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Richard Harris

Credit Doby Photography / NPR

Award-winning journalist Richard Harris reports on science issues for NPR's newsmagazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.

Harris, who joined NPR in 1986, has traveled to the ends of the earth for NPR. His reports have originated from Timbuktu, the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rain forest and the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis).

In 2010, Harris' reporting uncovered that the blown-out BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing out far more oil than asserted in the official estimates. He covered the United Nations climate negotiations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, followed by Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009. Harris was a major contributor to NPR's award-winning 2007-2008 "Climate Connections" series.

Over the course of his career, Harris has been the recipient of many of the journalism and science industries' most prestigious awards. The University of California at Santa Cruz awarded Harris the 2010-11 Alumni Achievement Award – the school's highest honor. In 2002, Harris was elected an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Harris shared a 1995 Peabody Award for investigative reporting on NPR about the tobacco industry.

As part of the team that collaborated on NPR's 1989 series "AIDS in Black America," Harris was awarded a Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, a first place award from the National Association of Black Journalists and an Ohio State Award. In 1988, Harris won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award for his report, "Anti-Noise: Can Technology Turn Noise into Quiet?" which explored a revolutionary technology that uses computer-generated noise to cancel out, not just mask, unwanted noise.

Before joining NPR, Harris was a science writer for the San Francisco Examiner. From 1981 to 1983, Harris was a staff writer at The Tri-Valley Herald in Livermore, California, covering science, technology, and health issues. Under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Harris spent the summer of 1980 as a Mass Media Science Fellow reporting on science issues for The Washington Star, in Washington, D.C.

Harris is co-founder of the Washington, D.C., Area Science Writers Association, as well as past president of the National Association of Science Writers.

A California native, Harris was valedictorian of his college graduating class at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, with highest honors.

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Environment
2:18 am
Sat May 18, 2013

Not Your Grandpa's RV: This Roving Lab Tracks Air Pollution

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Ira Leifer, next to an RV he has outfitted with methane sensors and other equipment to sniff the air.
Credit Courtesy of Ira Leifer and Paige Farrell, et. al. / Published in Atmospheric Environment
This map shows methane measurements Ira Leifer took as he drove in his RV around the Los Angeles basin. Notice the pronounced spike in levels of methane around the La Brea Tar Pits in the center of the image. Geological faults here allow "natural" methane to escape. The redder the color, the more methane was detected.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Ira Leifer, at his garage-turned-lab in Santa Barbara, has been studying the levels of methane in the atmosphere.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Leifer stands atop his roving chemistry lab. He and his team took 6,600 methane readings on the cross-country drive from Florida to California.
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Originally published on Sat May 18, 2013 10:45 am

If you're driving down the road someday and you come across a camper with a 50-foot periscope sticking up into the sky, you just might have crossed paths with Ira Leifer. His quirky vehicle is on a serious mission. It's sniffing the air for methane, a gas that contributes to global warming.

Leifer is an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But you'll more often find him off campus, in a garage, next to a string of auto body shops near the airport.

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The Salt
10:06 am
Wed May 15, 2013

Go Fish (Somewhere Else): Warming Oceans Are Altering Catches

Credit Melissa Farlow / National Geographic/Getty Images
Crew members unload a catch of sockeye salmon at Craig, Alaska, in 2005. Researchers say fish are being found in new areas because of changing ocean temperatures.
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Originally published on Wed May 15, 2013 4:39 pm

Climate change is gradually altering the fish that end up on ice in seafood counters around the world, according to a new study.

"The composition of the [global] fish catch includes more and more fish from the warmer areas, and cold-water fish are getting more rare, because the temperatures are increasing," says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia, a co-author of the study.

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Environment
9:27 am
Fri May 10, 2013

'Dangerous Territory:' Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach Iconic High

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Credit Jonathan Kingston / National Geographic/Getty Images
Carbon dioxide readings at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii have reached what atmospheric scientist Ralph Keeling calls a "psychological threshold" of 400 parts per million. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing since near-constant measurements began at the observatory in 1958.
Credit Will von Dauster / NOAA
Pat Lang, of NOAA in Boulder, Colo., measures the amount of greenhouse gases from an air sample. The Boulder lab is part of a global network of air-sampling laboratories that track carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
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Originally published on Fri May 10, 2013 4:26 pm

Earth's atmosphere is entering a new era. A mountaintop research station that has been tracking carbon dioxide for more than 50 years says the level of that gas in our air has reached a milestone: 400 parts per million.

That number is one of the clearest measures of how human beings are changing the planet. It shows how much carbon we have put into the air from burning fossil fuels — and that carbon dioxide drives global warming.

This measurement comes from Mauna Loa, Hawaii, a remote volcano where the air is largely free of local influences.

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Energy
2:09 pm
Tue April 23, 2013

Could An 'Artificial Leaf' Fuel Your Car?

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Credit Roy Kaltschmidt / Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Miguel Modestino, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, is part of the team working to create a solar fuels generator at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis.
Credit Roy Kaltschmidt / Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Ian Sharp (left) and Joel Ager use lasers to study the properties of water-splitting materials. The goal is to improve the efficiency with which solar energy can be used to create chemical fuel.
Credit Roy Kaltschmidt / Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
The concept for the project is to use sunlight as an energy source to take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into a fuel. This prototype, which was built using a 3-D printer, allows various designs to be tested easily.
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Originally published on Tue April 23, 2013 5:04 pm

It's easy to feel dispirited about climate change because the challenge of dealing with it seems so overwhelming. But Miguel Modestino is actually excited about the challenge. He's part of a large team hoping to make an artificial leaf — a device that would make motor fuel from sunlight and carbon dioxide rather than from fossil fuels.

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Environment
5:45 am
Mon April 22, 2013

This Scientist Aims High To Save The World's Coral Reefs

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science takes a water sample during his experiment on part of the Great Barrier Reef. The water is slightly pink because his team is using a dye to trace an acid-neutralizing chemical as it flows across the reef.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Ken Caldeira, a researcher with the Carnegie Institution for Science, pilots an aluminum skiff filled with equipment for his experiment on the reef. He is trying to figure out whether corals would grow faster if he neutralized human-induced changes in the ocean's acid balance.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Caldeira pours fluorescein dye over the coral to determine which direction the current is flowing. This spectacular dye is also used in medical diagnosis and is considered harmless for the reef.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Tubes snake back to a floating tank (the yellow object in the background), which is attached to a skiff anchored just off the reef. The tank contains antacid and some red dye.
Credit Courtesy of Lilian Caldeira
The world's oceans are 30 percent more acidic than they were before the industrial revolution because carbon dioxide from cars and power plants dissolves in ocean water and turns into carbonic acid. That threatens the health of the world's coral reefs.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
The antacid mixture is pumped over the reef during the hourlong experiment. Caldeira hopes it will neutralize the water and help the coral grow.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Field assistant Benjamin Cox keeps track of water samples as they are drawn from the edge of the reef. The samples will be analyzed in a chemistry lab back on One Tree Island.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
The sun sets at One Tree Island. The research Caldeira's team is doing might help save small patches of coral reefs, but it would be impossible to scale up a chemical treatment to protect whole reefs from increasing ocean acidity.
Credit Courtesy of Lilian Caldeira
Researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science spent a month at a remote research outpost — One Tree Island, at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef — to study how changing ocean acidity is affecting coral reefs.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Members of the research team fend for themselves in a communal kitchen (while fending off persistent ants) before heading out for a challenging day on the reef.
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Originally published on Mon April 22, 2013 6:52 pm

Most scientists find a topic that interests them and keep digging deeper and deeper into the details. But Ken Caldeira takes the opposite approach in search for solutions to climate change. He goes after the big questions, and leaves the details to others.

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