If climate change is the Super Bowl of pressing issues facing mankind, then Susan Solomon is one of the MVPs.
Like a pied piper bringing awareness to the issue when most of the public had never heard of climate change, the decorated professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is perhaps best known for pioneering the theory explaining why the ozone hole occurs in Antarctica, and obtained some of the first chemical measurements that helped to establish the chlorofluorocarbons as its cause.
But the professor of atmospheric science has also authored several influential scientific papers on climate science, including an ominous one on the irreversibility of climate change.
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In a symposium upon accepting the 2009 Volvo Environment Prize, Solomon said, “The Earth has a budget, just like anything else. And if we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, it’s going to keep more heat in to the planet, and less escaping to space, and the planet has no choice but to warm up. That’s basic physics, and there’s no way to beat basic physics.”
The 65-year-old Chicago native spent most of her career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but joined the faculty of MIT in 2011, where she serves as the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Climate Science.
Among her awards and honors, Time magazine named her as one of the most 100 influential people in the world in 2008, she received the 1999 National Medal of Science (the highest scientific honor in the US), as well as the Grande Medaille (the highest award of the French Academy of Sciences), and she led a working group that wrote a report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1986 and 1987, Solomon led a National Ozone Expedition formed by the National Science Foundation, which confirmed her hypothesis that the Antarctic ozone hole was created by a heterogeneous reaction of ozone and chlorine free radicals from chlorofluorocarbons on the surface of ice particles in the high altitude clouds that form over the area.
“The key conclusion of the IPCC report was: warming is unequivocal,” she told The Jerusalem Post. “This world is getting hotter. Our burning of fossil fuels is the primary reason, and some of my work has shown that the warming induced by human emissions of carbon dioxide is causing a warming that will be irreversible for at least many thousands of years. We’ve turned up the thermostat already, and can see the increasing frequency of heat waves, flooding, wildfires and severe storms that has resulted. So we had better stop cranking it up more as soon as we can, even if it’s a long time until nature will get cooler.”
Solomon’s greatest accomplishment may have been to activate the worldwide effort to combat climate change, a process she sees as an act of tikkun olam.
“There is the straightforward part of working as hard as I can to repair the damage that humans have done to the planet. I have a deep-seated love of nature and as I have studied ozone depletion and climate change, I often reflect on how important it is for humankind to stop piling abuses on this beautiful world that she just can’t sustain.
Certainly for me there is a concept that we are the stewards of this remarkable planet, and haven’t been doing our job. Without an ozone layer, there would be no life at all on the surface of the Earth, because ozone’s absorption of high energy ultraviolet light had to start before anything could crawl out of the ocean and walk on land. So I’ve derived a great deal of satisfaction out of the work that I’ve done on understanding ozone depletion, which has had an impact on the global phaseout of ozone-damaging chemicals.
“This brings me to the second part of tikkun olam, namely that climate change and many other forms of pollution have the largest impacts on poor people. The rich derive most of the benefits of burning fossil fuels, yet it’s poor people – both in their own countries and in the poorest parts of the world – who suffer the most. Society as a whole has to come to terms with that, and for me that means trying to understand the science to help us make better choices and better policies to repair what we’re doing both to the Earth and to each other.”
Related opinion piece by Susan Solomon: "Tikkun olam motivates my work."