Even in the face of dispiriting data, Solomon continues to focus on figuring out how to fix things. She tells her students that making headway on climate change depends on getting people to understand how the problem will affect them personally—and to believe there are practical solutions. And she’s hopeful about the progress she’s seeing.

“Climate change won’t be solved until alternative energies become more widely adopted, but they are already becoming adopted at an incredibly astonishing pace,” she says. “Admittedly, it may not be as fast as it would need to be to hold temperatures to one and a half degrees—that would really be Herculean. But we can bend the warming curve.”