Kerry Emanuel’s Visit

Hooray, Thanksgiving break is finally here at Penn State; we don’t have any classes at all this week! Once the Turbulence midterm exam finished back on Thursday (woohoo! I even think I did reasonably well too), it was essentially break for me. I’m not going home to Wisconsin at all, though. I’m staying right here in State College all week, primarily to get a fair bit of studying done for the candidacy exam (boo, hiss). Oh well. There are also a few other things I really should take care of this week, such as getting around to putting my old laptop up for sale on eBay. I’ve already dawdled entirely too long with that.
Happy Birthday Mom! You should have the deer campers treat you to dinner today. 🙂 And Happy Birthday to Kerrie as well! Also, congratulations to Jon & Steph for completing the Philadelphia Marathon yesterday!
I woke up Sunday morning to a great surprise: the first accumulating snowfall of the season! Everything’s all white and pretty, and I love it. I didn’t even mind scraping off the nearly 1 inch of wet snow off my car at 8am, or the additional 2-3 inches a bit after noon when I was done playing piano for both church services yesterday morning. Call me crazy if you like, but from November to February I absolutely love snow (usually by March winter’s gotten old and I’m more than ready for spring). Too bad it won’t stick around though, it’s supposed to be back up to the low 60s by Wednesday.
Chris & Amber came up to visit from North Carolina this weekend, and it was good to see them for a bit at Jeff [Frame], Vic & Bob’s place on Saturday watching some college football. I wish I could’ve gone bowling in the evening too, but alas, piano practicing prevented me from being able to do so. It’s too bad they couldn’t stick around for the meteo grad Thanksgiving dinner yesterday either, with Jeff, Vic, Bob, Lindsay, Nat, Robert & me. Mmmm, so much good food… I was so stuffed, but I’d expect nothing less after a Thanksgiving dinner!
Penn State’s football regular season is now over. The Nittany Lions snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against the Spartans of Michigan State, losing 35-31 after holding a 24-7 lead in the 3rd quarter. The sad part of it all is that just about everyone saw it coming and felt it pretty much inevitable that we’d lose the whole game, even when we were ahead. At least I got that vibe, anyway. So now Penn State gets to wait to find out what bowl game they’ll be playing in in a month or so. Since they lost this weekend, the two most likely options become either the Champs Sports Tangerine Bowl in Orlando on 28 Dec or the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio on 29 Dec. If they had won they might’ve been able to get an invitation to a New Year’s Day bowl game (either the Capital One Citrus Bowl or the Outback Bowl), but an 8-4 record isn’t good enough for that.
But hey, at least Penn State beat Michigan State in something that actually matters, the 14th Annual PSU-MSU Blood Donor Challenge. I gave blood early on in the challenge, and PSU was behind for most of it, but came roaring back to win 2,170-1,935 at the end. It’s important to keep perspective on these things, that while people might be disappointed that the football team lost a game, many lives will be saved from the donated blood.
Back on Friday I also went to my first ever women’s volleyball game here at PSU. I’d heard they were pretty entertaining (and free for PSU students), so I went with Jeff [Grabon] to watch the match between #1 Penn State and #9 Wisconsin to the raucous Rec Hall (it’d be awesome if the basketball team still played their games in that tiny, noisy gym!). (We also saw Drs Shirer, Lamb and Verlinde at the game too, they’re big volleyball fans.) It took a little while to get used to the rules, which were a bit different than in backyard volleyball. First off, the first team to 30 points wins the set (instead of 15). Second, the NCAA uses rally scoring, so that a point is scored off every serve, including service errors (instead of being able to score only when your team is serving). Third, if a serve grazes the net and goes over, it’s still good (instead of being a fault and giving up serve to the other team). All in all it was pretty fun, even though there were an abnormally large amount of service errors for both teams. It was a pretty exciting, tight match throughout too, as Penn State defeated Wisconsin 3-1 (30-28, 30-22, 24-30, 30-25). With their win over Illinois on Saturday night as well, Penn State’s record is 26-2 overall and 18-0 in Big Ten play. Not too shabby! If #1-ranked Penn State makes it to the Sweet 16/Elite 8 of the NCAA tournament (which will be held here at PSU), I think I just might go to another match!
As I mentioned in my last post, MIT professor Kerry Emanuel came to Penn State on Thursday. I had written that he’s been in a few high-profile tiffs with other prominent scientists who don’t share his view on whether humans are the primary cause for global warming, but after his visit I’m not so sure that’s entirely true. While Dr Emanuel certainly does believe that humans are the primary cause behind global warming, he did not come off as an alarmist at all; in fact, he was quite reasonable and fairly soft-spoken. That, and he’s clearly the opposite of a know-nothing blowhard.
I would say that by and large, it is the media and not the scientists who are responsible for irresponsible proclamations about global warming. Of course there are exceptions, but there are several factors that might contribute to sloppy reporting. Many “science reporters” probably have very little science background, given how inept science education is in the American education system today, but hopefully they at least have a bachelor’s degree in a scientific field. In any case, when reporters have to translate scientific findings that are couched in scientific jargon in scientific meetings or publications into “normal” language, much gets lost, whether intentionally or unintentionally. This is partly due (sometimes) to reporters not fully understanding what the scientists are saying, and partly due to many reporters being required to write to the lowest common denominator, so that somebody with absolutely no science education or background can have a chance of understanding it (which goes back to the lack of adequate science education). As a result, certain findings are selectively included in media, and are often sensationalized so they can sell more newspapers or magazines. That’s how there can get to be media reports of contentious wars of words between people like Drs Emanuel and Gray. Maybe they happened; maybe they didn’t. Or maybe some sort of disagreement happened, but it was blown out of proportion by a sensationalizing media. A useful attitude toward most media, especially in today’s day and age is, “Wouldn’t that be something? I wonder if it’s true…”
Anyway, a group of us grad students met with Dr Emanuel for an hour before colloquium, and we each briefly told him about our areas of research, and after he asked us what we think has been successful here at PSU about making a good graduate community, we asked him about how he transitioned from being a grad student to becoming a professor. And he had some really interesting things to say: he said that the very nature of a career in academia has changed significantly in the last 30 years or so. He said that when he started out, the reason for choosing an academic career over a business career was not the money, because professors didn’t make nearly as much as many businessmen. The reason, rather, was that the lifestyle was much more relaxed in academia; people weren’t nearly as busy, didn’t have to do nearly as much administrative crap, and simply had time to think and ponder ideas in their office. Dr Emanuel has observed a change though, in that nowadays while it’s still far less lucrative to choose academia for a career, the workload and time commitment is now just as much, if not more, than business. In his view, this is driving a lot of the best talent, minds and researchers away from academia, because they decide that if they’re gonna be working 60+ hours/week, why not go into business and get paid a bunch more while being a workaholic? Several of us thought he hit the nail right on the head. I told Dr Emanuel that I agreed with him completely, that I have virtually no desire currently to be a professor at a major research university, with responsibilities to be simultaneously a full-time teacher and a full-time researcher. If I decide I want to do research, I’d rather go to a research lab (like NOAA or NCAR here in the US, or CSIRO or BMRC in Australia, for instance), and if I decide I want to teach, I’d rather go to a small liberal arts college (like Gustavus!) where the focus is still on educating students. I don’t care if I’d be making less money; I’d rather have a higher quality of life and have time for things other than work.
Kerry Emanuel’s colloquium presentation, “Hurricanes and Global Warming,” was also very good, one of the best I’ve heard in my time at Penn State (112 Walker was also *packed*). He presented quite a bit of interesting research, some of which I’ll summarize here to the best of my recollection (and for those of you who were there, please correct me via comment or whatever if I’ve misspoken), since hurricanes and global warming are topics of such popular interest. He had several metrics that he uses which indicate that hurricanes have become much more powerful over the last ~20-30 years (following a dip from the 1940s-1970s, which followed a rise from about 1900-1940, but the overall trend since 1900 is a marked increase), and that the overall intensity (by his metrics) match up reasonably well with yearly variations in average SSTs (sea surface temperatures) over the last century (except for a blip from 1939-1945, when maritime radio communication, including of weather reports, was kept to a minimum because of the war), though SSTs are far from the only factor influencing hurricane intensity. Then he presented some new findings in palaeotempestology (I’d never heard of that word or field of study before, apparently it’s pretty new — it’s the study of past storms by examining the geologic record, such as beach cores from coastal lagoons) that indicate, in addition to a multi-decadal time-scale that we’ve been able to observe this century, the last ~100 years have been relatively active (possibly connected to the intensity increase in that same time frame?), much more so than the calm period for the ~1000 years prior to that, and comparable to the active period in the preceding 1000-2000 years before that. And perhaps the most interesting part of his talk was the last bit, where he investigated some of the feedbacks that tropical cyclones (TC, same thing as hurricanes/typhoons) have on climate; most current studies have only investigated the feedbacks that climate has on TCs, but he emphasized that TCs also have an impact on the climate. It’s well-known that SSTs are markedly cooler in the wake of a TC, due to colder water from below being mixed up to the surface, and warm surface water being mixed below. (The colder water that gets mixed up to the surface is also nutrient-rich, leading to explosions of plankton populations, which in turn draws fish to the region — do those weather-induced biological cycles have an impact on the climate system? Nobody’s really researched that yet.) Well, he notes that while the surface temps recover and re-warm, the sub-surface water stays warm — meaning the oceans have a local net input of heat from tropical cyclones. As this heat accumulates, the earth system naturally regulates itself by transporting the heat poleward, in the form of ocean currents. Therefore, Dr Emanuel is hypothesizing that tropical cyclones are in fact the main driver of the thermohaline circulation (the worldwide system of ocean currents that move warm water poleward and cold water equatorward). That was a very new and revolutionary theory to just about everybody in the room, as the current prevailing theory in oceanography is that the thermohaline circulation is ultimately caused by the moon — tidal forces causing internal waves which break on underwater topography and lead to mixing, if I recall correctly what he said. Climate prediction models simply do not account for this effect of tropical cyclones on climate. It’s not that they resolve or treat the process poorly, they don’t include it at all! Inclusion of this effect would have *huge* ramifications on climate model predictions, though it’s unclear at this point what that would be, since the atmosphere is a chaotic, nonlinear system. It’ll be *very* interesting to follow how this new theory is accepted and/or criticized.
Well, onto studying. After a lunch break. 🙂