Name Craig Loehle | ||
Institutions National Council for Air and Stream Improvement Thesis SAGEGRASS : a sagebrush-grass grazingland ecosystem simulation model (1982) Residence Naperville, Illinois, United States Alma mater University of Georgia, University of Washington, Colorado State University Fields Forest ecology, Environmental science | ||
Craig Loehle is an American ecologist, a principal scientist at the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, a forest industry-funded research institution. He has over 150 published papers on tree morphology and life history, animal behavior, landscape ecology, forest management, statistics, creativity, and philosophy of science. His top 25 papers have been cited a total of over 4000 times.
Contents
- Scientific career
- Scientific discovery and success
- Climate change research
- Views on climate change
- References
Scientific career
Loehle worked as a research ecologist at Savannah River Laboratory from 1987 to 1991, and in the environmental research division at Argonne National Laboratory from 1991 to 1998. While at Argonne, he conducted research which found that trees can grow to maturity up to a thousand miles south of their natural ranges, but only fifty to a hundred miles north of their natural ranges.
Scientific discovery and success
In 1990, in a paper in the journal BioScience, Loehle coined the term "Medawar zone" to refer to a scientific task which is only moderately difficult but still yields the maximum payoff. He named it after Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who once wrote that there seems to be a certain time when scientific questions seem especially ripe for answering, whereas other questions remain elusive and out-of-reach from investigation.
Climate change research
In 2007, Loehle published a paleoclimate reconstruction which reconstructed temperatures over the last 2,000 years, in Energy & Environment. It made a point of not using tree-ring data, and concluded that recent global temperatures are not unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. Loehle published a correction the following year. In the correction, he and J. Huston McCulloch (Ohio State University) concluded that there was "little change in the results" after dating errors were corrected for.
A 2009 paper by Loehle reported that the global oceans had been cooling since 2003.
A 2014 study by him concluded that climate sensitivity was 1.99 °C, with a 95% confidence limit of 1.75-2.23 °C.
Views on climate change
Loehle has argued that the divergence problem means that tree ring data is an unreliable indicator of past temperatures. In 2012, Loehle said that while many animal species have gone extinct in recent years, that this was not caused by global warming but rather by humans hunting them and introducing pests and diseases.