Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

I met Lixin Wu when I was at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao for a writing workshop (now called Nature Masterclasses). Several things impressed me about Lixin right away. First, he’s a lot of fun to be around and equally at ease in formal situations and banquets. Then, he’s clearly an inspiration to his staff and colleagues. Finally, he has big visions for his own science, the OUC, and Chinese marine science in general. Lixin has followed the career path of many notable Chinese scientists: educated in China, moved to the West for a postdoc, stayed for years, and returned to China for a variety of reasons (not just financial!). I was keen to hear the details of the story, and it didn’t disappoint. Lixin was born at the dawn of the cultural revolution, but his family was too poor to suffer many of its depredations. Instead, largely on his own motivation to leave the countryside and inspired by the Chinese space program, Lixin studied hard enough to get into the prestigious Tsinghua University and then, after graduating in the top three of his class, into Peking University (sort of like the Harvard of China). Throughout, Lixin studied fluid mechanics. He dreamed of getting into Stanford, where the best work in mechanics was being done at the time. That didn’t work out, but Lixin was keen to pursue his own American dream and ultimately got into a postdoc program at Rutgers, again working on mechanics. The initial shocks of moving to America included the comparatively massive paycheck and loneliness, at least until his family could come to join him. Then a choice loomed: move to Japan, for a great deal more money, or head to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to launch a new line of work into ocean dynamics. Still working on the American dream, Lixin moved to Madison, ultimately staying in the US for 11 years. But then, as is now so often the case, China came calling with a tempting offer to return home. The money was good, but Lixin also felt a responsibility to give something back to China in return for years of support in graduate school. And, after achieving his American dream, he felt a bit adrift. And return he did, to a chaired position at the OUC. In spite of not knowing the Chinese ocean community at all, Lixin rapidly moved up the career ladder, publishing numerous papers in Nature-branded journals and reaching the level of Vice President at the OUC and director of China’s first-ever national laboratory, for research on Marine Science and Technology. How he gets it all done, I have no idea. Along the way, we talk about Chinese science when he was a student …”You cannot imagine … at my time, no PhD student can publish a paper in Nature or Science” and what makes American science click…”Americans are high efficiency in work and very motivated and open minded … sometimes they do have creative ideas in science, and also quite humorous”. Lixin has huge plans for the future, including a breathtakingly massive mooring array, a fascinating merger of ocean floats and gliders, and major contributions to deep ARGO.  And, I’m sure, many more delicious banquets are in the works (Qingdao being in the heart of Shandong cuisine, after all). Tweet

Three decades of ice core science with Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

Into the deep ocean with Lorraine Lisiecki

Yusuke Yokoyama narrowly misses career in baseball, settles for stellar career in science

Amy Clement questions the core ideas of climate dynamics

Stefan Kröpelin and 45 years of exploration and science in the eastern Sahara

Lauren Andrews on glacial hydrology and field work in Greenland

Gavin Schmidt on the evolution, testing and discussion of climate models

Bette Otto-Bliesner and modeling past climates (most of them!)

Greg Jones on inventing the field of wine-climate interactions

Surabi Menon on aerosols and working in a climate foundation

Chris Field on scaling ecophysiology from cells to the globe

Running a small business Robin Bell and her colleagues found a volcano under the Antarctic Ice Sheet and water freezing onto the bottom of kms-thick ice. She championed the idea that glaciology needed instrumentation capable of observing the full ice sheet — from surface to base — all at the same time. To this end, she bolted ship-based gear on a small plane and … tried it out. And it worked! And continues to work, all in support of the massive question of trying to figure out how the ice sheets will behave in warming world, and what sea levels will be in the coming decades to centuries. Science, for Robin, is like running a small business, where the currency is ideas. We discuss how she’s worked, for decades, to increase the value of that currency in many ways, ranging from high-risk field work and instrumentation development to community building through committee work and some careful strategic planning. Robin and I talk about her early days in Antarctica, when the science world was a different place and she and other female scientists were often mistaken for secretaries. It wasn’t always an easy place to work. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory had no female faculty when Robin arrived over 30 years ago. She worked with the NSF Advance program to strengthen gender diversity and found that “running a field program in Antarctica was a piece of cake compared to trying to get people to think about diversity.” But years of effort have paid off, and Robin seems genuinely thrilled at the improvements for women in science. Also, Robin showed up for a job interview at Woods Hole in a sailboat. Now that’s style! Tweet

In love with Maxwell Bjorn Stevens has a lot going on: scientific member of the Max Planck Society, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, head of the department Atmosphere and the Earth System, professor at the University of Hamburg, lead author of an IPCC AR 5 Chapter 7, co-lead of a WCRP Grand Challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity. All of these roles don’t come as much of a surprise, once you get your head around the degree to which Bjorn manages to combine a deep scientific enthusiasm with big vision, an in-the-trenches grasp of details, a willingness to take risks, and an inspirational leadership style. Bjorn grew up all over the place, with the family following the career of his father, a petroleum engineer. The rise to the top of the climate science profession had plenty of twists and turns too: irregular schooling, an early passion for Maxwell’s equations, two degrees in electrical engineering, a switch to atmospheric science, time off during the PhD to rethink priorities. It’s hard to say what influence his unusual background had, but Bjorn is now outspoken on many topics: how to use models, the magnitude of aerosol forcing, the possibility of an iris effect – much of which comes, unusually, with clear statements on how he could be proven wrong. More than anything else, our talk continually came back to Bjorn’s sense of fascination with the beauty of the natural world, and the endless challenge in figuring it out. And most important, Bjorn likes fries and gravy. He claims not to eat them anymore. I’m certainly not the first person to interview Bjorn Stevens! You can check out another discussion at Ecoshock. There’s also a plenary lecture at the Platform for Advance Scientific Computing, and a recent lecture at the Lorenz Center should soon be available. Tweet

Obsessed by El Niño Corals and speleothems are some of our most useful recorders of past climate variability. The spectacular speleothem records from eastern China, for example, have been instrumental in building our understanding of past variations in the East Asian Monsoon. But as is the case for most any paleoclimate proxy, corals and speleothems do not record a direct record of … well, anything. The usual metric is δ18O, a measure of the amount of 18O relative to 16O. In principle, δ18O sounds simple enough. In a speleothem, more negative δ18O might reflect more precipitation or a stronger monsoon, as the heavier isotope is progressively “rained out”. But recent work has shown that δ18O is influenced by numerous other processes, like precipitation seasonality, atmospheric transport, atmospheric conditions in the location where the air mass was formed, etc. The relative influences differ by location and, almost certainly, over time. Kim Cobb works to figure all of this out, especially for El Nino. In this episode of Forecast, Kim and I talk about what corals and speleothems are telling us and what we know about past variations in El Nino. Kim and her students work with their many collaborators to bring together geochemical, computational, and dynamical understanding in a way that I think is really moving the field forward. Isotope enabled GCMs emerge as an especially promising tool. We also touch on some of the unavoidable problems in this sort of work – like diagenesis. But as Kim says, it’s good to have scientific obsessions, big questions, and if you can push through the problems, there’s a real pot of gold waiting at the other side. Kim is also a keen advocate for women in science, and we discuss some of the many issues facing young female scientists, and what can be done to increase opportunity and fairness. NB: prospective job seekers, Georgia Tech comes off awfully well in terms of supporting women scientists who are in the midst of a tenure run and raising a family. In episode 2 we heard Mat Collins’ take on El Nino from a modeling perspective. I hope you enjoy Kim’s take, from a more geochemical perspective. Tweet