Dear friends and colleagues:

I have watched with special interest as recent headlines refocused the world’s attention on the Paris climate accord.

Climate science and education is a strong interest of my wife, Roberta, and me, and has been a fixture of my own teaching and research for decades. In 1998, I had the honor of helping develop the early position statement on climate change and greenhouse gases for the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest scholarly association of earth and space scientists. In the early 2000s, I served as director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded laboratory that promotes discovery in climate science. And in my role as assistant director for the geosciences at the National Science Foundation from 2008 to 2012, I served as vice chair of strategic planning for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a national effort that has driven our understanding of climate change.

As a scientist and as president, I am proud of the University of Illinois System’s commitment to climate science and to the development of an action agenda to understand, mitigate, adapt and build resiliency to increasingly severe, human-induced climate change.

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