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Today, I think what's inspiring
is two things, one is the people I work with
my collaborators, grad students, postdoctoral fellows
are extraordinarily wonderful people to
to work with they're brilliant, they're motivated, they're dedicated,
they're accomplished, they're just the
cream of the crop, and in another sense it's because I work on climate change
and climate change is a very real, very practical very
serious problem for the world. So it's different from working on say stellar
evolution which is interesting but doesn't have any
immediate consequences for the world, and so
my hope is that, together with many many other climate scientists and let other
people who care about climate,
I can make a difference and
I can help the world to cope with a problem that is
very real, very serious, and going to get worse.
I was just fascinated by weather, and I thought, I would probably become a weather forecaster
and when I went to college I majored in meteorology
and in fact, I was growing up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC
and I just looked around
in choosing a college and tried to pick the nearest one
that was really good in meteorology, I pick Penn State.
Which was then, is now, a really
predominant excellent school in meteorology.
A lot of the people who are weather forecasters have Pen State meteorology degrees.
I had summer jobs working for what was then called the weather bureau
I worked at Washington's National Airport one summer, I remembered
taking weather observations plotting weather maps. I once closed down the whole airport
because the visibility dropped below a certain threshold and
it was up to me to decide when that happened, so it was a great feeling of power for a kid.
I'm what's know in the field as a climate modeler, that is I work on computer
simulations of the climate system.
That was a step away from wanting to be a weather forecaster,
of course, while I was in graduate school I learned what research is
and I think, the biggest step
after that choice, was deciding to come to Scripps Institution of Oceanography
and that happened when I was 38.
For me it was a remarkable transition, I came here at age 38
never haven written for proposal in my life, I was started as a full professor, I
was at the top of the academic ladder.
starting out, and very naive. I didn't know what a proposal was
but I quickly learned that what I was doing, I had traded the
resources of my previous places for the freedom, the autonomy
and the risk if you like,
of deciding what I wanted to do, finding the funding
and being my own boss and
for me I just like chocolate better. I mean it really worked for me.
People have spent their whole lives at wonderful careers in block funded
federal labs. But for me, I discovered when I got here
in early middle age you might say, at age 38, that
I was born to be a university professor.
I've been extremely lucky in many ways
and one of the way is that my career has spanned the time
of huge growth in this field and I can tell the numbers.
When I was a grad student in the early nineteen-sixties my PhD is from 1966.
When I was a grad student, there were 14 universities in the US that gave PhD's
in atmospheric science or meteorology, and today there are more than 70.
And so there's been, in my career, a five-fold increase
in the number of universities. So for example, Scripps at the time
didn't have an atmospheric science curriculum or didn't have atmospheric scientists
on the staff, I was the first on hired to the faculty.
So it's one of the places involved in the growth from 14 to
to 70. And that growth, with the number of universities involved
was paralleled by growth in faculty positions and in research dollars
and in resources are all kinds, so
I've just seen a huge explosion
in the resources available.
Which is not going to happen again, there's not going to be five times as many
there's not going to be 350 universities if you look forty years fifty years from now.
Well, I would say examine your motivation, what's driving you?
You have to be passionate about it, because your going to be
competing for everything.
For jobs, for resources, for proposals and so on.
Your going to be computing with people who are probably just as smart as you or smarter
and have just the same work ethic and so on
but who are absolutely passionate about it. Who would rather be doing this than anything else.
And a so, everybody that's any good in this field works a whole lot
more than 40 hours a week.
I don't know how you be a successful scientist at 40 hours/week but I don't
think you can be a successful
movie actor or for anything else
if you think of it as a job so it's a passion
so it's a little bit like what
I and, I suppose many parents tell their children
find out what you love to do and after that find out a way to get
somebody to pay you to do it.
And I think, in terms of practical advice, if you want to have
a shot at doing research, go
and first of all get very
well-prepared in basic science, math and physics and chemistry.
The other thing I tell people is English, that this is a field
in which communication matters.
The last thing that scientists do
is give talks and
present papers and publish
But, if the sciences attract you,
you a young person trying to decide what to do in life,
Then I think it's good to
consider earth sciences because you
are going to be dealing with things that matter to people.
Your gonna be dealing with things that affect the environment that affect the economy
that have implications for people's lives
and so for example, I worked on weather forecasting for a long time and I think
in a very tiny way, I and many many many other people helped make weather
forecasts today better than they were
fifty years ago, I was a student
and that's a great feeling because weather forecasts matter to people, weather forecasts
save lives for example weather forecasts
help farmers and airlines cope with
with weather emergencies and
so your really having an effect on real people
and on the planet and
to me that's very rewarding