Arnold J. Bloom became a botanist through a circuitous route. Upon receiving an undergraduate degree in Physics from Yale University, he spent several years developing computer models of the spread of air pollution over cities in the USA and Germany. He received a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, where he also completed a two-semester course in Environmental Legislation at the Law School. He conducted postdoctoral research on the temperature responses of plants at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

For the last thirty years, he has been on the faculty of the University of California at Davis. His publications range from major reviews on the economics of resource allocation in plants to the future of agriculture under rising carbon dioxide levels. He has coauthored textbooks on Plant Physiology and Plant Mineral Nutrition. The book Global Climate Change: Convergence of Disciplines derives from a General Education Course that he has offered for the past decade and has grown to an enrollment of nearly three hundred students.