Podcasts

PAGES 2k coordinator Nerilie Abram was interviewed by Michael White, Nature's editor for climate science, on his podcast. Abram, an associate professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, talks about her career, the PAGES 2k project (from 37mins 43secs) and the Nature paper she co-authored last year (from 44mins):

Alternative facts are much in the news. The idea is, of course, ridiculous. Some things are clearly facts. Pizza is delicious; cake makes me happy; serving a white Burgundy at 40 F is an abomination; you should never wear a backpack with a suit.

Much of climate science, however, is not what you would call a hard fact. Yes, we can begin with some facts, following immediately with a suite of questions on quantification and mechanism. Yes, the Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass. But what is driving the variations in time and space, are there physical limitations to retreat rates, what are the constraints on ice sheets behavior from paleoclimate, what is the role of firn/cryoconite/black carbon?

Research moves to the open questions, which, to some, provides an opening to say that scientists don’t have the facts. For the immediate questions at hand, it is of course true that we don’t have the answers — that’s why there’s research! Let’s not lose track of the vast amount of knowledge, and the big picture facts, that we do have.

Rant over, at least for now!

CVAS Science Committee member Maisa Rojas tells Nature's editor for climate science Michael White about her work on regional climate modeling, paleoclimate, and the Southern Hemisphere westerlies for the "Forecast" podcast:

Maisa Rojas from the University of Chile tells Mike about her work on regional climate modeling, paleoclimate, and the Southern Hemisphere westerlies. The story begins with Maisa’s birth in Chile, but quickly moves on to the family’s dramatic escape from Pinochet’s rebellion and immigration to Germany. Maisa returned to Chile at age 12, and then spent much of her young life traveling and working in the UK, US, and France.

Maisa has played an integral role in recent IPCC activities, and she updates Mike on the many changes in store for AR6, for which she’ll serve at a coordinating lead author for chapter I in Working Group I.

PAGES' PALSEA2 working group leader Andrea Dutton was interviewed by Michael White, Nature's editor for climate science, for the podcast "Forecast":

Andrea Dutton from the University of Florida tells Mike about the many nuances of using corals to reconstruct past sea level. Sounds simple enough: find corals at depth z, date them to year t, and Bob’s your uncle. Yeah … no. Turns out there’s a lot more at play: 3D topography, plasticity in coral’s depth preference, challenging geochemistry, changes in turbidity. The list of complicating factors is long, but Andrea and her colleagues are working incredibly hard to provide better constraints of sea levels during past warm periods — a critical constraint for the models being used to project sea level into the future. On top of all that, Andrea is an outreach superstar and was recently selected as one of Rolling Stones’ 25 People Shaping the Future in Tech, Science, Medicine, Activism and More. Professional success doesn’t always come easy, though, and Andrea has had to work through challenges like big publication gaps, divorce, and raising young children during the tenure process.

In episode 50 of Forecast, Julien Emile-Geay from the University of Southern California calmly presents a somewhat radical world view. Love of jazz as a means of selecting a grad school; universities as revolutionary institutions; pursuit of science as a subversive activity. Even more unusual: considering data and models not as separate entities, but as co-equal, and integral, facets of research into paleoclimate dynamics. For example, Julien is leading efforts on both massive data compilations, and on the massive Last Millennium Reanalysis. Progress is coming on many fronts, including ENSO dynamics, the always-controversial topic of solar-climate interactions, and low frequency climate variability — what Julien calls the “bassline of the climate soundtrack”.

Kevin Anchukaitis from the University of Arizona is probably best known for his work on dendroclimatology, but this is changing quickly. Now, his broader interests in the connections among history, political science, archaeology, statistics, climate modeling, and forward modeling of proxies are increasingly mirrored within the broader field of late Holocene paleoclimate research. Now, it’s possible to bring together this astonishingly wide range of evidence to disentangle, for example, the influence of volcanic eruptions on climate and society. It ends up sounding like a golden age for climate science, if not for the extinct Monteverde golden toad, whose extinction Kevin showed to be due to a fungal disease coupled with natural climate variability. As always, with good science, you have to go where the evidence takes you.