Dr. Wallace S. Broecker, one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about climate change and the researcher who popularized the term “global warming,” died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 87.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, his academic home for 67 years. It said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Dr. Broecker, a geologist by training whose questing mind led him to rove from field to field, had an uncanny ability to draw a comprehensive understanding of the Earth’s climate system from research into the oceans, the atmosphere, the planet’s ice and more.

He gave early warning of a planetary crisis if humans continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He published a landmark scientific paper in 1975 that asked in its title, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”