By LuAnne Thompson

Director, University of Washington Program on Climate Change
Walters Professor of Oceanography, Adjunct Professor Physics and Atmospheric Sciences

This past week has been a whirlwind and I feel like I am finally catching my breath and wanted to share my reflections on what role the Program on Climate Change should play both on and off campus over the next year.  After spending a week in France discussing the intricacies of measuring and interpreting sea level from radar altimetry and reconnecting with colleagues around the world, I came back to a changed landscape in United States in support for climate science and for limiting anthropogenic climate change.   My first response was personal, I feared for my husband’s job who has focused on measuring long term changes in the ocean for his whole career, and for myself because I am a woman leader.  These somewhat irrational fears then turned to thoughts of the time I spent over the last five months writing five proposals to NASA and NSF and whether funding for earth science research is in jeopardy.

Over the past few days, I have been thinking about where I should focus my efforts over the next year.  Initially I decided that I should say yes to more requests for outreach talks.  But I have realized that I have a larger role here at UW.  Part of that role is to continue to work across campus to include discussions of climate change in our collective work at UW, both in the classroom and in research.  For instance, as we have worked on the mission and vision for the UW wide Population Health Initiative, I have insisted that climate change cannot be ignored in discussions of environmental sustainability, health and socioeconomic inequities.

Most recently, I was prompted by PCC graduate students to have an open conversation about the results of the election and what we should do as individual climate scientists and collectively as a community.  While there is no simple answer to this, I believe that there are ways that we can enhance the impact of the work that we do.  The Graduate Certificate in Climate Science was designed by Chris Bretherton (former Director of the PCC) to have our work go beyond publication in peer reviewed journals by requiring a communicating climate science capstone.  Many successful projects have engaged multiple people in our community from high school science teachers to National Park Rangers.  But maybe we need to work hard to push beyond our comfort zones and more directly engage with people who are skeptical that the climate has changed, or believe the changes that we have experienced in the last several decades is not anthropogenic in origin.  This requires us to reach beyond familiar and friendly audiences.  We already have examples of this with Amy Brodbeck’s Capstone project where through several videos has told compelling stories about how climate change is impacting individual Alaskans.  We could also consider creating projects in collaboration with advocacy groups such as Climate Solutions, 350.org, or the Sierra Club.

The larger problem that we face is that we have not communicated how science is done: that is that scientists are skeptics at heart.  We all question our results repeatedly, we are compelled to do additional model runs, laboratory experiments, and acquire new data sets.  This is why scientific papers are years in the making.  And yet, we all feel like we have to be an expert in all areas of climate science in order to be able to answer any question that is thrown to us.  Maybe part of the answer is to communicate why we trust the scientific enterprise, and why the results of hundreds of scientific peer reviewed papers back up what we know about climate change science.

We will move through the next years together as a community.  I am proud to say that I am part of the climate science enterprise both here at UW and in the world.