I see two ways that my work relates to my concept of tikkun olam.
There is the straightforward one 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.
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I have also contributed to climate change science and policy, through my work as co-chair of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that resulted in a key conclusion: warming is unequivocal.
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.
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.