Obituary: Piers Sellers, astronaut who warned of global warming risks

Piers Sellers awaits the start of the
 mission's third space walk, 2006.

Piers Sellers, a British-born climate scientist for NASA who remained optimistic about the fate of the Earth, despite the grim climate change models he oversaw, and who gained US citizenship to fulfil a childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, has died in Houston aged 61.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and went public with his diagnosis in a New York Times column. He wrote that, while he had hoped he would see solutions to the problem of climate change in his lifetime, he was devoted to continuing his climate research until he died.

"There is no convincing, demonstrated reason to believe that our evolving future will be worse than our present, assuming careful management of the challenges and risks," he wrote, sounding a note of optimism, despite increasingly drastic changes in the global temperature and precipitation patterns that he studied. "History is replete with examples of us humans getting out of tight spots."

Read the obituary in today’s Melbourne Age - “Piers Sellers, astronaut who warned of global warming risks.”