Most of my professional life has focused, in one way or another, on the ways that humans affect the global environment. Greenhouse warming is the most complex and sprawling of those global problems; politically it is the toughest to solve. It has taken a career to understand the problem, and along the way I have accumulated many intellectual debts.

Before enrolling in graduate school at MIT in the late 1980s I worked with a research group at Harvard that studied atmospheric chemistry and physics. That group, led by Mike McElroy and Steve Wofsy, taught me more about basic science of the atmosphere and oceans than I ever learned as a student. At the time, the ozone layer was the big planetary worry, and through their eyes I learned how to read and interpret the cutting-edge science. I soon shifted my academic discipline to political science, but most of my career has been an attempt at serious interdisciplinary research on atmospheric and oceanic issues. That style of research only works when the scholar can read and interpret the frontier of research across often disparate disciplines. I trace my enthusiasm for interdisciplinary research to the orbit of interesting things I learned from Mike and Steve and the many other people in Cambridge, Massachusetts working on similar atmospheric problems. They included Jim Anderson's research group (which flew a converted spy plane into the ozone hole in the late 1980s and found the smoking gun showing that humans were to blame), Dick Holland, Ron Prinn, and Mario Molina.