William Aaron Nierenberg (February 13, 1919 – September 10, 2000) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 through 1986.

Nierenberg was born on February 13, 1919, at 213 E. 13th Street, on the Lower East Side of New York, the son of very poor Jewish immigrants from Austro-Hungary.

[2] He went to Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York (CCNY), where he won a scholarship to spend his junior year abroad in France at the University of Paris.

[4] During this period, in 1953, Nierenberg took a one-year leave to serve as the director of the Columbia University Hudson Laboratories, working on naval warfare problems.

Much later (1960–1962) he took leave once again as Assistant Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in charge of scientific affairs, where he oversaw many international studies on physics and advanced defense technologies.

Schelling and many of the scientists had served on committees for two previous reports for the Carter administration, which had highlighted global warming as a potentially major problem, and Nordhaus was developing a new model for growth in CO2 emissions, the first which did not assume linear extrapolations.

[13] Historians Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, and Matthew Shindell have argued that Nierenberg's report marked the genesis of climate change debates that would ensue over the subsequent decades.

[13] Oreskes and Conway contend that the chapters written by the economists differ from those written by the scientists, that the policy recommendations reflect mainly the views of the economists, and that Nierenberg, the committee chairman, personally rejected an emerging consensus view on global warming among climate scientists, and "in doing so arguably launched the climate change debate, transforming the issue from one of scientific concern to one of political controversy.

[16] Nierenberg subsequently became a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute,[17] and a critic of the scientific consensus on the role of human produced CO₂ emissions in climate change.

A building and a rose garden on the campus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography are named for him, and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest has been started.