Oppenheimer has played a leading role at the interface of science and public policy including influencing the development of the
acid rain provisions of the US
Clean Air Act. He co-organized a series of activities that prefigured the emergence of climate change as a top international concern and influenced the development of the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He directed climate and air pollution activities at the Environmental Defense Fund when that NGO's science-based and incentive-based approach to climate change was reflected in the language of the
Kyoto Protocol. Oppenheimer has played a significant role within the Nobel Prize-winning
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), serving as Contributing Author, Lead Author, or Coordinating Lead Author on each assessment report since IPCC's first report, as well as two special reports. Oppenheimer also serves as a Review Editor on the
Sixth Assessment Report.
Oppenheimer is a prominent public figure and has discussed various aspects of the impacts of and solutions to climate change and other issues in the media. He has testified before committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives on numerous occasions. He has also been a guest on many television and radio programs and talk shows, including This Week, The News Hour, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Colbert Report, and 60 Minutes. Oppenheimer is the author of over 200 articles published in professional journals.
He is the author of Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy[2] published in 2019 with several coauthors and Dead Heat: The Race Against The Greenhouse Effect, coauthored with Robert H. Boyle and published in 1990. Oppenheimer is co-founder of the
Climate Action Network and has served on many expert panels including the
New York City Panel on Climate Change and the US National Academies’ Board on Energy and Environmental Systems. He is a trustee of the NGOs
Climate Central and
Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Oppenheimer also serves as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Climatic Change.
He joined the Princeton faculty after more than two decades with the
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-governmental, environmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program. Prior to his position at the Environmental Defense Fund, Oppenheimer served as atomic and molecular astrophysicist at the
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lecturer on astronomy at
Harvard University.
He continues to serve as a science advisor to EDF.
His interests include science and policy of the atmosphere, particularly
climate change and its impacts. Much of his research aims to understand the potential for "dangerous" outcomes of increasing levels of greenhouse gases by exploring the effects of global warming on
ice sheets and
sea level, and on patterns of
human migration.[1] He has assessed linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico–US cross-border migration.[5][6] Oppenheimer studies the process of scientific learning and scientific assessments and their role in influencing public policies to respond to global change.[7]
In 2007, he wrote about limitations of the IPCC consensus approach in Science Magazine.[7] The current centralized assessment role of the IPCC allows for "communication in a monolithic message" but risks "ossification and eventual irrelevance" of the IPCC as an institution.[8] According to him, the "problem of creating, defending, and communicating consensus, as well as departures from the consensus" had been discussed but not addressed until after the AR4.[8] Oppenheimer notes important changes within the IPCC, including a stronger focus on uncertainty and risk management after publication of the
InterAcademy Panel IAC 2010 IPCC review.
Together with Jessica O'Reilly and
Naomi Oreskes, Oppenheimer discussed the way the risk of collapse of the
West Antarctic Ice Sheet was assessed in IPCC reports in a
Social Studies of Science paper in 2012. The authors cited the changes of IPCC chairpersons, authors teams, and chapter organization as reasons for an incomplete assessment of the ice sheet and resulting confusion among stakeholders.[9] Oppenheimer and coauthors pursued the theme of treatment of uncertainty in assessments in subsequent papers, particularly Climate change prediction: erring on the side of least drama?[10] (2013) and in the 2019 book, Discerning Experts: The Practice of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy.[2] The latter reports the results of the first phase of an ongoing ethnographic study of many assessments that includes, in its subsequent phases, direct observation of parts of IPCC author meetings and consensus panels of the US National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences.
Oppenheimer, Michael; Little, Christopher M.; Cooke, Roger M. (May 2016). "Expert judgement and uncertainty quantification for climate change". Nature Climate Change. 6 (5): 445–451.
Bibcode:
2016NatCC...6..445O.
doi:
10.1038/nclimate2959.
Lloyd, Ian D.; Oppenheimer, Michael (May 2014). "On the Design of an International Governance Framework for Geoengineering". Global Environmental Politics. 14 (2): 45–63.
doi:
10.1162/GLEP_a_00228.
S2CID20434511.
^O’Reilly, Jessica; Oreskes, Naomi; Oppenheimer, Michael (26 June 2012). "The rapid disintegration of projections: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change". Social Studies of Science. 42 (5): 709–731.
doi:
10.1177/0306312712448130.
PMID23189611.
S2CID33619256.