Now that the academic summer is over, I have left Australia and returned home to Canada. It is great to be with my friends and family again, but I really miss the ocean and the giant monster bats. Not to mention the lab: after four months as a proper scientist, it’s very hard to be an undergrad again.
While I continue to settle in, move to a new apartment, and recover from jet lag (which is way worse in this direction!), here are a few pieces of reading to tide you over:
Scott Johnson from Ars Technica wrote a fabulous piece about climate modelling, and the process by which scientists build and test new components. The article is accurate and compelling, and features interviews with two of my former supervisors (Steve Easterbrook and Andrew Weaver) and lots of other great communicators (Gavin Schmidt and Richard Alley, to name a few).
I have just started reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. So far, it is one of the best pieces of science writing I have ever read. As well as being funny and easy to understand, it makes me excited about areas of science I haven’t studied since high school.
Finally, my third and final paper from last summer in Victoria was published in the August edition of Journal of Climate. The full text (subscription required) is available here. It is a companion paper to our recent Climate of the Past study, and compares the projections of EMICs (Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity) when forced with different RCP scenarios. In a nutshell, we found that even after anthropogenic emissions fall to zero, it takes a very long time for CO2 concentrations to recover, even longer for global temperatures to start falling, and longer still for sea level rise (caused by thermal expansion alone, i.e. neglecting the melting of ice sheets) to stabilize, let alone reverse.
