Rafe Pomerance, an environmentalist who discovered in an obscure 1979 report that burning coal heats the atmosphere, which roused him, Paul Revere-like, to warn the public and politicians about climate change, died on May 21 in Washington, DC. He was 79.

Mr. Pomerance emerged as the central figure in a whole-issue article in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “Losing Earth” by Nathaniel Rich. The article later expanded into a book and is now in production as a movie.

Earlier cautions about climate change, first noted in 1896 into the 1960s had been largely ignored. Dire warnings about increased carbon in the air predicting melting ice sheets, rising seas, calamitous weather and imperiled species did not catch the awareness of the public, politicians, media or environmental groups, which were focused on smog and toxic waste dumps.

“Shouldn’t I be totally depressed?” he asked in 2019. “Yet, I’m not.” One reason was how many people had come to understand the climate crisis. “When I started, nobody had heard of the problem. Nobody was active,” he said. “We started at zero. Well, look at us now. Everybody in the world knows about climate change. So is that progress? Let’s hope.”

James Burrows, master of the television situation comedy, who was a creator of “Cheers” and directed more than 1,000 episodes of that show and other TV classics like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Taxi,” “Frasier,” “Friends,” and “The Big Bang Theory,” died on June 19. He was 85.

Mr. Burrows earned a reputation as the “Steven Spielberg of sitcoms,” winning 11 Emmy Awards and receiving 47 nominations in a career that spanned five decades. “When I direct a television show, I try to reach that sweet spot where the best script meets the best performance and the best chemistry between performers,” Mr. Burrows wrote in his 2022 autobiography, Directed By James Burrows, written with Eddy Friedfeld. “Hitting that exact moment, where these factors land in combination, results in the sweetest and most enduring laugh.”

Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian scholar renowned for an approach to history that focused on the mass of humanity that existed outside the political and social elites of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, died on June 17 at his home in Bologna. He was 87.

In the 1960s, when Mr. Ginzburg embarked on his research, there was little interest in discovering what the peasants of centuries past thought and believed. History was focused on great leaders and events, like the Medici banking and political dynasty of nearby Florence or the powerful doges who ruled over Venice. Mr. Ginzburg’s interdisciplinary approach straddled anthropology, literary theory, art criticism, and psychoanalysis.

His family spent several years in a small, southern Italian village to which his parents had been exiled for their opposition to the Mussolini regime. His father was tortured and killed in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Italy. Carlo spent the remainder of the war hidden in another rural village, under the protection of his maternal grandmother. “She was my only non-Jewish relative, and to protect me, she made me use her maiden name,” Mr. Ginzburg recalled. “I became Carlo Taszi.”

Greg Hyman, an electronics wizard and toy inventor who was a creator of Tickle Me Elmo, the giggling red plush Muppet when it appeared in 1996 and became a runaway success, died on May 1 at his home in Boca Raton, FL. He was 78.

Elmo was a bundle of red fluff and googly Muppet eyes. He giggled and said “That tickles.” What followed was retail mayhem. The first 400,000 sold out by Black Friday. As the company scrambled to make more, deploying Boeing 747s to deliver them, there were reports of frantic parents ambushing store employees and each other. A black market quickly emerged, with reports of Elmos, which had a retail price of $29.99 being scalped for as much as $7,000 each.

Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick-witted former Massachusetts senator, who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on May 19 at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.

Mr. Frank, a liberal Democrat, represented a diverse suburban Boston district for 32 years, starting in 1981. A Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Frank “bristled with intellectual firepower, acidic turns of phrase, and a zest for verbal combat,” The New York Times said.

His most significant legislative achievement was in the realm of financial regulation. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which he sponsored with Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, tightened the rules on the financial industry as part of the government’s response to the housing crisis of 2007 and the global financial meltdown the next year. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, the measure sought to prevent the nation’s biggest banks from engaging in behavior with risks to consumers.

Mr. Frank’s book, The Hard Path to Unity, completed shortly before he entered hospice care, opined that the political left had sometimes gone too far in pushing divisive causes. “Slow down,” he advised, “and find common ground.” He told interviewers that he was pleased that the book’s message was having some resonance. “Frankly,” he told The Times, “if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.”

Nicole Hollander, a biting cartoon artist, whose comic strip “Sylvia,” about a big-haired, cigarette-smoking, cat-loving, hyper-opinionated feminist, made her a singular voice on the funny pages for more than 30 years, died on April 23 in Chicago. She was 86.

Ms. Hollander made Sylvia a tart-tongued, witty, loquacious single mother who held court — sometimes from her bathtub — on sex and relationships, politics, health care reform, the environment, and other hot-button issues. The strip was syndicated in about 80 newspapers.

Eugene Braunwald, a groundbreaking cardiologist, whose research helped transform heart disease from near-certain killer into a condition often manageable with medications procedures and careful monitoring, died on April 21 in Newton, MA. He was 96.

Regarded as one of the most influential cardiologists of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Dr. Braunwald’s research reshaped how doctors understood heart attacks, heart failure, and coronary artery disease, and helped lead to therapies that saved millions of lives — medications that lowered the heart’s workload and reduced blood pressure, and treatments that reopened blocked arteries.

Dr. Braunwald remained deeply involved in research well into the 21st century, publishing papers mentoring younger physicians, and contributing to clinical trials. In 2014, he was a leader of a study that found an alternative cholesterol-lowering drug could protect people from heart attacks and strokes. The study validated previous findings that lowering cholesterol prevents heart disease — settling the issue once and for all, Dr. Braunwald insisted. “People,” he said, “can stop yapping.”