Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White episodes:

• 09.05.2018

  Peter Bauer on numerical weather prediction

  Numerical weather prediction (NWP) is like excellent coffee in the Bay Area: so common that it is now taken for granted, obscuring the decades of expertise, knowledge, and technique underlying the whole operation. In episode 77 of Forecast, Peter Bauer...

  
• 07.25.2018

  From porometers to the planet with Steve Running

  Steve Running from the University of Montana helped to invent the field of large-area, quantitative ecology. Steve was also my MS and PhD advisor – a role that doubtless was the most fulfilling of his career. This August, Steve celebrates...

  
• 07.11.2018

  Yao Tandong on research in the Third Pole

  Yao Tandong tells Mike about realizing his long-held dream: working of the Tibetan Plateau, now as director of the Institute for Tibetan Plateau (ITP) Research (and much else besides!). For Tandong, it all began in 1978 when he was initially...

  
• 06.27.2018

  Belinda Medlyn on climate-carbon-vegetation interactions

  The land biosphere takes up a big chunk of atmospheric CO2 emissions. But how, where, and for how long remains an area of, ahem, active research. Or put another way, there’s a lot we STILL don’t know about how increased...

  
• 06.13.2018

  Sergey Gulev’s oceanographic odyssey

  Sergey Gulev from Moscow State University grew up in the Soviet Union, forged a career as an oceanographer, and then witnessed the dissolution of much of what he and his colleagues had built. Gone were their four ocean-going ships, and...

  
• 05.30.2018

  Carl Wunsch and the rise of modern oceanography

  Carl Wunsch is at the heart of many of the major advances in modern physical oceanography. The World Ocean Circulation Experiment, satellite altimetry, acoustic tomography, and Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean: all are hard to imagine without...

  
• 05.16.2018

  Carolina Vera on the South American monsoon

  Carolina Vera from the University of Buenos Aires tells Mike about her work on the South American monsoon. Relative to the Indian and Asian Monsoon, the South American Monsoon is understudied — but equally fascinating. The bulk of the land...

  
• 04.18.2018

  Jay Famiglietti on GRACE and global hydrology

  Jay Famiglietti from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tells Mike about taking the plunge into using the GRACE gravity-measuring satellites for hydrology research. Keep in mind, this was at a time when hydrology was viewed as noise in the gravity signal,...

  
• 04.04.2018

  Around the world with Maisa Rojas

  Maisa Rojas from the University of Chile tells Mike about her work on regional climate modeling, paleoclimate, and the Southern Hemisphere westerlies. The story begins with Maisa’s birth in Chile, but quickly moves on to the family’s dramatic escape from...

  
• 03.07.2018

  Burning questions with Max Moritz

  Max Moritz regales Mike with some of the many intricacies of modern fire science. The dominant narrative in the Western US might be “long-term fire suppression is leading to severe fire seasons”. While there is some truth here, the individual...

  
• 02.21.2018

  Kaitlin Naughten on ice-ocean interactions

  Kaitlin Naughten from the University of New South Wales works on one of the most pressing issues facing modern climate science: interactions between the ocean and the vast ice shelves fringing Antarctica. Existentially, this interaction has the potential to largely...

  
• 02.07.2018

  Sonia Seneviratne on droughts, extremes, the IPCC … and laundry in Switzerland

  I met Sonia Seneviratne from ETH Zürich at a climate conference way back in 2013. This was not long after she served as a coordinating lead author of the now-famous IPCC SREX report, which lit a spark under the field...

  
• 01.24.2018

  Jessica Oster on speleothem geochemistry

  Speleothems — stalagmites, stalactites, flowstones — are a central tool for reconstructing past hydroclimate variability. But what, really, are they recording? Jessica Oster from Vanderbilt University walks Mike through the long, incredibly long, process of permitting, extracting, transporting, sampling, analyzing,...

  
• 01.10.2018

  Climate dynamics with Libby Barnes

  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...

  
• 12.27.2017

  The climate of Westeros with Dan Lunt

  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....

  
• 12.13.2017

  Reconstructing past sea level with Andrea Dutton

  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 …...

  
• 11.29.2017

  Abby Swann on plants in the climate system

  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,...

  
• 11.15.2017

  11th Graduate Climate Conference

  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...

  
• 11.01.2017

  The launch of EarthArXiv

  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...

  
• 10.18.2017

  Corinne Le Quéré on the global carbon cycle

  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...

  
• 10.05.2017

  Joe McConnell on the scientific riches in tiny bits of ice

  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...

  
• 09.20.2017

  Peter Cox’s emergent insights

  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...

  
• 09.06.2017

  Into the woods with Julia Pongratz

  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:...

  
• 08.23.2017

  Antarctic sea ice with Marilyn Raphael

  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...

  
• 08.09.2017

  The hot world of cold ice with Jérôme Chappellaz

  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...

  
• 07.27.2017

  The bassline of climate with Julien Emile-Geay

  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...

  
• 07.12.2017

  The arc of TEX86 with Jessica Tierney

  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...

  
• 06.28.2017

  Connecting Kevin Anchukaitis

  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...

  
• 06.13.2017

  Trace metals and thrash metal with Kaustubh Thirumalai

  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...

  
• 06.01.2017

  The Atlantic’s Rob Meyer on climate journalism

  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,...

  
• 05.15.2017

  Extremes are the new normal, with Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick

  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...

  
• 05.02.2017

  Climate economics with Sol Hsiang

  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...

  
• 04.20.2017

  Jennifer MacKinnon and the swirly things

  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...

  
• 04.04.2017

  Climate policy with Gretchen Goldman

  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...

  
• 03.27.2017

  Jana Sillmann and climate extremes

  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...

  
• 03.10.2017

  Monsoons with Bill Boos

  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...

  
• 02.21.2017

  Gabe Vecchi

  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...

  
• 02.02.2017

  Jory Lerback and gender inequities in peer review

  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...

  
• 01.24.2017

  Nerilie Abram

  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...

  
• 01.11.2017

  Noah Diffenbaugh

  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...

  
• 12.20.2016

  Josh Willis

  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...

  
• 12.09.2016

  Restaurants redux

  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...

  
• 12.01.2016

  Laura Wilcox

  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...

  
• 11.18.2016

  Jon Foley

  Jonathan Foley is the Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences, the previous director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of...

  
• 11.04.2016

  Bronwyn Wake chief editor of Nature Climate Change

  How, exactly, does one get to be an editor of a Nature-branded journal? What do we do? How do we decide what to publish? And what’s up with all our journals? In this episode of Forecast, I hash out these issues...

  
• 10.21.2016

  Daniel Aldana Cohen on urban climate mitigation

  Climate scientists are used to the idea of climate mitigation. But few are involved in the nitty-gritty of what climate mitigation might look like at the local or even neighborhood level. Daniel Aldana Cohen from the Department of Sociology at the...

  
• 10.07.2016

  Amelia Shevenell, big ideas and big risks

  Amelia Shevenell from the University of South Florida specializes in big ideas about paleoceanography and the Antarctic Ice Sheet. She’s also keen to push the methodological envelope, which can be risky if things go pear shaped. For Amelia, though, the...

  
• 09.16.2016

  Scott St. George on tree rings

  Tree rings are one of the key tools in paleoclimate research, and might seem like nothing more than big, woody thermometers. But tree-ring science is ever evolving, constantly debated, and — while it has answered some major questions — still...

  
• 09.07.2016

  An update on the 1.5 °C warming threshold

  Over the past few months I’ve discussed with a variety of guests the emerging idea of trying to keep global warming below 1.5 °C, and our family of journals has certainly been active on the topic, particularly with regard to...

  
• 08.25.2016

  Rob DeConto and Antarctica in the climate system

  I think I first learned of Rob DeConto when I saw his paper entitled Thresholds for Cenozoic bipolar glaciation, published soon after my arrival at Nature.  Specific and testable thresholds for the initiation of large scale glaciation in Antarctica and...