Melding Science and Diplomacy to Run a Global Climate Review (Dr. Susan Solomon)

[jpak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/science/earth/06profile.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Who in her right mind would want to detour from doing world-class atmospheric research at a laboratory tucked under the Rockies to be a co-leader of a years-long, largely administrative review by hundreds of experts from dozens of countries of existing studies on the atmosphere? Dr. Solomon, who won a National Medal of Science in 1999 for linking synthetic chemicals to the seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica, nonetheless chose that course in 2002.

“Thomas Jefferson once said something like, ‘Science is my passion, politics my duty,’ ” Dr. Solomon, 51, said Sunday in a telephone interview. “That’s probably how I think about it, too. Science does have a duty, when called upon, to provide information that’s important to society the best way it can.”

In place of making expeditions to the South Pole and Greenland, her old stomping grounds, she spent chunks of the last five years hunkered in gray buildings in Beijing, New Delhi, Marrakech and Paris running meeting after meeting of experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The panel was convened by the United Nations in 1988 — a year of record heat, burning forests and the first big headlines about greenhouse gases and global warming — to provide regular reviews of climate science to governments to inform policy choices.

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