Solomon Susan

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Solomon
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Susan
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  • Preprint
    Cracking the egg : how a nested framework illuminates the challenges of comparative environmental analysis
    ( 2013-04-13) Bors, Eleanor K. ; Solomon, Susan
    Stratospheric ozone loss is on course to become a solved environmental problem, with all significant producing countries (including China and India) undertaking complete phaseouts of ozone-depleting substances. The universal concurrence and speed with which ozone loss has been addressed are sometimes heralded as signs that effective international agreements on other problems of the global commons are just around the corner. But progress on many other issues has been strikingly limited. Is ozone the exception, rather than the rule, and if so why? Here we present one way to illuminate why some environmental problems are more tractable than others by consideration of a “nested” (vs. non-nested) framework. We will refer to nesting as having three components: intellectual, societal, and institutional. Intellectual nesting refers to the academic communities that study the roots of the problem as well as possible solutions. Societal nesting refers to the sectors of human actors and activities that are associated with the problem. Institutional nesting describes the types of governance or management structures that could address the problem. We define a fully nested environmental problem as one for which the science of the problem is rooted within multiple, disparate disciplines, and for which the causes, impacts, and solutions are nested within different sectors of society and government. Within these definitions, we discuss marine biodiversity loss as an example of a deeply nested environmental problem, climate change as a mostly nested environmental problem, and ozone depletion as a much less nested environmental problem.
  • Article
    Exceptional stratospheric contribution to human fingerprints on atmospheric temperature
    (National Academy of Sciences, 2023-05-16) Santer, Benjamin D. ; Po-Chedley, Stephen ; Zhao, Lilong ; Zou, Cheng-Zhi ; Fu, Qiang ; Solomon, Susan ; Thompson, David W. J. ; Mears, Carl ; Taylor, Karl E.
    In 1967, scientists used a simple climate model to predict that human-caused increases in atmospheric CO2 should warm Earth’s troposphere and cool the stratosphere. This important signature of anthropogenic climate change has been documented in weather balloon and satellite temperature measurements extending from near-surface to the lower stratosphere. Stratospheric cooling has also been confirmed in the mid to upper stratosphere, a layer extending from roughly 25 to 50 km above the Earth’s surface (S25 − 50). To date, however, S25 − 50 temperatures have not been used in pattern-based attribution studies of anthropogenic climate change. Here, we perform such a “fingerprint” study with satellite-derived patterns of temperature change that extend from the lower troposphere to the upper stratosphere. Including S25 − 50 information increases signal-to-noise ratios by a factor of five, markedly enhancing fingerprint detectability. Key features of this global-scale human fingerprint include stratospheric cooling and tropospheric warming at all latitudes, with stratospheric cooling amplifying with height. In contrast, the dominant modes of internal variability in S25 − 50 have smaller-scale temperature changes and lack uniform sign. These pronounced spatial differences between S25 − 50 signal and noise patterns are accompanied by large cooling of S25 − 50 (1 to 2C over 1986 to 2022) and low S25 − 50 noise levels. Our results explain why extending “vertical fingerprinting” to the mid to upper stratosphere yields incontrovertible evidence of human effects on the thermal structure of Earth’s atmosphere.