody was becoming concerned about climate change and its impacts on human affairs, Walt arranged for me to serve as rapporteur for several international meetings on climate and food production. This provided raw material for articles that I wrote for Smithsonian, Mosaic, Nature, The Christian Science Monitor, and a variety of other publications. Then, knowing that I was interested in writing a book on climate, food production, and population growth, Walt suggested that we collaborate. The result was The Climate Mandate.

At its 1990 annual meeting, the American Meteorological Society gave me a special award for "distinguished writing on meteorology, leading to increased public awareness and understanding of the subject." Walt not only deserves most of the credit for my ability to write competently about atmospheric science--he was the one who nominated me for the award.

Walt always had a remarkable ability to bring together just the right combination of experts in various fields to seek solutions to complex, multifaceted global problems. This talent kept him traveling almost constantly for many years, organizing and chairing groups that were working on difficult international issues. Walt's travel schedule was a source of some frustration for me when we were collaborating on The Climate Mandate in the late 1970s. We had a simple but effective working arrangement. First, we would sit down and talk about what we wanted to put in a particular chapter, then I would go back to my typewriter and rough it out. Walt would take a look at my first draft and mark it up, and then we would discuss what revisions we needed to make. It was a very congenial collaboration, and we didn't have any serious disagreements about substance, style, or anything else. The big problem was finding Walt in Boulder so I could sit down and talk with him. He had retired as UCAR president by then, but he was running a food-climate program for the Aspen Institute, and he was on advisory boards and task groups for several dozen national and international organizations. So it turned out that when I was ready to talk about Chapter 1, Walt was in Moscow, and he was in Alaska for Chapter 2, and Geneva for Chapter 3, and so on. But we finally got it together.

Walt had a rare talent for communicating with non-scientists about scientific subjects. When I was NCAR's information officer, one of my jobs was arranging interviews with NCAR scientists for journalists. Sometimes, after the interview was over, I would take the reporter aside and say something like, "Now, here's what he really meant . . . " I never had to do that with Walt. He always said exactly what he meant in language that could be understood by any intelligent person, not just his scientific peers.

--Henry Lansford

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