Richard Harris
Award-winning journalist Richard Harris has reported on a wide range of topics in science, medicine and the environment since he joined NPR in 1986. In early 2014, his focus shifted from an emphasis on climate change and the environment to biomedical research.
Harris has traveled to all seven continents 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, the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis), and Japan to cover the nuclear aftermath of the 2011 tsunami.
In 2010, Harris' reporting revealed that the blown-out BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing out far more oil than asserted in the official estimates. That revelation led the federal government to make a more realistic assessment of the extent of the spill.
Harris covered climate change for decades. He reported from the United Nations climate negotiations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and including 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 prestigious awards. Those include the American Geophysical Union's 2013 Presidential Citation for Science and Society. He shared the 2009 National Academy of Sciences Communication Award and was a finalist again in 2011. 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. Since 1988, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has honored Harris three times with its science journalism award.
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 related to the nuclear weapons lab in Livermore. He started his career as an AAAS Mass Media Science Fellow at the now-defunct Washington Star in DC.
Harris is co-founder of the Washington, DC, Area Science Writers Association, and is past president of the National Association of Science Writers. He serves on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Harris' book Rigor Mortis was published in 2017. The book covers the biomedicine "reproducibility crisis" 鈥� many studies can't be reproduced in other labs, often due to lack of rigor, hence the book's title. Rigor Mortis was a finalist for the 2018 National Academy of Sciences/Keck Communication Award.
A California native, Harris returned to the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2012, to give a commencement address at Crown College, where he had given a valedictory address at his own graduation. He earned a bachelor's degree at the school in biology, with highest honors.
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Greenland is covered in an ice layer that's up to 2 miles thick. But below the ice, there's a vast terrain of bedrock. Now scientists have found a mega-canyon there, twice the size of the one in Arizona. The hidden canyon is drawing oohs and aahs from scientists around the world. -
The Earth's average annual temperature has been rising for decades, but not in the last 15 years 鈥� colder winters and hotter summers notwithstanding. Now scientists offer evidence that this "pause" in average warming is because a cooler Pacific is temporarily taking up more heat than usual.
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Climate skeptics point to 15 years of no warming trend as a reason to doubt global warming. But Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research can explain a good bit of that temperature plateau 鈥� and he argues the Earth has continued to warm appreciably, even though our thin blanket of atmosphere hasn't.
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When Republicans on Capitol Hill want to hear reasons not to take strong action on climate change, sometimes they call on Judith Curry to testify. The climatologist has staked out an unusual position on the subject: She says the climate is changing and people are partly responsible, but we shouldn't bother regulating carbon dioxide. -
Sea level has been rising steadily as a result of global warming. But in 2010 and 2011, levels dropped sharply by a quarter of an inch. A new analysis says that's because extraordinarily heavy rainfall got trapped in inland Australia.
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Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere cycle up and down as plants take it up in the summer and let some of it out in the winter. Over the past 50 years, these "breaths" have gotten larger, as plants in the Arctic are taking up more carbon dioxide during the warmer summers. -
Paleontologists have been spending a lot of time studying the Earth of 50 million years ago, which was much hotter than it is today. They're hoping a glimpse into the planet's geologic past will show them how the planet will respond to all the carbon dioxide we're now putting into the air. -
Oil developers in the Canadian Tar Sands are trying to understand some odd oil eruptions around several drilling platforms where oil is coming up through the ground rather than through the wells they drilled. The latest of these events tarred about 50 acres of forest. -
Scientists are squaring off yet again on the question of why some mammals are monogamous. A new paper argues that monogamy is most likely the result of males trying to protect their youngsters from murderous rivals. A second study says monogamy in mammals evolved in species where females were scattered about. -
Biologists have discovered they can track hard-to-see species in streams, ponds and even the ocean by sampling the water for DNA. Scientists say the technique is an important conservation tool: So far, it's been used to track declining giant salamanders and even locate a rare whale.
