Research, ideas, and leadership for a more secure, peaceful world
Science, Precaution, and Political Realism: Has the NGO-Balancing Act Succeeded?
Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University. He joined the Princeton faculty after more than 2 decades at an environmental non-governmental organization, Environmental Defense, where he served as Chief Scientist and manager of the Global and Regional Atmosphere Program. His interests include science and policy of the atmosphere, particularly climate change and its impacts. Recently, he has served as a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on the National Research Council's Panel on the Atmospheric Effects of Aviation, and on several university and institutional advisory boards.
Dr. Oppenheimer is the author of more than 60 articles published in professional journals and is co-author (with Robert H. Boyle) of a 1990 book, Dead Heat: The Race Against The Greenhouse Effect. His recent professional publications include a review article in Nature entitled, "Global warming and the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet," as well as an analysis (with Anu Vedantham) of projected greenhouse gas emissions from aviation, published in Energy Policy, entitled, "Long-term scenarios for aviation: Demand and emissions of CO2 and NOx."
His contributions have appeared on the Op-Ed and Book Review pages of The New York Times and other newspapers. He has been a frequent guest on many television and radio news programs including ABC's This Week and Nightline.
His research and advocacy work on acid rain that contributed to the passage of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act include two key scientific articles: "Acid Deposition, Smelter Emissions, and the Linearity Issue in the Western United States," published in Science; "Atmospheric Nitrogen Deposition and the Chesapeake Bay Estuary," published in the journal Ambio.
In the late 1980's, Dr. Oppenheimer and a handful of other scientists organized two workshops under the auspices of the United Nations that helped precipitate the negotiations that resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (signed at the 1992 Earth Summit) and the Kyoto Protocol. He is also a co-founder of the Climate Action Network.
Prior to his position at Environmental Defense, Dr. Oppenheimer served as Atomic and Molecular Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Lecturer on Astronomy at Harvard University. He received an S.B. in chemistry from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Chicago, and pursued post-doctoral research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
