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 millennium. Now her interests encompass geoengineering, climate […]

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 Antarctic sea ice is increasing, slightly. But […]

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 of the field; the ever-present need to take scientific risks; documentary film […]

In episode 50 of Forecast, Julien Emile-Geay from the University of Southern California calmly presents a somewhat radical world view. Love of jazz as a means of selecting a grad school; universities as revolutionary institutions; pursuit of science as a subversive activity. Even more unusual: considering data and models not as separate entities, but as […]

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 discovery of the index; the inevitable struggles to […]

Kevin Anchukaitis from the University of Arizona is probably best known for his work on dendroclimatology, but this is changing quickly. Now, his broader interests in the connections among history, political science, archaeology, statistics, climate modeling, and forward modeling of proxies are increasingly mirrored within the broader field of late Holocene paleoclimate research. Now, it’s […]

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 […]

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 Bill Nyes is going to get […]

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 velocity of the car. But […]

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, migration and economic productivity? We talk through […]

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. And, increasingly, we are realizing […]

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 hand, knows a lot about science policy. Gretchen […]

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 — including the agonizingly slow pace of model development — and how […]

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 […]

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 America into a dystopian […]

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 too few women to referee“. Jory’s work […]

Alternative facts are much in the news. The idea is, of course, ridiculous. Some things are clearly facts. Pizza is delicious; cake makes me happy; serving a white Burgundy at 40 F is an abomination; you should never wear a backpack with a suit. Much of climate science, however, is not what you would call […]

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 decade. But, […]

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 The Onion: Idiot leftist scientist thrown out of school, concludes that warm […]

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 […]

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 on accessibility, or the lack thereof. The barriers to entry obviously vary hugely among nations. Just […]

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 one of the foremost thinkers and actors about the […]

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 […]

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 politics and sociology of urban carbon emissions. A […]

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) and Nature (TEX86). The method, while of course […]