D. James Baker is senior strategic advisor for the Clinton Climate Initiative of the Clinton Foundation, an international consultant for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, and an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware. He served from 1993 to 2001 as Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and then went on to become president and CEO of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Before that he was president of Joint Oceanographic Institutions; first dean of the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle; and he taught and conducted research at Harvard University. He has served on more than 30 NRC committees, most recently as cochair of the Space Studies Board’s Committee on Impediments to Interagency Cooperation. He was awarded the 50^th Anniversary Commemorative Medal of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in 2011, the Lifetime Achievement Award by Oceanology International in 2008 for “contributions to oceanography and marine science,” and the Vikram Sarabhai Medal by the government of India in 1998 for “outstanding contributions to space research in developing countries.” He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he cofounded and was the first president of the Oceanography Society. He has led oceanographic expeditions to many parts of the world and shares a patent for a deep-sea pressure gauge. He has more than 100 scientific publications and is the author of Planet Earth: The View from Space, published by Harvard University Press. He holds a BS in physics from Stanford University, a PhD in physics from Cornell University, and three honorary degrees.