To climate scientists, Isaac Held probably needs no introduction. He is one of the deepest and clearest thinkers in the field, and his insightful research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate has earned him immense amounts of respect and appreciation.

Isaac spent most of his long and distinguished career until his retirement in 2020 at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, one of the pioneering centers for climate modeling. He was born in 1948 in a refugee camp in Germany, from where his family emigrated to the United States just a few years after. Isaac’s father soon died, and so he and his brother were raised mostly by their mother, who always encouraged the two of them to do well in school – a “job” that Isaac took seriously, and that led him to discover and develop his natural talent for mathematics.

At the University of Minnesota, he became fascinated with theoretical physics as a “wonderful application of mathematics to the real world”, and he went on to go to graduate school in statistical mechanics at Stony Brook in New York. With the Vietnam war raging, however, Isaac started to question the importance of the research he was doing, and he eventually decided to switch to atmospheric and climate science. The rest, as they say, is history: Isaac produced field-changing contributions to topics such as the Hadley circulation, deep convection and tropical meteorology, water vapor and climate feedbacks, and tropical cyclones.

In this episode, Isaac also talks about the importance of good writing in science, and how he has always aimed to explain his scientific research and ideas clearly and concisely. This aspiration becomes evident when reading one of his papers or his blog on climate dynamics (see here for a complete archive of blog posts), which is widely acclaimed both for its thought-provoking content and its lucid style of writing.

His own life story has made Isaac keenly aware of the importance of random events and tipping points, which limit one’s control in ways both liberating and frustrating:

“Something happens and your life goes one way or the other and that happens to all of us in one sense. […] Some of life’s unpredictability can be these huge events affecting large parts of the world, but it could also be these little things in your individual life that make a big difference as well, which are uncontrollable.”

Finally, Adam and Isaac talk about the interaction of science and politics, and about the possible impacts of climate change on human societies, on which Isaac has a slightly more optimistic view than Adam:

“I think I’m a little bit of technological optimist, I don’t know if that’s quite the right word, but I can’t believe that I can visualize what we’ll be capable of in a hundred years, technologically, if I go back a hundred years.”

The interview with Isaac Held was recorded in September 2021. Image credit: NOAA

It’s been a while since we released the last episode of Deep Convection, but Season 3 is finally here! We are starting the season with a “prologue episode” featuring Adam and Melanie. Adam asks Melanie how her life has changed since their Deep Convection conversation that was recorded 2.5 years ago (and, spoiler alert, some aspects of it have changed in quite unexpected ways), and Melanie asks Adam  how his views about life and the world have changed, and what role the podcast has played for him.

Mostly though, this really is a warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Convection, the first one of which (with Isaac Held, one of the deepest and most original thinkers in climate science) will drop in just a bit more than a week!

When Shang-Ping Xie entered middle school in his home town about 300 miles southwest of Shanghai, China had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous political movement launched by Mao Zedong that had dominated Chinese life for a decade in the 1960s and 70s. That was lucky timing and a big turning point for Shang-Ping: If he had been a few years older, he might have been sent to the countryside after graduating from high school, to work on farms and learn about the rural life. But after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the universities reopened and a merit-based admission system was introduced, which allowed Shang-Ping to go to college to study oceanography (without ever having seen the ocean before!).

From there he went to grad school in Japan, then to the US, then back to Japan for his first faculty position, then back to the US, eventually taking on his current position as a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Shang-Ping’s research covers a broad range of topics centered around atmosphere-ocean interactions and their role in climate formation, variability, and change. Some highlights of his incredibly prolific scientific career include the work that led to the formulation of the wind-evaporation-sea surface temperature feedback mechanism in the 1990s, and later his contributions to the discovery of the Indian Ocean capacitor effect, and to the development of the “warmer-get-wetter” idea for how rainfall will change with global warming.

The driving force behind Shang-Ping’s impressive scientific output is his deep curiosity and (to quote Richard Feynman) the “pleasure of finding things out”, which have remained unaffected by the “daily grind” of academic life. How he has managed to do that is part of this conversation as well, along with his thoughts on climate change, and how his perception of it has evolved over the years.

“For a period of time I was asking myself what’s beyond what I have done so far. Because at some point, I felt, I know a few things, I just couldn’t see what’s ahead. But I think somehow I was able to overcome this feeling now. Because […] there are still a lot of puzzles. I feel like I know what I want to do for the next few years.”

The interview with Shang-Ping Xie was recorded in March 2021. Image credit: Nelvin C. Cepeda

Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, George Philander had to follow a lot of laws that didn’t make sense to him, e.g., that he was not allowed to stand in the line for white people at the post office. When he discovered mathematics and science, he was happy to have found a world that was governed by rational and coherent laws.

“South Africa […] was a strange place because of the apartheid policies. I basically lived in two worlds that didn’t really intersect. The one was the social world, which was subject to these strange laws. And at the same time, I was becoming a scientist, and the world of science seemed an escape from the irrationalities of the apartheid laws.”

George left South Africa in the 1960s to go to graduate school at Harvard, where he decided to move into oceanography. Apart from taking classes and doing research, he also continued to be interested in social concerns, and on weekends he would join people in protesting the war in Vietnam, or even the apartheid in South Africa.

Despite all the differences between the U.S. and South Africa, George also sees some fundamental parallels between these two stages of his life:

“So now I could again do the science and separate the social life [from it]. But the science was much more interesting, and the social life was much more interesting. So it was a somehow idealized version of what I had experienced in South Africa.”

After completing his PhD, George went on to do a postdoc with Jule Charney at MIT, before moving to Princeton where he spent the rest of his career, first at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics lab and then as a professor at Princeton University, from where he retired a few years ago. George is a giant in climate science and has made many important contributions to the field, but he is best known for his key advances in our understanding of the El Niño-southern oscillation phenomenon, or ENSO.

Throughout the years, George has been thinking a lot about how science interacts with the larger world, and he has become convinced that we should not divorce our social concerns from our professional activities. That recognition even led George back to South Africa for a few years in the 2000s, where his goal was to instill an appreciation for nature in young people:

“We’re so focused on the gloom and doom of global warming that we count on fear to persuade people to take care of planet Earth. And I would argue that instead of fear, they should do it out of love for the planet. But you can only love what you know, so they should really know something about the planet before we can expect them to take care of it.”

In this conversation, George also talks about the role of luck in people’s lives and careers, about shortcomings of the educational system, and about living far from home.

The interview with George Philander was recorded in February 2021. Image credit: Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications, Princeton University

Suzana Camargo is one of the world’s leading experts on tropical cyclones — a type of storm that includes hurricanes — and their relationship to the climate. When she first started to do research on hurricanes, she thought it was only going to be a one-year project. But life is unpredictable, and so

“[…] and then 20 years later, here I am, still doing hurricanes.”

Suzana’s path to the hurricanes had not been a straight one: She began her academic career in plasma physics, and only moved into atmospheric science after giving up her job as a tenured professor in Brazil and moving to the US, where she took a position as staff associate at the then newly-founded International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.

This was a big change, and in many ways also a big step down, and it required a lot of work and persistence to firmly establish herself as a leader in the field, and to rise through the ranks to her current position as the first holder of the Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professorship at Columbia University.

“[It] was a big change, […] it was a lot, everything. It was moving countries, two small kids, changing fields. Everything was so overwhelming that I basically was, I felt like I was just going through the motions and trying to survive each day.”

The move from Brazil, where Suzana was born and raised, to the US had not been her first international move: Suzana had done her Ph.D. and postdoc in Germany, where she learned, among other things, that the hardest part in science is often to come up with a good research question, and that the Bavarian dialect sounds very different from the standard German.

Over the last 20 years, Suzana has made important contributions to our understanding of how tropical cyclones are affected by natural climate variations, like El Niño; the influence of human-induced climate change on tropical cyclones, including the evaluation of simulations of tropical cyclones in climate models, and to the practice of seasonal climate forecasting of tropical cyclone activity. At Lamont, she and Adam have offices next door to each other, and the two of them have collaborated on many of these topics.

The interview with Suzana Camargo was recorded in October 2020. Image credit: Suzana Camargo

Nadir Jeevanjee is one of those rare people who have both depth and breadth in their skills. He is probably the only person who ever wrote a textbook about tensors and group theory while taking a few years off from grad school to tour with a rock band, and that fact alone should make you want to listen to this interview.

Nadir was born and raised in Los Angeles, and when he was 12 or 13, he got obsessed with music, especially with drumming. Towards the end of high school, he joined The Calling, a rock band that had a huge hit on the radio in the early 2000s. He went to college with the goal of becoming a professional musician, but found himself enjoying physics classes more than music theory, so much so that he embarked on a PhD in physics at UC Berkeley.

About three years into it and struggling with a bit of a “mid-PhD crisis”, Nadir left academia for what turned out to be four years, to tour the country with another band — that’s when he wrote that textbook about tensors. Eventually, though, he finished his PhD and moved into atmospheric science. He is now a Research Physical Scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, where he studies the physics of clouds, radiation, and climate, using a hierarchy of approaches ranging from pencil-and-paper theory to comprehensive computer simulations. His specialty is to condense the complexity of the atmosphere into simple, elegant frameworks that are tractable for human brains.

Nadir is also deeply engaged in the communication of climate science to the wider world and confounded a group called Climate Up Close, which tries to make the essentials of climate science accessible to a broad audience and give people the opportunity to talk directly with climate scientists.

“So I started to give public talks called “Climate Science: How Do We Know What We Know?”, trying to focus on evidence and trying to de-emphasize the consensus on climate change. It’s a very useful fact for people who don’t know it, but for people who do know there’s a consensus but aren’t convinced by that, I think that beating them over the head with it if they’ve already heard it, I think can backfire. And so I wanted to try an approach where I just focused on the evidence. […] And not only try to share a little bit of what we know about climate science, but also get face time.”

The interview with Nadir Jeevanjee was recorded in November 2020. 

Fran Moore, an assistant professor in Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, works at the intersection of environmental economics and climate science. She studies the impacts of climate change from an economic and societal perspective — how to quantify these impacts, and also how people and communities adapt.

Fran grew up in London, but moved to the US for college, in part because she wanted to do “something a little bit broader” than what continuing her science-focused academic track in the UK would have allowed her to do. This desire to look at things holistically and from an interdisciplinary angle has become a hallmark of her work, in which she uses a variety of statistical methods, economic and climate models. Recently, she has even used Twitter data to understand what type of weather people think of as normal, and how that might be changing.

In this interview, Fran also talks about what is valuable in human society, and how economists try to measure human well-being. And, she and Adam get into a broader conversation about the relation between science and politics, the roles of climate scientists and academics generally in the public sphere, and whether by doing research climate scientists are really helping anyone or not.

“That was part of my motivation to move more into the social sciences. Because my view was, I think, recognizing that the big questions we need to motivate action on climate change, on the science side, have largely been answered. At least on the mitigation side. But there are still big questions, right?”

The interview with Fran Moore was recorded in September 2020. Photo credit: UC Davis

Before Marshall Shepherd was bitten by the weather bug, he wanted to be an entomologist. But as luck would have it (at least for the fields of weather and climate science), Marshall changed his sixth-grade science project from honey bees to weather prediction after he had found out that he was highly allergic to bee stings. That science project marked the beginning of Marshall’s passion for weather, which has led him to become professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.

“I’ve actually been working or pushing really hard to try to advocate that engagement and service becomes more of a part of that sort of calculus for things like promotions and tenure because I don’t view it as something extra when I do these things. I view it […] as a synthesis of a broader mission that we have.”

The interview with Marshall Shepherd was recorded in August 2020. Photo credit: Nancy Evelyn

On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the plane were collecting, but she was also aware that the storm’s impact on New Orleans would be devastating. This experience made her realize at a visceral level that science alone is not always enough:

“And so it was that campaign which also made me realize something extremely important, that the best science is not of much use unless it gets to where it needs to go and comes in a form that it can actually be used. And so that’s when I started really thinking  about the interface of science communication, policy, emergency management, all these different factors. […] We as atmospheric scientists form one key component to that, but there’s this whole larger framework that the information that we produce has to fit into in a way that’s going to be usable by all those different stakeholders, so that they can work to, in this case, save lives.”

An Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Deanna studies tropical cyclones, particularly the structure of their rainbands. Her interests also include orographic rain in midlatitudes, and other aspects of cloud and precipitation physics. Growing up in the tornado-prone Dallas area, she became fascinated with extreme weather events at an early age, and got drawn into atmospheric science for real when she realized how much she enjoys participating in field campaigns like the one that gave her a close-up view of Hurricane Katrina.

Deanna has also made questions of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Earth sciences a primary focus of her work — an unusual commitment for a young faculty member working under the pressures of “publish or perish”, and in this interview she talks about that decision and its implications.

The interview with Deanna Hence was recorded in August 2020. 

Brian Mapes fell in love with cumulus clouds when he was looking out an airplane window during his first flight, on the way to Iowa to toil in the fields with his uncle. He was struck by their beauty, but also wanted to understand them scientifically. 

In particular, Brian got interested in how clouds, which are relatively small, are related to weather systems that are much larger, and which is controlling which, how and to what degree. He took issue with the (then-)predominant idea in the field that turbulent convection and clouds are merely a passive response to the large-scale forcing.

“They’re just chiseled from marble, these Midwestern summer clouds. It’s like landscapes, you could imagine romping and playing on them. Except they change every three minutes… It’s like a time evolving landscape. I was just in love with it. And I felt that it had a great amount of life force or something. […] Vigor, agency, life force. I felt like it was a thing that had some heart to it. And then you come, and so you go into that field of science and you come along and you discover the people running the show have decided that it’s a too-complicated-to-care-about response to some forcing. And it drove me batty.”

Before becoming an atmospheric scientist, Brian studied chemistry at Caltech and spent his free time experimenting with explosives of all kind in the Mojave Desert. But he eventually decided to look for a less hazardous field and discovered his fascination with the atmosphere after moving back to his home state of Colorado.

Over the course of his career, which has led him to become professor at the University of Miami, Brian has worked on a lot of different topics, but to him they are all manifestations of the one problem that interests him most, which is the problem of scale.

“[…] it was just echoes and echoes of a philosophical question which is, what’s the relationship between the individual and the collective? That’s the one thing that interests me, and I play it out over here in meteorology, and I’m also fascinated with the social sciences and ecology and stuff, where… It’s everywhere!”

In this interview, you will also hear Brian talk about language and poetry in science, improv, and the role of the appendix in “body politics.”

The interview with Brian Mapes was recorded in January 2020.