John W. Birks (born 10 December 1946, in Vinita, Oklahoma, USA) is an American atmospheric chemist and entrepreneur who is best known for co-discovery with Paul Crutzen of the potential atmospheric effects of nuclear war known as nuclear winter.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] His most recent awards include the 2019 Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award for his contributions to atmospheric chemistry and the 2022 Future of Life Award for discovery of the nuclear winter effect.
As an entrepreneur, Birks co-founded the two technology companies, 2B Technologies and InDevR. At 2B Technologies he served as president during 2005-2020 and currently serves as Chief Scientist.[8][9]
Birks co-founded 2B Technologies, a company specializing in the development of instruments for environmental and atmospheric measurements, with Dr. Mark Bollinger in 1998.[9][11] After twenty-five years of service, he retired from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2002 and joined 2B Technologies as vice president.[9] In 2005, he assumed leadership of 2B Technologies as president.
In 2009, he founded the Global Ozone (GO3) Project, a non-profit middle and high school outreach program for ground-level ozone measurements.[10] The AQTreks educational outreach program, an outgrowth of the GO3 Project that allows students to perform mobile monitoring of air pollutants along treks of their own design, was founded by Birks and his colleagues in 2017.[10]
In 2019, Birks received the Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award, also known as the "Nobel prize of air pollution and climate science", from the California Air Resources Board (CARB).[14] The award was given for having "advanced our understanding of Earth's atmosphere through more than 40 years of research, teaching and technological innovation."[14]
In 2022, John Birks received the Future of Life Award from the Future of Life Institute "for reducing the risk of nuclear war by developing and popularizing the science of nuclear winter."[15]
Kinetics studies of atmospheric reactions
Birks' early research focused on discovering new reactions that are important in controlling ozone levels in the stratosphere. He and his research team at the University of Illinois and later at the University of Colorado Boulder published some of the first measurements of the temperature-dependent rate coefficients and product distributions for important stratospheric reactions. Some notable works were introductions of the species chlorine nitrate (ClONO2)[16] and hypochlorous acid (HOCl)[17] to stratospheric chemistry via measurements of the rates of reactions forming those species.
In 1977, the rate coefficient for the reaction ClO + NO2 + M → ClONO2 + M was first reported by the Birks research group.[16] Although the formation of chlorine nitrate reduces the effect of chlorine on stratospheric ozone at mid latitudes, it was later discovered by Susan Solomon that chlorine nitrate plays a key role in the formation of the Antarctic "ozone hole", reacting in the Austral spring with HCl on the surfaces of polar stratospheric clouds to produce catalytic forms of chlorine.[18] The Birks group also was among the first to report temperature-dependent rate coefficients and branching ratios for catalytic reactions involving bromine (BrO+ClO and BrO+BrO reactions), which were found to contribute ~20% of ozone depletion in the Antarctic ozone hole.[19][20][21][22]
Discovery of nuclear winter effect
During his 1981/82 academic sabbatical at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany, Birks worked with Paul J. Crutzen (Nobel Laurette, 1995)[23] and wrote the first publication introducing the subject of what became known as nuclear winter: The atmosphere after a nuclear war: Twilight at noon (1982).[24] Their calculations showed that fires in cities, forests and oil production and storage facilities resulting from a major nuclear war would produce enough smoke to block as much as 99 percent of sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface throughout the northern hemisphere.[25] This work, published in 1982 in a special issue of the Swedish journal Ambio as part of a larger study of the environmental effects of nuclear warfare commissioned by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, was followed by a paper by Richard Turco, Brian Toon, Thomas Ackerman,[26]James Pollack and Carl Sagan (TTAPS) in the journal Science in 1983.[27] These two papers resulted in multi-year studies involving numerous government agencies and laboratories and evaluation reports by the National Academy of Sciences (1985),[28] the World Health Organization (WHO),[29] and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU/SCOPE)[30][31] on the environmental effects of nuclear war.
Highly portable instruments for air quality measurements
In 2009 Dr. Birks founded the Global Ozone Project or "GO3" Project, a middle and high school outreach program where students at more than 100 schools around the world measure ozone using a FEM ozone monitor (2B Tech Model 106-L) along with meteorological parameters using a Davis weather station.[43] In that project, data were continuously uploaded to a database for display on Google Earth and online graphing along with participation from schools around the world, including 30 international schools. More than 12 million ozone measurements and associated meteorological parameters were uploaded by these student-run monitoring stations.[44] This fixed-base monitoring program was replaced by a mobile monitoring project, AQTreks, in which students explore the concentrations of air pollutants (PM1, PM2.5, PM10, CO, CO2) in their communities along "treks" of their own design. Approximately 20,000 students at more than 250 U.S. schools have participated in the GO3 Project and AQTreks over the past 10 years.[44]
Birks, John W. (1989). Chemiluminescence and Photochemical Reaction Detection in Chromatography[45]
Ehrlich, Anne H.; Birks, John W. (1990). Hidden Dangers: The Environmental Consequences of Preparing for War[46]
Birks, John W.; Calvert, Jack G.; Sievers, Robert E. (1992). The Chemistry of the Atmosphere: Its Impact on Global Change[47]
Selected publications
Activation energies for the dissociation of diatomic molecules are less than the bond dissociation energies (1972)[48]
Effect of nuclear explosions on stratospheric nitric oxide and ozone (1973)[1]
Chemiluminescence of IF in the gas phase reaction of I2 with F2[49]
Studies of reactions of importance in the stratosphere. I. Reaction of nitric oxide with ozone (1976)[50]
Studies of reactions of importance in the stratosphere. II. Reactions involving chlorine nitrate and chlorine dioxide (1980)[16]
Studies of reactions of importance in the stratosphere. III. Rate constant and products of the reaction between ClO and HO2 radicals at 298 K (1980)[17]
Studies of reactions of importance in the stratosphere. IV. Rate constant for the reaction Cl + HOCl → HCl + ClO over the temperature range 243-365 K (1981)[51]
The atmosphere after a nuclear war: Twilight at noon (1982)[2][52]
High precision measurements of activation energies over small temperature intervals: Curvature in the Arrhenius plot for the reaction NO + O3 → NO2 + O2 (1982)[53]
Studies of reactions of importance in the stratosphere. V. Rate constants for the reactions O + NO2 → NO + O2 and O + ClO → Cl + O2 at 298 K (1984)[54]
Studies of reactions of importance in the stratosphere. VI. Temperature dependence of the reactions O + NO2 → NO + O2 and O + ClO → Cl + O2 (1986)[55]
Peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in liquid chromatography (1983)[56]
Peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence detection of polycyclic aromatic amines in liquid chromatography (1984)[57]
The effects on the atmosphere of a major nuclear exchange (1985)[58]
Luminol/H2O2 chemiluminescence detector for the analysis of nitric oxide in exhaled breath (1999)[59]
Using polymeric materials to generate an amplified response to molecular recognition events (2008)[60]
Mechanism and elimination of a water vapor interference in the measurement of ozone by UV absorbance (2006)[32]
Miniature personal ozone monitor based on UV absorbance (2010)[33]
Use of a heated graphite scrubber as a means of reducing interferences in UV-absorbance measurements of atmospheric ozone (2017)[34]
Folded tubular photometer for atmospheric measurements of NO2 and NO (2018)[35]
Portable ozone calibration source independent of changes in temperature, pressure and humidity for research and regulatory applications (2018)[37]
Global Ozone (GO3) Project and AQTreks: Use of evolving technologies by students and citizen scientists to monitor air pollutants (2019)[44]
Portable calibrator for NO based on photolysis of N2O and a combined NO/NO2/O3 source for field calibrations of air pollution monitors (2020)[38]
^"Possible Toxic Environments Following a Nuclear War," J. W. Birks and S. L. Stephens, In The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, Institute of Medicine, National Academy Press, pp. 155-166 (1986). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219160/
^ ab"John Birks". University of Colorado Boulder Department of Chemistry. October 1, 2020.