Humans have faced a series of national and global environmental challenges in the past half-century, including smog, the use of lead in gasoline, ozone depletion, and much more. This talk reveals how combinations of science, public policy, industry participation, and the engagement of citizens succeeded in addressing past environmental challenges. Finally, I probe how the lessons learned help us understand how to better manage today’s environmental problems, including climate change.

About the Speaker
Susan Solomon is internationally recognized as a leader in atmospheric science, particularly for her insights in explaining the cause of the Antarctic ozone "hole." She and her colleagues have made important contributions to understanding chemistry/climate coupling, including leading research on the irreversibility of global warming linked to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, and on the influence of the ozone hole on the climate of the southern hemisphere. Her current focus is on issues relating to both atmospheric chemistry and climate change

The media sometimes portrays the question of the human role in climate as a central debate in Climate Science, despite the strong scientific consensus that human emissions of greenhouse gases are affecting climate. At the same time, the scientific community is far from monolithic on many questions of societal relevance, and these debates are largely ignored in the media. Here we highlight one of those debates: the importance of the ocean for climate

It is often assumed that the ocean plays a central role in climate, both in the response to long-term human alterations, as well as in natural fluctuations. The implications of this are farreaching for the science of climate and climate change: For instance, suppose the ocean does play a central role in climate. Then we need a complete view of its current state, and the ocean must be fully treated in climate models in order to predict the climate of the coming season, year, or even decade. On the other hand, if the ocean does not strongly affect climate, such oceanic observations and dynamics may be unnecessary for prediction systems. Dr. Clement will review current debates on the importance of the ocean for predicting climate, where its importance is paramount (e.g. the equatorial Pacific and the Southern ocean), and where it is questionable (the North Atlantic).

After her lecture, a panel of experts on the ocean, atmosphere and climate from the UCLA Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Department will be convened to discuss Dr. Clement’s points. The audience will gain insight into how Climate Science is conducted and how the field must evolve over the coming years to fulfill its mandate to predict the behavior of the climate system.

Amy Clement teaches courses on atmospheric science, physics of climate, science policy, and climate and society. She mentors graduate students and postdoctoral scientists in the atmospheric and ocean sciences, and she prepares her students to go on to successful careers where they can make an impact in their fields. She enjoys changing the way people think about the Earth and its climate through her teaching and mentoring.

Amy Clement earned her Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Columbia College, and Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, both at Columbia University in New York.  She did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, France, and has been a faculty member at the Rosenstiel School since 2001. Amy Clement has made a mark in her field by motivating scientists to think more about the role of the tropics in paleoclimate and encouraging them to simplify the climate system in order to better understand its fundamental processes.

Fingerprint research seeks to improve understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. The basic strategy is to search for model-predicted patterns of climate change (“fingerprints”) in observed climate records. Fingerprinting exploits the fact that individual influences on climate have unique signatures. These unique features are clearer in detailed patterns of climate change than in global-mean climate information. Fingerprint methods are a powerful tool for separating human and natural climate-change signals. The results of fingerprint research provide scientific support for findings of a “discernible human influence” on global climate.

Twenty years ago, at the time of publication of the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), most fingerprint studies relied on surface temperature. Critics of this work argued that a human-caused fingerprint should be identifiable in many different aspects of the climate system – not in surface thermometer records alone. Fingerprint researchers responded to this justifiable criticism by moving beyond early “temperature only” studies, interrogating modeled and observed changes in rainfall, water vapor, river runoff, snowpack depth, atmospheric circulation, salinity, and many other climate variables. The message of this body of work is that human-caused fingerprints are ubiquitous in the climate system.

The Yanai lecture affords an opportunity to look back at the scientific and personal lessons learned from over two decades of efforts to fingerprint the climate system – and to tell the story of how the scientific community identified a human-caused warming signal.

Ben Santer is an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). His research focuses on such topics as climate model evaluation, the use of statistical methods in climate science, and identification of natural and anthropogenic “fingerprints” in observed climate records. Santer’s early research on the climatic effects of combined changes in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols contributed to the historic “discernible human influence” conclusion of the 1995 Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His recent work has attempted to identify anthropogenic fingerprints in a number of different climate variables, such as tropopause height, atmospheric water vapor, the temperature of the stratosphere and troposphere, ocean heat content, and ocean surface temperatures in hurricane formation regions.

Santer holds a Ph.D. in Climatology from the University of East Anglia, England. After completion of his Ph.D. in 1987, he spent five years at the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, where he worked on the development and application of climate fingerprinting methods. In 1992, Santer joined LLNL’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison.

Santer served as convening lead author of the climate-change detection and attribution chapter of the 1995 IPCC report. His awards include the Norbert Gerbier–MUMM International Award (1998), a MacArthur Fellowship (1998), the U.S. Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award (2002), a Distinguished Scientist Fellowship from the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (2005), a Fellowship of the American Geophysical Union (2011), and membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2011). He recently visited the Juneau Icefield in Alaska, and enjoys rock-climbing, mountaineering, and exploring the beautiful state of California with his wife Kris.