Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

Language is spectacularly imprecise. Susan Joy Hassol from Climate Communication has made a career out of studying how to — and how not to — use language to most effectively communicate climate science to a broad audience.

Well, you might think, surely this isn’t too complicated. But step back for a moment and think about some of the terms you’ll see on a daily basis in the formal language of climate scientists speaking to one another: THC, aerosols, enhance, error, bias, negative emissions, positive feedback, positive trend.

These words might sound innocuous enough in a scientific context, but to a non-scientist, or even to scientists from a different field, these words can have entirely different meanings: the active ingredient in marijuana, spray cans, make better, mistake, preconceived notion, bad emissions, something good, a helpful development.

Susan has worked for years to collate a list of these and other trigger words, as well as suggested replacements. If you see yourself using potentially confusing terminology in public communication, then you might like to check out the articles in Physics Today and EOS on the resources page of Susan’s website (which, by the way, is an excellent resource for all manner of climate communication info!).

Susan’s career provides a great example of how to build a non-academic career in climate science. It’s possible, but you need a passion for what you’re doing, and the ability to pull together a diverse line of work. Susan started with a long stint as a writer/communicator for the Aspen Global Change Institute, followed by an increasingly diverse portfolio including one-on-one coaching, running communication workshops, writing a documentary for HBO, serving as the Senior Science Writer for the National Climate Assessments,  and a great deal of public outreach, including a terrific TEDx talk.

Susan grew up in a four-generation apartment in Brooklyn, with Yiddish spoken. Her parents always said she was a good communicator, and that’s certainly remained true. From her years of experience with climate communication, some of Susan’s take-home messages are:

* Good communication means “simple, clear messages repeated often by a variety of trusted sources”.

* Stories are important: you have to speak for the facts, which don’t speak for themselves.

* Speak a common language: “…while there is always complexity, I find that the basic story in many cases is really pretty straightforward”.

* Use analogies. Instead of talking about gigatons of annual meltwater from Greenland, try saying that it is like the water use of LA for a year.

* Talk about hope and urgency in climate discussions. Hope and worry motivate action; fear and despair do not.

* Emphasize that we still have a choice. Do you want just a few more days per year like the currently hottest day … or a month more?

Sometimes, community inertia on communication is so strong that it can difficult to break through. Susan was invited to speak at a National Academy meeting on the recent reduced rate of global warming — you know where I’m going with this — and emphasized that “hiatus” was a misleading term, both scientifically and for communication. But the message didn’t take: “…everybody shook their head and agreed with me and then they kept on calling it the hiatus”. The point, perhaps,

Maybe once a year I have a nightmare that I’m back in grad school, grinding out an interminable PhD in some entirely new field. Ed Hawkins from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science actually did head back for a new degree and a new career, but, luckily for climate science, it seems to have been more of a dream than a nightmare.

Ed got his start in the Master of Physics program at Oxford, where the intense, small-group discussion and examination was pretty intense, to put it mildly: “If you hadn’t done enough that week you got found out, certainly”.

Straight after Oxford, Ed moved on to a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Nottingham. There, Ed worked on minor topics, you know, like mapping out the entire universe.

Prior to prepping for the interview, I was completely unaware of Ed’s first career, but it turns out that much of this work on the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey is massively cited, with five papers with more than 300 citations in Web of Science. Ed has an H-index of 13 from his first career alone!

But the topics in astrophysics proved to be too divorced from immediate societal relevance, and at the time Ed wasn’t too sure about academia in general. So it was off to the IT industry for a year.

Happily for us, IT proved a bit of a bore, and Ed’s interests drifted towards weather, climate and something more tangible than astrophysics. As Ed says, “I wanted my research, if I was going to pursue a career, to be more directly relevant to the real world and policy making”. That’s when he returned for a Master’s degree from the University of Reading.

Ed is now well-known for his work on model processes, uncertainty and predictability, with specific work on a wide range of topics like the the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, sea ice, temperature vs. precipitation, extremes, and regional climate change.

As is the case in many of the Forecast interviews, contextualizing the importance of internal climate variability emerges as a major theme, to be explored, at least in part, through large, perturbed initial condition ensembles.

Sea ice is a classic case in which one could easily mistake a short observational record as a forced trend. “It’s a very tricky problem to try and untangle all of these factors, and try and understand what it is the underlying trend, due to increasing global temperatures and what is due to variability on top of that trend”.

But untangling the answer is at the heart of providing policy-relevant science, and Ed is focusing on using observations to query whether or not models are simulating the correct processes. Recovering old weather data, too, provides huge opportunities to contextualize modern processes, extremes especially.

Another classic example of the untangling process is the hiatus/pause/slow down — a period of reduced global warming beginning ~ 1998, ending in 2015. In AR5, the IPCC authors realized that observations were on the low end of model simulations, presenting an apparent challenge to the modeling community. Ed talks me through how the initial debates led to better — and fairer — model-data comparisons and improvements in the observational reconstructions. Now, the community appears to be moving towards more of a consensus that the initial mismatch is, when done properly, not nearly as serious as initially thought.

That, however, is not all. Oh no. Ed also produced the massively viral spiral graphic on climate change, runs a terrific

Gabi Hegerl is famous for her work seeking to understand the processes driving climate variability, but she was initially destined to study language arts, and started off with seven years* of schooling in Latin.

Schools in Germany, at least in Gabi’s time, tended to place students into career tracks quite early, and for Gabi that meant language. But she never loved it, and soon realized “I always really enjoyed maths, even though it seemed a bit pointless”.

It turns out that her father, a lawyer, had an unfulfilled ambition to be a mathematician. But for reasons that remain unclear, he didn’t tell Gabi of his interests, and actively encouraged her to go into law. Due to the horrendous boredom of the subject, though, Gabi demured, initially pursing her interests in archaeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

Describing archaeology, Gabi says “I found it really interesting but I found it just frustratingly illogical”. There was far too much fuzziness in data and interpretation, and she could never make it work entirely.

Reviewing her interests and skills, Gabi finally concluded that maths (and art!) were  immensely satisfying and continually challenging. I think the interview contains a terrific description of why people might study applied maths — a combination of a vast intellectual construct, the sense of building on prior knowledge, a simple end result, and direct applicability to real-world problems.

These interests in maths led Gabi to switch her PhD from computer logic to numerical fluid dynamics, focused on a Siemens-funded and high-risk project seeking to model fluid flow in the throat. A long way from climate science!

Juggling career options, and applying to software companies, Gabi was intrigued by the mismatch between mapped and actual glacial extents in her climbing haunts in the Alps and decided to — almost out of the blue — apply to the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, working with Klaus Hasselmann and Hans von Storch.

Gabi thought of the climate work as an experiment, something to try out. But von Storch said it only made sense if an academic career was the final goal. Ultimately, Gabi agreed, even thought the salary was lower than in industry and she had to wrestle with family and relationship entanglements. “I felt putting myself to very hard work is much nicer if you feel it brings about something useful”.

Now, after a scientific career spanning the MPI, the University of Washington, Texas A&M, Duke and now the University of Edinburgh, Gabi is known for her pioneering work on the detection and attribution of climate change, climate extremes, and climate sensitivity.

We discuss the surprisingly large and long-lasting impacts of volcanoes on climate, disentangling internal vs. external controls on climate, why spectral analysis isn’t too satisfying without a mechanism,  whether or not models simulate extremes for the right reasons, how to work with Bayesian statisticians.

For me, though, the most interesting section of the interview comes in our discussion of Gabi’s work with her late husband, Tom Crowley, and the aftermath of his death in 2014.

Even after years of working with the climate community, I can think of scientists as independent constructs, visible by their papers and community activities, but not as part of a human system. The reality, of course, is intensely human.

Gabi experienced one of the most wrenching life changes one can imagine,

Jerry Mitrovica from Harvard University sits at the surprisingly wobbly interface between the solid Earth, oceans and ice. Trained in serious geophysics, Jerry quickly found a niche in explaining how movements of the Earth’s mantle – in three dimensions – control the apparent variation of past sea levels. In many cases, this means pointing out that many or all of our records of past sea level are fundamentally altered by processes like dynamic topography and isostatic rebound.

Jerry was born to a Greek mother and Albanian father. Their meeting in the aftermath of WW II remains fuzzy, but they soon immigrated to Melbourne, where Jerry was born as the youngest of seven siblings. Although Melbourne supported a small and vibrant Albania expat community, the move never gelled for family, and they moved to Toronto.

The shift proved difficult, as Jerry’ charismatic and intellectual father died soon after, leaving the family in dire financial straits. The local Albanian community responded by pooling together money for a down payment on a house, where Jerry’s mother lived for the rest of her life, but still … “It was my mother trying to keep the family together and survive … a widow with seven children in her late 40s”.

Jerry, however, loved Toronto, staying for all of his subsequent schooling and his initial academic career. He initially tried a PhD at Cambridge, but felt isolated and adrift. The overseas experiment lasted only a month, and Jerry returned to Toronto, where he had a strained relationship with his PhD advisor. As he says, “I wouldn’t say my PhD in Toronto was the happiest time in my life.” But the experience at Cambridge provided considerable motivation to get through, and to thrive. “I thought that leaving Cambridge after a month was a failure. I didn’t want to fail again.”

Along the way, Jerry got some key advice: “You know, you’re a theorist…you need to go to a place where data is primary”. He did, joining Irwin Shapiro at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and it provided to be one of those fortuitous collaborations that seem to define the careers of successful scientists. “It’s just one of these wonderful things that you luck into in life, that I worked with people that were trying to build that capability, at just the time I had developed the expertise to model that.”

Jerry made predictions about rates of post-glacial isostatic rebound before the requisite GPS data existed. The predictions proved to be correct, but at the time it was a bit terrifying, and Jerry had real fears about the career consequences of being wrong “Graduate students and postdocs, even though many of them won’t admit this to you, feel extremely vulnerable. You don’t want to make a major mistake, because that’s when you’re looking for a job”.

Jerry is now famous for bringing geophysical insights to the sea level debate: gravitational attraction, sea level fingerprints, rotational shifts, isostatic rebound, and near field and far field effects have now fully oozed into the field to such an extent that it is almost impossible to imagine interpreting any sort of sea level record – be it tide gauges, salt marshes, corals, beach terraces – without considering the possible confounding effects. For many of these records, “It’s a lens alright, but it’s a contaminated, distorted lens”. Without a solid geological interpretation, some pretty big miscalculations can result.

Now, Jerry is collaborating with his students and people like Bob Kopp to bring a statistical approach to the interpretation of modern sea level rise,

Tina van de Flierdt from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London is an international leader in the use of geochemical proxies – particularly neodymium (Nd) – for reconstructing past ocean circulation, water masses and weathering. But her childhood and early interests pointed in a different direction.

Tina grew up on a dairy farm in rural western Germany, raised by parents who were largely tied to the land but entirely supportive of her outside interests and desire to attend summer camp away from home. By her late teens, Tina knew she had a keen interest in geology, but didn’t realize that it existed as a field. It took the combination of an inspirational teacher and a sharp career counselor to set her down the path that’s led her to where she is today.

Initially, however, Tina wanted to be a hard rock geochemist, or to study volcanoes and mantle processes — passions that drew her to work in Namibia. Then, following an off-hand comment by a friend, Tina sent her CV to Alex Halliday, at the time working at ETH Zurich. Although she had no particular interest in paleoceanography, the moment she entered the lab, Tina thought “…well, screw it, I’ll do paleoceanography”. That’s all it often takes to switch gears entirely.

Tina then dove into early work on the use of Nd to trace water masses, and was a first-hand participant in the seemingly inevitable progression of a new proxy from optimism to pessimism and later reconciliation. Along the way, Tina helped to lead the GEOTRACES program, a massive international effort to disentangle the many influences on geochemical tracers. As I keep hearing on the podcast, it was a case of being in the right place at the right time, particularly if that place was Lamont.

Tina is particularly interested in the marine-terminating sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during past warm periods. With her team, Tina is already producing evidence to suggest that it may be as sensitive to warming as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If so, the implications for sea level rise are obviously startling, and Tina is now working to move from qualitative statements to a quantitative reconstruction of past mass loss.

For a long time, the modeling community was well ahead in trying to generate these sorts of estimates, but as Tina tells it, the geochemists are rapidly catching up and the field is now in a fantastic-sounding state of collaboration and mutual stimulation of ideas.

We talk through several career topics, too: watching out for open-ended technical analysis in your early days; the unexpected rewards of teaching; the merits and problems of the UK academic assessment process; and management of peer review, particularly now that Tina is an editor at Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

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Reto Knutti and I are both interested in cake. Reto, as an analogy for the problems society faces when trying to divide up the allowable carbon emissions among historically greedy and newly desirous consumers. Me, because I love cake (ok, it’s also a great analogy).

Reto is a stellar climate physicist, working on many angles of climate system, including climate sensitivity, ocean circulation, aerosols, radiative forcing, changes in extremes, and allowable carbon emissions (most recently at Nature, he co-authored a paper on how regional extremes scale with global mean temperature — figure below).

Hard core IPCC Working Group I stuff, you could say.

But Reto is also interested in climate and society interactions. He’s done dozens of outreach activities, has clear ideas about how to engage with non-scientists, and thinks deeply about what models are and how to use them. So I decided to steer the conversation more towards social/policy/economics angles … fields in which neither one of us has formal training, making it all the more fun.

Reto has certainly tried hard to build scientific bridges among fields. In his experience, the theoretical and practical challenges in working across disciplines are enormous and the immediate benefits can be scant. For Reto, working with economists and social scientists: produced “…some of the hardest papers to write, ever”. And some of this work is cited hardly or not at all. If you don’t start, though, you’ll never get anywhere, and Reto doesn’t seem to regret any of the considerable effort he’s put into “non-core” activities.

In this vein, I posed a series of quasi-unanswerable questions (paraphrased):

Q: How do you get society to stop eating so much cake? A: Perhaps by massive regulation or massively reduced use, but neither seems likely. Massive investment in research and technology might be a better way forward.

Q: What’s the best way to engage with a range of civic and financial institutions on climate change? A: Keep facts and values separate: “rather than telling people what they need to do, you tell them what the facts are, what the options are, and you let them basically think on their own about what they could do or what they need to do”. Shared values definitely helps.

Q: Given that the EU and the US are at approximately similar points on the Kuznets curve, why do they have such different attitudes towards climate? A: The EU tends to think more as a society and less as an individual, and the US has fundamentally different geographical constraints and faith in technology to solve problems.

Q: How do you decide whether or not there are fundamental limitations to model projections … or put another way, is there a question for which the answer is so uncertain that modelers shouldn’t even provide an answer (inspired by Lenny Smith)? A: That’s a tough one, and actively debated in the modeling community. At the least, you can evaluate against the paleo record, check for consistency across models, and compare to modern observations. But the potential still exists that models could be missing some sort of critical physics or constraints. The potential for this kind of “miss” is probably highest for the things that are really relevant for society, like extremes and abrupt change.

Reto kindly indulged my open-ended questions about these and many other thorny issues. We did, of course, eventually get around to talking about some actual physics of the climate system!

For Valérie Masson-Delmotte, climate science is like a jigsaw puzzle. Unlike a house of cards, where the removal of one element causes the whole thing to crash down, the central picture of a puzzle is still apparent when pieces — maybe even many pieces — are missing.

Valérie works, at least in part, to fill in the missing pieces, using tools like ice cores, climate models, and statistics. I guess you could say that Valérie is an ice core scientist, but that’s like saying that Eric Ripert knows how to cook fish. Yes he does, and he’s great at it, but that kind of misses the bigger picture.

In fact I would have a hard time trying to pin down what Valérie does, because the range is so broad, spanning monsoon modeling, polar climate variability, interpretation of δ18O, age models, volcanic impacts on climate … I suppose it’s simplest to say that Valérie is trying to understand past climate variability and the underlying processes, on an astonishing variety of fronts. A great example of how Valérie and her colleagues are bringing together multiple archives and techniques is a recent Nature paper on the reconstruction of the North Atlantic Oscillation.

That’s not all, though. Valérie is the co-chair of Working Group I for the sixth IPCC assessment report, a children’s book author, and the mother of two teenage daughters.

It seems like nearly everyone gets into science by some roundabout way. In Valerie’s case, her early interest in archaeology morphed into engineering. But then, in the process of deciding whether or not to stay in science, a chance encounter with a popular science article on the Vostok ice core led to her cold-calling the French scientists who were involved in the project, and soon, the day after finishing her PhD on monsoon modeling, a postdoc at the new LSCE with the great Jean Jouzel.

The timing was perfect and, for a brief time, Valérie and her colleagues could pursue any sort of curiosity-driven science they wanted. Those days are long gone, but Valérie is still a passionate supporter of long-term, curiosity-driven science.

One theme that keeps emerging in my interviews with climate scientists is the way in which larger cultural practices inform how science gets done. For Valérie, French culture has some specific practices, particularly around raising questions. As she says, “We are not taught to ask questions … questions are supposed to reflect how smart you are … but not acknowledge your ignorance”. Yet it doesn’t seem that Valérie has any issues asking tough, reasonable questions, like when she takes me to task for not accepting important methodological advances for publication in Nature (at least in climate).

Our interview, recorded at the end of the March 2016 IPICS meeting in Hobart, Tasmania, was a great chance to hit some of the nitty-gritty of ice core science. We hash through CO2 offsets, age model synchronization with speleothems and tephra, integration of ice core records with ocean and non-polar terrestrial records, and the hunt for the oldest ice.

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I first heard of Piers Sellers some time in the mid-1990s, on a trip to the southern BOREAS field site when I was in my master’s program at the University of Montana. The talk was something on the order of “… have you heard? Piers is entering the astronaut program!” which, at the time, came as a complete non-sequitur to me. Why would someone at the peak of an influential scientific career at NASA choose to walk away?

At the time, Piers had already made some fundamental progress in at least three areas of science: bringing land-atmosphere interactions and ecology into atmospheric and climate models; working with Compton Tucker to show that weather satellites can be used to generate global estimates of plant productivity; and organizing unprecedented field campaigns like FIFE and BOREAS to show how it all came together — that yes, you really can scale physiological processes from cellular to global levels. As my grad advisor Steve Running says: nontrivial accomplishments.

Then, 20 years later, I started making my list of who I’d like to interview for Forecast, and Piers was on the list. It’s a long list, though, and Piers’ background edges more towards biogeochemistry and away from physical climate — my area at Nature. But then I read Piers’ moving Opinion piece at the NY Times, in which he announced his diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I realized I’d better try as soon as possible, and with the help of Compton Tucker — one of Piers’ closest friends and neighbor — I was able  to arrange a call.

If you read the NY Times piece, it’ll come as no surprise, but Piers was incredibly gracious, funny, optimistic and passionate about life and science, which, for Piers, are more or less the same thing.

I learned, at last, that he’d been trying for some time to get into the astronaut program. Once in, he stayed for 15 years, conducting three space walks and six trips to the international space station. Eventually, he wanted to make space for younger astronauts to join the program and chose to return to NASA, this time as acting Deputy Director of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate … AND … Acting Director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The three careers span an incredible range: individual scientist, astronaut (or operator, as Piers calls it), and administrator. Now, Piers estimates that he has about 500 days left, and has narrowed in on family and work as the highest priority — with climate change at the forefront.

But it’s not all serious stuff. Piers also tells me how he brought his grade school’s charter into space … although maybe it was a copy!

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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).

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Dorthe Dahl-Jensen is one of the leaders of the second generation of Danish ice core scientists, following on from pioneers like Willy Dansgaard and Sigfus Johnsen. She’s began publishing in Nature and Science since 1993, and now has 16 papers between the two. Her career spans technical details, modeling, age models, abrupt change, isotopic interpretation … nearly any topic you can imagine about the Greenland ice cores.

Dorthe grew up largely in Switzerland, where her father worked at CERN. Back in the day, Dorthe watched the physicists make Lego histograms and enjoyed a robust education in physics herself.

But by her own description, Dorthe was not an especially good student, and generally found Danish education rather uninteresting upon the family’s return when she was 12. Happily, an interest in glacial climbing and exploration led to an interest in actual glaciology. But her nascent career almost came to a crashing end, when the leaders of the Greenland crew banned females in the field, after the cook ran off with the previous woman.

Eventually, though, Dorthe made the field crew, landed Willy and Sigfus as graduate advisors, and never looked back.

We talk through a vast array of topics … raising four children (partially in Greenland), abrupt warming, implications of Eemian climate for modern climate change, the importance of resolving the bedrock topography under the ice sheet’s margins and ice streams, the growing use of drones, and smoking a cigar while doing ice core analysis. But what really sticks with me is a story about how to deal with problems.

In 1993, the Danes published two papers in Nature about the GRIP ice core, near the summit of Greenland. Soon after, the American team published the GISP2 core. Immediately, it was apparent that there was a major discrepancy in the inferred climate history between the two, even though they were almost neighbors. The Danish team soon realized that what had looked like a remarkably large and abrupt climate shift was instead the signal of the ice folding back upon itself.

The insight of course had the immediate consequence that the conclusions in the Nature paper needed to be substantially revised. But the findings also led to the realization that ice sheets are not simple layers: they twist, fold, and freeze on from the bottom (check out my earlier interview with Robin Bell for more on the topic). So the GRIP results, although problematic at the time, opened up a vast field of inquiry that continues to this day. The GRIP-GISP2 comparison also shows the value of core replication, even in two such nearby sites.

And oh yes … if you end up in the Danish ice camp, you will have to endure weekly showers and all night parties. As they say, it’s Saturday night — and the rest of the week!

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