PODCAST · science
Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White
by Michael White
Michael White has been Nature's editor for climate science since 2008. He ran Forecast for three years, in an effort to provide an inside view into climate science - and the amazing people doing climate science. Each interview documents one person's pathway to climate research, and a massively geeky discussion of his/her work.
Episodes
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Episode 66: Max Moritz
Max Moritz regales Mike with some of the many intricacies of modern fire science. The dominant narrative in the Western US might be “long-term fire suppression is leading to severe fire seasons”. While there is some truth here, the individual fire stories are, inevitably, local. Local land use...
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Episode 77: Peter Bauer
Numerical weather prediction (NWP) is like excellent coffee in the Bay Area: so common that it is now taken for granted, obscuring the decades of expertise, knowledge, and technique underlying the whole operation. In episode 77 of Forecast, Peter Bauer from the European Centre for Medium-range...
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Episode 76: Steve Running
Steve Running from the University of Montana helped to invent the field of large-area, quantitative ecology. Steve was also my MS and PhD advisor – a role that doubtless was the most fulfilling of his career. This August, Steve celebrates his retirement with a reunion of lab members and close...
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Episode 75: Yao Tandong
Yao Tandong tells Mike about realizing his long-held dream: working of the Tibetan Plateau, now as director of the Institute for Tibetan Plateau (ITP) Research (and much else besides!). For Tandong, it all began in 1978 when he was initially exposed to Tibetan glaciology. It cannot have been an...
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Episode 74: Belinda Medlyn
The land biosphere takes up a big chunk of atmospheric CO2 emissions. But how, where, and for how long remains an area of, ahem, active research. Or put another way, there’s a lot we STILL don’t know about how increased CO2 will manifest, or not, as an ongoing increase in the terrestrial uptake…
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Episode 73: Sergey Gulev
Sergey Gulev from Moscow State University grew up in the Soviet Union, forged a career as an oceanographer, and then witnessed the dissolution of much of what he and his colleagues had built. Gone were their four ocean-going ships, and the then-Russian science community was not able to capitalize...
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Episode 72: Carl Wunsch
Carl Wunsch is at the heart of many of the major advances in modern physical oceanography. The World Ocean Circulation Experiment, satellite altimetry, acoustic tomography, and Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean: all are hard to imagine without Carl’s involvement. In this…
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Episode 71: Carolina Vera
Carolina Vera from the University of Buenos Aires tells Mike about her work on the South American monsoon. Relative to the Indian and Asian Monsoon, the South American Monsoon is understudied — but equally fascinating. The bulk of the land mass is centered near the equator, amplifying the role of...
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Episode 70: Sarah Kang
Sarah Kang from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology tells Mike about her work to understand the atmospheric and oceanic dynamics that link the extratropics to the tropics. Paleoclimate research has long shown that climate perturbations with strong Northern Hemisphere imprints —...
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Episode 69: Jay Famiglietti
Jay Famiglietti from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tells Mike about taking the plunge into using the GRACE gravity-measuring satellites for hydrology research. Keep in mind, this was at a time when hydrology was viewed as noise in the gravity signal, and that Jay was just starting off as an...
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Episode 68: Maisa Rojas
Maisa Rojas from the University of Chile tells Mike about her work on regional climate modeling, paleoclimate, and the Southern Hemisphere westerlies. The story begins with Maisa’s birth in Chile, but quickly moves on to the family’s dramatic escape from Pinochet’s rebellion and immigration to...
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Episode 67: Michael Greenstone
World-famous economist Michael Greenstone tells Mike about his main professional mission: to apply the tools of economics to reduce human suffering. But that wasn’t always the case. No indeed. For many years, including all of college, Michael’s main goal in life was to have a career in the NBA....
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Episode 65: Kaitlin Naughten
Kaitlin Naughten from the University of New South Wales works on one of the most pressing issues facing modern climate science: interactions between the ocean and the vast ice shelves fringing Antarctica. Existentially, this interaction has the potential to largely determine the rate and amount…
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Episode 64: Sonia Seneviratne
I met Sonia Seneviratne from ETH Zürich at a climate conference way back in 2013. This was not long after she served as a coordinating lead author of the now-famous IPCC SREX report, which lit a spark under the field of climate extremes. Sonia tells me the back story of becoming a CLA, the…
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Episode 63: Jessica Oster
Speleothems — stalagmites, stalactites, flowstones — are a central tool for reconstructing past hydroclimate variability. But what, really, are they recording? Jessica Oster from Vanderbilt University walks Mike through the long, incredibly long, process of permitting, extracting, transporting,...
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Episode 62: Libby Barnes
Libby Barnes, like essentially no one else on Forecast, wanted to be a professor from age 12. Specifically, a physics professor. And indeed, climate science almost lost Libby to neutrinos. But an instrumentation disaster, and the associated personal mayhem in the research group, made Libby…
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Episode 61: Dan Lunt
There’s incessant talk about impostor syndrome among scientists. But paleoclimate modeler Dan Lunt from the University of Bristol actually DOES pretend to be someone he is not. Specifically, Radagast the Brown from Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Samwell Tarly from Martin’s Westeros. Madness? Only if…
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Episode 60: Andrea Dutton
Andrea Dutton from the University of Florida tells Mike about the many nuances of using corals to reconstruct past sea level. Sounds simple enough: find corals at depth z, date them to year t, and Bob’s your uncle. Yeah … no. Turns out there’s a lot more at play: 3D topography, plasticity in...
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Episode 59: Abby Swann
Abby Swann tells Mike how plants both respond to and affect climate change. Some of this seems obvious: more CO2, more photosynthesis, bigger plants. Maybe, but there’s a lot more to it: nutrient limitations (or lack thereof!), changes in respiration, stomatal conductance downregulation, drought...
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Episode 58: 11th Graduate Climate Conference
In episode 58 of Forecast, Mike talks with Henri Drake, Jennifer Carman, and Molly Keogh, three of the attendees at the 11th Graduate Climate Conference. The meeting itself is a great chance for grad students working on climate change — broadly defined — to get together with their immediate…
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Episode 57: EarthArXiv
Tom Narock and Chris Jackson tell Mike about the new EarthArXiv preprint server. The show is a bit of an oddball for Forecast, considering that the show’s usual diet is long-format interviews about a scientist’s life and research. But the launch of EarthArXiv — one of a growing series of preprint...
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Episode 56: Corinne Le Quéré
Deciphering the global carbon cycle is as fascinating as it is difficult. There are carbon fluxes in and out of the planet, all over the place, and at all time scales. Observational gaps are numerous and gaping. Uncertainties on country level emissions are increasing. Yet the global carbon budget...
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Episode 55: Joe McConnell
Most everyone you’ve heard on Forecast has a twisty career path. But Joe McConnell took an unusually circuitous route to his current role as a leading ice core scientist. Joe bombed as a dishwasher, thrived as a post-hole digger, started a consulting company as a teenager, considered anthropology...
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Episode 54: Peter Cox
In Episode 54 of Forecast, Peter Cox from the University of Exeter gives Mike the inside story about how the “emergent constraints” approach is reshaping our ability to wring every last drop of useful information from climate models. It’s a two step process. First, using climate models, establish…
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Episode 53: Julia Pongratz
In episode 53 of Forecast, Mike talks with Julia Pongratz from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology about the role of land cover and land use change in the climate system. Julia began working on the topic with an unbelievable challenge: simulating the impacts of LCLUC over the past…
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Episode 52: Marilyn Raphael
In episode 52 of Forecast, Mike and Marilyn Raphael from the University of California at Los Angeles talk about Antarctic sea ice. Arctic sea ice is, on a relative scale, well understood: observations and models show a massive decline. Antarctic sea ice is weirder. Overall, the extent of…
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Episode 51: Jérôme Chappellaz
In episode 51 of Forecast, Jérôme Chappellaz regales Mike with all manner ice core tales. The early days of discovering that methane varies hugely between glacial and interglacial states; profligate consumption of ice in the early days; the intensely competitive yet fundamentally friendly nature…
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Episode 50: Julien Emile-Geay
In episode 50 of Forecast, Julien Emile-Geay from the University of Southern California calmly presents a somewhat radical world view. Love of jazz as a means of selecting a grad school; universities as revolutionary institutions; pursuit of science as a subversive activity. Even more unusual:...
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Episode 49: Jessica Tierney
In this episode of Forecast, Jess tells Mike about the origins of the TEX86 temperature proxy — an index of membrane lipids produced by mesophilic archaea. The origins in the 1980s in extreme ocean environment; discovery of membrane production in a huge range of environments; brute force…
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Episode 48: Kevin Anchukaitis
Kevin Anchukaitis from the University of Arizona is probably best known for his work on dendroclimatology, but this is changing quickly. Now, his broader interests in the connections among history, political science, archaeology, statistics, climate modeling, and forward modeling of proxies are...
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Episode 47: Kaustubh Thirumalai
People find science for all kinds of reasons. Some are born to it, but usually not. Most people find science by bumping into it at a bar, getting help from it while fixing a flat tire, seeing it alight on a leaf, iridescent, or watching it pass by on a subway car going the other […] Forecast:...
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Episode 46: Rob Meyer
Sometimes papers in Nature are incomprehensible to anyone other than a hard-core specialist. Yes, we use press releases, News & Views, and other reporting to make the leap to our broader readership. But for bringing science to the general public, no amount of Carl Sagans, Neil deGrasse Tysons, or...
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Episode 45: Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick
The causes of heat waves are kind of like the controls on a car. We know that pressure systems, land-atmosphere interactions, and modes of variability like ENSO act to control extremes, just as we know that the steering wheel, moderated by the brake and gas pedals, controls the direction and...
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Episode 44: Sol Hsiang
The field of environmental economics in general — and climate economics in particular — is exploding. And my guest on episode 44 of Forecast, Solomon Hsiang from UC Berkeley, is helping to crack open some of the recalcitrant oyster shells of the field. How does climate influence conflict…
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Episode 43: Jennifer MacKinnon
Most of the big stuff in Earth system science arises from the small stuff. The Keeling curve is the balance between an unknowably large number of microorganisms and the cellular fixation of carbon. Clouds, covering more than half of the planet at any one time, are created at the sub-cm scale.…
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Episode 42: Gretchen Goldman
Forecast is mostly about climate science — the people who do it, and why they’re stoked about their work. But science is inevitably conducted within a political context, and Mike is a neanderthal when it comes to politics. Gretchen Goldman from the Union of Concerned Scientists, on the other…
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Episode 41: Jana Sillmann
Jana Sillmann has carved out a career working on understanding and predicting climate extremes — heat waves, heavy rainfall, atmospheric rivers. What combination of factors controls the occurrence of extremes, particularly in a changing climate? Jana and Mike hash through the underlying science —...
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Episode 40: Bill Boos
Bill Boos and I have something in common. Neither of us is much of a long-term planner, but we both like to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. For me, this approach led to a switch from academia to editing. For Bill, it led to an in-process move from Yale to UC Berkeley. Bill’s […]...
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Episode 39: Gabe Vecchi
Gabe Vecchi is a world-famous atmospheric scientist with a pretty simple attitude to making progress: In order to do something, you need to do it. And Gabe’s done a lot! He was born in Boston but grew up in Venezuela, and witnessed the country’s dissolution from an intellectual magnet for South...
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Episode 38: Jory Lerback
Today’s interview, with Jory Lerback from the University of Utah, has both nothing and everything to do with climate science. I think for the first time in the history of Forecast, no one mentioned the word climate. Instead, we talked about Jory’s recent Nature Comment entitled “Journals invite…
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Episode 37: Nerilie Abram
Alternative facts are much in the news. The idea is, of course, ridiculous. Some things are clearly facts. Pizza is delicious; cake makes me happy; serving a white Burgundy at 40 F is an abomination; you should never wear a backpack with a suit. Much of climate science, however, is not what you...
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Episode 36: Noah Diffenbaugh
I like doing Forecast for a lot of reasons. I get my fingers into the entrails of science in a way that isn’t really possible from reading submissions. I hear some appalling stories, off the record. I’m caught up in the enthusiasm of scientists for what they’re dreaming of discovering in the next...
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Episode 35: Josh Willis
Normally my show notes are carefully reasoned, sober discussions of the remarkable pathways forged by inspirational scientists, and their subsequent breakthroughs. Not this time. This time, I will begin with a headline about today’s Forecast victim guest, Josh Willis, that might be suitable for…
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Episode 34: San Francisco restaurants
My post on restaurant picks for AGU 2016 was one of the more popular blog entries to date on Forecast, so I thought I’d add a quick podcast on the same topic. I got together with two of my colleagues from Nature Chemical Biology, Mirella Bucci and Grant Miura, to talk through some of my […]...
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Episode 33: Laura Wilcox
Inequities exist throughout the scientific enterprise. Women continue to be progressively underrepresented at more senior career stages. Access to excellent research universities is unequally distributed. Representation by many minority groups is low. Nature Geoscience has an entire Focus issue…
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Episode 32: Jon Foley
Jonathan Foley is the Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences, the previous director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin. In many ways, Jon is...
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Episode 31: Bronwyn Wake
How, exactly, does one get to be an editor of a Nature-branded journal? What do we do? How do we decide what to publish? And what’s up with all our journals? In this episode of Forecast, I hash out these issues with Bronwyn Wake, the chief editor of Nature Climate Change. But don’t worry … if […]...
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Episode 30: Daniel Aldana Cohen
Climate scientists are used to the idea of climate mitigation. But few are involved in the nitty-gritty of what climate mitigation might look like at the local or even neighborhood level. Daniel Aldana Cohen from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania is digging into the...
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Episode 29: Amelia Shevenell
Amelia Shevenell from the University of South Florida specializes in big ideas about paleoceanography and the Antarctic Ice Sheet. She’s also keen to push the methodological envelope, which can be risky if things go pear shaped. For Amelia, though, the work resulted in papers in Science (Mg/Ca)…
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Episode 28: Scott St. George
Tree rings are one of the key tools in paleoclimate research, and might seem like nothing more than big, woody thermometers. But tree-ring science is ever evolving, constantly debated, and — while it has answered some major questions — still grapples with making the connection to broader climate...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Michael White has been Nature's editor for climate science since 2008. He ran Forecast for three years, in an effort to provide an inside view into climate science - and the amazing people doing climate science. Each interview documents one person's pathway to climate research, and a massively geeky discussion of his/her work.
HOSTED BY
Michael White
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How many episodes does Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White have?
Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White currently has 77 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White about?
Michael White has been Nature's editor for climate science since 2008. He ran Forecast for three years, in an effort to provide an inside view into climate science - and the amazing people doing climate science. Each interview documents one person's pathway to climate research, and a massively...
How often does Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White release new episodes?
Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White has 77 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White?
Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White is created and hosted by Michael White.
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