Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

Libby Barnes, like essentially no one else on Forecast, wanted to be a professor from age 12. Specifically, a physics professor. And indeed, climate science almost lost Libby to neutrinos. But an instrumentation disaster, and the associated personal mayhem in the research group, made Libby realize that she was geared more for solving a great many problems, not any one particular decade-long quest. Now, Libby is exploring a dizzying array of topics in climate dynamics, and we bore down into the long-running debate on arctic impacts on the mid-latitudes and subseasonal to seasonal prediction. Along the way, Libby tells Mike about her amazingly sensible — and highly intentional — approach to academia and the tenure process. Music: Zopje, The Township Two Step, and HUA by Brazzmatazz are licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, as is this episode of Forecast. Tweet

There’s incessant talk about impostor syndrome among scientists. But paleoclimate modeler Dan Lunt from the University of Bristol actually DOES pretend to be someone he is not. Specifically, Radagast the Brown from Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Samwell Tarly from Martin’s Westeros. Madness? Only if it is mad to spend what must have been a ridiculous amount of time researching and writing papers on The  Climate of Middle Earth and The Climate of the world of Game of Thrones. Dan tells Mike what’s behind this unusual outreach work, and some of the surprisingly interesting climate mechanisms at work (annual precession  cycles anyone?). The conversation wheels across Dan’s studies at Oxford, the incredible longevity of HadCM3, Earth system sensitivity, EMICs vs. emulators, model intercomparisons, the challenges of working with geologic data, and launching Geoscience Model Development. And finally, the life-long trauma of supporting a mediocre football club. Tweet

Andrea Dutton from the University of Florida tells Mike about the many nuances of using corals to reconstruct past sea level. Sounds simple enough: find corals at depth z, date them to year t, and Bob’s your uncle. Yeah … no. Turns out there’s a lot more at play: 3D topography, plasticity in coral’s depth preference, challenging geochemistry, changes in turbidity. The list of complicating factors is long, but Andrea and her colleagues are working incredibly hard to provide better constraints of sea levels during past warm periods — a critical constraint for the models being used to project sea level into the future. On top of all that, Andrea is an outreach superstar and was recently selected as one of Rolling Stones’ 25 People Shaping the Future in Tech, Science, Medicine, Activism and More. Professional success doesn’t always come easy, though, and Andrea has had to work through challenges like big publication gaps, divorce, and raising young children during the tenure process. Music: The Professor’s Lab by Christian Bjoerklund CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Tweet

Abby Swann tells Mike how plants both respond to and affect climate change. Some of this seems obvious: more CO2, more photosynthesis, bigger plants. Maybe, but there’s a lot more to it: nutrient limitations (or lack thereof!), changes in respiration, stomatal conductance downregulation, drought responses, sea ice interactions, atmospheric feedbacks, changes in land cover … the interactions are complex and numerous. With her strong background in both atmospheric sciences and land-atmosphere interactions, Abby is ideally placed to be tackling these issues, and we talk through a lot of them. Abby, like many academics, has had to grapple with discussions surrounding sexual harassment, and we round out the conversation with a hopefully helpful discussion of how to at least frame supportive discussions within a research group. Tweet

In episode 58 of Forecast, Mike talks with Henri Drake, Jennifer Carman, and Molly Keogh, three of the attendees at the 11th Graduate Climate Conference. The meeting itself is a great chance for grad students working on climate change — broadly defined — to get together with their immediate peers, away from, ahem, pesky senior scientists. The interviews span physical oceanography, wetland restoration, environmental psychology, education, and behavior change. A tiny window into the inspiring work being done by the next generation of climate researchers!   Tweet

Tom Narock and Chris Jackson tell Mike about the new EarthArXiv preprint server.  The show is a bit of an oddball for Forecast, considering that the show’s usual diet is long-format interviews about a scientist’s life and research. But the launch of EarthArXiv — one of a growing series of preprint servers — could be the spark to light the  climate science community’s interest in the use of preprints, long a fixture of fields like physics and mathematics. For a discussion of EarthArXiv within the broader publishing landscape I encourage you to check out Victor Venema’s excellent blog post over at Variable Variability. Music: Hallon by Christian Bjoerklund CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Tweet

Deciphering the global carbon cycle is as fascinating as it is difficult. There are carbon fluxes in and out of the planet, all over the place, and at all time scales. Observational gaps are numerous and gaping. Uncertainties on country level emissions are increasing. Yet the global carbon budget is perhaps THE central bit of knowledge that society must have, if an informed decision on carbon mitigation is ever to be made. Corinne Le Quéré from the University of East Anglia is working to quantify — with enormous effort — just such a budget. You might think it’s like balancing a checkbook, and you’d be right. But only if your checkbook includes investments with unknown and time-variable interest rates, and frequent, untraceable withdrawals. As Corrine tells Mike, in spite of the massive challenges, the carbon cycle community is making tremendous progress in pinning down the many elusive processes that ultimately control the main variable of interest: atmospheric CO2 levels. Music: Hallon by Christian Bjoerklund CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Tweet

Most everyone you’ve heard on Forecast has a twisty career path. But Joe McConnell took an unusually circuitous route to his current role as a leading ice core scientist. Joe bombed as a dishwasher, thrived as a post-hole digger, started a consulting company as a teenager, considered anthropology and environmental law for his studies, switched gears to signal processing for oil exploration, traveled the world, returned to grad school with the aim of starting a hydrological consulting company, but ultimately returned to work on one of his enduring passions — the high latitudes. Now, Joe and his crew melt and analyze tiny bits of ice cores in one of the world’s premier continuous flow analysis labs. The samples are small, but the output is huge: major leaps in our understanding of black carbon, volcanism, and the interactions between humanity and the Earth system. Tweet

In Episode 54 of Forecast, Peter Cox from the University of Exeter gives Mike the inside story about how the “emergent constraints” approach is reshaping our ability to wring every last drop of useful information from climate models. It’s a two step process. First, using climate models, establish a relationship between something you care about in the future to something that is mechanistically related and for which we have modern/historical observations. Then, construct a meta-model that is constrained by the models’ varying ability to simulate the observed variable. Bob’s your uncle. It can be more complicated than that, but Peter’s genius is identifying, probing, and polishing simple nuggets of science, many of which end up published in Nature. And speaking of Nature, we kick it off by discussing the benefits of knowing and, let’s just call it, “handling” your editors. Tweet

In episode 53 of Forecast, Mike talks with Julia Pongratz from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology about the role of land cover and land use change in the climate system. Julia began working on the topic with an unbelievable challenge: simulating the impacts of LCLUC over the past millennium. Now her interests encompass geoengineering, climate mitigation and model intercomparisons, with a focus on understanding the ever-complex interactions among biophysical and biogeochemical feedbacks. Also, Julia assures Mike that, unlike in Maine, the ticks aren’t too horrendous in Germany. Probably. At least in the big cities.   Tweet

In episode 52 of Forecast, Mike and Marilyn Raphael from the University of California at Los Angeles talk about Antarctic sea ice. Arctic sea ice is, on a relative scale, well understood: observations and models show a massive decline. Antarctic sea ice is weirder. Overall, the extent of Antarctic sea ice is increasing, slightly. But this masks nearby areas with both large increases and decreases. Mike and Marilyn discuss the many mechanisms that might be underlying the interesting and somewhat bedeviling trends, as well as the multitude of ways in which Antarctic sea ice interacts with the broader climate system. We wrap up with a personal discussion of what it’s like being an introvert in science, and some ways to navigate the often-draining interpersonal demands. Tweet

In episode 51 of Forecast, Jérôme Chappellaz regales Mike with all manner ice core tales. The early days of discovering that methane varies hugely between glacial and interglacial states; profligate consumption of ice in the early days; the intensely competitive yet fundamentally friendly nature of the field; the ever-present need to take scientific risks; documentary film making. Spontaneity, chance and inspiration dominate the conversation. Jérôme’s insomnia while in Antarctica leads to the crazy dream of Subglacior, a radical development in ice core technology, and a meeting with royalty leads to funding for the Ice Memory project. Perhaps unique among the geosciences, the ice core community and Jérôme in particular are constantly faced with disappearing/melting records, and the pressing need to create an ice archive for the next generation and whatever hammers will be in their toolbox. Leading to … sequencing the history of the Black Plague from ice cores, maybe? Tweet

In episode 50 of Forecast, Julien Emile-Geay from the University of Southern California calmly presents a somewhat radical world view. Love of jazz as a means of selecting a grad school; universities as revolutionary institutions; pursuit of science as a subversive activity. Even more unusual: considering data and models not as separate entities, but as co-equal, and integral, facets of research into paleoclimate dynamics. For example, Julien is leading efforts on both massive data compilations, and on the massive Last Millennium Reanalysis. Progress is coming on many fronts, including ENSO dynamics, the always-controversial topic of solar-climate interactions, and low frequency climate variability — what Julien calls the “bassline of the climate soundtrack”. Tweet

In this episode of Forecast, Jess tells Mike about the origins of the TEX86 temperature proxy — an index of membrane lipids produced by mesophilic archaea. The origins in the 1980s in extreme ocean environment; discovery of membrane production in a huge range of environments; brute force discovery of the index; the inevitable struggles to understand what it actually represents; an unusually active and sometimes dismissive debate about its usefulness. All proxies have issues, but Jess and her colleagues are converging on the what/when/where for TEX86’s application. For Jess, work on TEX86 (and other methods!) is leading to an improved understanding of the atmospheric dynamics, surface processes, and feedbacks governing past climate variability, particularly in the tropics. Tweet

Kevin Anchukaitis from the University of Arizona is probably best known for his work on dendroclimatology, but this is changing quickly. Now, his broader interests in the connections among history, political science, archaeology, statistics, climate modeling, and forward modeling of proxies are increasingly mirrored within the broader field of late Holocene paleoclimate research. Now, it’s possible to bring together this astonishingly wide range of evidence to disentangle, for example, the influence of volcanic eruptions on climate and society. It ends up sounding like a golden age for climate science, if not for the extinct Monteverde golden toad, whose extinction Kevin showed to be due to a fungal disease coupled with natural climate variability. As always, with good science, you have to go where the evidence takes you. Tweet