Deep Convection

This episode launches a new series about the artist and musician Sumner Crane (1946-2003). Scientist Adam Sobel --- Sumner's nephew, and the host of this series as well as the podcast Deep Convection, out of which it grows --- introduces the whole thing, explaining who Sumner was, why he (Adam) is doing this, and how it came to be. Image credit: collage with photo of Sumner Crane, by Julia Gorton.

Shortly after Hurricane Otis hit Mexico in late October 2023 after a very rapid (and poorly forecast) intensification, Adam sat down with Frank Marks from NOAA's Hurricane Research Division (HRD) for the last episode of this season. Frank is one of the central figures in the world of hurricane science. With a career spanning over four decades at the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Frank has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of hurricanes and improving their forecasts.Frank's journey with HRD, including two decades as its director, has been dedicated to unraveling the inner workings of hurricanes, with the objective of improving their forecasts (which are not made by the HRD, but by the National Hurricane Center). This pursuit has led Frank to fly through the eyes of over 100 different storms, crossing the eye of a hurricane more than 500 times. "Sitting at a desk and writing papers and doing analysis, that's also enjoyable, but there's nothing like getting out in the environment [...] I always try and encourage even my numerical modeling partners to come on a flight so they can see what it takes to get the information that they need , and almost all of them step away from that with a different perspective. […] There's nothing like breaking out into the eye and seeing mother nature in all her glory or just flying to the storm and seeing the halos from the rain falling down. The natural beauty is there, and the thing about a hurricane is, you go from the most wonderful weather into the worst thing you can imagine in a very short time, and out the other side, and you do that repeatedly." However, reducing Frank's career to just these flights would be an understatement. He is a distinguished scientist with 139 published papers to his name and a mentor who has guided many junior scientists. His contributions to the field have earned him numerous accolades, reflecting his deep and broad contribution to hurricane science. One of Frank's most notable achievements has been the development and application of airborne Doppler radar technology. This innovation has allowed for an unprecedented view of hurricane structures, playing a crucial role in improving hurricane intensity forecasts through the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, which Frank conceived and led. This project represents a significant national effort to tackle the challenge of predicting hurricane intensity more accurately, a crucial factor in safeguarding lives and property. Frank's conversation with Adam traces his path from his early interest in meteorology as a high schooler in New York's Hudson Valley, through his graduate studies at MIT, and on to his long-standing tenure at NOAA since 1980. Frank's story is not just about the science; it's also about the institutions, the art of scientific communication, and his approach to addressing some of the more outlandish ideas about hurricane intervention (like using nuclear weapons). Throughout the discussion, Frank's humility shines through. He continually acknowledges the contributions of his mentors, colleagues, and team members, emphasizing the collaborative nature of scientific progress. He attributes his success to not only his own efforts but also to being at the right place at the right time and seizing the opportunities presented to him. The interview with Frank Marks was recorded in October 2023. Image credit: NOAA Frank's website at NOAA/HRD

Bjorn Stevens' main scientific interest is in the role of clouds in the climate system. He established himself early in his career as a leader in the study of marine stratus-topped boundary layers. That eventually led him to a broader climate research agenda. And since about 2008, Bjorn heads one of the world's most prominent climate modeling labs, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. In that position, with his team there and many collaborators, he has produced an enormous volume of important research, and that's not to mention the countless additional studies that use the data his lab contributes to the CMIP archives.Bjorn's personal story is as fascinating as his professional achievements. Born in Germany, he first moved to the US when he was only a few months old, and from then on he and his family kept moving a lot for his father's work. Because of that, his education ended up being “a bit of a patchwork”, but he soon realized that he felt drawn to the beauty of math and science: “Science opened itself up as something that I seemed reasonably good at, and I felt the rewards of doing it. It had this wonderful mix of being creative work, and it had an aesthetic to it. It involved many different skills from writing to analyzing to programming, so it was just something I [...] realized and enjoyed, and I had a certain amount of success that allowed me to continue.” Bjorn did indeed continue, from his PhD at Colorado State and early career at NCAR and UCLA, to his current position as managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. His research covers many topics, but a particular focus have been clouds—he has studied them as a modeler and as a theorist, and he has led many field campaigns to collect data that improve our understanding of these elusive yet critical components of the climate system. “How does precipitation affect the clouds? There were some simple hypotheses at the time […] which didn't make sense to me, and so I tried to understand how drizzle affects the development of the cloud layer. So that was mostly my PhD thesis, and at that time I was really concerned with how to use models to come up with ideas that we could test in observations. So I think that's also an enduring aspect of the way I think about things, which is not to use models to provide answers but to use models to tell us how to look at nature differently.” Bjorn's leadership role in the global climate science community goes well beyond his astonishing scientific productivity. He has a unique gift for starting, leading and facilitating important and sometimes difficult scientific conversations.And currently, Bjorn is doing this in a bigger way than ever before, as he leads an international effort to develop the Earth Virtualization Engine, or EVE. EVE is conceived as a large international collaboration, taking CERN—the particle physics facility—as a model. EVE's proposed mission is to develop kilometer-scale, that is, ultra high-resolution global climate models, using the biggest computers that exist, and use them to support climate services worldwide. You'll hear Adam and Bjorn spend quite a bit of time talking about that towards the end of their conversation. The interview with Bjorn Stevens was recorded in September 2023. Image credit: MPI-M, D. Ausserhofer Bjorn's website at Max-Planck-Institut

Adam answers listener questions!

In this episode we take a break from guest interviews. Instead, Adam explains in detail how the podcast got started, how and why we do it, and who is involved. Just like when you go to any web site or anything and there's an "About" link, this is that, except via 40 minutes of talking.

Arlene Fiore got interested in air pollution first as a kid in the Boston suburbs, partly because she suffered from bad asthma, and that taught her that the air can be harmful. Even though her interest in the Earth's atmosphere was there from an early age on, the path that led her to her current position as a professor in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences was, in her own words, a circuitous one, partly because of life's inherent unpredictability and coincidences, but also because of Arlene's wide array of interests. When it came to thinking about what to do in college, she struggled to make a decision: "And then when I was thinking about college I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I mean, I really had broad interests—I liked history, I liked math and science, I liked English. […] The things that I started thinking about though were really probably more geared towards engineering, and that was because my dad was an engineer. I was [also] pretty serious about track and cross country running, [and so] I was trying to find places where I could run and do all these things. In the end I applied to a bunch of places, and my mom had really wanted to see if I could get into Harvard, and so I applied there and I vividly remember telling her she was wasting her $50 application fee because there was no way." Those $50, as history would have it, became a pivotal investment in Arlene's life—she got into Harvard, where it was eventually the earth and planetary science courses that captivated her, and where she soon started to do research in atmospheric chemistry in Daniel Jacob's group. She ended up staying at Harvard for a PhD, a decision that had taken some nudging by those around her, who saw Arlene's potential more clearly than she saw it herself. Arlene has become an expert in atmospheric chemistry, air pollution, atmospheric transport, and climate. She uses numerical models to understand all the different factors that influence the concentration of constituents that affect human health, especially ozone. Her early work was about defining the “background” ozone that sets the floor for air quality regulations, and especially understanding the role of long-range transport of ozone itself as well as its precursors. Her work has uncovered linkages between air quality and climate change, for example by highlighting the role of methane, a greenhouse gas, in regulating ground level ozone. And she's made important contributions on a range of other topics, including not just chemistry but, more lately, physical climate, including extreme events. From the beginning Arlene's research has had direct implications for policy. Translating between the abstract world of atmospheric chemistry and the concrete realities of policy and regulation, Arlene has been working with a range of stakeholders to influence regulation and practice at the federal, state and local levels. Yet she does this stakeholder-engaged policy work while remaining a highly productive basic researcher whose work contributes to fundamental understanding. Listening to Arlene, you'll notice that she has a rare combination of personal talent and a profound commitment to collective scientific progress, and an ability to shine while ensuring others do too. The interview with Arlene Fiore was recorded in September 2023. Image credit: Steph Stevens website of Arlene's group at MIT

Aglaé Jézéquel's journey began surrounded by books, in a home where knowledge was cherished. Aglaé shared her parents' passion from an early age on, but while her family was more into literature, she fell in love with science. Her academic path has led her to her current position as a scientist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she does research spanning climate science and social science. She is not a climate scientist whose work extends into social science, or a social scientist who collaborates with climate scientist—no, she's genuinely a physical climate scientist and a social scientist at the same time. Her PhD thesis had roughly equal components of both, and she writes legitimate research papers in both. It's not just methodological, though. When Aglaé talks, her scientific curiosity comes across as inextricable from her desire to do something about the climate problem, and as part of that, to understand both the earth system and the human, social processes involved. She has made multiple substantive contributions to the methodology, both its statistical aspects, and meteorological questions like how to characterize the atmospheric circulation of events in a way that makes attribution more effective. Aglaé has worked a lot on extreme event attribution, that is, the science of relating individual extreme weather events to climate change. She has made multiple substantive contributions to the methodology, both its statistical aspects, and meteorological questions like how to characterize the atmospheric circulation of events in a way that makes attribution more effective. But she has also studied how attribution science is used by those outside the scientific community, and in the space between the physical and social science dimensions, Aglaé has contributed in major ways to the discussion about the relationship between the two major types of attribution, "storyline" and "risk" approaches. For many in the climate science field, there's a palpable tension between pure scientific curiosity and the aspiration to effect real-world change. Thanks to her natural ability to integrate these two spheres, this tension seems to be much less present for Aglaé—and probably also for many young scientists of her and future generations. "One thing I've realized is that you have two different motivations as a scientist […], one is curiosity and the other one is social usefulness, and they generally don't really align. And you have to be okay with that. They can align to a point but they don't entirely, and I think it's important to be aware of that. And then [...] I try to think not only as myself, but as what does a society wants from scientists and why are we paid by the state to do science. […] I [try to be] relevant as a scientist for society." The interview with Aglaé Jézéquel was recorded in August 2023. Aglaé's website at ENS

Sarah Kapnick's journey in the climate world has not been a conventional one. Starting as a "math nerd in the Midwest", her path meandered through investment banking, back to academia for a PhD., and now to one of the most influential positions in US climate science and policy - Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Sarah's initial foray into the world of finance might seem unorthodox for a climate scientist, but in reality, it was a preview of the broader understanding she would bring to the field. At Goldman Sachs, she learned how to structure catastrophe bonds, a financial instrument intrinsically linked to climate-related events such as hurricanes. Sarah realized that accurately quantifying the risk of such events requires an understanding of how their probabilities of occurring in the present-day climate may differ from their historically observed occurrence probabilities. So, she decided to go back to academia and become an expert in this field. She first went to UCLA to do a PhD and then on to NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. Here, Sarah was at the forefront of developing climate models, forecasting climate patterns from mere months to many decades into the future. At the same time, she kept doing some research at the intersection of climate and economics. After her decade-long stint at GFDL she went back to another bank, before getting recruited to be NOAA Chief Scientist. What distinguishes Sarah beyond her scientific credentials is her ability to bridge disparate worlds, and to merge science, finance, and leadership. Her return to NOAA as Chief Scientist comes at a pivotal moment. With climate changes already upon us, the need for informed, integrated action has never been more pressing – and Sarah is a great person to drive the transition from identifying climate problems to actively developing solutions. She emphasizes the interdependence of user-driven and basic science in making that transition happen: "We still need our basic research, but we also need to transform, because if we are going to deal with the manifestations of climate change, which are going to continue happening and continue to get worse and continue to evolve in the coming years and decades until emissions reach zero, we need to prepare and know what to do. And so the science needs to continue, needs to be fundamental because that drives the [creation of] models that can actually do things that are actionable." The interviews with Sarah Kapnick were recorded in March 2023. Image credit: NOAA/GFDL Sarah's website at NOAA

Growing up outside Braunschweig, just on the west side of the border with East Germany during the Cold War, Tapio Schneider spent a lot of his teenage years doing sports, and skiing (often just meters away from the East German border patrol) became a large part of his life. He also had a keen interest in science and a desire to understand the world around him, and so he decided to study physics and math---he did that at the University of Freiburg, a school he picked in no small part due to its close proximity to the Black Forest, which meant that he could continue to ski as much as possible. Science became more and more important to him though, and after he came to the US (with what was supposed to be an exchange fellowship, but Tapio ended up not going back to Germany), his career quickly took off, starting from his PhD with Isaac Held (a previous guest on the podcast) at Princeton and on to his current position at Caltech. The array of topics on which Tapio has made major contributions, and the magnitude and impact of those contributions are astonishing. After his early, field-changing work on the general circulation of the atmosphere, Tapio did a whole set of studies on planetary atmospheres. And then he got into marine stratocumulus, and the parameterization of those clouds in models. This led him to studies of clouds and climate more broadly, and eventually to rethinking how climate models should work from the ground up. On top of that, Tapio's early work on statistical methods, though just an aside for him, have become hugely influential papers for statisticians and scientists alike. For the last few years, Tapio has been leading the CliMA project at Caltech. A visionary endeavor, the project aims to bring about a paradigm shift in the way climate models are constructed and used. It advocates for a more holistic approach, making use of observations, machine learning, and high-resolution simulations. The inception of CliMA came from a series of workshops on the future of Earth system modeling. They ended up being a lot of fun and very interesting. […] Each time, it was like 30-some people, perhaps. So it was fairly small, [and] you could interact intensely with everyone. And we we were just trying to ask the question, "So suppose you don't have to deal with these layers upon layers of history on climate models, how would you go about building a climate model now if you could?" And it was really meant as a hypothetical at the time. There wasn't any plan to build a climate model. The plan came later, and it turned into CliMA. As with any pioneering venture, the road hasn't always been easy, but Tapio has an exceptional ability to treat challenges just as problems to be solved step-by-step—and to not lose sight of the big picture while doing so. The interview with Tapio was recorded in December 2022. Tapio's website at Caltech Website of the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA)

In keeping with this season's excursions away from Deep Convection's traditional focus on climate science, this episode features Abhisheik Dhawan. While he's not a climate scientist, his innovative ideas intersect with climate change, development, and finance in a unique way. He is currently a Sustainable Finance and Partnerships Specialist at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), an organization that focuses on providing essential financial support to the world's least developed countries. In that role, Abhisheik is responsible for coming up with innovative mechanisms for providing sustainable finance to the world's poorest countries. And the mechanism he has come up with is called Climate Insurance Linked Resilient Infrastructure Finance, or CILRIF. The premise of CILRIF is to grant long-term insurance to cities against weather and climate related calamities, such as floods and storms. Then, when cities actively invest in resilience or adaptation methods, they receive a cut in the premium. So CILRIF's ultimate aim is to assign a tangible price tag to climate adaptation in urban settings, thus unlocking capital for it. While it might sound fairly straightforward, this is in some ways quite a radical proposal. For instance, the long-term contracts it proposes are nearly unheard of in the world of property insurance. CILRIF is not operational yet, but for nearly three years, Abhisheik has been at the helm of a volunteer working group, collaborating with insurers, academics, engineers, and finance experts to set the CILRIF wheels in motion. "[What we want] is resilient cities, whatever that means for that city. [...] You need to define for every city on the planet, […] what is the extreme climate it is most exposed to? We don't want to look at financing for regular floods […] which have been happening every year […]. But looking at a 200-year flood […], which will have a devastating effect on a community, how do you protect from that? And actually if you protect from that, then you will automatically reduce the damage from regular floods as well." Of course, Adam also talks with Abhisheik about his whole life and career, starting with his origins in Lucknow/India, his training and early employment as a mining engineer, how he transitioned to finance and then made it to the US, to do a graduate degree at Columbia, and then into his current role. The interview with Abhisheik was recorded in March 2023.  Abhisheik's website at the UNCD

Bob Kopp's academic roots lie in the realms of paleoclimate, paleobiology, and ecology. But, inspired by a legacy of public service passed down from his parents, he soon gravitated towards areas where science meets actionable change. Over the course of his career, he has learned to master the dance of blending use-inspired, policy-oriented research with traditional academia.Today, Bob is a professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University, but that role is just one of many hats he wears: He is also Co-Director of the University Office of Climate Action, and he directs the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub. And as if that weren't enough, he is also a driving force behind the Climate Impacts Lab. This consortium has pioneered an integrated assessment model, which now influences the EPA's estimates of the social cost of carbon—an important metric for assessing climate impacts of federal policies.As Adam and Bob delve into their conversation, they traverse the challenges and rewards of Bob's diverse career—from his enriching interdisciplinary postdoc to the Department of Energy, and even to the challenges of today's climate policy in the US. They touch upon the setbacks, like the Waxman-Markey act's failure, as well as on milestones such as the Inflation Reduction Act.They also talk about the difficulty and obstacles in doing policy-oriented research while remaining viable as an academic (something that Bob has managed to do to a remarkable degree), and about the importance and undervaluation of boundary workers:"In this case, the boundary is between researchers who have the science, and policymakers or community members who have decisions they're trying to make, […] like how high we should require houses to be built. You can look at [this problem] from the perspective of the municipal government, or you can look at it from the perspective of sea level scientists. But [...] you need people in the middle who [...] are fluent talking to scientists and who are fluent talking to non-scientists. And who are helping helping the two of them have discussions that can inform the decisions and shape the science that is done."The interview with Bob was recorded in December 2022. Image credit: Rutgers UniversityBob's website at Rutgers University, and his personal website

In the second episode of this season, we're branching out from the traditional, science-centered sphere of Deep Convection and into a world captured through the lens of Manila-born photojournalist, Hannah Reyes Morales. Hannah and Adam crossed paths a dinner at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, where they found themselves immersed in a discussion sparked by shared interests: the relentless typhoons that shape life in the Philippines. From a young age, Hannah was enchanted by the vibrant pages of National Geographic magazines at her home in Manila. A career as a photographer for such an esteemed publication seemed as far-fetched to her as becoming an astronaut, yet this dream became her reality. Her journey is a blend of happenstance, grit, and an immense passion for her craft, leading her to places and stories all over the world. "When I was a kid I lived in a very cloistered environment. Manila in the 90s was not—I mean it's arguably still not the safest place, but Manila in the 90s was a little more crazy. And so I wasn't really allowed to play outside. [...] I spent a lot of my time indoors and photography for me was one of the ways where I really felt like I could explore and, you know, tickle my imagination—all those worlds that seemed so far away and yet so near through a photograph. That was something that I truly fell in love with." Hannah's work documents the resilience of struggling communities across Asia, often focusing on the personal narratives unfolding under the impact of inequality, poverty, and injustice. One story that gets highlighted here is about women in the Philippines propelled into the sex trade by the losses suffered during Typhoon Haiyan. Hannah also talks about Emerging Islands, a unique initiative she co-founded to facilitate collaborations between artists and scientists, focusing on the thematic intersections of oceans, nature, and climate. Finally, she and Adam have a profound discussion about their shared experiences as researchers and storytellers. They question the purpose and impact of their work, particularly when they confront misinformation or indifference. The interview with Hannah was recorded in November 2022. Hannah's website featuring examples of her photos and stories.

Rebecca Morss' scientific credentials are impeccable – a PhD in atmospheric science from MIT, more than 20 years of experience at the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and currently the Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the center. But what really sets Rebecca apart is her focus on the intersection between scientific information and its use by people.Rebecca is an expert in weather forecasting systems and risk communication, and she specializes in high-impact weather including hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Her research isn't limited to the intricacies of weather phenomena and prediction, but extends to how forecasts are formulated, communicated, received, and acted upon. For Rebecca, science is not a solitary endeavor but a bridge that connects researchers, societal stakeholders, and policy-makers alike.Despite the importance of weather predictions in preserving lives and property, ensuring that people understand these forecasts and know how to act upon them has often been overlooked and underfunded. In her conversation with Adam, Rebecca talks about how she has retained her unique identity as a physical scientist while navigating the challenges of this inherently interdisciplinary sphere:"There's a lot of counterincentives. I've been to workshops on interdisciplinary research [...] in a variety of fields, and if you talk to professors at universities, even if they wanna do this, there's so many barriers to doing it, there's so many disincentives. The best way to get ahead if you're in a research career is to publish a lot of papers and get a lot of citations. And the best way to do that is to do something that other people are doing, and to not buck the trend. It takes a lot longer to learn new things every time. People aren't citing you if no one else is doing it."Adam's and Rebecca's discussion then pivots to two recent extreme weather events. First, Hurricane Ian, where an evacuation order delay resulted in tragic loss of life in Lee County/Florida. Second, the Marshall Fire of December 2021, a disaster that literally hit close to home for Rebecca. The fire ravaged her neighborhood in Boulder County, Colorado, coming perilously close to her own house, and giving her a first-hand experience of the crucial role of effective risk communication.The interview with Rebecca was recorded in October 2022.Rebecca's website at NCAR

It's been almost a year since our last episode, and we're thrilled to announce the arrival of Season 4! In our season opener, Adam and Melanie reconvene, checking in on each other's lives and exploring some detours---much like in previous seasons, this is the warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Convection. Expect an array of diverse guests, each contributing a unique perspective to our ongoing exploration of the interwoven tapestry of climate science, humanity, and our shared experience of this moment in history. Until then, stay tuned and be sure to hit the subscribe button to get all future episodes right as they drop. You can also catch up on previous seasons in the episode archive.   Image credit: DALL·E 2

Gabe Vecchi's research spans a remarkably wide range of topics: he started as an oceanographer, and studied intraseasonal variability in the Pacific, before moving to the Indian Ocean, and then, when he moved to Princeton in the 2000s, to a range of atmospheric problems, including a critically important paper on the influence of global warming on the tropical Walker circulation. And then Gabe got into hurricanes, a topic on which he's been a key player for a decade and a half now. He has made important contributions not just on those topics, but on a dizzying array of others that one can see on his truly remarkable publication list. Gabe's work spans ocean and atmosphere, tropical and extratropical, weather and climate, basic and applied, and nearly every other dichotomy in this field one can think of. In fact, Gabe says that to keep things fresh, scientists should be forced to change the topics they work on every 10 years. He himself certainly loves to seek out new problems and projects, but he somehow manages to do that without having to drop the old problems he used to work on. Hallmarks of Gabe's work, and as you'll hear, Gabe himself, are freshness, openness to new ideas, and openness to what the data say for that matter, and overall the lack of pretense that he brings to science, and to life. Gabe's story really starts in Venezuela. After being born in Boston, he spent most of his childhood there, moving back to the USA, and New Jersey in particular, when he was 16, fleeing the runaway inflation, deterioration of living standards, and other difficulties that came with the Chavez regime. You can't hear Gabe's Venezuelan background in his perfect American accent, which he describes learning from TV shows as a high school student. But it gives him a particular perspective on what's happening in the US now, and at the end of the episode he and Adam get into what the US democracy's accelerating failures do and don't have in common with Venezuela's. Gabe's scientific career led him from his undergraduate studies at Rutgers to graduate school at the University of Washington, and then from NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle to its Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. He was a civil servant for a number of years before moving across the street a few years ago to become professor in the Geosciences department at Princeton University, where he's also Director of The High Meadows Environmental Institute and Deputy Director of the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System. Apart from talking about science, Gabe and Adam also discuss the challenges of communicating their science to the media, what kinds of climate science do and don't matter to real-world mitigation or adaptation efforts, and other issues that they've both struggled with. And Gabe gives advice on how to make important decisions: "So many of the things that affect the paths that we take are so totally out of our control, even totally invisible to us, that spending too much time planning beyond making sure that you're not making a really obviously bad decision is, I think, a waste of energy. And it keeps you from discovering things." He applied that decision-making philosophy for example when he had to decide where he wanted to go for graduate school: "I had winnowed down the choice to two places. One was Washington and one was another place on the West Coast. And so, the reason I chose Washington... And this I'll stand behind. This is the way to make decisions. I winnowed it down to two good options, and then I chose something almost arbitrary to make the distinction, and what I chose was where my dog would be happier. [...] Moving past the decision as fast as possible and in a way that was as amusing and stress-free as possible to me was the way to do it. So, thinking about what my dog would have wanted was that." Besides being an amazingly productive and influential scientist whose impacts are both broad and deep...

In-Sik Kang's career in climate science started about half a century ago, and it has been remarkable in many ways—scientifically, but also in that In-Sik has spent most of his life in a country that started from very little, in climate science and every other way, having been devastated by war right at the start of his life. In-Sik is a long-time global leader in climate modeling, climate variability, seasonal climate prediction and atmosphere-ocean interaction. He built a large and amazingly successful group over several decades as a professor at Seoul National University. At SNU, he and his students built an original atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, or climate model, one of very few University groups to do that in-house in the modern era where it tends to happen only in national labs, and they also turned this into a state-of-the-art seasonal prediction system. The many generations of students that he trained now fill academic and research positions in Korea, the US and elsewhere. Like almost no other scientist in the field, In-Sik has been a tireless organizer and builder of scientific collaboration and scientific institutions internationally. He has done this through service on many international committees and panels; through his long-time affiliation with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy; and through his work as an advisor, formally and informally, to climate scientists in many developing countries. Having grown up in a poor country himself, In-Sik can relate to their struggles, but he is also keen to underline the importance of self-responsibility: "And then I ask them immediately, "Can you change your country? Can you change your institution? And can you change your professor? Of course, no, right? So that [means] you should change yourself.” Most recently he helped the founders of the Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research at the King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia to get that center started. For all this work, in 2021 In-Sik was awarded the IMO prize, the highest award given by the World Meteorological Association. In-Sik's family came from North Korea, but fled to the South just before his birth to escape communism and war. So In-Sik grew up in Busan, at the southern tip of South Korea, during a time when the country was poor to a degree that's hard to grasp if you only know it from recent decades. But he got an education at SNU, the nation's top University, became a weather forecaster in the military, and then, by a serendipitous connection, got admitted as a graduate student at Oregon State University in the US. He did so well there that he finished in just a little over 3 years, and got a postdoctoral position to work with Isaac Held at GFDL, despite not having published any papers yet. From there In-Sik got a faculty position back at SNU, and the rest is history. But In-Sik's own story, as he's the first to point out, runs parallel to, and in some ways exemplifies that of his country, as both rose from poverty and hardship to amazing, globally recognized success, through talent, intense hard work, and a profound belief in the importance of education. The interview with In-Sik Kang was recorded in February 2022. Image credit: SIO

Born to a space physicist father, Andy Dessler was steeped in science and academia from birth. Unlike other children of successful academics, he never perceived his father's profession and the implicit expectations put on him as a burden, but soon decided that science was what he wanted to do as well. Andy describes how his career was strongly influenced, at many critical junctures (including where to go to grad school) by his dad. So this keeps with a little theme of parents and children that we seem to have this season. Andy and Adam are more or less contemporaries and have quite a few things in common. They both started out working in the stratosphere, on topics related to the ozone problem. In fact the first scientific seminar Adam went to as a new graduate student was given by Andy, right after his own thesis defense. So this was a conversation between two people who understand each other pretty well. The ozone problem was more or less solved by the time Andy was a postdoc, and so, wanting to be where the action was, he switched, and started working on tropospheric water vapor, and from there he got into climate change. This continues to be a theme in Andy's research: he works on something for a while, but when he senses it's tapped out, he changes direction, and he's done this a few times. Perhaps all scientists do this, but Andy has done it more consciously and maybe more often than others. I tell graduate students that all the time, I say, "In 10 or 15 years, you're not gonna be working on this. So you need to learn how to do research." If you know how to do research, you can do anything, that's really the key: to come up with hypotheses, read the literature, do stuff like that... […] There's a huge amount of data out there, just mountains of data that you can download, and it's really exciting. I'm having a great time.” At least as much as for his scientific research, Andy stands out for his public engagement. For many years, he has been writing and speaking to broad audiences about climate. He has written blogs, op-eds, books, and he's active on social media. He hasn't shied away from the political, despite having told himself, early in his career, that he would. So he and Adam talk about how that happened, including the time he spent, early in his career, at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In the last couple of years, Andy's research has moved into climate impacts. He's studying the Texas power grid, for example, and generally looking for ways to understand the risks due to extreme weather events and climate change, and to contribute to climate adaptation. Making this shift, at this point in time and in their careers, is another thing he and Adam have in common. The interview with Andy Dessler was recorded in February 2022.  @AndrewDessler on Twitter Andy's website at Texas A&M

Growing up on Long Island, Sandra Yuter loved to go on field trips—she learned about how glaciers had shaped the environment around her and was fascinated by how the resulting landscape still told the history of its geological past. The combination of scientific exploration and imagination that these field trips offered was something Sandra also drew to science fiction, another passion that she shares with Adam.Sandra has turned her interest in science into a career; she is a distinguished professor at the department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University. Her research uses measurements made by remote sensors, including radar, satellite, and lidar, as well as in situ measurements, to understand processes in the atmosphere, especially those related to clouds and precipitation. And occasionally, she even gets to be a bit of a science fiction writer herself:And it turned out I was particularly good at writing proposals and my lab manager [...] explained that proposal writing is a lot like writing science fiction because you're basing it on what's here today, but you're sort of pushing the technology a bit. […] If you think about my interest and all my background reading in hard science fiction, which is what's gonna be going on 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now, you could sort of translate that to, "Okay, given what we can do right now, what can we do two years from now or five years from now?"Sandra has made important advances on a wide range of meteorological problems, including the structure, dynamics, and cloud microphysics of deep convection in the tropics; shallow stratocumulus-topped boundary layers; and winter storms in the extratropics.Methodologically, Sandra's work has contributed to the algorithms used to retrieve precipitation from satellite measurements, and to the diagnostic methods used to infer physical processes in precipitating clouds from radar observations. As one particularly prominent example, the contoured frequency by altitude diagram, or CFAD, that she conceived more than 25 years ago is now a standard and widely used diagnostic.As an "observationalist", Sandra has done a lot of field campaigns, and she talks here with Adam about some of the challenges of these campaigns, the decline of the routine observational network, and the way the prominence of climate "reanalysis" data sets (which are observation-based, but not literally observations) may have contributed to that.Later in the conversation, Adam and Sandra also get into the questions of how to do usable science and contribute to solutions to the climate crisis. Sandra's view on this is informed by her early experiences doing science in the private sector, including at a defense contracting company before grad school. But more recently, like Adam, she's been thinking more broadly about how to do science that may have a concrete impact. And that conversation leads them into solar geoengineering, the role of the private sector in climate and weather science, and other topics.I think atmospheric science has done a really good job of explaining and understanding the climate problem, but maybe we're not the solution, maybe the solution is more on the engineering side, and partly, that's just building buildings that are more resilient or moving infrastructure, or figuring out how to do carbon capture in a scalable way, or investing in fusion [...]. Maybe we should just say, "Hey, we've done a really good job explaining the problem, giving you the likely scenarios and the potential timing of those scenarios. But the actual more pragmatic solutions are not what we do."The interview with Sandra Yuter was recorded in February 2022. Image credit: Sandra YuterSandra's website at North Carolina State University

Chris Bretherton gravitated towards math and science as soon as he could read, which was at the tender age of three. His interest was probably the result of both genetics and family upbringing: Chris' father is Francis Bretherton, a brilliant scientist who made important theoretical advances in fluid dynamics. This gave Chris big advantages, but he also talks about the shadow his dad cast over his career and the need he had to prove himself. "There are actually several other examples within our own field of father-son pairs who were relatively well-known. [...] So it's not actually that uncommon. And I suspect for all of the junior members of those partnerships, there's always been the struggle of, on the one hand, wanting to be different, and on the other hand, being endowed both through genetics, and also through basically family acculturation and upbringing with all the skills to actually be good at the same field." Because of his father's work, Chris' family moved from the UK to the US when he was eight years old. Chris' fascination with math deepened over the years, but he also became interested in how to apply mathematical thinking to physical problems. He discovered the kind of physical problems that he would work on throughout his career when the family relocated to Boulder, Colorado, due to Francis Bretherton's appointment as the director of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). "It really took fire when I was a high school student in Colorado and I joined the Colorado Mountain Club. Because of being a rock climber and a mountaineer as a teenager, I was always very aware of the weather, very concerned about the weather, and experiencing it and its extreme settings, and so it then became rather natural to gravitate towards that later." Chris has worked for his whole career on problems involving moist convection and clouds in the atmosphere, and the roles they play in the larger-scale weather and the climate. He made his name in the field for solving a major and fundamental problem involving shallow convection. In the 90s, using field observations and high-resolution models, Chris and his students figured out how the solid decks of low stratocumulus cloud over the cool subtropical oceans break up into much more scattered and taller cumulus clouds as the trade winds take them over warmer water. Since these low clouds were, and still are, poorly simulated in climate models, and yet they influence the global climate a lot because of the sunlight they reflect, understanding them is really important, and this work was a big breakthrough. Chris has made major advances on a wide range of other problems, including many aspects of deep convection in the tropics, and statistical methods. Recently, Chris left his long-held faculty position at the University of Washington to lead a climate modeling effort at Vulcan, the philanthropic organization of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. His team is using machine learning to make climate models better. It's a big new direction for Chris and for climate science as a whole, and Adam and Chris get into that in the end of their conversation. The interview with Chris Bretherton was recorded in December 2021. Image credit: University of Washington College of the Environment Chris' website at the University of Washington, and the website of the research team at the Allen Institute for AI, where Chris ist the Senior Director of Climate Modeling

Jane Baldwin has just completed her first year as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine. Her combination of interests is non-traditional, at least for someone coming up through the places and programs that she has. For one thing, Jane does straight up climate dynamics. One of her recent projects, for example, is about how mountains affect various aspects of the tropical climate. But Jane also has a strong interest in how climate affects people, and that leads her in some diverse and interdisciplinary directions. One thread of her research involves extreme heat events, and in that work she's collaborating with experts in public health to understand the human impacts of those events. In another thread, one that she started during a postdoc in Adam's group at Columbia University, Jane is looking at tropical cyclone risk. In particular, she is trying to translate tropical cyclone hazard, which means the probabilities of storms with given intensities, into the actual damage those storms would cause. Quantifying climate impacts like this is messy work. It isn't based on any fundamental physical equations such as those describing the atmosphere or oceans. Often the kind of data or knowledge that would be important to have does not exist. To produce good studies of climate impacts, one needs to collaborate widely, and one needs to know the user and understand what they're going to do with the results. But this is what it takes to bring knowledge to action, and Jane is serious about doing that. "I had a great time during my PhD, but I think something that weighed on me a little bit is that I felt like there was a bit of a hierarchy in that program [...] The people who do theoretical atmosphere dynamics, that's the peak of the pyramid, [...] and if you're really smart, that's what you should be doing […]. I think I'm still kind of coming to terms with who I am as a scientist and being like, yeah, maybe that's not my jam, but the stuff I'm doing is really cool, and I think as intellectually engaging just in different, maybe slightly different ways." Precisely because this work is so collaborative, interdisciplinary, and focused on objectives that are not purely academic, it's not entirely obvious that universities know how to reward it. Adam and Jane talk for a while at the end about the potential risks a young academic might be taking by going in this direction. Before Jane became an academic, she had already gathered work experience in a completely different industry, when she interrupted her college education to work for a year as a fashion model. She talks with Adam about what that was like, what she learned during that year, why she did it in the first place and why she later decided to go back to school and become a scientist. The interview with Jane Baldwin was recorded in December 2021. Image credit: Jane Baldwin Jane's website at the University of California Irvine on Twitter: @janebaldwin

On her website, Kate Marvel describes her research like this: “I study climate forcings (things that affect the planet's energy balance) and feedbacks (processes that speed up or slow down warming). Our work here has shown that observational estimates of the Earth's sensitivity to greenhouse gases are probably biased low: assuming climate changes will be small is not a very good idea. We've also shown that human influences are already apparent in global drought patterns, cloud cover, and in the timing and amount of regional rainfall.” You can tell from that summary that Kate, besides being an excellent scientist, is also exceptionally good at communicating her work to the public. Kate has been on tv, on radio, in print, and in countless online fora, talking about the climate problem, as a whole, and many specific aspects of it. Kate translates the science, but more than that, she communicates the emotional reality of being a climate scientist who feels the urgency of global warming, in a way that's honest and personal. She's clear, compelling, and funny, and you'll hear all that in this conversation. You might think that becoming famous for communicating effectively to large, broad audiences would help in one's scientific career, but that isn't necessarily the case. While many of her colleagues admire Kate's public persona, she has the distinct impression that some disapprove, and that that has held her back professionally. Adam and Kate talk at length about that, and about how the bias in academia against popularizers is a special case of a more general problem: Namely, that scientific institutions prioritize research far above all else, and don't know how to value many other kinds of work that make the institutions themselves better, and that increase the benefits that our research brings to the larger society. Kate came from theoretical physics, with an education in the US and the UK, and a stint in Zimbabwe along the way, before she made it into climate science and then to NASA GISS, down the block from Columbia in New York City. She thinks that the experience of working her way into climate science has sharpened her already existing ability to write and talk clearly, and to not be afraid of asking seemingly simple questions: “I think a lot of it came from very openly being an impostor. Being new to the field, coming into climate science from theoretical physics and not really knowing the jargon. Not really knowing the important questions in the field. […] And that, I think, forces you to be good at eliciting information, and it forces you to be good at communicating. […] And I do think that having no idea what was going on for a really long time and blundering my way around has forced me to get good at figuring out how we talk about what's going on.” The interview with Kate Marvel was recorded in November 2021. Kate's website at Columbia University, and her personal website  Kate giving a TED Talk in 2017, on "Can clouds save us from climate change?" (that's where her picture in this blog post is from) and here she is on Twitter: @DrKateMarvel

Kelly Hereid had never heard of reinsurance companies when she got recruited by one while attending a scientific conference. A quick Google search brought some clarification, and in the years since, Kelly has become an expert in the field of catastrophe modeling. This type of modeling was developed mostly in the private sector, driven by the need of reinsurance and insurance companies to quantify the financial risk from natural disasters such as tropical cyclones or earthquakes. In her current role as head of a research and development team at Liberty Mutual, Kelly needs to understand both the science of natural hazards as well as the business side, and she needs to be able to translate between the scientific community and the business community. Bridging this gap has become even more essential as the reinsurance industry is starting to think about how extreme weather events will impact their bottom lines with global climate change: "We have an office of sustainability that thinks about transition risk and climate strategy, and how we incorporate this massively changing world of climate risk into our business. And so that's actually an area that I spend a lot of time in now as well. […] And I talk a lot. Seriously, I do a lot of talks about climate change, catastrophes, and how we can incorporate them into the business. Because I want every single slice of our business to be educated and be able to speak coherently about how climate can affect their business." Before the conference that marked the beginning of her career in the private sector, Kelly had done a PhD in paleoclimate, dating dead corals and trying to learn something about the water conditions they had lived in. Coming from a family without any connections to the academic world, going to grad school was not an obvious choice for her at all, even though she had always been interested in science and wanted to become an entomologist as a child (but dropped that plan for fear of getting stung by bees). Luckily though it was obvious for one of her professors: "So one of my absolute favorite professors came up to me in my senior year [...]. And he was like, "Kelly, what are you doing next year?" And I'm like, "Well, I don't know. I haven't really thought about it." And he's like, "You are going to grad school." And he was the kinda person that you just... When they say a statement like that, you just don't argue with it. So I started going to grad school." When you hear Kelly talk, you won't find it hard to imagine that she can be as convincing and effective in communicating as that professor has been – it's a rare and much needed superpower for getting science and industry to collaborate. The interview with Kelly Hereid was recorded in October 2021. Kelly's personal website, and here she is on Twitter: @KellyHereid

Ousmane Ndiaye's path to becoming the director of Senegal's national meteorological service was an unlikely one: Born in Senegal as the youngest of 10 children, he lost his parents at a young age and was raised mostly by one of his sisters. That sister was deeply committed to her little brother's education, and Ousmane ended up being the first in his family to start high school. But that was just the beginning of an academic career that led him from Senegal to Algeria, and then to the US, where he started a PhD at Columbia University. At Columbia's International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), he worked on developing better ways of predicting the west African monsoon a few months ahead of time. These forecasts are important for farmers, who can use them to inform their decisions on the types of crops they want to plant on their fields. Equipped with a doctorate, Ousmane decided to go back to Senegal rather than to pursue an academic career in the US – not an easy decision, especially since Ousmane already had a family with four children at the time of his graduation. But he had a strong desire to bring his knowledge back home, and to share it with the communities that could directly benefit from it. Ousmane understood that the value of the forecasts would be limited not just by how accurate they were, but by whether their potential users understood them and valued them, or not. And he also knew that in order for that to happen you have to understand the users and their needs. So when he got back to Senegal he started holding meetings with farmers, to learn how they think and how they work, and to develop practices of forecasting and forecast communication that would work for them. The meetings served a social purpose – they were a way of gaining the farmers' trust and respect – as well as an educational one, with Ousmane explaining for example the probabilistic nature of forecasts: In the training, I was trying to explain to them that maybe sometimes our forecast can be wrong, and we have only probabilistic ways to estimate. We are not 100% sure […], it's just a likelihood, it's our best guess. I was […] trying to emphasize [that] again and again. There was an older farmer sitting back, and he just raised his hand while we were explaining, and […] he says: "Don't worry about it. We know that only God knows 100% what will happen. We know your forecast sometimes will go wrong." Ousmane's work was successful, and in 2019 he became the director of Senegal's national meteorological service, where he is responsible for everything related to weather and climate, and where he continues to use all his resources – his time, research, knowledge and connections – for the important work he's doing. The interview with Ousmane Ndiaye was recorded in September 2021. Image credit: Vanessa Meadu (CCAFS)   Website of Senegal's national meteorological service, which is part of the country's National Civil Aviation and Meteorology Agency (ANACIM)

To climate scientists, Isaac Held probably needs no introduction. He is one of the deepest and clearest thinkers in the field, and his insightful research on the dynamics of the Earth's climate has earned him immense amounts of respect and appreciation. Isaac spent most of his long and distinguished career until his retirement in 2020 at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, one of the pioneering centers for climate modeling. He was born in 1948 in a refugee camp in Germany, from where his family emigrated to the United States just a few years after. Isaac's father soon died, and so he and his brother were raised mostly by their mother, who always encouraged the two of them to do well in school – a "job" that Isaac took seriously, and that led him to discover and develop his natural talent for mathematics. At the University of Minnesota, he became fascinated with theoretical physics as a "wonderful application of mathematics to the real world", and he went on to go to graduate school in statistical mechanics at Stony Brook in New York. With the Vietnam war raging, however, Isaac started to question the importance of the research he was doing, and he eventually decided to switch to atmospheric and climate science. The rest, as they say, is history: Isaac produced field-changing contributions to topics such as the Hadley circulation, deep convection and tropical meteorology, water vapor and climate feedbacks, and tropical cyclones. In this episode, Isaac also talks about the importance of good writing in science, and how he has always aimed to explain his scientific research and ideas clearly and concisely. This aspiration becomes evident when reading one of his papers or his blog on climate dynamics, which is widely acclaimed both for its thought-provoking content and its lucid style of writing. His own life story has made Isaac keenly aware of the importance of random events and tipping points, which limit one's control in ways both liberating and frustrating: "Something happens and your life goes one way or the other and that happens to all of us in one sense. [...] Some of life's unpredictability can be these huge events affecting large parts of the world, but it could also be these little things in your individual life that make a big difference as well, which are uncontrollable." Finally, Adam and Isaac talk about the interaction of science and politics, and about the possible impacts of climate change on human societies, on which Isaac has a slightly more optimistic view than Adam: "I think I'm a little bit of technological optimist, I don't know if that's quite the right word, but I can't believe that I can visualize what we'll be capable of in a hundred years, technologically, if I go back a hundred years." The interview with Isaac Held was recorded in September 2021. Image credit: NOAA Isaac's website at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory His blog on climate dynamics

It's been a while since we released the last episode of Deep Convection, but Season 3 is finally here! We are starting the season with a "prologue episode" featuring Adam and Melanie. Adam asks Melanie how her life has changed since their Deep Convection conversation that was recorded 2.5 years ago (and, spoiler alert, some aspects of it have changed in quite unexpected ways), and Melanie asks Adam  how his views about life and the world have changed, and what role the podcast has played for him. Mostly though, this really is a warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Convection, the first one of which (with Isaac Held, one of the deepest and most original thinkers in climate science) will drop in just a bit more than a week!

When Shang-Ping Xie entered middle school in his home town about 300 miles southwest of Shanghai, China had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous political movement launched by Mao Zedong that had dominated Chinese life for a decade in the 1960s and 70s. That was lucky timing and a big turning point for Shang-Ping: If he had been a few years older, he might have been sent to the countryside after graduating from high school, to work on farms and learn about the rural life. But after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the universities reopened and a merit-based admission system was introduced, which allowed Shang-Ping to go to college to study oceanography (without ever having seen the ocean before!). From there he went to grad school in Japan, then to the US, then back to Japan for his first faculty position, then back to the US, eventually taking on his current position as a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Shang-Ping's research covers a broad range of topics centered around atmosphere-ocean interactions and their role in climate formation, variability, and change. Some highlights of his incredibly prolific scientific career include the work that led to the formulation of the wind-evaporation-sea surface temperature feedback mechanism in the 1990s, and later his contributions to the discovery of the Indian Ocean capacitor effect, and to the development of the "warmer-get-wetter" idea for how rainfall will change with global warming. The driving force behind Shang-Ping's impressive scientific output is his deep curiosity and (to quote Richard Feynman) the "pleasure of finding things out", which have remained unaffected by the "daily grind" of academic life. How he has managed to do that is part of this conversation as well, along with his thoughts on climate change, and how his perception of it has evolved over the years. "For a period of time I was asking myself what's beyond what I have done so far. Because at some point, I felt, I know a few things, I just couldn't see what's ahead. But I think somehow I was able to overcome this feeling now. Because [...] there are still a lot of puzzles. I feel like I know what I want to do for the next few years." The interview with Shang-Ping Xie was recorded in March 2021. Image credit: Nelvin C. Cepeda Shang-Ping's website at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, George Philander had to follow a lot of laws that didn't make sense to him, e.g., that he was not allowed to stand in the line for white people at the post office. When he discovered mathematics and science, he was happy to have found a world that was governed by rational and coherent laws."South Africa [...] was a strange place because of the apartheid policies. I basically lived in two worlds that didn't really intersect. The one was the social world, which was subject to these strange laws. And at the same time, I was becoming a scientist, and the world of science seemed an escape from the irrationalities of the apartheid laws."George left South Africa in the 1960s to go to graduate school at Harvard, where he decided to move into oceanography. Apart from taking classes and doing research, he also continued to be interested in social concerns, and on weekends he would join people in protesting the war in Vietnam, or even the apartheid in South Africa.Despite all the differences between the U.S. and South Africa, George also sees some fundamental parallels between these two stages of his life:"So now I could again do the science and separate the social life [from it]. But the science was much more interesting, and the social life was much more interesting. So it was a somehow idealized version of what I had experienced in South Africa."After completing his PhD, George went on to do a postdoc with Jule Charney at MIT, before moving to Princeton where he spent the rest of his career, first at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics lab and then as a professor at Princeton University, from where he retired a few years ago. George is a giant in climate science and has made many important contributions to the field, but he is best known for his key advances in our understanding of the El Niño-southern oscillation phenomenon, or ENSO.Throughout the years, George has been thinking a lot about how science interacts with the larger world, and he has become convinced that we should not divorce our social concerns from our professional activities. That recognition even led George back to South Africa for a few years in the 2000s, where his goal was to instill an appreciation for nature in young people:"We're so focused on the gloom and doom of global warming that we count on fear to persuade people to take care of planet Earth. And I would argue that instead of fear, they should do it out of love for the planet. But you can only love what you know, so they should really know something about the planet before we can expect them to take care of it."In this conversation, George also talks about the role of luck in people's lives and careers, about shortcomings of the educational system, and about living far from home.The interview with George Philander was recorded in February 2021. Image credit: Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications, Princeton UniversityGeorge's website at Princeton University

Suzana Camargo is one of the world's leading experts on tropical cyclones — a type of storm that includes hurricanes — and their relationship to the climate. When she first started to do research on hurricanes, she thought it was only going to be a one-year project. But life is unpredictable, and so "[...] and then 20 years later, here I am, still doing hurricanes." Suzana's path to the hurricanes had not been a straight one: She began her academic career in plasma physics, and only moved into atmospheric science after giving up her job as a tenured professor in Brazil and moving to the US, where she took a position as staff associate at the then newly-founded International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. This was a big change, and in many ways also a big step down, and it required a lot of work and persistence to firmly establish herself as a leader in the field, and to rise through the ranks to her current position as the first holder of the Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professorship at Columbia University. "[It] was a big change, [...] it was a lot, everything. It was moving countries, two small kids, changing fields. Everything was so overwhelming that I basically was, I felt like I was just going through the motions and trying to survive each day." The move from Brazil, where Suzana was born and raised, to the US had not been her first international move: Suzana had done her Ph.D. and postdoc in Germany, where she learned, among other things, that the hardest part in science is often to come up with a good research question, and that the Bavarian dialect sounds very different from the standard German. Over the last 20 years, Suzana has made important contributions to our understanding of how tropical cyclones are affected by natural climate variations, like El Niño; the influence of human-induced climate change on tropical cyclones, including the evaluation of simulations of tropical cyclones in climate models, and to the practice of seasonal climate forecasting of tropical cyclone activity. At Lamont, she and Adam have offices next door to each other, and the two of them have collaborated on many of these topics. The interview with Suzana Camargo was recorded in October 2020. Image credit: Suzana Camargo Suzana's website at Columbia University

Nadir Jeevanjee is one of those rare people who have both depth and breadth in their skills. He is probably the only person who ever wrote a textbook about tensors and group theory while taking a few years off from grad school to tour with a rock band, and that fact alone should make you want to listen to this interview. Nadir was born and raised in Los Angeles, and when he was 12 or 13, he got obsessed with music, especially with drumming. Towards the end of high school, he joined The Calling, a rock band that had a huge hit on the radio in the early 2000s. He went to college with the goal of becoming a professional musician, but found himself enjoying physics classes more than music theory, so much so that he embarked on a PhD in physics at UC Berkeley. About three years into it and struggling with a bit of a "mid-PhD crisis", Nadir left academia for what turned out to be four years, to tour the country with another band — that's when he wrote that textbook about tensors. Eventually, though, he finished his PhD and moved into atmospheric science. He is now a Research Physical Scientist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, where he studies the physics of clouds, radiation, and climate, using a hierarchy of approaches ranging from pencil-and-paper theory to comprehensive computer simulations. His specialty is to condense the complexity of the atmosphere into simple, elegant frameworks that are tractable for human brains. Nadir is also deeply engaged in the communication of climate science to the wider world and confounded a group called Climate Up Close, which tries to make the essentials of climate science accessible to a broad audience and give people the opportunity to talk directly with climate scientists. "So I started to give public talks called "Climate Science: How Do We Know What We Know?", trying to focus on evidence and trying to de-emphasize the consensus on climate change. It's a very useful fact for people who don't know it, but for people who do know there's a consensus but aren't convinced by that, I think that beating them over the head with it if they've already heard it, I think can backfire. And so I wanted to try an approach where I just focused on the evidence. [...] And not only try to share a little bit of what we know about climate science, but also get face time." The interview with Nadir Jeevanjee was recorded in November 2020.  Nadir's website  His book, An Introduction to Tensors and Group Theory for Physicists Climate Up Close Three blackboard lectures on simple models in climate science, which Nadir gave in February 2018 in Princeton

Fran Moore, an assistant professor in Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, works at the intersection of environmental economics and climate science. She studies the impacts of climate change from an economic and societal perspective — how to quantify these impacts, and also how people and communities adapt. Fran grew up in London, but moved to the US for college, in part because she wanted to do "something a little bit broader" than what continuing her science-focused academic track in the UK would have allowed her to do. This desire to look at things holistically and from an interdisciplinary angle has become a hallmark of her work, in which she uses a variety of statistical methods, economic and climate models. Recently, she has even used Twitter data to understand what type of weather people think of as normal, and how that might be changing. In this interview, Fran also talks about what is valuable in human society, and how economists try to measure human well-being. And, she and Adam get into a broader conversation about the relation between science and politics, the roles of climate scientists and academics generally in the public sphere, and whether by doing research climate scientists are really helping anyone or not. "That was part of my motivation to move more into the social sciences. Because my view was, I think, recognizing that the big questions we need to motivate action on climate change, on the science side, have largely been answered. At least on the mitigation side. But there are still big questions, right?" The interview with Fran Moore was recorded in September 2020. Photo credit: UC Davis Fran's website at UC Davis Follow Fran on Twitter: @ClimateFran

Before Marshall Shepherd was bitten by the weather bug, he wanted to be an entomologist. But as luck would have it (at least for the fields of weather and climate science), Marshall changed his sixth-grade science project from honey bees to weather prediction after he had found out that he was highly allergic to bee stings. That science project marked the beginning of Marshall's passion for weather, which has led him to become professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia. Marshall is particularly well known for his work on urban weather and climate, where he has shown that large urban areas can have a more substantial impact on the atmosphere than had been previously though — that is, cities can make their own weather to some extent. In addition to doing research and teaching, Marshall hosts his own podcast, Weather Geeks, which grew out of the award-winning Sunday talk show he did for some years on the Weather Channel. He writes a regular column for Forbes, and does a lot of service to the scientific community at the highest levels — e.g., he served as President of the American Meteorological Society in 2013.  In between all of these activities, Marshall regularly finds the time to testify before Congress and provide expertise to federal agencies. To Marshall, public outreach and service is an integral part of being a scientist: "I've actually been working or pushing really hard to try to advocate that engagement and service becomes more of a part of that sort of calculus for things like promotions and tenure because I don't view it as something extra when I do these things. I view it [...] as a synthesis of a broader mission that we have." The interview with Marshall Shepherd was recorded in August 2020. Photo credit: Nancy Evelyn Marshall's website at the University of Georgia, and his personal website His recently published book, The Race Awakening of 2020: A 6-Step Guide for Moving Forward The Weather Geeks podcast Marshall's TEDx talk on biases that shape our worldview Marshall's articles in Forbes

On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the plane were collecting, but she was also aware that the storm's impact on New Orleans would be devastating. This experience made her realize at a visceral level that science alone is not always enough: "And so it was that campaign which also made me realize something extremely important, that the best science is not of much use unless it gets to where it needs to go and comes in a form that it can actually be used. And so that's when I started really thinking  about the interface of science communication, policy, emergency management, all these different factors. [...] We as atmospheric scientists form one key component to that, but there's this whole larger framework that the information that we produce has to fit into in a way that's going to be usable by all those different stakeholders, so that they can work to, in this case, save lives." An Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Deanna studies tropical cyclones, particularly the structure of their rainbands. Her interests also include orographic rain in midlatitudes, and other aspects of cloud and precipitation physics. Growing up in the tornado-prone Dallas area, she became fascinated with extreme weather events at an early age, and got drawn into atmospheric science for real when she realized how much she enjoys participating in field campaigns like the one that gave her a close-up view of Hurricane Katrina. Deanna has also made questions of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Earth sciences a primary focus of her work — an unusual commitment for a young faculty member working under the pressures of "publish or perish", and in this interview she talks about that decision and its implications. The interview with Deanna Hence was recorded in August 2020.  Deanna's website with information on his research, papers, biography, etc.

Brian Mapes fell in love with cumulus clouds when he was looking out an airplane window during his first flight, on the way to Iowa to toil in the fields with his uncle. He was struck by their beauty, but also wanted to understand them scientifically.  In particular, Brian got interested in how clouds, which are relatively small, are related to weather systems that are much larger, and which is controlling which, how and to what degree. He took issue with the (then-)predominant idea in the field that turbulent convection and clouds are merely a passive response to the large-scale forcing. "They're just chiseled from marble, these Midwestern summer clouds. It's like landscapes, you could imagine romping and playing on them. Except they change every three minutes... It's like a time evolving landscape. I was just in love with it. And I felt that it had a great amount of life force or something. [...] Vigor, agency, life force. I felt like it was a thing that had some heart to it. And then you come, and so you go into that field of science and you come along and you discover the people running the show have decided that it's a too-complicated-to-care-about response to some forcing. And it drove me batty." Before becoming an atmospheric scientist, Brian studied chemistry at Caltech and spent his free time experimenting with explosives of all kind in the Mojave Desert. But he eventually decided to look for a less hazardous field and discovered his fascination with the atmosphere after moving back to his home state of Colorado. Over the course of his career, which has led him to become professor at the University of Miami, Brian has worked on a lot of different topics, but to him they are all manifestations of the one problem that interests him most, which is the problem of scale. "[...] it was just echoes and echoes of a philosophical question which is, what's the relationship between the individual and the collective? That's the one thing that interests me, and I play it out over here in meteorology, and I'm also fascinated with the social sciences and ecology and stuff, where... It's everywhere!" In this interview, you will also hear Brian talk about language and poetry in science, improv, and the role of the appendix in "body politics." The interview with Brian Mapes was recorded in January 2020.  Brian's website with information on his research, papers, biography etc. "Pattern and Meaning in Mesoscales", a seminar talk Brian gave at the University of Miami in February 2021

Vishal Vasan, an applied mathematician at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore, India, thinks of himself as a “mathematical salesman”, who uses his mathematical tools and expertise to help potential collaborators in other fields. Vishal's particular interest are problems involving partial differential equations,their properties and behavior, and methods for solving them, whether on paper or on the computer. "This is at least my personal view of applied math. It's a service. I help other people. I helped people with their homework problems when I was a kid. And I help my colleagues with their math problems now. And if that's what this leads to, helping other people with their problems, then sure. If I can help I'll help." His eagerness to apply mathematics to real-world problems has led Vishal to work on a wide range of topics: condensed matter physics, optics, water waves  –especially, tsunamis – and recently also the Indian monsoon. Apart from solving mathematical and scientific problems, Vishal also likes to think and talk about political and societal issues, particularly those that concern his home country: "I think a lot of India's problems are not sexy. Which is we don't require grand solutions. We require things that most of the world has figured out. Toilets. Sewage treatment plants. Garbage disposal plants. I don't think our problems for now are sexy." Having moved back and forth between India, the UK, and the US, Vishal is a perfect example of the internationality of science. Given his own global life trajectory, he is deeply interested in the question of how to form an identity and a sense of belonging in the midst of a tsunami of cultural influences, and in this interview he talks about that as well. The interview with Vishal Vasan was recorded in December 2019. Image credit: ICTS Vishal's website with information on his research, papers, biography etc.

Sulochana Gadgil has had a life-long fascination with the Asian monsoon, the seasonally shifting wind pattern driving the rain storms which are the lifeblood of India's agricultural economy. Born in Pune, she studied mathematics in India and the USA - at Harvard and MIT - before returning to India, where she was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore from 1973 until her retirement a few years ago.  Sulochana is one of the world's leading experts on the monsoon, and she has made enormous contributions to its understanding. She has never shied away from questioning the prevailing theories, and she was the first one to demonstrate that, contrary to the explanation still found in many textbook, the monsoon is not a gigantic land-sea breeze. Instead, it is a manifestation of the "intertropical convergence zone", a migrating planetary-scale system of tropical rain belts. Sulochana has also worked with economists and mathematicians (including her son) to quantify the impact of year-to-year monsoon variations on the Indian economy. They showed that even though the contribution of agriculture to India's economy has diminished over the last five decades, the impact of droughts on the GDP has remained large (2 to 5%) throughout.  Apart from her research, Sulochana also talks about growing up as a scientifically-minded girl in Pune, about the Western-centric lens in science and the thinking about environmental problems, and about the challenges of interdisciplinary collaborations. “But I found to my dismay that agricultural scientists were least interested. Although when you talk to farmers, what is the most important factor impacting your yields, they will say climate. But agricultural scientists since the Green Revolution can only think of different varieties and pesticides and fertilizers." The interview with Sulochana Gadgil was recorded in December 2019. Image credit: Adam Sobel Sulochana's website with information on her research, papers, biography etc.

Deep Convection is back with a new season! Starting next Tuesday, February 2nd, we will release a new episode every other week. In this prologue to Season 2, which was recorded two weeks ago, Melanie asks Adam about his experience making Deep Convection; they look back at the past season and ahead to the upcoming new season. We'll say this much: Season 2 starts in India, and it features 10 wonderful guests who share stories from their lives in and outside of science. Stay tuned! Make sure to hit the subscribe button to get all future episodes. You can also find all episodes of Season 1 in the episode archive on this website.

Melanie Bieli is a special guest in more than one way. She’s the first junior scientist to appear on Deep Convection, having just finished her Ph.D. a year ago; but more importantly, she’s the co-creator and creative director of the podcast. So she has been part of all the previous episodes, silently --- but on this episode you can actually hear her voice. Melanie was born and raised in Switzerland. She did her MS degree at ETH Zurich, in Atmospheric Science, and then spent a couple of years working in the reinsurance industry, at Swiss Re in Zurich, studying extreme weather risk. That was a good job, and could easily have led to a permanent career and nice life in her home country. But Melanie didn’t feel challenged enough by that life, so she left to do a Ph.D. in Applied Math at Columbia. “Whenever I get too comfortable, I make decisions that get me out of my comfort zone." Melanie wrote her doctoral thesis on the extratropical transition of tropical cyclones, and is now a postdoc at Caltech working with Tapio Schneider’s CliMA project to design a new climate model. She’s thinking about her next steps. They may or may not be in academia. You can see all your peers starting their post doc positions and [...] my natural reaction to that is, let me not go with the flow. Melanie and Adam recorded this episode in Costa Rica, while there for the NSF OTREC field campaign, just a few days after Melanie’s thesis defense. Besides her life and career to date, they talk about religion and spirituality, the merits of academic vs. private sector jobs, and how to maximize one’s positive impact on the world. “Most people want to have, want to feel like they’re having an impact...they want something that’s emotionally satisfying and not necessarily... if you actually evaluate what your contribution is to the world, that would actually look good in that evaluation.” The interview with Melanie Bieli was recorded in August 2019. Find Melanie on Linkedin. Here is a blog post she wrote while in the field in Costa Rica. And you may hear her voice again if you keep listening to Deep Convection in future!

For Ed Sarachik, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, science and art have always been complementary but equally important ingredients to an intellectually fulfilling life. When he was a physics major at Queens College in New York City, his art teacher gave him an assignment that would become a formative art experience: Spending hours at the Frick Collection looking at a Vermeer, Ed started to truly see the painting, the play of light and vividness of the scene that a postcard of the original just can't capture. He was hooked, and visits to art museums remained an essential counterpart to his professional work throughout his scientific career. “If it wasn’t for art and music, I don’t think I would have been as good a scientist as I am. It provided an outlet. […] Although there have been times when I’ve done science 12 and 14 hours a day, there’s also times I neglected it entirely, and looked at pictures and listened to music. […] I find it absolutely necessary for my existence, for my intellectual satisfaction. " Ed struggled to get his career off the ground in a time of federal budget cuts in the 1970s. Eventually though (and thanks also to an encounter with Jule Charney), things turned around: Ed transitioned from laser physics to oceanography and went on to write a series of foundational papers on the dynamics of the equatorial ocean with Mark Cane in the late 1970s. He has worked for many decades on climate problems, and especially those that involve coupling between the ocean and the atmosphere – e.g., he has done important work on the role of the ocean in decadal variability, interannual variability and climate change. In this interview, Ed and Adam also talk about many other subjects, including how Ed started to think about climate impacts after he got to the University of Washington, why he thinks current climate models are poorly suited to that work and how they should be re-formulated. The interview with Ed Sarachik was recorded in May 2019. Ed''s book, co-written with Mark Cane, The El Niño-Southern Oscillation Phenomenon

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

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.

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 tomake 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. 

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. 

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

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

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

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. The interview with Naomi Oreskes was recorded in July 2019. Photo credit: Kayana Szymczak, ©Princeton University Press

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 Point of View: Avoiding a lost generation of scientists Academic Careers and Gender Inequality: Leaky Pipeline and Interrelated Phenomena in Seven European Countries