Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

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!

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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,

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 Wisconsin. In many ways, Jon is one of the foremost thinkers and actors about the science of sustainability.

But Jon has nothing even resembling the air of an operator or empire builder. He’s candid, provocative, and personable. After our interview at the Cal Academy, Jon invited me to visit the museum, and along the way was stopped by three elderly patrons trying to find the way to the roof. Jon said goodbye to me, and walked them to the elevator. It’s this kind of relatability and keenness for people that, in part, make Jon’s efforts to build connection and community so successful. Jon’s also a great photographer, as seen in the images he kindly shared with Forecast.

Jon grew up in Maine, loving the natural world and knowing that his passion lay in science.  But that’s not to say that his early years were idyllic. As described in a moving post on his blog, The Macroscope, Jon’s mother died from ALS when he was only 17, and his father descended into alcoholism. In some of her final words, Jon’s mother made him promise to do the best that he could, for the world.

That’s a big load to take on, and John’s pathway to carrying it took him through an early career in pure physics. But that seemed, in the end, too abstract. One discussion with particle physicists highlights the problem:

I kept on asking ‘why are we doing this’ … and 20 really smart people with PhDs … none of them can answer that question

Jon moved on, but the immediate pathway still wasn’t clear:

I wanted to be an astronomer, a marine biologist and an ecologist all at the same time

Eventually, John found inspiration in the work of Bob Dickinson, even though he was working with paleoclimatologist John Kutzbach in grad school. He went on to make some major advances in adding the biosphere to climate models, for example in the development of the IBIS model. Yet …

I was kind of a misfit in grad school  … hanging out with all these ecologists

Maybe a result of being a misfit, or perhaps because he has “a little bit of academic ADD”, Jon moved on to trying to understand the emerging issues surrounding sustainability, politics, economics, and physical sciences. Rapidly, he began to realize that science wasn’t the whole story, and that our political and economic systems in fact tend to go out of their way to ignore physics and, more importantly, ethics.

Jon’s major academic question before coming to the Cal Academy was something on the order of “how can we feed humanity without destroying the planet”. Agriculture, to degrees that are still not broadly appreciated, is a huge strain on the planet:

From a biodiversity, water, land, and future climate change perspective [agriculture] is the number one planetary emergency

After years of making major scientific advances but frustratingly limited broader impact, it was time for a change. The position at the Cal Academy arose — and with some prodding from his family — Jon ultimately accepted the rather huge leap.

Now, Jon is taking the Academy forward in some amazing ways, guided by their awesome mission statement: “To explore,

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 with Bronwyn Wake, the chief editor of Nature Climate Change. But don’t worry … if you’re thinking about becoming an editor, working in a bar is not a prerequisite.

I’m 46 and bald, but when people meet me, they frequently say that they were expecting someone even older, and, I suspect, sporting an extravagant beard and wearing a thin-elbowed tweed jacket. The reality is that the editors across our journals span a range of ages from freshly-minted PhDs to editors who have been in the job for decades. And, unusually for a scientific career, there is excellent gender balance!

Editing can also allow you to have — really! — a reasonable work-life balance in a challenging and intellectually stimulating career. So, if you’re nodding your head in agreement at Nature’s blood-curdling feature on the brutal challenges of starting a scientific career, editing is something to think about.

Most of our editors have broad interests and a preference for a non-academic lifestyle. Bron’s voyage to editing took her through undergraduate degrees in Japanese and chemistry, working in a bar, almost teaching English overseas, chance encounters with science opportunities (in Antarctica), interesting work as a postdoc but no clear avenue to a permanent position. As is the case for a lot of us, Bron “…really enjoyed the research and the field work…” but the rest of the academic pathway wasn’t too compelling.

Bron attended a Nature career fair in London and felt that editing might fit the bill. After an hour-long chat with my boss at Nature, Karl Ziemelis, Bron interviewed at Nature Climate Change and was soon hired. As is often the case, there was a chance for promotion, and Bron now runs the journal.

Running a journal, though, is no picnic. Nature Climate Change was our first journal working in the social sciences, and attracting the best work from these communities took a huge effort, and remains challenging. The range of content is correspondingly vast, spanning climate impacts

to battery packs:

Managing brings new challenges. Staff moved on to launch other projects within the company, and recruiting can seem endless. Bron juggles manuscripts with writing editorials and Research Highlights, editing News & Views, coordinating with the art and production teams, and commissioning content. Still, for Bron, the job is not all-consuming: unlike in academia, you can usually shut off your work brain when the day is done.

If all this sounds appealing, and you’re interested in learning some more about a career as an editor, let me know via [email protected] or [email protected] and I’d be happy to chat.

 

Music: Anemic Alloy! by SubRosa CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Available on Soundcloud.

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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 University of Pennsylvania is digging into the politics and sociology of urban carbon emissions. A dizzying array of forces are at work.

Family debates on urbanism

Daniel’s interest in the science and sociology of urban emissions arose from the same sort of incredibly implausible events and circumstances that seem to orbit nearly every guest on Forecast. This time: father was a writer and back-to-the-lander who hated cities; mother loved cities and was a children’s book publisher; family compromised by living in rural France every fourth year or so, with the rest of the time in Toronto; both parents rebelled against science; childhood faith that somebody would solve the climate change problem crushed by reality; early exposure to social justice travesties; interest in magazine writing diverted to research focus by Elizabeth Kolbert‘s brilliant work in the New Yorker on climate change.

The surprisingly simpatico interests of urban elites and urban justice

Possibly arising from his own family’s rejection of and affection for urbanism, Daniel chose to revisit the long-standing ideals of urbanism. Can we have fantastic, equitable and decarbonized cities? In a Bloomsburg-esq fantasy world, yes: government policies create a luxury economy bubbling with a glittery green stew of financial services, young professionals, walkable streets and bike paths. Think Seattle in the Amazon age. Eventually, trickle-down greening occurs, and there’s a net reduction of emissions.

Only, no, on many levels. The policies that spawned modern Manhattan also led to mass gentrification and displacement. And as Daniel shows in his contribution to Rebecca Solnit‘s blisteringly great series of atlases, a full-cost accounting for Manhattan reveals that the core of the green city is also the most rapacious consumer of carbon:

Is there a way forward, to create both the cities and climate mitigation we’d like to see? Ironically, as Daniel has heard from modern urban planners, we might get the desired outcome by not talking about climate in the first place: “Social justice and climate justice actually went really well together … it’s just better not to talk about climate change at all”.   Focusing on housing, and not talking about the environment, can actually lead to the exact environmental changes that would otherwise be desired by an explicitly mitigation-focused effort. In the end, social justice and the fantasy low carbon city seem to have the same goals.

Building a new research community

This is not to say that this is an easy goal to achieve. The community working on the micro-scale processes that determine global urban emissions is tiny; academic institutions are not actively encouraging young scholars to pursue the necessary interdisciplinary work; and there is almost no literature on realistically attributing emissions to specific cities and neighborhoods (the map above represents one such effort).

Daniel is working to reach across the dauntingly-wide chasm between sociology and physical science, and runs his own podcast, Hot and Bothered at Dissent magazine. Daniel also co-authored a Nature Comment on urban sustainability,

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 work resulted in papers in Science (Mg/Ca) and Nature (TEX86).

The method, while of course important, is not the main motivation. Instead, it’s the huge, gaping holes in our knowledge of Southern Hemisphere climate variability that seem to motivate Amelia. The questioning and search for challenges was there from the start. In high school, Amelia’s uncle unleashed her on climate variability over the past century in the Durham NH area. Coring away, when I was scooping ice cream.

Amelia had plenty of inspiration from her family, including Great Aunt Mary Sears. The family spirit of exploration and possibility was infectious, and Amelia double majored in geology and studio art. She still does pottery (example above) and, unbeknownst to her, worked for years with actor Jeff Bridges (full story at the end of the podcast).

Throughout, Amelia’s been interested in how Antarctic functions within the climate system. And it’s weird, sometimes. During the Miocene Climate Optimum, “It’s almost like we’re having ice growth during a period of warming … and nobody’s really said that out loud”. Now, Amelia is working with her colleagues to link together the deep sea records with shelf- and land-based evidence to try and understand the shockingly large ice sheet variability that seems to have happened at millennial time scales.

Getting all this done, while raising a family and going for tenure at USF, isn’t for the faint of heart. Although she was tenured at UCL, Amelia chose to return to the US for family and financial reasons (living in London on a geoscientist’s salary is, in British understatement, a bit difficult). Now, Amelia’s mom is next door and helping with child care, and her husband sounds epic. But it’s all-consuming, nonetheless.

Still, as you’ll hear in the interview, the practical realities of family and career haven’t done anything to diminish Amelia’s enthusiasm for her science!

Music: Running Waters by Jason Shaw CC BY 3.0 US; Siesta by Jahhzar CC BY-SA 3.0.

Copyright: This episode of Forecast is under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

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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 grapples with making the connection to broader climate questions.

Paleoclimatologist Scott St. George from the University of Minnesota works on both the guts of tree rings as climate recorders, and their linkage to the wider climate system. Doing so, however, didn’t always seem like a great idea, and Scott experienced some initial horror at having entered the field …

The despair didn’t last long, and Scott was soon making major advances in using tree rings to research past floods. We talk about these early discoveries, the furor over the missing ring debate, and how the field is now trying to explicitly link tree rings to variations in atmospheric circulation.

The tentacles of Scott’s ideas, however, extend far beyond a narrow interest in tree-ring science, and we have a craic about a couple. Scott and I both share the perception that scientific talks could be … improved somewhat. Mine included! I think presentations can be a sort of intellectual defense system. As Scott puts it:

But unlike me, Scott has taken the time to think about scientific presentations, what tends to go wrong, and how we can all craft a more meaningful talk … oftentimes by talking less, and especially by having some empathy for your audience. You don’t have to get it all done at once:

Scott’s website is a great resource for ideas on how to streamline and hone presentations, and he has a veritable treasure-chest of excellent and thought-provoking graphics.

During the course of teaching a monstrously huge undergrad class, Scott grew frustrated with presenting the standard NASA GISS graph of industrial era climate change, and had long thought that there must be a better way. Ultimately, he was able to convince undergrad Dan Crawford to translate the graph into music. The results spawned a pretty incredible level of interest, and show that there’s a real interest in presenting climate science in ways that make sense to and connect with people.

Science and geopolitics have always been intermixed, sometimes to great effect, other times less so. Witness the recent CSIRO debacle. Scott began his career in the Geological Survey of Canada during a time of interest in climate science, but once the Harper administration was in full suppress-scientists mode, Scott new he’d have to look for other options to pursue his long-term interests. For Scott, this meant leaving Canada and moving to Minnesota. A loss for Canada, but I’m glad that Scott’s found his way, now to a tenured academic position at a great university.

Music: Organ Grinder Swing by ChēēZ π CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; Planetary Bands, Warming World by Daniel Crawford CC BY-NC 4.0; Oh! By Jingo! by All-Star Trio Public Domain Mark 1.0.

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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 feasibility and mitigation pathways.

But I thought it would be a good idea to find out what the IPPC is actually doing on the topic, as one of their three special reports. IPCC Working Group I co-chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte kindly agreed to come back on the podcast for a quick catch-up on the recent 1.5 scoping meeting held in Geneva.

At this point, discussions are extremely preliminary, but it is clear that the IPCC is undergoing a fairly huge change in culture, at least for the special reports. Most notably, the entire framing of the debates, questions, and approaches is taking place across the three working groups. Additionally, the author group chose to bring in outside scientific consultants to bolster their expertise, for example in ethics. As Valérie says, the scoping meeting was:

It’s still early days for the report, but I think it will provide an unusually broad discussion of the social and ecological issues that are inextricably intertwined with trying to reach any particular mitigation or climate goal. One notable point of discussion was the potential of the human, as well as climate, system to undergo abrupt change.

If you’re keen to read more on the 1.5 threshold, you can check out the across-journal collection from Nature, Nature Climate Change and Nature Geoscience.

Music: Stance Gives You Balance by Hogan Grip, Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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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 the Northern Hemisphere? Interesting!

Soon after, I handle Rob’s next two papers at Nature: Modelling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years (led by David Pollard) and Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations (led by Tim Naish). Published in the same issue, the two papers showed — from the ANDRILL observations and a simple “hybrid” ice sheet model — that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet waxed and waned over a few thousand years, sometimes retreating to almost nothing. Interesting!

Then my colleague Juliane Mossinger handled Rob’s provocative paper Past extreme warming events linked to massive carbon release from thawing permafrost, suggesting that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum could have been caused by terrestrial carbon cycle processes on an ice-free continent. Rob was essentially new to the field, but dove in anyway:

Interesting, interesting stuff (and that’s not even delving into Rob’s other publications in Science and Nature Geoscience). Where did all these disparate ideas, skills, models and insights come from?

As it turns out, they come from one of the most seemingly straightforward careers I’ve yet come across: childhood interests in geoscience and outdoor recreation > Earth Science degree at UC Boulder > graduate work at UC and NCAR with people like Bill Hay, Starley Thompson and Warren Washington > faculty position at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst > long-term involvement in the awesome Urbino Summer School for Paleoclimatology > Tinker Muse Prize > geoscience superstardom. It was, as Rob says:

Yes, but … that doesn’t mean it’s easy. A huge chunk of our conversation centers around Rob’s long-running collaborations with David Pollard, which surely has to be one of the great partnerships of modern geoscience. It was just luck that they were both in Starley Thompson’s group at NCAR, and luck that they ended up being quasi-neighbors on the East Coast.

Rob had long realized that — even with the deglaciation of Greenland, West Antarctica and peripheral glaciers and ice sheets — modelers still could not produce the ~ 20 m sea level rise in the Pliocene warm period. For a while, Rob was convinced that surface melt must be the answer, which could in turn lead to hydrofracturing. Nope! Increased basal lubrication?* Still not enough!

Sitting in the audience at Rob’s EGU talk, David Pollard wondered if Richard Alley’s ideas on ice cliffs might be important. But how, exactly, would cliffs come into play? David and Rob turned to an elegant theoretical model from Jeremy Bassis describing the maximum height an ice cliff could attain, from structural properties: about 100 m, it turned out. All of which, when put together, leads to the marine ice cliff instability (MICI) mechanism.

Rob and David looked to the Pliocene and last interglacial to better constrain the model parameterization.