-A distinct privilege,
obviously,
to welcome our speaker,
Dr. Gavin Schmidt,
all the way from New York,
so let's give him
a round of applause
to make him feel welcome.
[ Applause ]
I wanted to begin
with a short story
of a man who was
walking home very drunk...
[ Laughter ]
-Not me. [ Laughs ]
-...and complaining loudly
to God about his own problems.
He found a preacher by the river
baptizing people
by submerging them in the water.
The preacher asked the man
whether he wanted to be baptized
so that he could see the Savior
who'd take away
all his problems.
The man did not hesitate
a second
and agreed to be
submerged in the river
to be baptized the first time.
The preacher submerged the man
in the river for a few seconds,
then he pulled him back up
and asked him
whether he had seen the Savior,
and the man said, "No."
Then he say,
"Let's try a second time."
The preacher submerged
the man for a second time
but this time a little longer
and then pulled him back up.
He asked him the same question,
"Did you see the Savior?"
I say, "No.
I didn't see the Savior."
The preacher then, of course
who's flustered --
then he decided to take him back
again to the river,
but this time, a little longer,
until his legs
started kicking about,
and then he pulled him
back up again,
and then asked him
the same question,
"For Heaven's sake,
have you seen the Savior?"
The man wiped his eyes,
coughed a little bit,
and caught up his breath,
and asked the preacher,
"Are you sure the Savior
fell in this place?"
[ Laughter ]
Now, clearly, there are
communications breakdown
between the man
and the preacher...
[ Laughter ]
...even though both understand
that a change is needed.
When it comes to matters
of climate change,
nothing is simple.
From the heroic construction
of a model,
with complicated
technical components
that attempts to reproduce
the climate system
to communicating
and explaining climate models
to a general audience
through the media.
Our speaker, Dr. Gavin Schmidt,
is a master of both worlds.
As a leader of NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies,
he is forced to balance
his media persona
with his role
of an institutional leader
and also a spokesperson --
not an easy task.
Today, he's gonna talk
about his own journey.
How did he get there?
Or what steps did he take
to get there?
How did he get involved
in what he's doing today?
What excites him about it?
Ladies and gentlemen,
help me welcome Gavin Schmidt!
[ Applause ]
-Thank you very much.
Alright, so my first instincts
upon being asked
to do a MANIAC Talk
was one of horror.
"I'm still young," I said.
"I have potential!"
And Charles said, "Yeah, no, no,
no. You had potential,
so now it's time
to talk about what you did."
Okay, so this is where I'm from.
Somebody asked me this just now.
This is where I'm from --
a totally nondescript,
uninteresting, small,
tiny part of the UK,
and you can see where all the
names of interesting places are.
It's nowhere near any of them.
[ Laughter ]
It is so uninteresting that
in the entire history
of my high school,
precisely two people
have done anything of note --
me... [ Chuckles ]
...who left and went to NASA --
which they
are very impressed by --
and Zoe Sugg, who I don't know
if you might know.
She goes by the name of Zoella,
and, you know, she does
something on the Internet.
I am obviously
a tremendous success.
You know, I have 31.8 thousand
followers on Twitter, yes?
Impressive? No?
Yes, impressive.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you...
[ Laughing ] 13.5 million
followers on Twitter
and has a book.
Anyway, so in terms of --
It's interesting
that they chose to put me first,
but really, in today's world,
Zoe has been
far more successful,
so I'm not even
the most interesting person
that's come out
of my own high school.
So what was I doing when I was
in high school?
All I really cared about was
mathematics and doing problems
and trudging through problem
sets and learning more about it,
then getting very excited
by Martin Gardner
and "Scientific American"
and all the rest of it,
and so this was really
my only thought for the future.
"I shall do math,"
and when I was 16,
that was kind of easy.
I will go study maths at --
"Maths", like, plural
because there's more than one.
I will do that, and I
will study that at university,
and I was quite good
at what I was doing,
and so I went to university,
and I went
to a very pretty university.
This is Jesus College, Oxford,
and it's very pretty,
and it's very nice for people
who like that kind of thing.
But most of the time
that you're there,
you know, you're too
kind of caught up in everything
to ever really
pay attention to it.
So, now I enjoy going back,
but at the time,
I really didn't appreciate
it very much at all,
and I spent most of my time
perfecting my pool game,
which actually
is still not very perfect,
but I spent more time playing
pool than I did on mathematics
until about the last six months
of the whole course.
And the UK is very interesting
because, instead of,
like, amassing credits
and GPA points as you go
through, everything --
It's an all-or-nothing,
one massive exam
right at the end
where you have to disgorge
every single thing you've learnt
over the last three years.
That means
that you can totally coast
for 2 1/2 years of your degree
and only actually apply yourself
in the last six months
and do extremely well.
So that was something I learnt,
but don't do that at home, kids.
But at the end of that,
I was still following that path.
I was saying, "Oh, mathematics,
that's what I should do,"
but you get to the end
of your undergraduate degree,
and you're going,
"Where does this go now?
It doesn't go anywhere,"
and so I decided that
I would take some time off,
and I took some time off,
and I came to the U.S.
for the second time,
and I was in Boston,
and I just decided
to just do some random stuff
So -- oh. Okay, hold on.
So I'm gonna
intersperse this talk
with typical conversations
I have had
through my career, okay?
So, okay,
typical conversation at a party
at around 1985, right.
So when I was still
an undergraduate.
So a random person asks me,
"So, what do you do?"
"Oh, I'm a mathematician."
"I was terrible at maths."
And I said, "Well, no. It's
really not so ba-- Okay, bye."
[ Laughter ]
That happened a lot.
So, at the end,
I decided to work
for a high-class establishment.
I got a job as a security guard
at the Gucci store
in Copley Plaza in Boston --
quite frankly,
the most horrible people
I have ever, ever had
the pleasure of working with.
Like, horrible human beings.
The shoppers were fine, but
the staff were just the worst.
Interestingly enough,
I was at a gig
at Woolworths
in Downtown Crossing,
which has obviously
since closed.
Actually, I think the Gucci
store is closed as well,
so this dates me.
The Woolworths people
were actually very nice.
We spent most of our time
picking up people's shoes
that they'd left when they were
stealing a pair of shoes
from the really,
really cheap, cheap shoe aisle,
and you really didn't
begrudge them
stealing a $10 pair of shoes.
And then I worked for Avis car
rental for a little bit.
This was out of Logan Airport.
Some of you
may have flown through there.
And you may not know, but the
Avis lot and the Hertz car lot
are on opposite sides
of the street,
and one Sunday morning
when I really wasn't paying
too much attention,
I took my Avis car,
and I drove it into the Hertz
lot through the fence,
and instead of promoting me,
'cause I took out three of their
cars for only one of ours,
they fired me.
[ Laughter ]
So anyway,
so I moved on from there.
I worked in Australia.
I worked as a waiter
in a very nice cafe
in a not-very-nice part of town,
but it was nice and friendly.
I picked grapes
in the Swan Valley,
and my best job ever,
and including the job
I have now,
the best job that I ever had
was running a youth hostel
in Perth, Western Australia.
Let me recommend it
to all 21-year-olds.
It was great.
I got bored with just,
like, doing nothing,
and just really the only
intellectual contribution
I was making was the crossword
every week, and they were --
You know, you'd buy it --
the cryptic crossword,
the UK crosswords.
You know,
not your everyday crosswords.
And I would do that every week,
but it was kind of tedious,
and I was thinking,
"I should do something more.
You know, this is --
I should do something more."
So, I went back to London,
and I was thinking,
"Well, you know, maybe I should
do a PhD or something,"
and I thought, "Well,
how does one do a PhD?"
So I just went
to a maths department
at
the University College London,
which is in Central London.
I went to the office, and I
said, "I'd like to do a PhD,"
and they said, "What?
You can't just come in here
and tell us
you want to do a PhD.
There are deadlines.
There are forms.
There's a whole process that
you should've been following,"
and I said,
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry.
I really didn't mean
to mess with your system.
You know, I didn't realize,"
and they said, "Well, okay,
but go and talk
to that guy over there,"
and I went to talk to that guy
over there, and he says,
"Oh, I just got this thing
funded. When can you start?"
And I said, "You know, I was
gonna go on holiday again,
and I'll be back
in about two weeks."
He said, "Fine.
Just come by," and that was it.
[ Laughter ]
And it turns out that the PhD,
what it was gonna be --
It was in a maths department,
so I felt pretty secure
that it would be
of some interest,
and it turns out to be
on the calculation stability
of topographic Rossby waves.
So, these are waves
that exist in stratified flow
because of both
the stratification,
the rotation of the Earth
and the topography,
and so there's
an interesting interplay
between changes in topography
and these wave modes
and things like that.
It turns out that the people
who'd been calculating
these things had not been
doing a very good job,
and it was actually
quite an easy thing
to come up with
a much better way of doing it
involving Green's functions
and divergence theorem
and all the rest of it.
So I did that,
and it seemed very,
you know, straightforward,
and there was
an interesting side effect.
So, typical party conversation
in 1992 -- "So, what do you do?"
"I study waves in the ocean."
"Does that involve dolphins?"
"No, but it's --
Oh, okay, done."
[ Laughter ]
But progress had been made.
When I finished that,
I had a big change.
It turns out that actually
nobody really cares very much
about topographic Rossby waves,
and so the four people
who did care about my PhD
did not have any money in,
so I had to throw the net
a little bit wider
if I was gonna get a job.
And so, I threw the net wider.
I talked to Lawrence Mysak
at McGill University,
and he says, "Oh,
I used to do stuff like that
when I was young,
but we're doing climate now.
Climate is the thing."
And I'm going,
"Oh, well, that sounds very --"
He says,
"What we're gonna do is,
we're gonna do models
of the thermohaline circulation
and understand its role
in natural variability
in the past."
And I said,
"Oh, that sounds fascinating,
absolutely fascinating."
And I remember
putting down the phone
and turning to my supervisor
and saying,
"What is
the thermohaline circulation?
Is that important?"
Anyway, so I arrived
in Montreal,
and, actually, it looked
a little bit like that.
I arrived.
It was, I think, December 29th.
There was a massive snowstorm.
I was totally unprepared
to the extent I did not
even have a proper winter coat
and no long underwear
or even any boots.
The first thing we did,
of course, was go shopping.
This was a whole change
of climate
and a change to climate.
The interesting thing
about McGill at that time
was that it was all new
for them as well,
and so they didn't
really have any big plans
about what they were gonna do,
so they just kept inviting.
They had all this money.
They kept inviting
interesting people from all over
to talk about --
"Tell us about climate
from this perspective
or that perspective,"
and from a huge range
of different people.
For somebody who also did
not know anything about climate,
this was a fantastic
opportunity.
I was just, like -- Basically,
I was just, like, soaking it in.
Like, "Oh, tell me.
Tell me more.
Tell me more. Tell me more."
And I was very...
kind of open-minded
about what it was that
one might do as a researcher.
But, of course, you know,
I'm a postdoc.
So, you know,
you're all going through
that kind of mild case
of impostor syndrome
where you're going, "Can I
really make it as a researcher?
Are my ideas at all valuable?
Can I stand on my own,
or am I always gonna be
kind of traipsing
after somebody else
who has better ideas than me?"
And so I'm actively looking for,
you know,
"What can I do
that's gonna make a difference?
What can I do?
What can I do? What can I do?"
And so what I ended up doing
was playing around
with relatively simple kind
of zonally averaged models.
So three dimensions
is too many dimensions,
so you reduce it by one.
So, while you're able
to churn out a lot of results,
you're always kind of suffering
from dimension envy, right?
You know, all of your friends
have got three dimensions,
and you've only got two.
But, you know, I wrote a couple
of interesting papers
and did
some interesting mathematics.
For instance, if you go back
to really warm climates
in the Cretaceous,
you can have situations
where you have warm water
that's so dense in the tropics
that that's where
the overturning streamfunction
comes from.
Or if it's salty in the poles,
then you get it from over there,
and that makes a big difference
to how much heat
you're moving through the ocean.
So, you know, there was kind
of interesting things there.
And, of course, this was related
to the Cretaceous, right?
Okay, so remember that because
my first media interview ever --
So, this is 1995 --
I'm in McGill in Montreal,
and I'm asked by a French
TV journalist about this,
and he says,
 "Comment était le Crétacé?"
Right? So, "What was it like
during the Cretaceous?"
So it was in French and with
a heavy Montreal accent.
I could do that for you,
but if anybody's watching,
that would just be
too embarrassing.
And I said, "Chaud.
It was hot."
And he said, "A quel point
 il faisait chaud?"
So, like, "How hot?"
I said, "Trés chaud."
[ Laughter ]
He said, "Thank you very much."
And I felt, "Oh, this media
thing isn't too bad.
I could get used to this."
This is a true story.
At the end of my time at McGill,
I was, again,
losing the thread a little bit.
Like, "Where am I going?
What am I doing?
Do my ideas have any value?"
I was very lucky to get
to apply for and to be awarded
one of the NOAA Climate &
Global Change postdocs,
which is a great,
great program
which is somewhat under threat
at the moment,
but it has an absolutely
stellar cast of people
that have gone
through that program.
I'd written a proposal
to work with somebody at MIT,
but for some odd reason,
the powers that be
on this program said,
"You know what? We've given
too much money to MIT.
You know, we have to be
a little bit --
We have to distribute
the money more widely,
so you can't go to MIT."
And I said,
"But this proposal that I wrote
can only be done there."
And they said, "Yeah.
I mean, can you just do
something similar --
vaguely similar?"
And I'm going, "Well, I guess,"
and I said, "But where?"
And they said, "Well,
just find somewhere."
And so, basically I had money,
I had a vague topic,
and the ability
to go anywhere in the country.
So what does one choose,
and what does one base
those choices on?
Oh, you're all looking
at me blankly.
No. It's like, "Where was my
girlfriend living at the time?"
My girlfriend at the time
was living in New York
because she hadn't been able
to get a visa
to come to visit me
in Montreal,
so we were doing this kind
of New York-Montreal thing.
I said, "Well, you know what,
can I go to New York?"
And they said, "Sure.
Just find a host."
So, I came to New York,
and here I am, a --
what I think of as --
a bright, bushy-tailed postdoc
with his own money,
and I go to all the places
around New York
where I could possibly,
I think, find a home.
I went to Lamont-Doherty,
and everybody there, they just
really wanted me to work
on very, very, very specific
and kind of...
kind of little things,
and I'm going, "Ehh...
Don't really know
if I want to do that."
I went to Princeton and GFDL,
and nobody
had the time of day for me.
Like, everybody was too busy.
And I thought,
"Free money...and you're too --"
So I didn't really feel
very welcome there.
Then I went to GISS,
and I called up one of
the people there, David Rind --
who some of you might know --
and I said, "You know,
I read one of your papers
once about Cretaceous climates
and ocean-heat transport,
and, you know, I've done
a little bit of work on that,
and I'm in town.
Would you like to --"
And he said,
"Oh, come on by. Come on by."
We sat in his office,
and he brought people in,
and we sat there
for about four hours,
and we talked about everything
from the modern climate
to the future climate
to the past,
modeling, data, comparisons,
history of everything,
and I said,
"Oh, this is fantastic."
And then we went out
for a beer afterwards
with a bunch of people,
and we went to a dive bar --
which is no longer
there, thankfully --
and then we carried on talking,
and I go home.
I go back to the apartment
after that a little woozy
and, like, just going,
"Oh, this is my place.
This is where I want to be."
So, the next day, I said,
"Is it okay if I go to GISS?"
And they said,
"Sure. That's fine."
And so I ended up at GISS...
a little bit randomly, I admit.
This is GISS for those of you
who don't know it.
This is Tom's Restaurant,
which is a famous exterior scene
for "Seinfeld,"
also "Tom's Diner."
If any of you remember
Suzanne Vega,
this was "Tom's Diner",
and it's just a couple of blocks
down from Columbia University.
In fact, you still
have to fight your way
through crowds of tourists
photographing the building
every day in the morning.
"Oh, my god.
It's the Tom's Diner."
It's like, "Okay. Get out
of my way. Get out of my way."
We're renovating at the moment,
so right now, the sixth floor
is a building site,
and the seventh floor
looks like the Superdome
after Hurricane Katrina.
In about a year and a half's
time or maybe a decade,
we will have a beautiful
new conference center in here
that you will all be most,
most welcome to come visit.
So, yeah, so that was 1996
I started there,
so that's 22 years now
I've been at GISS,
which seems like a long time.
Hmm.
And the one idea that I had
that stuck...
...was related to these
things -- water isotopes.
It turns out that water isotopes
are a bit of a gateway drug
to that whole, like,
naughty issue of modeling,
and the reason why is this.
So why does anybody care
about water isotopes?
Water isotopes are what you're
measuring in the ice cores
when you're interpreting
a temperature, right?
So your temperature changes
over the last 110,000 years
from the ice cores,
they're water isotopes.
The temperature changes
that we're inferring
for the whole of the Quaternary
or going back to the Cenozoic
or even further back --
those are all
water-isotope measurements
made on small shells
of small creatures
that live in the ocean, and
their shells fall into the mud,
and then you analyze
the shells in the mud.
These shells
are made of carbonate.
The "O" in the carbonate
gets its isotopic signature
from the water
in which the shell was formed
plus a temperature signal.
Conflating
the temperature change
in the water-mass-isotope change
has been one of the fundamental
programs in paleoclimatology
since the 1960s.
But if you want to understand
how water isotopes change
and how they get recorded
in these carbonate shells
and also in cave records
and lake records and in corals,
you have to understand
a lot about the system.
You have to understand how
things change during convection.
You have to understand
how things change
during evaporation and rainfall.
There's interesting things
that are going on at the
tropospheric-stratospheric
boundary.
And, of course,
there's a whole bunch of things
that are going on in the ocean
that is both mixing and
diffusing these signals away.
The impact of sea ice --
as it turns out
that that's important
to include as well.
And my big insight,
such as it is,
from all that time at McGill
was that people had not done
this problem properly.
People had, for a long time,
worked on atmospheric models
of the isotope changes
to some good effect,
but nobody had really
done the ocean part,
and nobody had done
the coupled part.
It seemed to me
if you're going to connect
an isotopic signal
that you're measuring
in a foram
at the bottom of the ocean
and you're gonna compare it
to an isotopic signal
that you're measuring
in a cave in China
or an ice core in Greenland,
you really need to understand
how these things are coupled.
And I thought,
"I shall model this.
I shall do this myself.
Yes, on my own. Ha-ha."
And so I came to GISS,
and I said,
"This would be
a worthy project of my time,"
and everybody was very polite,
and they said,
"Oh...that'll be great.
While you're doing that,
you might want to do
a few other things."
And I said,
"Oh, well, oh, okay.
I can probably squeeze
those in as well."
[ Chuckling ]
So did some interesting things.
My first Nature paper
was about changes
in Northern Hemisphere
winter climates,
and it made a prediction
about how
the North Atlantic Oscillation
had been increasing
up until that point
and how it would continue
to increase
because it was being driven
by greenhouse gases.
Obviously, the day
that this was published,
that trend that you saw
in the data
completely reversed
and disappeared,
and so we had then
10 years of people saying,
"No. There's no effect on
the North Atlantic Oscillation
by greenhouse gases."
At which point, I was, "Oh,
okay. Well, we made a mistake.
Okay. Who knows?"
Until now, of course,
the trend has come back,
and so, like, now, oh, yeah,
we're totally vindicated.
[ Laughs ]
So that was fun.
And the reason
that this came about
was because Ron Miller --
who's now my deputy --
and I were both
printing out some analyses
on the same printer,
and his analyses were kind of
interleaved with my printout,
and it turns out
we were calculating
the exact same diagnostic,
the change in the sea-level
pressure over time.
And I'm going, "Oh, well,
that looks like my diagnostic.
And he says, "Oh, well,
that looks like my diagnostic.
What's going on?"
And we got together.
We worked out that we were
looking at two different sets
of model runs that had
very different behavior,
which was the genesis
of this paper.
So that was fun.
But it turned out --
I mean, other people knew,
but it was news to me --
It turned out that adding whole
new coupled systems
to early...kind of first or
second-generation coupled models
was actually quite difficult.
The tracer code that worked
for the isotopes
was in this version
of the model.
The up-to-date
convection schemes,
which had better accounting
for all the different things
that happened to water, was in
this version of the model.
The coupled model was a totally
different branch
of the model entirely
and actually was very little
to do with any of the others.
And then the tracer code
was in yet a third variation
on the model.
And it turns out that
our version control system...
I can say this now.
I probably couldn't
have said it then,
...but our version
control system circa 1997
had totally fallen apart.
Like, we had a very...
We had our own
kind of homemade way of doing it
that was brilliant,
but it had got out of control.
So, nobody really knew what
versions anybody else was using,
everybody else was doing
their own development,
and it was a total mess.
So, in order to do
my one big idea,
it turns out that I had
to bring the coupled model in,
I had to bring
the convection in,
I had to bring
the tracer code in,
I had to bring the --
You know, everything had
to go in together.
[ Laughs ]
It turns out
that that was a job.
It ended up being a job
that involved
almost everybody
at the institute,
and you can see
how many authors there are --
I think there's 45 authors
on that paper --
and you can also see
when that was published.
2006. Right.
In coming in, in 1996,
it took me 10 years
to build the model
that allowed me to do the thing
that I wanted to do
in the first place,
which was then published
in 2007.
But all of that were --
Everything we needed to do
for that had to be done
for everybody.
So that put me in a position
where I knew a little bit about
every single part of the model
and then suddenly became,
like, the new Gary Russell.
Gary Russell
had been the person
that knew everything
about the model,
he'd kind of given up on that,
and now it was me.
And the reward for that
is being the first author
on these papers,
which get quite well cited
if not very well read.
[ Scattered chuckling ]
Okay. Yes.
So that was in 2007.
So, I'm feeling a little happier
about myself.
You know, I'm doing
all these things.
I know a lot more about
the climate system than I did.
Okay. Now
I'm gonna venture forth --
no more patsy interviews
with Radio Canada.
I'm gonna go
into the tiger's den.
Alexander Cockburn
was a columnist,
English guy,
very left wing
but a total
climate-change denier,
and he was writing
in New York Press
around this time,
and some of you will remember
the Harries et al. paper
in 2001 in Nature,
which compared some of the
old image spectral results
with some of the newer stuff
and showed very clearly
that if you looked at the
greenhouse-gas absorption lines
over a 30-year period --
20, 25-year period --
you could see where the changes
in that concentration
of the greenhouse gases
had led to changes
in the absorption-specific
spectra, right?
So it was a very,
very good paper,
and what it showed actually was
that radiative transfer models
were very, very good
and that our understanding of
that whole thing was excellent.
But this guy got some
very, very bad advice
and totally misread the paper.
He even printed a picture
from the paper
in this kind of popular column,
and he goes on and on at length
about how this is
a terrible thing.
Anyway, so one of the things
he says is,
"The models have been
disastrously contradicted"
because he doesn't
understand anything.
Yes, it does,
and it's not unusual,
and, like, absolutely,
we've gone back.
You can see the same things
for many, many decades
before that, as well.
So I wrote a letter
to the editor,
which included,
among many other things,
"Your writer
is seriously confused."
"You've misunderstood this,
this, this, this, this,
this, this, and this, and what
you're actually concluding
is completely the opposite of
what you should be concluding."
Now, I'm not quite sure
what I was expecting.
Gratitude?
[ Laughter ]
Well, I didn't get that.
"Schmidt's invective
beats his science.
He cannot focus on the details.
I hope Schmidt isn't advising
anyone on anything scientific."
[ Sighing ] Oh, dear.
At which point I realized that
this whole communication thing
was a little bit more tricky
than I had thought.
So, well, I still
went to parties, right?
2004, I had actually
broken up with the girl
I moved to New York to be with,
but I was still in New York,
and so is she,
and we're still good friends.
Anyway, so typical party
conversation in 2004 --
"So, what do you do?"
"I study climate change."
Right, you know,
I've grown into this.
"Oh, like that movie?"
"Well, actually,
that wasn't -- yeah, okay."
[ Laughter ]
Some of you might remember
that movie.
[ Chatter ]
-All our grid models
are worthless.
-I don't think grid models are
gonna be a lot of help here.
-Nope. Nope, they're not.
[ Laughter ]
Some of you might also remember
that the producers of this movie
did not sign
a Space Act Agreement with NASA,
and there was a memo that
went out from public affairs
instructing us all
not to discuss
either the science fiction
or the science fact
associated with this movie
in any venue whatsoever.
That was a little Draconian,
even for the times,
and I think that
that found its way
to the front page
of the New York Times
in very, very short order --
not through me,
I'm hesitant to add
but possibly somebody
I was next to, but anyway.
[ Laughter ]
[ Laughing ] So this movie
is very interesting
and actually has a bigger role
to play in this story
than you might think.
This movie made a half
a billion dollars gross, right?
That's an enormous
amount of money.
That's an enormous number
of people that saw that movie.
Yet our kind of collective,
institutional,
community response
to the science fiction
and the science fact
in this movie was pathetic.
It was nonexistent.
And after the memo telling us
not to do anything
went to the Times,
they rescinded it.
They said, "No, that's not
what we meant at all."
Like, "Somebody, somebody,
write us some talking points
so that we know
what we're talking about."
I wrote them some talking points
because of all my work
that I had done
on the thermohaline circulation.
See, it's all coming together.
And they send these talking
points to everybody in NASA,
and then everybody protests.
"Why are you telling us
what to say?
This is totally outrageous."
Like, you know, alright, okay.
And at the bottom
of the talking points,
it says, "You're not allowed
to make these public."
[ Laughs ] Whatever.
Secret, secret talking points.
[ Laughter ]
I'm going, "This is nuts."
And so the collective response
from the scientific community
was...
There were
two static web pages,
one at Woods Hole --
which is like,
"Here's all our work
that we've ever done
on the thermohaline
circulation" --
and then there was one
at Lamont-Doherty, at Columbia,
which said, "Oh, my God!
The ozone is gonna collapse
any minute." Okay...
It wasn't quite that bad,
but that was it.
That was it.
There was no engagement.
There was no, "Let's reach out
to the .01% of people
that might have
seen that movie
and then had an actual question
about the climate."
There was no outreach to that,
and I was just kind of appalled.
I thought, "Well, why didn't we
use that as a teaching moment?"
Why didn't we, like, take
something that's out there
and tell people about
what the real science is
and how fascinating it is
and, you know,
and how some of, like,
the whole kind of, you know,
Stratospheric air coming down
and freezing you solid
in like 10 seconds thing
probably isn't
gonna ever happen,
but, you know, there's
interesting things to be said.
But we didn't,
and that kind of...
That bothered me,
and I kept thinking,
"Well, how could we
do a better job?"
Because we're not doing
a good job,
and the institutions,
you know,
perhaps they're incapable
of doing a good job,
and meanwhile, there's so much
nonsense out there
that's going
un-rebutted and unchallenged,
and so the discourse on climate
and discourse on the changes
is just being polluted by,
you know, a million people
who don't have the faintest clue
what they're talking about.
And the people who do know
what they're talking about,
which includes the people in
the room and the people at GISS
and the people
at the universities,
are just not saying
anything in public.
Okay, how is this sensible?
And it's not, and it's not
sensible, and it's not something
that you can just sit back
and let happen,
With a couple of other people,
I said,
"We have to do something.
We have to do something."
Then it turns out that
other people had also thought,
"We have to do something."
And then we got together,
and we said,
"Well, what should we do?"
And 2004 was also
the summer of the blog, alright?
Blogs are suddenly the thing.
Weblogs, what are these things?
It seems like an odd thing,
right, that it's so recent?
You know, it's 14 years ago,
and this is --
Like, there's no Twitter.
There's no Facebook.
Like, there's no social media
to speak of, right?
There weren't even RSS readers.
You know, it was
a totally different world,
and so what we did was
we got together,
and we built a blog,
and we said,
"We shall give climate science
from climate scientists,"
which is not a terrible slogan.
And we said,
"We shall provide the context
to breaking-news stories
that is missing
in the mainstream media."
We were very noble-minded
about what we were going to do,
and people liked it.
You know, Nature
thought it was a great idea.
Scientific American
gave us some award.
Like, the week
after we launched this,
Michael Crichton came out
with his totally appalling book
"State of Fear,"
and I forced myself --
I said, "This is the kind
of thing that we should be --"
And I forced myself to buy it
on the first day
that it was available,
and then I read it,
you know, that weekend,
and I'm putting in, like, little
Post-it notes every time
there's something totally,
egregiously appalling in it,
and, you know,
I get to the end of the book,
and this whole thing is like
a forest of Post-it notes,
and I'm thinking, "Oh, my God.
That was a terrible book."
And it was.
It was a terrible book.
Like, there's lots of people
running around,
running around, running around,
and then, "Stop.
I'm gonna give you
a four-page lecture
on some totally random, bullshit
aspect of climate change."
And everything just stops while
somebody lectures the reader.
And then they start
running around again,
you know, and then, "Stop.
Here, let me tell you
about how important
the temperature measurements
are curated by GISS."
And it turns out that
Michael Crichton
actually knew about GISS
because he'd come to visit us.
He'd come to visit us.
He said, "Oh, show us
a little bit of what you do.
Like, "Talk to me
a little about climate."
And during none
of the interaction
that we had with him --
It was Me, Ron Miller,
Jim Hansen --
did he ever actually
ask a question
that would imply
that he didn't understand
what was going on,
so it was just like --
And the whole thing was just,
like, it was very odd.
Anyway, so we're blogging,
and I'm writing about his book,
and I think I title
my commentary,
"A State of Confusion" again
because I think a lot
of these people are --
Some of them
are generally confused,
and some of them
kind of confuse themselves
just to make
a political point.
Crichton confused himself.
He was very tall.
Like, he was a very weird --
I did an event with him
a couple of years later,
which was a mistake,
but he is a very imposing figure
and a great storyteller,
and let this
also be a lesson to you.
It doesn't matter
how smart you are.
You are not gonna be
more entertaining
than somebody who is
a professional entertainer.
Like, you're laughing at
my jokes, but I'm shit, right?
[ Laughter ]
I am.
So, typical party conversation
kind of 2009, alright?
"So, what do you?"
"I work at NASA
on climate change."
I was single at this point.
"No, you don't.
My uncle says
it's all a hoax anyway."
"Well, actually --
Oh, you're gone."
[ Laughter ]
So this actually happened to one
of the people at GISS now.
She's in a bar,
Downtown New York,
and I think she was single
at the time,
and, like,
she's standing at the bar,
and some guy comes up to her,
and he says, "Hi."
And she says, "Hello."
And he says, "I work at NASA."
And she says, "Oh, really?
Which of them?
Like, 'cause I know some
people at Goddard and
some people at Marshall,
and we're working
with some people at JPL,"
and was like, you know, "So,
which bit do you work with?"
And he goes, "Okay."
[ Laughter ]
So, I started
doing other things.
I wrote a book,
which was a collaboration
with some photographers.
The actual idea for this came
about from the photographers.
They put together
an exhibition of photos
related to climate change,
and they said,
"Can you just do the captions?"
'Cause I knew
one of the photographers
from a different part
of my life.
And he says,
"Can you do the captions?"
And I said, "Sure, sure. I'll
help you with the captions,"
And the captions turned into
a book proposal,
which turned into a book,
which turned into this,
which is lovely,
and I still have 400 copies
in my cupboard in my office,
if anybody cares
to take them off my hands.
And it was very good.
It was moderately successful,
and it looked very good.
Meanwhile, my boss
was getting arrested,
and totally coincidentally,
I was named
as the Director of GISS
a couple of years later.
I've continued to, you know,
get better at communicating.
A big step forward
was during a TED Talk
where they were really very
helpful in kind of forcing me
to think about what it was
that you were saying,
you how say it, how deep you can
go, and it turns out,
you can go deeper than most
people think because people
are actually interested.
They're so curious about it.
They can be taken
into the details of the science
far more easily
than we often anticipate.
And that's been
moderately successful.
You know, a million people
or so have seen it.
But, like, compared to Zoe Sugg,
I'm still in kindergarten.
But then there's this weird
thing that happens, right?
Some of you must know who...
-Oh, yeah.
-Yes, okay. So there's some
"Buffy" fans here, right? Okay.
So this is Willow,
our LGBTQ witch,
and this is Evil Willow,
who comes from
a parallel universe, of course.
And Evil Willow is everything
that Willow is except evil.
It turns out
that once you go outside
of our little comfort zone
in a community,
you, too, will have
an evil Internet doppelganger.
They will have your name, they
will have your place of work,
they will have your
publication record,
but they're terrible!
Terrible, terrible people.
They lie all the time,
they make up data,
they're totally
not to be trusted.
You know,
they beat their children.
They're just horrible,
horrible people,
and people refer to them a lot.
If you Google me
on certain websites,
you will find lots of people
saying really,
really terrible things
about you, and you go...
[whimpering] "That's not nice.
That's not nice,
and it's not true,"
but you have to get over that.
You have to understand
that you are not
your Internet doppelganger.
You are not your evil twin.
In fact, you are still
a perfectly fine
and mostly-upstanding person --
that this is just an icon.
It's a hammer that people use
to make a bigger point
that actually has nothing
to do with you,
and once you realize that most
of the people shouting at you
have no idea who you are
or what you do
or anything that you feel,
it's actually a lot easier
to deal with.
It's kind of like people coming
up to me in the playground,
perhaps, and they say to me,
"You dirty hippie!
Get your hair cut!"
And what would you
think about that?
You say, "Well, this is
an angry, shouty person,
but they're very confused."
[ Whispering ] I have no hair.
Right?
It's the same thing.
They're not shouting at you.
They're shouting
at an abstraction
of something
that they don't like.
Once you understand that,
your life becomes
a little easier.
But, you know, once you venture
out into the public,
you know,
you will be criticized.
You will. So here's an example
of when I was criticized.
In 2014 --
some of you might remember --
this is the temperature curve
that GISS curates.
It goes back to about 1880.
You can see ups and downs
associated with volcanoes
and El Niños and La Niñas,
and then you can see this, like,
big kind of
global-warming signal
that's kind of popping up there.
You can see that in 2014,
it was just
a little bit warmer than 2010,
which is just
a little bit warmer than 2005,
which is actually quite
a little bit warmer than 1998.
As a service to the people
who are looking at this,
we give a press conference
every year jointly with NOAA
on what all of this means,
and basically, we give the same
press conference every year.
The press conference
goes something like this,
"This is our record year,
near-record year, top-five year,
blah, blah, blah, blah,
but that doesn't really matter.
What really matters
is the long-term trend
because that's the thing that we
understand. It's predictable,
and that's what's gonna continue
to move forward."
Okay, so we give the same
press conference every year,
and people still come to it,
which is interesting.
As a help to people, we said,
"Well, you know, so there's
uncertainty in these numbers."
I mean, not a huge amount,
but there is some uncertainty.
So, given that there's
a little bit of a gap
between here and here,
which is less than,
you know, two standard
deviations of that uncertainty,
it's conceivable
that in the real world,
2010 was actually warmer
than 2014," right?
It's possible,
and I calculated what that was
using some pretty
conservative assumptions.
The probability that 2014
was really the warmest year
in the real world
comes out to about 38%.
Probability that 2010 was
the warmest year is about 23%.
So, in terms of years,
2014 is your favorite, right?
So the odds are that 2014 was,
in fact, the warmest.
In fact, the odds
are a little bit higher
because the uncertainties are
correlated from year to year,
so everything kind of moves
up and down together.
Anyway,
this is an estimate of that,
and this is what we said
in the press conference.
NASA, NOAA --
they put out press releases,
find 2014 was
the warmest year on record,
and the line about
the uncertainty in here
disappeared in the final
version...unfortunately.
But the Daily Mail thought
that they had something.
Daily Mail was very excited.
David Rose.
If David Rose ever e-mails you
or calls you up
and wants to talk to you
about anything,
you put that phone right down.
[ Laughter ]
"NASA climate scientist," me,
"We said, '2014
was the warmest year on record,
but we're only 38% sure
we're right.'"
Again, well,
that's not really...Okay.
Well, never mind.
The funniest thing, though,
was they took a stock photograph
of me
that was lying around somewhere.
There it is.
They put me in the paper.
My mother was very proud,
not that she reads
the Daily Mail, of course.
The caption was the best bit.
The caption says,
"Garrett Schmidt
of NASA's Goddard Institute
for Space Studies
admits there's
a margin of error."
[ Laughter ]
Oh, my God.
The secret is out.
[ Laughter ]
The actual work that we do
[laughs] is not really that.
That's a tiny bit
of the work that we do.
The actual work that we do
is stuff along these lines.
It's kind of attribution.
How do we understand
what's going on?
What are the drivers of change?
So this is an animation,
a data visualization that
we made with Bloomberg News,
and, well, we asked
these questions,
and it's a very nice
thing, so are all of
these natural things.
Does that explain
what's going on?
No.
Land-use changes, does that
explain what's going on?
No.
Ozone pollution, does that
explain what's going on?
-No.
-No.
Aerosols, does that explain
what's going on?
-No.
-No!
Greenhouse gases, does that
explain what's going on?
Uh-huh.
And so when you put these
all together,
you can see for yourself
that the net effects
of all the human factors matches
the trends that you're seeing,
and when you add in
the natural things,
what you find is that you have
an extremely good
and robust understanding
of what has been going on,
and this is just
in the surface temperature.
You can add in your
understanding
of the ocean heat
content changes,
the top-of-the-atmosphere
fluxes,
the stratospheric changes,
all of those things,
and you end up a very, very
strong and robust result that --
This trend
that we're seeing here,
it's us,
and you don't need to know that
very precisely.
It's us, and that seems
to be something
that is still contested
for various reasons.
The interesting thing
about this graphic --
and I think this gives you
a sense of the work
that we're actually doing --
is that there is about
6,000 pieces of information
that went to make
all of the lines that you saw.
One for each year,
the arrow bars,
the different runs.
Each run was like
five different ensembles.
And the amount of data
that we had to crunch
in order to get those
6,000 points of information
was about a billion times larger
than what you're
actually seeing.
When people were writing papers
in the 1980s,
you did not have to do
quite so much data reduction
in order to get one graph
'cause you only did one run.
There was much less data
to average.
But now things are different.
We live in a big-data world,
and while we can pull,
like this one story out of that
massive amount of data,
how much more interesting stuff
is in that billions of bits
that we haven't yet
been able to pull out?
So that's really what we spend
our time actually working on.
And this was huge.
This was actually the
most-viewed data visualization
on the whole
of the Bloomberg Media site
for over a year,
so this has been very useful.
Coming into 2017,
2016 was, in fact, again,
the warmest year on record
on the tails of 2015,
which was also
the warmest year on record,
which, on the tail of 2014,
which was only 38% sure
it was the former
warmest year on record.
This is the third time in a row
that my name was on
the front page of the Times.
Yay.
The interesting thing here
is that --
So, it's a joint press
conference with NOAA and NASA,
so NASA has its data set,
NOAA has its data set, and we
have this little competition
about whose data set
makes it into the graphic.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Suck on that, NOAA.
[ Laughter ]
They made it into
the Washington Post,
but that's not as interesting.
So, what do we actually do?
Right now, we're gearing up
for this thing here,
CMIP6, massive amount
of computation
that we're doing for all
these different experiments
to understand
various processes,
to make new predictions
for the future,
to do new analyses
for the past.
We're improving our model.
This is clouds,
this is an LES simulation,
and then this is the GISS model,
which is actually now
looking quite good.
We're now representing
the MJO and Kelvin waves
much better than we used to,
and, you know,
we're even applying the models
that we have to situations
that are way outside
their initial
design specification.
We're running these models
for Mars.
We're running these models for
Venus 2 1/2 billion years ago.
We're running these models
for exoplanets
that we have yet to discover
and some that we already
have discovered,
and it turns out
that it matters.
It matters that you're using
a three-dimensional
climate model
to understand what's going on,
on an exoplanet,
and it gives you
different results
than the one-dimensional
calculations
that people have been doing
traditionally
to understand whether something
is in their habitable zone
or not.
And this is all...
This is the great thing
about walking at NASA.
When GISS started,
which was over 50 years ago,
they focused mainly
on astrophysics.
Robert Jastrow was, you know,
interested in red dwarfs
and black holes
and galaxy formation
and all the rest of it,
and we had instruments.
We sent instruments to Venus.
We sent instruments to Jupiter,
and we had to retrieve
information, so we built...
We, not me. People before.
Jim, mainly.
...built codes to understand
how to retrieve information
from the back-scattering
from the aerosols,
and that stuff
made it into the models
that we were using
in the 1970s
to kind of gear up
for Mission To Planet Earth.
Suddenly, we're using the stuff
that we learnt applied to space.
We're using it on Earth
to understand
how things
are changing on Earth
and to understand
what is driving things on Earth
and to make better predictions
for what's going
to be happening.
Now, that understanding
has become so sophisticated
and so good
in including the chemistry
and the aerosols and the clouds
and the different phases
and all the rest of it
that we can apply
those same models
to simulations of Venus,
of Mars, of exoplanets.
It's all kind of come
full-circle.
It could only
have happened at NASA.
This is the thing, though,
that makes it not quite as fun.
These are the simulations that
you do for different scenarios
going into the future,
to the 21st century.
Business as usual, here,
is burn it all.
Find every hydrocarbon
you can and burn it.
Aggressive mitigation would be,
essentially,
we've already
hit peak emissions,
and we're reducing the amount
of emissions by 5, 10 percent
every year going forward.
So, that isn't gonna happen.
I really, really, really
don't want this happen.
This is kind of, maybe,
somewhere where we will end up.
But look at this scale here.
This is 4 degrees Celsius.
This is maxed out, this scale.
This is, in terms of
the history of the Earth,
if you think about how cold
the Ice Age was
20,000 years ago,
the Ice Age was about 4 degrees,
5 degrees colder
than the Pre-industrial --
really not very much.
This is a planet
that is one Ice Age unit
in the other direction,
and if you thought
that the Ice Age
was a totally different planet,
totally different ecosystems,
totally different sea level,
this planet, as well,
will be
a totally different planet.
I think this is something
worth avoiding.
Even these serious-mitigation
scenarios,
which is something
we may end up with --
Look how warm it
is in the Arctic.
This is not consistent.
This is not coherent
with existing
summer ice in the arctic.
-It looks like
what we're getting now.
-I'm sorry?
-Looks like the anomalies
we're getting now.
-It's still maxed out.
It's way more than 4 C.
-Yes, yes.
It is way more than 4 C.
The changes
that you're seeing here,
the implication that this has
for sea level --
look at West Antarctica,
look at Greenland.
What is the implication
for sea level?
We don't yet know,
but the last time
that the planet was this warm
for any length of time,
sea level rose 25 meters, right,
which was in the Pleistocene.
These are nontrivial issues,
and they have
nontrivial consequences.
You find yourself
in the position
that Sherwood Rowland
found himself in
after he discovered
the chemistry
that was leading
to ozone depletion.
This is many years ago.
This is in 1992, I think.
He says, "What's the use
of having developed a science
good enough to make predictions
if, in the end, all you're
willing to do is sit around
and wait for them to come true?"
And he's right.
It is not good enough
to sit around
and wait for these things
to come true.
We have an ethical
responsibility to tell people
about what it is
that we have discovered,
and that sometimes clashes
with our
institutional responsibilities
to just get on with the job,
but it's something that we have
to deal with individually
all the time,
It's just something that
I've thought very deeply about
when I have become, like,
a public scientist and --
"Like a public scientist."
I play one on TV, sometimes.
In going forward,
we always have our two hats.
We have our scientist hat,
which, when we're wearing that,
we take pride in the idea
that we have wrestled
information from the universe,
encapsulated it in theory
and in code and in models
and made predictions
that have come true,
and we go, "Yay, us!
How smart are we?"
And then there's the citizen,
which says,
"That thing that I predicted
that came true,
I didn't actually
want that to happen.
I predicted ahead of time
that 2016 --
like a year ahead of time
that 2016 would be
the warmest year on record,
and I was vindicated.
"Yay! Oh..."
It's not something we want,
and so we have this dilemma.
We are predicting things
that we do not want to happen,
and that puts us
in a very odd position,
but it's not one that I think
that we can't deal with,
but you do need
to think about it.
Meanwhile, I work at NASA,
so I can do fun things.
[ Chuckling ] So we published
a paper on Monday,
which came about from
discussions with Adam Frank,
who's an astrobiologist
at the University of Rochester.
What we said was, "Well, what's
the geological impact
that we're gonna have
right now?"
Right?
We can calculate these things --
the change in carbon isotopes,
global-warming signals,
increased sedimentation,
extinctions, funnel radiation,
increased spikes
of heavy metals,
all sorts of things,
layers of plastic.
You know, we know what impact
we are gonna have
on the geological record,
but has anything like
that happened in the past?
And the answer is,
"Hmm, yes, actually.
There was this thing
in the Pleistocene,
and there was this thing
in the Cretaceous,
and there was this other thing
in the Cretaceous,
and there was this thing
in the Jura--"
And it sounds like that
there have been things
that have happened
a little bit like this
all throughout history.
The question then arises --
I know this is not likely,
but how do we actually know
what caused those things?
What are the clues?
Do we know?
Do we really know?
And so this is a paper
that explores that concept
a little playfully,
and this is the graphic
that the University of Rochester
made for us
with the idea of intelligent
fossil-fuel-burning dinosaurs
sometime in the Cretaceous.
That's just playful,
but again, I get to do that
because I work at NASA.
People would like this
kind of thing here, I think.
So, typical
party conversation now --
"What do you do?"
"I just wrote a paper about
the detectability
of ancient civilizations
millions of years ago
and how that relates
to astrobiology."
"Cool! Lizard people are real!"
"Oh, dear."
[ Laughter ]
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
-So we'll take a few
quick comments, questions.
-Joe?
-Joe?
-Okay, I'm gonna
make some comments.
Wonderful.
-Thank you.
-You are one of the funniest
people I've ever seen.
[ Chatter, laughter ]
-For a scientist, you are funny.
-I really enjoyed this.
It's a 15% chance
that it's one of the better
talks that I've heard.
[ Laughter ]
We're gonna put out a paper,
hopefully, this week,
about global warming,
where we're using the Air Zeta.
-Yes!
-And in fact, 2017
was the second-warmest year
in spite of a La Niña,
which was probably
cutting it down.
We can talk about that -- but
you showed your predicted...
with moderate mitigation.
There's something interesting
in that picture.
-Yes.
-'Cause it's what
we're seeing now.
It shows an El Niño trend.
-Yes.
-Is the ocean expected to --
Right now,
it's an oscillatory thing...
-Mm-hmm.
-...but your predictions predict
the ocean
to actually be warming?
I put my -- It looks just like
the anomalies we have now.
-So different models differ
on the predictions for --
There's good theoretical
reasons for it to go one way,
and there's equally good
theoretical reasons for it
to go the other way,
and the models do a bit of both.
It's one of those things
where, you know,
do we trust that we have enough
of the physics of El Niños
and Rossby waves
and the like on the equator
for those things to be credible?
The answer is no, not really,
There's still
a big question mark there.
This is what our model does.
Other models do something
a little bit different.
-Well, it looked a lot like
what we're seeing right now --
the figures there.
-I mean, the overall pattern
that you see -- you know,
when we're on land
and on the ocean,
when we're in the north
and in the south,
warmest of all in the Arctic,
some warm patches in near
the Antarctic Peninsula,
slight cooling
in the North Atlantic
is very, very similar to
the pattern that you're seeing,
the trends over
the last 50 years.
Yes, and the models
produce those things
for this same period, so...
-Yes? Speak up.
-So when I prepare or update
my public talk each year,
I make use of the Web tools
that you have for exploring
the GISS data.
Thank you for whoever
puts those together.
-If you have
any comments on those
or how we can improve them,
we're always happy to know
comments and suggestions.
-I'll save those for offline.
But this talk really made me --
So when I generate
something from that,
then I can show people
that in the Arctic,
where I'm working now,
that we're already
at a winter anomaly
in the 7, 8 C range,
which is astonishing.
-Yes.
-And the presentation
made me think,
"Do we need a bigger boat?"
Do we need a different scale
in what we're showing
to the public?
Because those projections
would look really different
if it wasn't all
saturating at 4 C.
-Oh, yeah.
-I mean, there would be
some insane colors in the --
-I chose the color line,
so that's not really
an accident, though --
how that looks.
But, yeah,
the bigger problem, though,
is that people
don't viscerally understand
what 1-degree C in a global
mean temperature means, right?
And so one of the most effective
things that I've done
when I talk about
these things in public
is not to use
temperature units at all
but to put things in the context
of the last Ice Age
and the Pleistocene
and things that the planet
has actually seen before
because that gives you
an appropriate scale.
Like, the numbers, like, you
have to think too hard for those
whereas the changes
that we're seeing
and the comparisons to previous
massive changes in the climate,
they're much more visceral.
So, I think we can get hung up
with the numbers,
so I would recommend
never using numbers, actually.
-You've probably seen the xkcd.
-Yeah, no,
so we worked together on that.
-Oh, you worked with that.
-All the way
in the back, there.
-Yeah, you talked a bit
about your experiences
on how you researched --
how you had this kind of
really long time period
of kind of exploring the climate
models and different components
and copying them together,
and you didn't seem to be
under too much pressure to,
you know, publish or perish.
Any comments as to how
that's aided your ability
to be a good
climate communicator
and maybe the struggles
of a career researcher now
and how we can [Indistinct]?
-That's two questions.
[ Chuckling ]
so let me answer
the last one first.
To become a good communicator,
what you need to do
is communicate,
and you will fail
miserably many times,
and then you will
get better at it.
It is not a God-given talent
to be a good communicator.
It is a craft. You get better
at it with practice,
and if you pay attention to
the audiences that you talk to,
and you understand
where they're coming from
or what they understand --
you know, know your audience --
it remains the key thing
for communicating,
and you can get much better,
and you can talk to people
who've communicated about
this particular subject a lot,
and you can have, like,
a crash course in things to do,
things not to do that
will be very, very useful.
Now, you know, as an
early career researcher,
what were the things
that I would say?
GISS was a very
interesting place,
and I hope that
under my direction,
it remains
an interesting place
because there is
an overall mission, right,
that is very much focused
on improving these models,
keeping them up-to-date,
making them better,
using them in interesting ways
to compare the data
and get information
about the real world.
But there's always been room
for people to pursue things
on the side, right?
It is not a very
hierarchical organization,
and the people there
that do well
understand that they have
one foot in each kind of area.
There are things
that you can be doing
that push everybody forward,
and there are things
that you can do
that really only you care about
that may end up being key
for pushing everybody forward,
but you don't know
that ahead of time.
Google runs
on a similar approach.
You know, you've got directed
work 80% of the time,
and then 20% of the time
is your own
to do interesting things,
and 99% of their
interesting things go nowhere,
but 1% of those
interesting things
that interested people did
turn out to be
the next big, killer app
that they put on the site.
Not quite sure that the odds
are similar at GISS,
but, you know, a lot of this
stuff that we ended up
incorporating into --
you know, the latest models --
came about because Drew Shindell
was interested
in the ozone hole and climate,
and nobody else cared.
I was interested in traces
because of my weird obsession
with water isotopes,
but really, nobody else cared.
You know, somebody else cared
about ocean biology,
and nobody -- But now,
it's all part of the whole kit,
and so having places, finding
places where you can feel
that "A" -- there's a point
in being there.
There's a collective effort
that's going forward,
but it also has enough freedom
for you to explore
your own ideas
and your own kind of
out-of-context thinking.
That was key for me,
and it's not for everybody.
You know, people that want to be
told what to do don't thrive
in an environment like that,
and people that only want
to do their own thing
don't thrive
in an environment like that,
but if you can balance
those two things,
then, you know,
find somewhere like that,
and then you've got both
a little bit of security
but also the freedom
to do the interesting stuff
you want to do.
-Okay, one last question.
-Yeah. Sorry.
-Thank you this day
for all you've done.
I'm curious to know if you
considered the solar events
or specific rays that interact
in connection with that.
Mostly, how do they
affect the climate change?
Do you take those
considerations in your work?
-Did you say
"solar event effects"?
-Yeah.
-Oh, yeah, absolutely.
We have a paper that is almost
finished which discusses
how you put all of those
different mechanisms together
and what impact
that gives you at the --
So, you know,
thinking about UV increases
that are larger than
the total solar ratings changes,
solar electron,
solar energetic particle events,
even, you know,
modulation of ionization
by galactic, cosmic rays,
which go in the same cycle.
You know, we can put all of
those things in the models now,
and, you know, we get
a good match to the solar signal
that you can see
in the observed data.
I mean, so it's clearly there,
and it's obviously larger
in the stratosphere
than it is at the crown,
and it's a fascinating topic.
It doesn't really change
much of the big picture,
but, yes, this is something
that I'm, like, literally,
I'm working on this week.
-Okay.
Let's thank Bobby Watkins.
-Thank you very much.
