Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

Running a small business

Robin Bell and her colleagues found a volcano under the Antarctic Ice Sheet and water freezing onto the bottom of kms-thick ice. She championed the idea that glaciology needed instrumentation capable of observing the full ice sheet — from surface to base — all at the same time. To this end, she bolted ship-based gear on a small plane and … tried it out. And it worked! And continues to work, all in support of the massive question of trying to figure out how the ice sheets will behave in warming world, and what sea levels will be in the coming decades to centuries.

Science, for Robin, is like running a small business, where the currency is ideas. We discuss how she’s worked, for decades, to increase the value of that currency in many ways, ranging from high-risk field work and instrumentation development to community building through committee work and some careful strategic planning.

Robin and I talk about her early days in Antarctica, when the science world was a different place and she and other female scientists were often mistaken for secretaries. It wasn’t always an easy place to work.

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory had no female faculty when Robin arrived over 30 years ago. She worked with the NSF Advance program to strengthen gender diversity and found that “running a field program in Antarctica was a piece of cake compared to trying to get people to think about diversity.” But years of effort have paid off, and Robin seems genuinely thrilled at the improvements for women in science.

Also, Robin showed up for a job interview at Woods Hole in a sailboat. Now that’s style!

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In love with Maxwell

Bjorn Stevens has a lot going on: scientific member of the Max Planck Society, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, head of the department Atmosphere and the Earth System, professor at the University of Hamburg, lead author of an IPCC AR 5 Chapter 7, co-lead of a WCRP Grand Challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity. All of these roles don’t come as much of a surprise, once you get your head around the degree to which Bjorn manages to combine a deep scientific enthusiasm with big vision, an in-the-trenches grasp of details, a willingness to take risks, and an inspirational leadership style.

Bjorn grew up all over the place, with the family following the career of his father, a petroleum engineer. The rise to the top of the climate science profession had plenty of twists and turns too: irregular schooling, an early passion for Maxwell’s equations, two degrees in electrical engineering, a switch to atmospheric science, time off during the PhD to rethink priorities.

It’s hard to say what influence his unusual background had, but Bjorn is now outspoken on many topics: how to use models, the magnitude of aerosol forcing, the possibility of an iris effect – much of which comes, unusually, with clear statements on how he could be proven wrong. More than anything else, our talk continually came back to Bjorn’s sense of fascination with the beauty of the natural world, and the endless challenge in figuring it out.

And most important, Bjorn likes fries and gravy. He claims not to eat them anymore.

I’m certainly not the first person to interview Bjorn Stevens! You can check out another discussion at Ecoshock. There’s also a plenary lecture at the Platform for Advance Scientific Computing, and a recent lecture at the Lorenz Center should soon be available.

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Obsessed by El Niño

Corals and speleothems are some of our most useful recorders of past climate variability. The spectacular speleothem records from eastern China, for example, have been instrumental in building our understanding of past variations in the East Asian Monsoon. But as is the case for most any paleoclimate proxy, corals and speleothems do not record a direct record of … well, anything.

The usual metric is δ18O, a measure of the amount of 18O relative to 16O. In principle, δ18O sounds simple enough. In a speleothem, more negative δ18O might reflect more precipitation or a stronger monsoon, as the heavier isotope is progressively “rained out”. But recent work has shown that δ18O is influenced by numerous other processes, like precipitation seasonality, atmospheric transport, atmospheric conditions in the location where the air mass was formed, etc. The relative influences differ by location and, almost certainly, over time.

Kim Cobb works to figure all of this out, especially for El Nino. In this episode of Forecast, Kim and I talk about what corals and speleothems are telling us and what we know about past variations in El Nino. Kim and her students work with their many collaborators to bring together geochemical, computational, and dynamical understanding in a way that I think is really moving the field forward. Isotope enabled GCMs emerge as an especially promising tool. We also touch on some of the unavoidable problems in this sort of work – like diagenesis. But as Kim says, it’s good to have scientific obsessions, big questions, and if you can push through the problems, there’s a real pot of gold waiting at the other side.

Kim is also a keen advocate for women in science, and we discuss some of the many issues facing young female scientists, and what can be done to increase opportunity and fairness. NB: prospective job seekers, Georgia Tech comes off awfully well in terms of supporting women scientists who are in the midst of a tenure run and raising a family.

In episode 2 we heard Mat Collins’ take on El Nino from a modeling perspective. I hope you enjoy Kim’s take, from a more geochemical perspective.

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Understanding climate models

If you’ve heard about any climate cycle, it’s probably the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. 2015/2016 is looking like it might bring a record El Niño, and media coverage is, for climate, pretty remarkable.

The coverage is understandable, as weird things happen during big El Niños. The eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is anomalously warm during boreal winter. Deep convection moves away from the Western Pacific Warm Pool, and other bits of the climate system tend to shift to unusual states.

Sometimes! My house in northern California might flood this winter, but then again it might not.

Even though ENSO is correlated with climate variations all over the place, the explained variance is often small. Pretty much every big El Niño is its own beast, and the field is still working towards a prediction system that has skill at more than seasonal time scales. Decadal- to centennial-scale projections remain uncertain.

Mat Collins, from the University of Exeter, is one of the world’s leading authorities on ENSO. As we discuss in episode 2 of Forecast, while many aspects of ENSO predictability indeed haven’t gotten much better, other aspects are now far better understood. Mat and I also discuss how working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is like dealing with a hangover, atmospheric circulation on Mars, uncertainties in climate modeling, and how to talk to a statistician.

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The highs and lows of Antarctic science

For my first interview, I met with Martin Siegert, who I’ve known for a few years from meetings and a visit to the University of Edinburgh. Martin is the co-director of the Grantham Institute, a well-known climate institute based at Imperial College London, with a goal to, at least in part, bring climate science into a broader societal discussion.

Martin is best known for his work as a glaciologist, particularly in Antarctica, and particularly for subglacial lakes and remote sensing. In this episode, we delve into Martin’s early life in Suffolk, his early career as a road engineer, and learn about the scientific excitement, terrible disappointment, and ongoing lessons from the Subglacial Lake Ellsworth drilling program in East Antarctica.

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