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Feb. 24, 2014—Susan Solomon is responsible for a lot of change at your house. It's partly due to her that refrigerators don't use freon anymore, that hair spray is now made with relatively benign aerosols like ethanol or butane and that the strawberry fumigant methyl bromide has been outlawed. In 1986, Solomon, a Berkeley-trained atmospheric chemist working for NOAA, led an expedition to Antarctica that confirmed what climate scientists like "ozone hole" pioneer Mario Molina had been suspecting: that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the earth's atmosphere were depleting the planet's protective ozone layer. The next year the Montreal Protocol opened for signature. It phased out all CFCs and related compounds, and in a rare example of multilateral cooperation, it was universally ratified.

So it's fair to hope that when Solomon delivers the Fred Keeley Lecture on Environmental Policy at UCSC this Friday, she'll bring some talismanic good luck with her. Solomon's address kicks off a campus conference on climate science and climate change that has attracted some big names, including climatologist Michael Mann, whose "hockey stick graph" in 1998 showed a precipitous rise in historic global temperatures in the twentieth century, and environmental journalist Andrew Revkin, author of the New York Times' "Dot Earth" blog. Since the nations of the world have famously failed to rally around climate change as they rallied around ozone depletion, we could use the luck.

Solomon, who left NOAA in 2011 to join MIT and continues to work on climate research, might be just the person to deliver it. As she told Hilltromper in an email, she'll be focusing on environmental success stories. "I find it amazing and inspiring to reflect upon how the world has dealt with a series of past environmental problems—we haven't been perfect, of course, but there are lessons to be learned in the ways that issues ranging from acid rain to smog to lead in paint were ultimately managed—in my opinion to a better place," she wrote. "So I'll be reflecting how science, public understanding and engagement and other factors have served the world on past problems, and prospects for how they can do so again."

Solomon was one of the co-authors of the Fourth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007.

The Keeley Lecture on Environmental Policy with Susan Solomon happens Friday, Feb. 28 at 7:30p at UCSC's University Center. It's free and open to the public.

NOTE: Immediately preceding the lecture is a fundraising dinner for the Keeley Coastal Scholars Program, which benefits low-income kids pursuing careers in the marine sciences. Tickets are $100 per plate. For more information contact fjkeeley@yahoo.com.

Climate Conference at UCSC

On Saturday, March 1, Climate Science and Policy Through The Looking Glass starts at 9am with a panel on "The Current State of Climate Research." Panels follow at 10:45am ("Mitigating the Effects of Climate Change: What Is Possible?") and 2pm ("Adapting to the Future Effects of Climate Change"). Scientists from Harvard, Lawrence Livermore, NASA, Scripps, Columbia University's Earth Institute and the California Department of Food and Agriculture will sit on these panels, which gives some sense of the conference's wide-ranging nature.

Saturday night's keynote address, also free and open to the public, comes from outspoken climatologist and author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State. Because the "hockey stick graph" modeled by Mann and fellow researchers in the late 1990s pointed to humans as the cause of global climate change, he's been a target of climate change deniers, and he was one of the scientists named in the 2009 IPCC email scandal dubbed Climategate, which critics said proved that global warming was a conspiracy among scientists.

Mann, who never stopped fighting back against his detractors, has recently upped the ante; in January he published a powerful opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that scientists should involve themselves in public policy rather than hole up in the ivory tower, or else "leave a vacuum that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of short-term self-interest."

"Climate Science and Policy Through The Looking Glass" begins Saturday, March 1 at 9am; Michael Mann delivers the keynote address that evening at 7:30pm. All panels and addresses are at the University Center at College 9/10, UCSC campus. Free and open to the public.