Upholding Commitment to Quality Climate Science Across Generations and Finding Our Paths Forward

Public perception and overall understanding of climate change have evolved immensely over the past two decades. Significant improvements are largely due to the efforts of today’s senior scientists that have been joined by the work of middle-career scientists. Now, a new generation of early career scientists is entering the workforce. While maintaining the same high level of scientific rigor, we are tasked with bringing our collective areas of research forward to combat the climate crisis we are now facing. In this presentation, I will discuss my research on volcanoes and climate interactions, a sub-area of Earth system and atmospheric science that I chose to pursue with the goal of reducing model uncertainties and improving climate model fidelity. Large volcanic eruptions exert a radiative cooling effect on Earth’s climate, but unraveling and predicting their impacts is far more difficult than one might think. Volcanoes have presented complex challenges for climate model hindcasts. The difficulty of properly simulating stratospheric volcanic aerosols has at times led to snags in trust in climate models and climate science. The warming hiatus that was not captured by CMIP3 projections can be partly attributed to the exclusion of smaller volcanic eruptions from models. Jerry Meehl, a key figure in climate science and a lifelong mentor of mine, was involved in uncovering this issue. Significant improvements have been made in CMIP6 and CMIP7, but there is more that needs to be done. I will offer specific strategies for how upcoming and current early career scientists can contribute to critically reducing climate model uncertainty. This includes revisiting older assumptions and replicating laboratory findings with updated techniques. Achieving these goals will require the invaluable knowledge and experience of later career researchers, who must be actively involved in this collective effort. I will propose strategies that other mentors, professors, and later career scientists can take to propel the younger generations of scientists forward, just as Jerry has helped me.