Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

Lorraine Lisiecki is in the business of understanding past variations in ocean circulation. In particular, she uses mathematical approaches to interpret observed variations in δ18O and δ13C on times scales of thousands to millions of years.

Lorraine is the senior author of the famous LR04 benthic stack. There are ~ 3400 papers in ISI with the word “Pliocene” in the title. The LR04 paper, as of early February 2016, has almost 2000 citations, more than twice as many as the next most-cited Pliocene-entitled paper.

Why? Other δ18O stacks exist, but none had provided such a high level of mathematical rigor, objectivity, global scope and duration. The LR04 stack — in a comical understatement — proved to be one of the most useful records in all of paleoceanography. Lorraine tells me the back story of its creation, arising from an informal spousal consultation.

Lorraine’s interest in paleoclimate arose in part from the early realization of “what, we *still* don’t understand glacial-interglacial cycles?!” The answer’s still out there, and we discuss how it might involve a combination of deterministic and stochastic processes. I suspect that many in the paleoclimate business have the same motivation, but in Lorraine’s case she brought an unusually quantitative lens to the problem.

This should come as little surprise, as Lorraine went to high school at the South Caroline Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics and received her undergraduate degree from MIT. This sort of background equipped Lorraine for all sorts of mathematical approaches, like phase lags in the relationships between orbital forcing and ocean circulation.

Lorraine’s now working on reconstructing a 3D picture of past ocean circulation and updating LR04 with time-variant uncertainties. Uncertainties pop up throughout our discussion, not the least the frustration in trying to publish on the true magnitude of reconstruction uncertainties.

We discuss some of the perennial topics of academic life — like finding a manageable work life balance and the best way to discuss publication gaps (both from an application and hiring perspective) — and a fairly unusual one: life with triplets.

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Nearly everyone I’ve interviewed so far has a healthy dose of “what if” in their background. But maybe no one more so than Yusuke Yokoyama, a star paleoclimatologist – geochemist – engineer – inventor at the University of Tokyo.

What if he hadn’t been a stellar athlete growing up in Japan? He might not have had such a good experience during his junior high school exchange in Tennessee, leaving him with a keen desire to go overseas again.

What if his high school hadn’t given students such a long leash? Maybe he  wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be inspired by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos …  or to explore careers in journalism and medicine.

What if his PhD program in Australia already had a state-of-the-art mass spec? Then he never would have had the chance to build a new vacuum apparatus for Tezer Esat’s homemade unit, or probably to land a job working on cosmogenic isotopes in California years later.

I realize that these musing verge on an academic origin story trope — everyone has random twists along the way — but the chance occurrences came fast and furious for Yusuke, along with plenty of irony.

Although Japanese, Yusuke had a hard time getting a position back in Japan, at least in part because he had been gone for a while and wasn’t known in the hiring world, at the time a fairly insular affair. But that worked out alright in the end, as Yusuke’s experience interviewing at UC Santa Barbara totally changed his perception of how interviewing could be done. Twelve years ago, for example, Japanese universities did not routinely bring in candidates for interviews. Now, there is a formal travel budget, an extended interview process, and an effort to reach out internationally.

Yusuke’s career path, even in sea level research for which he is best known, had an unusual start. Initially he was interested in inverting the relative sea level variations of Jomon archaeological sites to get mantle properties, but this eventually led to a more direct interest in geochemical estimates of sea level, from corals in particular.

Coral collection always seems to bring problems. For Yusuke and his colleagues, the Gulf War scrapped plans for the collection of Last Glacial Maximum samples. And in Tahiti, the LGM was also elusive, leading instead to some fundamental insights on Meltwater Pulse-1A. It seems to me that Yusuke worked out his own expansive skill set, and then kept a keen eye out for opportunity.

We talk about learning Japanese drumming while in America and bringing some American “what have you got to lose attitude” back to Japan, not the least from his children’s temporary grade school in Houston, where the slogan was something like “We are risk takers”.

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Essentially from the start of her career, Amy Clement has been interested in the big ideas in atmospheric dynamics. But she’s also continually raised questions and proposed her own sometimes controversial ideas.

El Niño is fundamentally linked to atmosphere-ocean interactions? Maybe not. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation drives the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation? Again, maybe not.

The large scale atmosphere instead seems to set up these preferred “modes of variability”. It’s not entirely clear how this works, but part of making major conceptual advances is being willing to accept a large dose of remaining mystery.

In delving into these major questions, Amy collaborates with paleoclimatologists and seems to enjoy the sort of challenging interactions that always seem to arise when working across disciplines. Mostly, the paleo record interests Amy in the degree to which it can reveal something fundamentally important about the broader climate system.

We talk about other kinds of radically different approaches and ideas that can exist in academia. Hashing out issues over a beer might be the first thing that would occur to male advisors, but Amy argues that this might be the last thing that many female mentors would try.

Amy received all of her degrees from Columbia and went to the University of Paris for a post doc, where she was marooned in the early days of EU mass-project-mania. Then the government cut her project’s funding. All of which goes to show that even highly successful scientists can go through difficult periods, professionally.

In Amy’s case, the Paris postdoc was soon followed by an ongoing career at the Rosenstiel School in the University of Miami. Amy’s now a full professor and associate dean, which brings its own challenges. She was also press-ganged into becoming a surfer.

Over the long-term, Amy is working to understand how a hierarchy of climate models can reveal the physical processes controlling the climate system itself. Not a small goal!

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Interesting stories and insights on life come tumbling out of Stefan Kröpelin — one of the foremost scientists working in the eastern Sahara — like snowflakes in a blizzard. Science is at the forefront of our conversation, but his worldview is literary: “It was never my intention to make, out of 100 books, the 101st.” Always, Stefan looks for the empty space and fresh opportunity, on the map and in science.

Stefan was born in 1952 in Munich. His father was a political journalist at the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, his mother was one of the first successful female lawyers in town, and his grandparents were in the resistance against Hitler. By age five or six, he was talking politics at the dinner table and had decided to become an archaeologist. He grew up in Schwabing, at the time a hotbed of bohemianism. Stefan was expelled from high school for excessive political demonstration, and made use of the time by traveling in a $50 VW van to India, where he met the Dalai Lama. By 18, he was crossing some of the world’s major deserts. Not your average childhood.

Stefan finished his high school degree in communist-era West Berlin, where, as a Bavarian, he found a special sense of isolation. Soon he became one of the first computer science students in Germany and narrowly missed moving to silicon valley.

Instead, Stefan found the Sahara, or maybe the Sahara found Stefan. He’s been going  back for 45 years, almost every year, for months at a time. We talk about the desert: the absolute freedom of nothingness; harrowing entanglement with local politics; waking up in your sleeping bag covered with a small dune, or ice; the collapsing window of opportunity due to the rise of political instability in region; bathing with half a gallon (“…there’s some techniques…”).

Over the decades, Stefan has managed something that would be miraculous in a short-term funding environment: four major grants have kept him going, with relatively few, yet high-impact papers — not suprising, given that it can take ten years from taking a core to publication. He’s also clear on the separation of professional disagreements from personal friendships, a skill that sometimes seems lost in modern science.

I left our interview with an intense feeling of nostalgia for something I never experienced, or am likely to ever experience. Stefan’s brand of Saharan research was always sparsely populated, and it’s unclear if anyone else will step into the void.

All of which makes me regret even more the audio quality of the interview. Unfortunately I had some issues with my portable recorder and the entire discussion has a bad echo. It’s still completely comprehensible, and I hope you’re able to overlook the sound quality!

Note: my colleague at Nature Quirin Schiermeier has a great profile of Stefan and a description of a recent expedition.

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Lauren Andrews has done some of the most interesting work I’ve seen on subglacial hydrology — as a grad student, and with a degree of independence that would be unusual in most any PhD.

Lauren grew up in a scientific/agricultural household: her father was a groundwater hydrologist but the family also ran a small farm, with a range of animals. Lauren was active in 4-H, an organization that promotes (among other things) individual responsibility and organization, skills that came into play during Lauren’s time on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

After a stint as a consultant on acid mine issues in remote parts of California, Lauren signed up for a PhD in glaciology from the University of Texas at Austin, where she’d immediately clicked with her advisor, Ginny Catania. But a great match with your advisor can’t guarantee a smooth PhD. Ginny’s time was constrained due to family issues, and Lauren had to take responsibility for big chunks of major field campaigns in Greenland. Aside from pre-campaign nausea, there were great moments: blissful isolation, intense focus, and getting engaged on the ice.

Lauren’s idea of how science works seems pretty darn reasonable … begin with a question, gather your data, hash out possible explanations and guesses with some smart people, try to prove your self wrong, and stay open to the possibility that your interpretation might be subject to revision down the road.

We also chat about deciding whether or not to submit to Nature (go ahead!), the frustration and value of dealing with reviewers’ comments, and the impact of having a paper in Nature. In this case, the biggest outcome for Lauren was learning to explain her science, not the career boost you might expect.

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Gavin Schmidt runs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and develops, pokes, prods, tears down, builds up, and talks about talking about climate models. He also considered opening a child care center at GISS, but thought better of it.

I’m a complete neophyte when it comes to doing interviews. Most of the time, I’m trying to think about my next question, making sure that I’m still recording, and listening for distracting background noises. It’s hard to keep track of the overall theme  of the conversation.

This time, it wasn’t until I was in the editing phase that I understand that Gavin was essentially laying out an entire philosophy of how climate models get built. evaluated, and presented.

At least for the NASA GISS ModelE, the model didn’t leap fully-formed, Athena-like, from any sort of centralized plan. Rather, it evolved over decades, with many of the innovations coming from seemingly off-topic work pursued by not-overburdened GISS employees. As Gavin says, “Just get on with it. Whatever you want to do, just do it”. That sort of attitude led to novel components, like direct simulation of isotopes and atmospheric chemistry.

Model testing is key, of course. You make a change, see what happens, test the results against observations, and make a decision about what to keep, what to simplify, and what to place in the circular file. As the model develops, you can then use it to evaluate the physical mechanisms that drove abrupt changes, for example the 8.2 kyr event.

Models develop by fits and starts, experimenting, replacing parameterizations with processes over time. How do you know a model is improving? At least partially through emergent behaviors. As you increase resolution, you’re not specifying that atmospheric transport across the tropopause gets better … but it does, and that improves other processes like the quasi-biennial oscillation.

We talked extensively about science-government interactions, and some of Gavin’s many  Kafkaesque experiences. In the end, attempts at government muzzling and micromanagement of science communication comes across as impractical, appalling, and … a bit comical.

But it’s not all bad. The complete government failure to engage in any sort of response and discussion of climate-related science fiction like The Day After Tomorrow led Gavin to participate in the RealClimate blog.

Gavin, like many of the other climate scientists on Forecast, has some level of optimism for the future. The carbon-GDP relationship isn’t a law of nature and it does seem like governments are starting to come to grips with the size of the problem.

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Bette Otto-Bliesner from the National Center for Atmospheric Research has shaped the field of paleoclimate modeling for decades and I’d been keen to talk with her ever since I started the podcast.

My process for inviting people to be on the podcast isn’t totally random. Usually I find the person’s work to be particularly compelling,  we might be in the same location, or I’m trying to find a good balance of tropics.

In this case, over the past couple of years, I ran into Bette at a meeting in Belgium and began to realize that she’s a leading force in the paleoclimate community – both in terms of modeling and data-model comparisons. Bette is also heavily involved in the organizational/planning side of paleoclimate research, via entities like PAGES and PMIP. Who better for a overview on past progress and ongoing challenges.

Bette’s scope of work is huge. The Cretaceous, the Last Glacial Maximum, the Last Interglacial, the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, the African Humid Period … all that and mechanisms too! Bette and her collaborators have explored how changes in, for example, CO2, insolation, vegetation, and ocean circulation affected past climate.

We talked about basic processes and big questions. What does it mean to have sea level 10-50 m above present in the mid-Pliocene? What are models still missing in simulations of the African Humid Period? Will isotope-enabled GCMs finally provide a one-to-one comparison between data and models?

Talking with Bette was illuminating, not only because she knows about the nuts and bolts of climate modeling, but because she explains in clear terms how models have progressed over the past few decades, how models and data can constrain each other, and to what degree paleoclimate modeling can increase our confidence in simulations of future climate.

And Better was in the Dirty Dozen. Just not the one with Lee Marvin.

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Greg Jones is one of the foremost authorities on wine – climate interactions. I started hearing about  Greg some time in the late 1990s, when Rama Nemani, one of my friends from the University of Montana, went out to NASA Ames for a year. Rama got interested in remote sensing of vineyards and then climate-wine interactions. Somehow we all started talking, and a few years later this led to a paper in Climate Research. Greg and I continued to work together off and on for years, including a feature in Nature Geoscience soon after I started at Nature.

As tends to happen when careers diverge, Greg and I were in touch only occasionally as the years went by, so I was keen to have him on the show, both to catch up and to ask the questions you don’t tend to ask during normal scientific interactions.

A lot of the scientists I’ve interviewed have had unusual backgrounds, but Greg’s is the most startling so far. He didn’t finish high school on the first attempt, going instead into careers in cooking and owning golfing supply shops. Only the economic crash of 1987 got him into science.

Early on, Greg and his advisor at the University of Virginia, Bob Davis, realized that there was an almost completely unexplored niche in wine-climate interactions. Greg started in Bordeaux, for his PhD, and continues uninterrupted today. His career spans global climate change, site selection in his home area of southern Oregon, and collaborations around the globe and in the family winery.

Greg and I talk about most everything … cooking, cold calling the French wine industry, terroir, and macro- and micro-climate influences on grape production. I love wines with strong minerality, and it turns out this flavor might simply arise from fermentation technique, not anything in the soil. Lots of bits like that in the chat.

It goes to show, it’s never to late to finish high school, or to invent your own field of science.

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If you’re a frequent reader of Nature’s Career section, you’ll have seen a lot of content on various aspects of non-traditional scientific careers (for example, conversations with Nobel Laureate Eric Betzig, a Q&A on transitioning from academia to industry, an editorial on life after academia, and a feature on why top academic prospects might pursue other opportunities).

In biomedical fields, the non-traditional options seem clearer and more abundant than in geosciences, and climate in particular. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find any number of interesting pathways.

My guest for episode 7, Surabi Menon, followed one such pathway. Surabi was a successful researcher at NASA GISS and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working on issues like black carbon and urban heat islands. In 2012, she moved to ClimateWorks, a philanthropically-funded organization devoted to promoting and supporting actions designed to reduce climate change and the impacts of climate change.

Along the way, and almost by accident, she ended up enrolling in an MBA program. MBA/PhD certainly isn’t a combination you come across every day in climate science!

We talk about Surabi’s early life in India, the shock of moving from Bombay to West Lafayette, IN, her initial attraction to observational work and later interest in modeling, collaborating with Jim Hansen, and why, in the face of society’s ongoing reliance on a fossil-fuel-based economy, there’s still room for optimism.

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Into the boiling cauldron

This intro could read “today I interview Chris Field” and that would be enough. But just in case …

Few climate scientists are as well-known or far-reaching as Chris Field. Chris is famous for working and thinking across scales – in particular, from the leaf level to the globe (as far as I know, he’s not working on exoplanets). In Chris’ words, “I see a sophisticated feel for individual organisms as being the foundation on which we think about the global scale issues”. Indeed!

By absolutely no coincidence, Chris has a massive leadership role in many areas: co-chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, and faculty director of Jasper Ridge. He is also an AAAS/AGU fellow and was awarded the Roger Revelle Medal. And oh yes, 50,000+ citations.

I met Chris at Carnegie’s office on the Stanford campus. We talked about the early days of CO2 measurements (when a portable system fit into a mini-van), building and hacking instruments, how being in a boiling cauldron (of ideas) is great, and transitioning to an energy system that is radically less dependent on fossil fuels.

Maybe the best message of all — so obvious as to be routinely ignored — is that you can’t do global ecology without considering humans.

NB: for more details on the IPCC, check out Chris’ interview with The Carbon Brief.

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