Susan Solomon (Chicago, Illinois, United States; 1956) was won over to science at an early age by watching TV nature programs like The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Her passion for atmospheric chemistry was already apparent in high school, where she won a prize with a project measuring the amount of oxygen in gas mixtures.
After earning her PhD in 1981 at the University of California, Berkeley with an atmospheric chemistry project alongside future Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, Solomon began working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where she stayed until 2011. A hole had been discovered in the ozone layer over Antarctica in 1983, and although chlorofluorocarbons were known to have a destructive effect on stratospheric ozone, the scale of the depletion was bewildering scientists.
In 1986 and 1987, Solomon led two expeditions during the Antarctic winter – with its permanent nights and temperatures as low as 50°C below zero – to gather data on atmospheric composition at the time and place when the hole was forming. Science had already established that a lack of ozone led to an increase in the ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth, but it was Solomon who proved, in later research, that these changes in stratospheric composition also impacted on climate.
From 1995 to 1996, Solomon was Acting Director of the Atmospheric Chemistry Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Then from 2002 to 2008, she served as co-chair of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2012, she joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is currently Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies.
Solomon was the world’s third most highly cited geoscientist of the 1990s, and in 2008 Time magazine named her one of its top 100 most influential people. She even has an Antarctic glacier named after her. Her numerous distinctions include the U.S. National Medal of Science, her appointment as ‘Chevalier’ of the Legion d’honneur (France), the Blue Planet Prize (Japan) and a UN Environment Programme Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and holds honorary doctorates from twelve universities.
Speech
Climate Change, 5th edition
Susan Solomon emits 140 tons of carbon a day. But this “Godzilla size” footprint, as she calls it, is not the fault of ignorance or lack of awareness. Quite the opposite. For it was Solomon who found the first proof that human action was changing the atmosphere. She also discovered that climate change would last for a thousand years, even if carbon emissions were stopped altogether from this point on. And she was at the head of the international scientific group which in 2007 reached a historical conclusion: “Warming of the climate system is now inequivocal.” Susan Solomon has been granted the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change for helping to elucidate how human beings alter the atmosphere and, by extension, the Earth’s climate.
“Through her research and leadership,” reads the citation, Solomon “has contributed to the safeguarding of our planet.” And it is true that on at least two occasions, the work done by this professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has influenced global agreements to protect the Earth.
The first occasion came after she had solved one of the scientific enigmas causing most consternation among the research community: the severe depletion or “hole” in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Researchers on the British Antarctic Survey had discovered back in 1983 that the ozone was thinning out “at an astounding rate, and no one knew why,” Solomon relates. “It was a tremendous shock to the whole community.” She had by then earned her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, with an atmospheric chemistry project alongside future Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, and had started work in the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
Fascinated by the mystery, she ventured that ozone was being destroyed in the ice crystals of the Antarctic stratosphere in chemical reactions involving chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a kind of man-made compound. But she needed data to back her theory and promptly set about finding them. At the age of just 30, she was chosen to lead two expeditions during the Antarctic winters of 1986 and 1987.
“I loved Antarctica, it is one of the most amazing places I have ever worked in,” says Solomon. Years later, in 2001, she would narrate Robert F. Scott’s doomed attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in her essay “The Coldest March.” But the important news in 1987 was the confirmation of her theory: in effect, CFCs, used in refrigeration and aerosols, were ozone-destroying agents. There was no longer any cause to doubt man’s capacity to alter the atmosphere.
The proof came at just the right moment. While Solomon and her team were taking gas samples in Antarctica, a few scores of countries approved the Montreal Protocol with the precise aim of curbing use of CFCs. Earlier research – including the project that would win Crutzen a Nobel Prize jointly with Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland – had sounded a warning about the ozone-depleting capacity of these gases; what was missing was direct, global evidence to back it up. Hence Solomon’s work, as the citation affirms, “led to strengthening of the Montreal Protocol.”
The second occasion when the laureate’s influence went beyond the purely scientific was in the period 2002-2008, when she co-chaired the scientific group tasked with the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Solomon, by that time a reputed expert not only in ozone but also climate change, recalls the sleepless nights and then the “intense emotion” when the report was approved: for the first time, scientists had come out and said that climate change was under way, and was in all likelihood a product of human activity.
This was science fulfilling its guidance mission. “I have always thought that scientific results and progress can be the light of the world,” says Solomon, “and that the public and policy-makers should be able to make informed choices, with the information science provides. What is really great about scientists is that you can have ten of them in the room and it doesn’t matter if their native languages are different. They look at the data and are able to talk to each other in a constructive way. That’s truly incredible and it’s also the reason I love being a scientist.”
One of her latest findings highlights the slowness with which the atmosphere recovers: even if we stopped emitting carbon today, existing alterations would take at least a thousand years to fully unwind. Does this mean there is little point in fighting climate change? Not by any stretch, Solomon insists:“It is important to know that it’s not too late to stop turning up the thermostat. My discoveries increase the importance of making good choices about how much more carbon dioxide we want to put into the atmosphere, because we need to understand that what we are doing cannot be easily undone.”
“It is important to know that it’s not too late to stop turning up the thermostat. My discoveries increase the importance of making good choices about how much more carbon dioxide we want to put into the atmosphere, because we need to understand that what we are doing cannot be easily undone.”
TUITEAR
The key question then is what must we do to emit less carbon? Solomon doesn’t have the answer, but she does have a strong faith in technology: “We need to develop better and cheaper sources of low-carbon-emitting energy. If we don’t devote more attention to that kind of research I think we’ll be very hot indeed within about 50 years. So I would like to see a broader diplomatic effort to spur joint research on technology development worldwide.”
While we wait for the technology, Solomon argues, we have to look hard at our own day-to-day decisions. She can’t stop taking planes to scientific congresses – the cause of her large carbon footprint – but she supports reforestation projects and drives a relatively low-emissions car. What is missing, she thinks, is a wider social debate: “It worries me greatly that the people most affected by climate change will be those living in poor countries, where emissions are very low. I think we need a deeper discussion of the moral issues surrounding climate change.”
