Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

People find science for all kinds of reasons. Some are born to it, but usually not. Most people find science by bumping into it at a bar, getting help from it while fixing a flat tire, seeing it alight on a leaf, iridescent, or watching it pass by on a subway car going the other way. For Kaustubh Thirumalai (Kau), the stage was set with burnout on chemical engineering in India coupled with a side job reviewing comics and black metal for a friend’s website. Then, almost randomly searching for an interesting internship, he hooked up with Prosenjit Ghosh, for whom he worked as a local fixer, helping to procure parts for the construction of a mass spec. After that, it was geosciences, full-on: a move to the US, interests in the techniques and concepts of paleoclimate, and an ever-expanding network of collaborators. But still comics and metal! Just now with a splash of trace metals — little bundles of strontium and company, waiting to be discovered.   Intro music is from the album Terminal Redux by Vektor, ranked by Kau as the #1 metal album of 2016. Extro music is Quartz, by Kau himself. All music used by permission — thanks Dave and Kau! Photos are by Kau, used by permission. Tweet

Sometimes papers in Nature are incomprehensible to anyone other than a hard-core specialist. Yes, we use press releases, News & Views, and other reporting to make the leap to our broader readership. But for bringing science to the general public, no amount of Carl Sagans, Neil deGrasse Tysons, or Bill Nyes is going to get the job done. You need journalists. Journalists like Rob Meyer from The Atlantic, who are producing an astonishing amount of great content on topics like the Paris Agreement, fracking regulations, and Antarctica. Rob talks me through his path from music major to twitter procrastinator to Atlantic writer. I flip the usual Nature-related questions around to Rob: how do you select stories, frame them for your audience, and discuss the policy implication? And what is the rationale for the New York Times hiring Bret Stephens? Definitely a story there. Music: Clips for the intro and extro are the songs 1969 and One Ticket Two Bills by Ending Satellites CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Tweet

The causes of heat waves are kind of like the controls on a car. We know that pressure systems, land-atmosphere interactions, and modes of variability like ENSO act to control extremes, just as we know that the steering wheel, moderated by the brake and gas pedals, controls the direction and velocity of the car. But imagine driving a car blindfolded. Yes, you know what the controls do, but the chances of hitting something hard are pretty high if you keep the gas pedal down, careening across even the most familiar of roads. For extremes, the moment-to-moment, season-to-season occurrence of extremes will remain challenging to predict, like the exact moment at which you’ll veer out of your lane, but the coming impact of blindly increasing emissions is more certain. Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick from the University of New South Wales endured the horrendous heat of Australia’s 2017 summer – pregnant, in a badly insulated house with wobbly air conditioning – and is studying heat waves and how they will change in a persistently warming climate. As Sarah tells Mike, the news is almost uniformly not good. Unless the foot comes off the gas pedal, the car is going to hit the wall: rare events in today’s climate are likely to become seasonally persistent; different emission pathways might delay but won’t alter the ultimate arrival of catastrophic heat. Of course, society could adapt, and Australians could end up living the bulk of their lives in air conditioned spaces, at the cost of further emission increases, radical changes to lifestyle, and eye-popping expense. Is this the world we want? Let’s hope not, but the mitigation equivalent of self-driving cars is not going to magically appear. It’s just us. Music: Balkan Qoulou by Watcha Clan CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US; Backed Vibes Clean by Kevin MacLeod CC BY 3.0.  Tweet

The field of environmental economics in general — and climate economics in particular — is exploding. And my guest on episode 44 of Forecast, Solomon Hsiang from UC Berkeley, is helping to crack open some of the recalcitrant oyster shells of the field. How does climate influence conflict, migration and economic productivity? We talk through some of the big challenges in addressing these topics: the frequent impossibility of running experiments and the accompanying use of quasi-experiments; the growing use of — at last! — data; how incredibly hard it is to disentangle the influence of single factors — like climate — in a complicated human system. In many ways economics is decades behind physical sciences. As Sol explains, we’ve now for the most part forgotten about the initial debates regarding fluid dynamics, but economics is still very much at the phase of figuring out elementary processes. Sometimes this means that the major findings reside in statistical approaches, without clear mechanistic understanding. But Sol and his colleagues are working towards linking microscale human decisions to aggregate societal processes, and it is this sort of understanding that will, and indeed already is, proving important in a policy context. Music:  Le train pour Paspébiac, Quand la bière est tirée and Matelot by Quimorucru. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Tweet

Most of the big stuff in Earth system science arises from the small stuff. The Keeling curve is the balance between an unknowably large number of microorganisms and the cellular fixation of carbon. Clouds, covering more than half of the planet at any one time, are created at the sub-cm scale. And, increasingly, we are realizing that ocean circulation — once conceived as a sort of monstrous conveyor belt — is instead a motley crew of what Jennifer MacKinnon from the Scripps Institution calls “the swirly things”. Eddies, turbulent billows … “there’s just a ton of animals in the zoo”. Jen talks Mike through the close linkage between observations and theory: it’s hard to conceive of an Antarctic Circumpolar Current composed of a horde of eddies if you can only look over the side of one ship at a time. And the more we observe the ocean, the more interesting it becomes. It now looks, for example, that there may be super-weird interactions between internal waves and mesoscale eddies. More is coming, too, probably from Deep Argo. Yet beyond observations and theory — and as we also heard from Bill Boos — Jen’s kind of science can play a key role in advancing societally-relevant prediction systems. Plus, sabbatical in Palau*, wrestling, and Walter Munk is turning 100 — the party is on! Music: Springish, All Eventualities and The Everlasting Itch For Things Remote by Gillicuddy. CC BY-NC 3.0. *In the interview I said that Palau is in the Eastern Pacific. It is, of course, in the Western Pacific. Tweet

Forecast is mostly about climate science — the people who do it, and why they’re stoked about their work. But science is inevitably conducted within a political context, and Mike is a neanderthal when it comes to politics. Gretchen Goldman from the Union of Concerned Scientists, on the other hand, knows a lot about science policy. Gretchen initially planned to avoid the often-unpleasant dynamics surrounding climate science, and went into air pollution research. Eventually the draw of engaging in even bigger issues proved too much to resist, and Gretchen is now the research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the UCS. Gretchen leaves Mike feeling surprisingly optimistic. In spite of the dark times facing US climate science, and as Gretchen discusses in a Science Policy Forum, there are still clear ways for scientists to engage with the broader public and to promote the use of science in the democratic and policy process. For those interested in getting more involved, the UCS provides excellent resources for networking and dealing with personal attacks. Disclosure: As Gretchen discusses in the interview, her husband works at NOAA, an agency whose budget faces major cuts. He is also the consulting meteorologist for climate.gov. Music: Hashashin by Metastaz, CC BY-NC 4.0.; A1 Rogue by Podington Bear, CC BY-NC 3.0. Tweet

Jana Sillmann has carved out a career working on understanding and predicting climate extremes — heat waves, heavy rainfall, atmospheric rivers. What combination of factors controls the occurrence of extremes, particularly in a changing climate? Jana and Mike hash through the underlying science — including the agonizingly slow pace of model development — and how society is affected by and responds to extremes. Jana’s background and pathway to her current position are equally fascinating: an idyllic childhood in communist East Germany, with mom teaching construction; exchange student in rural North Dakota, hosted by an accordion virtuoso; grad school in the US; realizing that a career with computers and coffee was preferable to field work; chance exposure to an inspirational talk by Mojib Latif; a PhD from the Max Planck in Hamburg; four years in Canada with people like Francis Zwiers; leaving Canada in response to the anti-science politics of the time (sound familiar?); finally, moving to what sounds like a fabulous position at CICERO in Norway, where, remarkably, society actually seems to fully support women in science. And the ideal science environment? A sprinkle of Norwegian funding for individual academics, a bit of German support for postdocs and grad students, and a splash of Canadian IT investment. Music from the album Encounters by Metastaz CC-BY-NC 4.0. Includes the tracks Hashashin, Vampire, and Girl and Assassin. Tweet

Bill Boos and I have something in common. Neither of us is much of a long-term planner, but we both like to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. For me, this approach led to a switch from academia to editing. For Bill, it led to an in-process move from Yale to UC Berkeley. Bill’s career had plenty of twists and turns along the way. Namely, we almost lost him to the dark side … a career in financial consulting at Anderson (now Accenture). Happily, that path didn’t prove sufficiently interesting, and Bill landed in a terminal one-year MS program at MIT, where he started his work with Kerry Emanuel. Except it wasn’t so terminal. Post-graduation, Bill checked out the professional job market, but quickly found that: The best job that I’ve interviewed for is not as interesting as staying in graduate school Things started to click with Kerry, and Bill pursued work on fairly theoretical ocean and atmospheric dynamics. But soon after graduation he published a landmark paper suggesting that a strong Indian monsoon can be generated solely by the presence of the Himalayas: no Tibetan Plateau required. I found the paper fascinating when I handled it at Nature, and it certainly stirred things up in the monsoon community. As I’ve mentioned on the show in the past, monsoons are endlessly vexing: tantalizing but ephemeral teleconnections; busted predictions; monstrous interannual variability; conceptually simple but terribly complex in the details. One approach to disentangling the mess might be, as Bill puts it, to start off with a clear null-hypothesis: Can we disprove the hypothesis that this year-to-year variability is just random and we’ll never be able to predict it? Answering the question would inevitably take a renewed focus on observations, a deep dive into reconstructing past variability, and improved dynamical understanding. One area of low-hanging fruit — or at least fruit that could be reached by a long extension pole, perhaps while teetering at the top of a rickety three-meter wooden ladder, the base of which has long been under assault by termites — is monsoon depressions. These systems, a topic of much research in the 1970s-1980s, don’t look that horrendous in comparison to typhoons, but end up generating some of the most destructive storms. Why? Bill would like to know. Me too. Tweet

Gabe Vecchi is a world-famous atmospheric scientist with a pretty simple attitude to making progress: In order to do something, you need to do it. And Gabe’s done a lot! He was born in Boston but grew up in Venezuela, and witnessed the country’s dissolution from an intellectual magnet for South America into a dystopian nightmare. Going into the interview, I wondered about Gabe’s perspective on the anti-science, inward-looking trends we’re now seeing in the US. Are we headed for the same fate? At this point, it’s impossible to say. But what I can say is that Gabe’s enthusiasm for science is undiminished by current politics. It was, in fact, kind of refreshing to talk to someone outside of the Bay Area echo chamber in which I live. It’s good to see science (and home renovations and new jobs) remaining at the forefront. Gabe’s grandparents immigrated to Venezuela from Italy, and he lived there until his early teens. Ending up as a scientists might have been inevitable: I think having [an] engineer and artist [as parents] … the only natural outcome is to be a scientist And even though Gabe began knowing, as he says, just about nothing, he went on to make some of the major advances in atmospheric dynamics, tropical cyclones and seasonal prediction over the past couple of decades, including the now-famous modeling of a reduced zonal circulation in the equatorial Pacific. Working in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, with brilliant colleagues like Isaac Held and Suki Manabe, played a part in Gabe’s success. But still, and as so often seems to be the case, some of the big findings arose almost by accident. By working on the still-not-fully-cracked nut of estimating changes in hurricane frequency and intensity in a warming climate, Gabe and his colleagues ended up with a modeling system with seasonal skill in regional hurricane prediction. The field is now able to resolve the small scale interactions between hurricanes and the large scale environment. Probably, as Gabe says, they wouldn’t have gotten to seasonal hurricane prediction if they’d been trying to do so: You can’t see things if you look at them directly As always with forecasting/prediction, it is easy to get carried away. But Gabe has a healthy skepticism for all sorts of modeling, prediction included: Skill when applied to the past tends to be higher than skill going forward Most importantly, one should keep a careful eye out for wild-eyed optimism or irrational exuberance: The better you feel about it the worse it behaves … the probability of misleading yourself can be very high Now in a multi-disciplinary department at Princeton, Gabe is looking both forwards and backwards. Forwards, to a closer collaboration with the geochemical proxy community, to unravel some of the many competing hypotheses for modern processes. Backwards, to hopefully develop a state-of-the-art yet simple climate model that could be run in a desktop machine by any interested academic, rather than at a super-computing facility. Either way, there is endless scope for peeking under the mossy rocks of science, or looking for the structural members that we still need to install: The things that we already know are much less interesting … if I can find something that we don’t know or that is kind of broken, then that’s great Today’s music is from the album Anthropomorphic by Sister Sadie’s Foundry.

Today’s interview, with Jory Lerback from the University of Utah, has both nothing and everything to do with climate science. I think for the first time in the history of Forecast, no one mentioned the word climate. Instead, we talked about Jory’s recent Nature Comment entitled “Journals invite too few women to referee“. Jory’s work arose out of her time between undergraduate and graduate studies, when she worked at AGU headquarters analyzing their massive database of authors and referees. There is some good news on the gender equity front. For the youngest cohorts of geosciences, women are at ~ 40% of corresponding authors. But otherwise,  it’s still discouraging. Overall, women are about 28% of AGU authors, yet make up only 20% of the pool of referees. So, even relative to their low representation as authors, women are even more underrepresented as referees. The problem arises at least in part because corresponding authors recommend too few women and editors select too few women. Women also decline reviews at slightly higher rates. At Nature, our informal analysis shows roughly similar results, although in some fields, submitting authors recommend women referees in the single digit range. Addressing gender inequity in science is a perpetual topic, but for the specific case of referees, there is at least a practical way forward. Authors — recommend female referees! Editors — invite female referees … and when invited referees decline, ask for recommendations for appropriate female alternatives. Tweet

Alternative facts are much in the news. The idea is, of course, ridiculous. Some things are clearly facts. Pizza is delicious; cake makes me happy; serving a white Burgundy at 40 F is an abomination; you should never wear a backpack with a suit. Much of climate science, however, is not what you would call a hard fact. Yes, we can begin with some facts, following immediately with a suite of questions on quantification and mechanism. Yes, the Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass. But what is driving the variations in time and space, are there physical limitations to retreat rates, what are the constraints on ice sheets behavior from paleoclimate, what is the role of firn/cryoconite/black carbon? Research moves to the open questions, which, to some, provides an opening to say that scientists don’t have the facts. For the immediate questions at hand, it is of course true that we don’t have the answers — that’s why there’s research! Let’s not lose track of the vast amount of knowledge, and the big picture facts, that we do have. Rant over, at least for now! Sometimes I don’t fully grasp the scope of what Forecast guests are doing until I have time to reflect, during editing or while writing the show notes. That was certainly the case with today’s guest, Nerilie Abram. Nerilie has astonishingly broad interests. She works with corals, ice cores, speleothems, and modelers on topics all over the world (literally!) from the past to the future. Much of our discussion centered around the process by which Nerilie cracks open new topics: framing questions, conducting research, challenging her own ideas, and grinding through the review process. Over time, this is the work that ends up in the fact category. It takes, in addition to mad technique, stubbornness: Science requires, for all sorts of reasons, people who are going to be able to stick it out in this game, to have that kind of determination … not just the skills Facts are indeed hard to come by, and proxies can be particularly bedeviling, particularly if one takes the time to actually think about them: When you’re dealing with indirect proxies, things can change that you’re not expecting The geochemistry behind proxies is hard enough. Interpreting the data with physically meaningful hypotheses, and testing everything with compelling statistics — is even harder. Nerilie is doing all of this, on topics ranging from tropical ocean-atmosphere-coral interactions, Holocene climate, sea ice proxies, and hemispheric reconstructions. All of which makes me think of Nerilie as the Danny Meyer of science. What, you’re running a restaurant in a museum now? Or in Nerilie’s case, what, you had a quick talk with

I like doing Forecast for a lot of reasons. I get my fingers into the entrails of science in a way that isn’t really possible from reading submissions. I hear some appalling stories, off the record. I’m caught up in the enthusiasm of scientists for what they’re dreaming of discovering in the next decade. But, maybe most of all, I get to ask all kinds of impertinent questions that would rouse the ghost of John Maddox if done during the course of normal editor-scientist interactions. And so it is with my interview with Noah Diffenbaugh, one of the leading investigators of extreme events in a changing climate, and a friend for over 10 years. Getting to know someone in science, especially after grad school, is weird, as huge chunks of their being remain out of view. Indeed I am often reminded of the blind men and an elephant. Perhaps before I only saw Noah’s enormous feet and extravagant tail, without realizing his true self. I am not at all sure that I do now, but at least it is clear he is a pachyderm. Noah grew up at the Mount Madonna Center, one of the intentional communities that erupted like mushrooms from the rains of the 1960s’ spiritual and yoga movements. Most withered under divisiveness, absolutism, and isolationism. Mount Madonna, though, continues to thrive. Yes, it was, and is, a yoga and communal life center. But it is not a cult. Instead, it is open to the outside world, and has grown to support a renowned school and series of cultural events. Mount Madonna’s sense of openness and inquiry are a clear feature of Noah’s work and collaborations. Our work together, on topics like wine and climate, grew from a short chat in an elevator during an NCAR young scientist boot camp. In general, because it’s impossible to tell which collaborations are going to work out, Noah’s default is yes. Saying yes has clearly worked for Noah. He spent time at Purdue and is now tenured at Stanford, one of the premier universities in the world (and a very tough place to get tenure). Noah’s involved in the IPCC, regularly consults with a huge range of public and private interests, and publishes in Science and Nature. The path to the top was clear, and swift. Except, no. Noah was an undergrad premed at Stanford. Until he failed, spectacularly, Chem 31. Then it was, almost, a degree in religious studies. But, no. Earth Systems 10 proved riveting and, fortunately for the field (and my own academic career!), Noah turned to science. At least for a while. Upon graduation, Noah returned to Mount Madonna. He taught at the center’s school but a broader direction eluded; restlessness grew; the benefits and costs of communal life came into sharper focus. I essentially didn’t go through adolescence and didn’t really leave home until my mid 20s when I was already married and already had a kid For a lot of us, grad school attracts because it is something to do that seems potentially valuable, interesting and fun, without having to make an absolute choice about what, exactly, you’re committing to. So it was for Noah. I went to grad school, and I made my grad school decision, for all the wrong reasons … if I ever said out loud my motivation and what I was thinking … I don’t think I would ever get admitted And leaving home, surprisingly,

Normally my show notes are carefully reasoned, sober discussions of the remarkable pathways forged by inspirational scientists, and their subsequent breakthroughs. Not this time. This time, I will begin with a headline about today’s Forecast victim guest, Josh Willis, that might be suitable for The Onion: Idiot leftist scientist thrown out of school, concludes that warm water melts ice This is all true, from a certain point of view. Josh was called an idiot leftist scientist by Rush Limbaugh (a moniker enthusiastically adopted by Josh and, err, Josh’s wife), had to leave his PhD program in Physics, and is now leading the massive Oceans Melting Greenland program. But a more realistic telling is doubtless in order. Josh grew up in Texas and completed a bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of Houston. There, in the honors program, he met his future wife, a California native. The two soon relocated to SoCal, where Josh entered the PhD program in physics at the University of California San Diego and his wife attended medical school in Los Angeles. Physics, however, was not to be Josh’s calling and he ultimately did not pass the departmental examinations. Although he came out with a master’s degree in physics, the experience was certainly a setback, and one that took Josh a year or two to get over. Failure, as is so often the case, had an upside. Rather than inducing a downward spiral, the physics experience ultimately proved a huge relief for Josh, and one that led him to a vastly more fulfilling career studying oceanography at Scripps, where he worked with the great Dean Roemmich. There, Josh did some of the early work on coupling satellite altimetry with ocean observations to estimate ocean heat content. The start of Josh’s PhD coincided almost exactly with one of the most important advances in oceanography, maybe ever: the Argo program. As Josh says It was super exciting … it was also kind of scary … In retrospect it seems obvious, but at the time, it was almost crazy The launch of the incredible Argo data stream created nearly new fields of inquiry, particularly into ocean heat content. But as is the case with any new data explosion, particularly when trying to bolt it onto older datasets, problems can emerge. Josh and his colleagues published a paper entitled “Recent cooling of the upper ocean“, but soon found out that the cooling was due to problems in both the earlier XBT data and software problems in a group of North Atlantic Argo floats. A correction soon followed. I completely view this as a positive, rather than negative, example of how climate science actually functions: scientists follow the data, and revise their conclusions based on new information. Unfortunately, Josh figured out the error upon walking out the door for a Valentine’s day dinner with his wife. Dinner was a disaster, and As retribution, my wife had business cards made that have my job title as idiot leftist scientist Now Josh is pursuing one of the main topics in sea level research: the interactions between Greenland’s marine-terminating glaciers and the surrounding ocean.

My post on restaurant picks for AGU 2016 was one of the more popular blog entries to date on Forecast, so I thought I’d add a quick podcast on the same topic. I got together with two of my colleagues from Nature Chemical Biology, Mirella Bucci and Grant Miura, to talk through some of my list, and a few new additions. We recorded in the loud, reverb-laden Nature office, so the audio quality is horrendous. And I did virtually none of my usual editing. Quick and dirty, just like a good Mission burrito. Happy eating! Tweet

Inequities exist throughout the scientific enterprise. Women continue to be progressively underrepresented at more senior career stages. Access to excellent research universities is unequally distributed. Representation by many minority groups is low. Nature Geoscience has an entire Focus issue on accessibility, or the lack thereof. The barriers to entry obviously vary hugely among nations. Just have a look at the authors of papers in Nature … you’ll see a lot more from England than Eritrea. It’d be easy to think that within a country like the UK, it would therefore be pretty simple to get into science. But as I found out in my interview with Laura Wilcox from the University of Reading, it still isn’t so easy, even for the English. Laura grew up in northern England in Stoke-on-Trent, at the center of the Liverpool-Birmingham-Sheffield triangle. It was, and is, a sparsely populated, gloomy, windy place [UPDATE: Laura let me know that Stoke itself if quite industrial … the pretty stuff is a ways out]. Think moors, 60 mph fog, pubs with roaring fires and rabbit pie (ok, I’m fantasizing about the last part). All of which suited Laura fine, and from the start she loved nature and science (not the journals, at least not yet). Still, though, she’d not met anyone with a PhD and there were precisely zero scientific role models. Most of her childhood friends pursued careers in trades, and only a few ended up in Universities. The idea of becoming a scientist simply didn’t occur to Laura until Quite late on … I realized that actually I could be a scientist too All it took, as is so often the case, was encouragement from one person. In Laura’s case it was a professor, and the first person she’d met with a PhD. Science, then, seemed like a viable possibility. But entry into one of the world’s finest universities? Again, Laura didn’t even know she could apply to Oxford, and again it took just a slight bit of encouragement. Laura did apply to Oxford, and after four interviews with old white men, was admitted to Corpus Christi College at Oxford. After a degree at Oxford, Laura moved to Reading, in many ways ground zero for meteorology and atmospheric sciences. For her PhD, Laura — after a sort of science speed-dating experience — worked with Keith Shine on the effects of aviation on tropospheric water vapor, along the way coming up with a new definition of the tropopause. Since then, Laura has made a career out of studying aerosols, the endlessly vexing universe of tiny particles capable of altering … well, most anything you can think of in atmospheric sciences: cloud brightness, cloud lifetime, particle nucleation, local precipitation, monsoons, tropical cyclones, air quality, the position of jets. The problem, and challenge, is that With aerosol, there’s uncertainty coming at you left right and center” Laura made important progress on the role of aerosols in multidecadal climate variability, and she and her colleagues are in the thick of trying to trace down some of the sources of uncertainty in, for example, aerosol effects on cloud albedo. Emissions, transport, mixing, rain-out, particle formation. All are important, and most vary (strongly!) across models. It’s a huge, and important, task. For many years now,