As a collaborator on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), professor Michael Oppenheimer is honored by the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC, and shared with Al Gore, for its work in understanding the climate change crisis and pointing the way forward to solving it.

At the 2007 TEDSalon, “Hot Science: Radical Ideas to Combat the Climate Crisis”, Oppenheimer laid out the case that he has spent decades making: that “pervasive climate change is already under way” and “further warming is physically inevitable.” His lifetime of work has allowed humanity to understand the scope of this problem. With the IPCC, he’s been a lead author on several major assessments of the climate, including the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report due next month, assembling the research from more than 130 countries and thousands of studies into a window on our climate crisis.

Photo of Michael Oppenheimer by Myrna Suarez, Condé Nast Portfolio