Deep Convection

Latest Episodes:

Episode 8: Amy Clement Jun 08, 2020

Show notes

Amy Clement, professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, loves the ocean. We are mentioning this because her research may seem to suggest otherwise: Amy has proposed bold and controversial ideas about how the role of the ocean in controlling several modes of variability of the climate system may be smaller than most climate scientists had believed.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon relies heavily on the coupling of the atmosphere to the ocean? The sea surface temperature patterns of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) are the result of ocean heat transport? Maybe not, argues Amy. She found that climate models with “deactivated” oceans can produce many aspects of these phenomena with atmospheric forcing alone.

As remarkable as these findings is the way Amy has never been afraid of discussing them with scientists who held strongly opposing views, even when she was a grad student and was much less experienced than her critics. For Amy, science is about leaving your ego at home and focus on the ideas, with openness and curiosity, and a shared goal of advancing our understanding of the earth system.

“As scientists, when someone comes along and says, well let’s look at it differently. Isn’t that fun? If you read the literature, there’s a lot of confirmation bias, to be honest, and less of people saying, ‘how can this idea be wrong?’ And to me, that’s really disappointing.”

As much as she enjoys doing research for the pleasure of figuring things out, she has also been led into climate science by her social consciousness, and in this interview you’ll hear her talk about her work on climate adaptation with a range of groups in Miami, and why she started doing this after waking up the morning after the Presidential election of 2016. Also, she and Adam discuss whether science is the right career for someone who wants to make a difference on climate.

The interview with Amy Clement was recorded in July 2019. Image credit: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/

Amy’s website with information on her research, papers, biography etc.
Rethinking the Ocean’s Role in the Southern Oscillation
The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation without a role for ocean circulation

Special Episode: Faye McNeill May 25, 2020

Show notes

Faye McNeill studies aerosols, small liquid or solid particles floating in the atmosphere. Each cubic centimeter of air contains hundreds or thousands of these particles – some of them are natural (e.g., dust from dry regions or salt from the ocean) and others are released into the air by human activity, e.g., by cars or factories that burn fossil fuels.

Faye, a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University, studies how aerosols form and evolve, how they influence climate, and how they affect human health. Over the last few months, the coronavirus pandemic has moved the aerosol science community into the international research spotlight, raising many urgent questions about aerosol transmission and COVID-19. These questions were the original motivation for the special episode with Faye, and near the end (at about 1:16) the conversation eventually turns to the pandemic.

But the way the conversation went, most of it is just about Faye’s life and career. Some topics Faye and Adam talk about are the challenge of teaching students how to do research; how important a few words of encouragement from a good mentor can be; and how Faye evolved, step by step, from a young scientist who was intensely focused on the technical challenges of her research, to someone who now sees a much bigger picture of its place in society and has consciously broadened her portfolio in order to make it more directly useful to people.

“And right away we basically identified that as a community, from our own research experience and expertise, we had a suite of tools, things that we could help a city with that’s interested in improving its air pollution. And beyond the technical work there is also this big element of capacity building. “

The interview with Faye McNeill was recorded in May 2020.

Faye’s website with information on her research, papers, biography etc.

Episode 7: Mark Cane – Part II May 11, 2020

Show notes

This second part of the interview with Mark Cane picks up where Part I left off – at MIT, in the middle of Mark’s PhD. A major focus of the interview is the discovery that made Mark’s career, when he and his student at the time, Steve Zebiak, developed the first dynamical model that could both simulate and predict El Niño events; and then how they ventured to
make an actual real-time prediction, of the 1985-86 event, and then publicized it. That was a bold and risky move, but it paid off.

“The fact that it worked as soon as we started doing realistic things actually added to the sense of confidence. […] We had sweated to make the model work but not to make the forecast work.
So I was fairly confident. And one thought, I thought, and others, that okay, this could do some good if we’re right and people paid attention.”

El Niño and its companion La Niña (collectively referred to as El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) are drivers of the strongest year-to-year climate fluctuations on the planet. They alter patterns of weather variability in many places around the globe, including the frequency and severity of extreme events such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and tropical cyclones. Current forecast models can predict these events 6-12 months ahead, and their predictions help to reduce the impacts of ENSO on people and businesses.

The model developed by Mark Cane and Steve Zebiak laid the foundation for this huge success story — ironically, that breakthrough happened just after the biggest disappointment of Mark’s career: He had left MIT after being told that he wouldn’t get tenure. This was no doubt a difficult experience for Mark (and probably a decision MIT has come to regret), even though the many successes in his career by far outweigh that setback.

You can find more information about Mark and his work here.

The interview with Mark Cane was recorded in May 2019.

Episode 6: Mark Cane – Part I Apr 28, 2020

Show notes

Mark Cane is the center of the “family portrait” of climate scientists that are featured in this first season of Deep Convection. In recognition of his special role, we are going to cover Mark’s life in two episodes – this is Part I.

Mark Cane is most famous for his seminal work on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation phenomenon, which will be one of the main topics of Part II. But this conversation starts at the beginning, with Mark’s origins in Brooklyn during the age of the Dodgers, before the club moved to Los Angeles in 1957. It was a time when baseball was more than a game: When the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson in 1947 as the first black player in the modern major leagues, it was a big step forward for the American civil rights movement.

After graduating from Harvard in the 60s, Mark became himself a civil rights activist and spent a summer in the South trying to register people to vote. Back in New York and working as a programmer at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he had his first encounter with Jule Charney, who was brought in as a consultant for the project he was working on. Charney left a strong impression on anyone who worked with him (in episode 2, Kerry Emanuel shares some of his memories of this exceptional meteorologist), and Mark was no exception:

“And it quickly became clear that he understood how things worked. I was kind of amazed by that since I assumed nobody understood it. […] And I asked him a lot of ignorant, very ignorant questions because I had no basis for asking other than ignorant questions. And he was actually pretty patient with me looking back. I mean he wasn’t always so patient with fools but there you go.”

After an interlude as a math professor in rural New Hampshire, Mark decided to go back to graduate school – he chose to go to MIT, where he switched to physical oceanography and became Charney’s student. This was the beginning of an outstanding career filled with many highlights, including the development of a groundbreaking forecast model that helps millions of people around the world become more resilient and better prepared for El Niño weather patterns. But more on that in two weeks, in Part II.

You can find more information about Mark and his work here.

The interview with Mark Cane was recorded in May 2019.

Episode 5: Richard Seager Apr 13, 2020

Show notes

Richard Seager is a climate scientist at Columbia University and has been an Englishman in New York for more than 30 years. In this conversation, he talks about what will happen to the tropical Pacific under global warming (and why the climate models are wrong about that), about his passion for jazz and how it once led him to bike home at 1 am in the morning from Manchester to Liverpool after seeing the Sun Ra Arkestra, about the Green New Deal, the power of imagination, and combining science and art.

Richard is a man of many interests, both within and outside his work as a scientist. Among his numerous peer-reviewed papers you can find topics such as medieval megadroughts in the American West, the causes of Europe’s mild winters, the tropical Pacific warm pool and why it exists, or the role of climate in the Syrian war. In this interview, Richard explains to Adam the main finding of one of his most recent papers – you can read a summary of that paper here, and if you want to take a deep dive you can also download the entire paper.

The last part of this episode is about politics, the social responsibility of scientists, and what science can and cannot do to help societies mitigate and adapt to global warming.

“The big challenge is how are humans going to learn to live on this planet, in a way that we don’t destroy it. In the end, we just live on it in a way that everything is powered by our friendly star, the sun. […]. And I find that should be as exciting a challenge as the space race was for many people in the 1960s and the 1970s, and as exciting as many advancements in the medical science that people get really thrilled about.”

You can find more information about Richard Seager and his work on his website.

The interview with Richard Seager was recorded in September 2019. Photo credit: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Episode 4: Amitav Ghosh Mar 30, 2020

Show notes

Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, “Gun Island”, takes its readers on an adventurous journey from the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans to raging wildfires in Los Angeles and to a Venice that is inexorably sinking into the sea.

Amitav is one of the most accomplished writers in either India or the US, the two countries in which he lives. In 2018, he became the first English-language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. Amitav is known for novels such as Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy, which chronicles the opium trade between India and China run by the East India Company, but also for non-fiction works such as The Great Derangement, which sets out to understand our collective failure to deal with climate change.

In Gun Island, published in 2019, Amitav uses the power of stories and legends to look at a reality where humans seem at the same time more connected and more disconnected than ever before. The book’s narrator, Deen, a Brooklyn-based antiquarian from Kolkata, becomes obsessed with untangling the mystery of an old Bengali folktale. Throughout the book, climate change provides the backdrop to a story that is full of natural disasters and human tragedies.

At times, the uncanny coincidences and freak weather events blur the boundaries between legend and reality, and the plot becomes almost unbelievable. Yet reality sometimes really is stranger than fiction, and in an interview with npr, Amitav recalls such an incidence: In 2016, working on Gun Island, he described a scene in which a wildfire was advancing toward a Los Angeles museum. About half a year later, reality outran his imagination, as the Skirball fire burned on the hill adjoining the Getty Center in December 2017.

Amitav thinks that in order to deal effectively with climate change, we have to open ourselves to ways of thinking that go beyond scientific and technological approaches:

“What interests me more and more, and I’m sure that shows in the book, is what science cannot tell us. […] The idea that nature is entirely the domain of science – I don’t really accept that. Within this world there is something in excess of what science can tell us – certainly right now, and perhaps even in the future.”

You’ll hear Amitav explain his views on the limits of science in a discussion about geoengineering. Gun Island covers an incredibly broad range of topics, and so the conversation also touches on the role of modern technology in migration, fantasy lives, our changing (perception of) reality, and social hysteria.

The interview with Amitav Ghosh was recorded in July 2019. Photo credit: Photo credit: Aradhana Seth

Amitav Ghosh’s website with information on his books, essays, interviews, and mores

Special Episode: Jeff Shaman Mar 24, 2020

Show notes

This is a bonus episode, thrown together quickly, as the coronavirus pandemic is evolving at such a rapid pace that predicting what it will look like in the weeks ahead is incredibly difficult. The guest is Jeff Shaman, one of the world’s experts in modeling the spread of infectious diseases. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, but these days he is spending his time less on his research than on communicating with public officials and sharing his expertise with the White House and the CDC. Despite his overfull schedule, he took the time to do this interview (in fact, two of them), and we are deeply grateful for this.

While Jeff’s work focuses now on epidemiology, his academic background is in climate science, so he fits right in the profile of this podcast. The conversation opens with Jeff’s biography (including the story of how he almost became an opera singer) and then moves on to his seminal work on the flu (Jeff found out why the flu peaks in winter and largely subsides in summer). The discussion about the current coronavirus outbreak starts about 55 minutes in.

The two interviews with Jeff Shaman were recorded on March 18 and March 24, 2020. Image credit: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Jeff’s website with information on his research, papers, biography etc.
Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center
Updates on the coronavirus/COVID-19 situation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Episode 3: Naomi Oreskes Mar 16, 2020

Show notes

Why should we trust science? Historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pondered this question for years, and here she talks about the surprising answer she has come up with (hint: it’s not because of the scientific method). Naomi, a geologist by training, also talks about her time working for a mining company in Australia, the skepticism she faced as a woman, and how she later fell in love with the history of science.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading voices on the role of science in society and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. She has thought and written extensively about climate denial and disinformation, most famously in 2010’s Merchants of Doubt, which she co-wrote with Erik Conway.

Her latest book “Why Trust Science?” was published in October 2019. In it, Naomi argues that it is the social character of science – the various ways in which scientists discuss, scrutinize and test each other’s findings – that makes scientific knowledge trustworthy. If that process operates without conflicts of interest, and if it includes a diversity of methods and voices, it will result in an evidence-based consensus that people have good reasons to trust.

“Most people think that if we should trust science it’s either because scientists are brilliant and geniuses, or because scientists use the scientific method, and the scientific method produces reliable results. I argue that neither of those is correct.
What really is crucial in science is the social process of vetting claims. […] My argument is that that’s actually the basis for the reliability of scientific claims.”

You can find more information about Naomi Oreskes and her work on her website.

Episode 2: Kerry Emanuel Feb 22, 2020

Show notes

Episode 1: Michela Biasutti Feb 19, 2020

Show notes

Michela Biasutti studies rainfall in the tropics – when and where it rains, and why. She does this at Columbia University in New York, where she settled down after her scientific curiosity had first led her to move from her native Italy to Seattle.

Michela is one of many foreign-born scientists who have managed to build successful careers in the United States and have made the country their home. Adjusting to all the practical aspects of daily life in the United States can be challenging, and with family and loved ones far away, finding and building a new community becomes especially important. Michela has succeeded in that as well, and she talks here about what community means to her and how she tries to make her community better.

Another topic that comes up is the prevalence of soft money jobs in academia and the pressure and financial insecurity that living from grant to grant brings about. This is a systemic problem, but one that disproportionately affects women, and you’ll hear Michela’s views about that and other gender-related issues in science (below are two links to more information).

And of course, the discussion eventually also leads to Trump.

“I only have gratitude for [the individual relationships I’ve had]. The system is a different story. […] I don’t want to have to do it the way the mighty white male wants me to do it.“

You can find more information about Michela Biasutti and her research on her website.

The interview with Michela Biasutti was recorded in September 2019. Image credit: Suzana Camargo

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected