Weathering Politics & Climate Connections with Dr. Scott Weaver

In this episode of the Everything Weather podcast, Kyle David interviews Dr. Scott Weaver, the Founder and Chief Science Officer for CLIMET Consulting. Dr. Weaver shares his extensive journey through various roles, including being the former White House Executive Director of Meteorology and working with various government organizations. The discussion covers his early interest in weather, his diverse experiences in meteorology and climate science, his significant contributions to policy and infrastructure standards, and his recent foray into climate consulting. The episode also features fun segments, along with in-depth conversations on the adaptation gap, interdisciplinary challenges, and the future of climate science and policy.

Dr. Scott Weaver's Socials & Website:
CLIMET Consulting: https://climetconsulting.com/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/ClimateWeave
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-weaver-983b6210/

We want to hear from you!

Have a question or comments? You can text us using the link above or email us at everythingweatherpodcast@gmail.com.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Everything Weather Podcast! We hope you enjoyed it and found the content valuable. 

About the Everything Weather Podcast

A weekly podcast where we talk with people about the weather world, explore and discuss everything weather and the many things that connect to it, and have a little fun along the way. The podcast is hosted and produced by Kyle David, a meteorologist and digital science content producer based in New Jersey.

Follow us on social media!
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter/X
Threads
TikTok
YouTube

Transcript

Welcome & Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Everything Weather Podcast, where we talk with people about the weather world, explore and discuss everything weather, and have a little fun along the way. I'm your host, Kyle David, and today on the podcast, we're excited to have Dr. Scott Weaver. Dr. Weaver is the founder and chief science officer for climate consulting. He is also the former White House Executive Director of Meteorology and currently an associate affiliate professor at the University of Maryland. Hello, Dr. Weaver, and welcome to the Everything Weather Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hey Kyle, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Yeah, I'm looking forward to our conversation about your very diverse experience in weather and climate.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Looking forward to it. I love talking about this kind of stuff.

Weather Would You Rather

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Absolutely. And before we get into it, we've got our first fun game for you. Would you rather have a picnic inside with no air conditioning or outside during the rain?

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Oh, definitely outside during the rain.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Would it matter the m the amount of rain? Like what what's the threshold to put you back inside?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

I love air conditioner. So it would have to be something, some kind of rain rate that's approaching really uncomfortability, right? Otherwise, I'm fine with just frolicking, playing in the rain. I got a couple kids. They love, you know, puddles. They they watch Peppa Pig uh when they were younger and they would try to dance in the puddle. So I'd I'd probably be with them outside until it just became uh a situation where it was so uncomfortable or visibility was a problem or the hamburgers got too wet. I think that might be an issue.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

So you so hamburgers your choice of uh picnic food.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Uh it just came, you know what? I had one yesterday, so I think it just it just and I don't eat them often, so I think it just came, it just came to the top of my head. But probably more like turkey sandwiches with a really nice uh spicy mustard with a little tomato. That would probably actually be what would happen, but you get the point.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

All right, your next one. Would you rather jump in a giant puddle of rain or a giant pile of snow?

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Oh, that's good. Well, definitely a giant pile of snow, and that will probably become more of a frequent pining, if you will, because I've moved from an area that does get snow to an area that gets no snow. So I'm sure at some point in the near future I'm gonna be missing the snow. So I'd have to go with the jumping in the pile of snow.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

I'll join you with that because also like you don't know what's in the puddle and you don't know how deep it goes. Good point. All right, would you rather carry an umbrella every day or wear winter boots year-round?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Yeah, I'm more of a sneakers kind of person, so wearing boots year-round probably wouldn't be all that comfortable. It's pretty easy to just carry an umbrella. You get one of those small ones, you put it in the side pocket of your backpack, you're good to go.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

I mean, then you're always prepared too. You can have like a small umbrella with you at all times and not notice it.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

These are good brain teasers, right? You gotta think of the strategy for your answer.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Definitely, yes. I got two more for you. Would you rather experience thunderstorms every week or blizzards every week?

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Well, definitely thunderstorms. I'm a sucker for convection. Uh especially I live in Florida now, so I believe Florida's the lightning capital of the world. So I'm getting my fill of thunderstorms, and a blizzard is so large scale that you can't really see it. And not to mention it by definition, you probably have whiteout conditions, right? Whereas thunderstorms, they're smaller, and so sometimes off in the distance, you get a pr a side view of it, you get the profile view. And to me, there's just nothing more beautiful than that.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

That's true. But what if thunder snow was on the table? Would you still take thunderstorms every week or the blizzards with the thunder snow?

SPEAKER_01 3:53

I'd have to still go with the thunderstorms. Again, just because of the visual aspect of it, right? There's nothing like seeing, especially when they're you can see the setup where you have the budding thunderstorm, the mature stage, and then the dying one. Like sometimes you can actually see the life cycles, just like you would see in an intro to meteorology textbook. And so to me, that just nothing beats that.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah, literally, I think my intro to meteorology or a couple of my textbooks have that like textbook image, no pun intended. All right, one more for you, and I feel like I know which way you're gonna go with it. But would you rather experience a winter without snow or a summer without hot days?

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Which tough one. I'm gonna have to go with the summer with no hot days, even though I like the summer. When I did live in the north for most of my life, if we didn't get snow during a winter, which does happen every so often, it was pretty disappointing, right? So I think I could deal with the summer of lower temperatures because it's you still have all the light. And I'm sure when you say lower temperatures, you're not talking about 30s or anything. So I I think I'd have to go with the uh summer. That's what I would rather experience.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

That's a good choice, unfortunately. Up here in New Jersey, it's already decided for us. We get winter without snow. It's been quite a while.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

It's terrible when that happens. I know.

Dr. Weaver's Meteorological Journey

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Yeah, all right, definitely. So let's get into talking about you. So every podcast guest that I have on, I always ask them about what got them interested in the weather. So, Dr. Weaver, tell me about your weather story. What got you interested in everything weather?

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Sure. So this is like the villain origin story, right? Like what kicked you into the new era of your interests. So when I was about 12, 13 years old, the weather channel was actually it was pretty new. I'm not sure the exact date it started. It's probably several years before it was really everywhere and every home, etc. I can even remember when cable was like just coming online as a thing, cable TV, right? I I can actually remember a little bit before there we didn't have cable. So I go pretty far back. And one of the amazing things was just the satellite imagery of the hurricanes out over the Atlantic with the enhanced infrared, and that was just a new thing. And trying to understand and think about what was going on inside a hurricane, that started to get my interest flowing a little bit. Not enough to really get me hooked. Uh, but it just so happened that when I went into eighth grade that year, we did earth science. And I was very lucky to have a teacher who had his bachelor's degree in meteorology and was our science teacher. And so instead of him teaching the unit out of the book, the boring way, like, oh, here's what's in the book, here's the clouds, that kind of thing. He had access to these old, probably a little before your time, but before the internet, the National Weather Service would produce these huge maps. I want to say they were like five feet long, maybe three feet tall. They were called Difax maps. And it was essentially a map of the US with all the stations and the symbols on them. And he brought in like 15 maps. And so we paired up in groups of two, and he taught us how to decode the map. And then from decoding the map, figure out where the fronts are, the highs, the lows. And we actually we analyzed the map like you would do even when your first year of college, you start to learn how to do that. So this was way above anything I'd ever experienced. And something with the combination between the weather channel and this amazing teacher who really brought meteorology to the classroom during that part of the earth science unit and really made it come to life, it just got me hooked, those two things. And so again, you see how important teachers are, right? Especially when you're in that impressionable age. Had I had a different teacher, I'm not sure if I would have, you know, called the weather bug, if you will. So interesting there from my point of view.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Yeah, and the only reason why I've heard of those maps is because my advisor at the time at Rucker's doctor, Tony Broccoli, was talking to me about his undergraduate experience there. And he had mentioned working on these big maps, but that was for like meteorological analysis. And you got exposed to that at eighth grade. How did that feel to be able to do what the real big-time meteorologists are doing?

SPEAKER_01 7:59

It was just, it was like, wow, we're actually doing because because you're right, that's actually a really great point. The people who were working at the National Weather Service, where he got these maps, right? He knew someone there at the forecast office down in, I guess down in Mount Holly, because so this is by the way, this was all happening in Edison, New Jersey. That's where I grew up. So not far from where you are now, obviously. And that's exactly the point is that we were very early trained to do something that real meteorologists would do, right? So when you have that, and then in the summer, I'm watching the uh weather channel used to have the tropical update, and there was this really fantastic uh meteorologist. He he was an older gentleman at the time, I think his name was John Hope, and he would give the tropical update every 50 minutes past the hour. And I just learned so much because he was a scientist too, not just a TV weather person. He was the first one that started to educate you on things. It wasn't just here's the weather, here's the forecast. He talked a little bit about the why and the how, and I always found that to be really compelling as a kid.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Absolutely. I don't believe I've heard of John Hope, but there are so many people that have worked at the Weather Channel. It wouldn't surprise me if that was one of the names I forgot over time.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

This is a while ago, right? So it's quite a while ago that he was on.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Good point. Yeah. With that said, you got interested because of the big maps your eighth grade teacher brought in. You got interested because of the weather channel and John Hope. When did you realize this could be something that you do for the rest of your life or at least for your career?

SPEAKER_01 9:23

I had competing interests at the time. So it's like I got I call it the weather bug, right? I got like bit by the butt. That's what we talk about. A lot of meteorologists have this event. Maybe they went through a storm or something. A lot of us have this story where something caught our eye. But at the same time, but you're 13 years old, right? So things like rock and roll and music and these other things might also be interesting for someone of that age. And so I had a very strong interest in music as well. And being younger, I was interested in meteorology, but I didn't really think of it as a real career path. I saw people on TV, and in my head, I went, oh, if you're on TV, you're famous, and it's nearly impossible to ever be famous at anything. Although ironically, I pursued music, which people become famous for that too. So it's like my reasoning was, oh, I'll never be on TV, but for some reason I thought maybe I could take a shot at being a rock star, right? So anyway, um, I got much more into learning uh how to play uh you know music and went more in that direction for a while. But the meteorology aspect was always there. I just wasn't sure at the time if I can turn that into something. And you you have to understand back then, I couldn't just pop open a laptop and start research. Like my daughter is my age, is 13. So she's the age I was at when I got interested in this. She's interested in marine biology. She already knows so much about marine biology, even some of the technical science aspects, it would have been very difficult for me to acquire any of that kind of knowledge very easily, or even really know what career paths were or who to talk to back in the 80s. We just didn't have access to that kind of information. So I didn't really think, well, how would I turn this into a career until I was much older, right? So for a while, I pretty much pursued music as a passion. And then when I got a little bit older, like in my early 20s, I decided I started to learn a little bit more about the science, a little bit more about meteorology in general. And I thought, hey, this might be something that I could actually turn into a career that can pay the bills, but also be something exciting to do every day.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Definitely. And marine biology, that's very specific. Yeah.

unknown 11:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Just curious, would you say that she got that interest from your interest in the sciences or just somebody else?

SPEAKER_01 11:36

I actually don't know. I mean, I know where it started, but I don't know why. She became very interested in sharks. Just something about sharks, she just wanted to watch anything when she was very young, like four. She just wanted to watch any documentaries on sharks. And what a four-year-old wants to watch documentaries. That's not usually a thing, right? Something about sharks caught her, perhaps just like the weather caught me. And she just had she's just been obsessed with sharks and all kinds of marine life since then. And it's interesting you bring that up because I'm in climate, and then obviously climate influences everything, but certainly the oceans are, you know, what one of the most important, if not the most important part of the climate system, right? In terms of forcing physical climate variability, et cetera. So there's a lot of overlap there, and we we've talked about it. Just even how species react to different kinds of warming patterns or El Niños and La Niña cycles, things like that. So yeah, it it definitely overlaps.

The Intersection of Science and Policy

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Yeah, and like you said, climate and even the weather too, it it touches a whole lot of different things, not just the day to day, the week to week, but like everything with society, economics, politics, and we'll get in a little bit more about your experience with politics and stuff too, because you were involved with the White House, you were the executive director of meteorology. And on that note, I'm curious, how did you get there? That that's a pretty big title to have.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Yeah. So when you think of the White House, you think of just, oh, well, there's like these, I don't know, 20 people that probably work in the West Wing. It's more than 20, I'm sure, but you know what I'm saying? Not that many people, and they come in with the administrations, but that's actually only part of the story, right? The White House requires a lot of staffing and um very few permanent employees of that White House ecosystem. I call it the White House ecosystem because, again, what people see on TV is the White House, the West Wing, like the press secretary, the few advisors that are right there. I mean, the cabinet doesn't even isn't even at the White House most of the time. So very few people. But in reality, there's an enormous office building that's right next to the White House within the same campus. So you can you have to go through the same security check. So it's on the White House grounds that has several hundred people in it. But these people that they're working for the given administration, they're not paid by the White House per se. The way the White House staffs up for a lot of its science and policy positions and other things too, but in my world, it was the science and policy aspect, is they borrow from federal agencies, right? So, like if they need someone for this role, they send out a memo to all the federal agencies. Hey, we're looking for someone to serve to help lead meteorological efforts across the federal government to help coordinate the different agencies who do different but complementary things, et cetera, et cetera, to advance weather prediction, observational capabilities, whatever it may be. So they send this out to the agencies, and then the agencies recommend folks, or I got wind of it. So, and then you apply just like you would a job, right? You send your CV, you interview for it, and then if you get it, you're you're selected. But you're still an employee of your home agency. So I worked at an agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the time. Yeah, I worked at NOAA and NASA previously also, but at this point I was working at NIST or the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And I was leading weather disaster impact reduction efforts across the federal government from NIST. So I had some interagency experience, which I guess helped. And so, yeah, I was selected to go to the White House and serve in a role there for a while, trying to coordinate the federal agencies. And it was super interesting. I mean, the things you get to see, you're looking at it from a top-down level, looking at the agencies from outside all of them, right? And trying to coordinate them, get them to think about how they can coordinate budget activities when they go to when they go to submit their annual budgets, like I said, complementary to each other and reduce unnecessary overlap or unnecessary duplication. Now, don't get me wrong, some duplication is important. I mean, this is science after all, right? In science, it's really good to replicate things or duplicate things, or just like when we model the weather, we want more than one model or more than one run of a given model. Same kind of principle here. And so it was really interesting to just see the federal meteorological landscape instead of being buried in the technical details in an in an individual agency, which is also interesting, mind you, very interesting. So it was it was really great to get that experience to really see how the agencies work and how they think about the meteorological enterprise.

Engineering and Weather Impact Reduction

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of interesting things. And you sound interested in not only the work you did with the White House, but also with uh the National Institutes of Standards Technology. What did you do there during your time?

SPEAKER_01 16:14

So there I was director of the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program. This is a program that is mandated by Congress. So essentially, Congress writes a law, they vote on it, they pass the law called the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Act, and that law charges NIST, FEMA, NOAA, and NSF, which is the National Science Foundation, uh, to work together to coordinate to reduce impacts from weather and climate disasters. So there's a lot of work that goes into that. I mean, there's a lot of different subtopics that are under that, and we could talk for hours just about that. But one of the things that's really become interesting is the engineering community, the civil engineering community, which basically designs all of our infrastructure, uh houses, you know, homes, buildings, bridges, roads, skyscrapers, anything you could think of, right? The structural and civil engineering profession designs all of these different things. And they're using uh much older data to figure out what the risk is now. And so one of the efforts is that going on right now in that space is to better connect meteorologists and climatologists with the engineering community and try to figure out better ways that meteorological data can be used more efficiently in their standard setting procedures. So this is not something that has historically been really strong connection. Like there are pockets of people who have been working on this for a very long time, but it hasn't really bubbled up to where it needs to be, right? Which is a concerted national effort to inform design standards with better meteorological data, is the best way I could describe it.

Challenges in Adapting to Changing Climate

SPEAKER_00 17:57

So and sure, what's the importance of keeping those building standards up to date and constantly exploring them based on your weather and climate?

SPEAKER_01 18:06

So think about it. Let's say you're basing a given area's rainfall risk profile off of data that's from 1950 to 2000. They're not using data that's up to date. Uh, so they're using either old data, and then there's the issue of how do you define the risk profile in a system that's changing? So, because if it's changing, you're not in a stable system. So if you had a stable system and you could monitor that system for 50 or 100 years, like in our case, let's say for temperature, we have 170 years of pretty high quality temperature observations around the world. Let's say if that was a stable system, we would have a distribution of temperature events. Some would be really warm, some would be really cold, most would be in the middle, that kind of thing. And we would know pretty much what our risk for a given threshold would be. But if the system is changing, it's not stationary, then you have issues, right? You're never really in a stable system. And every year that goes by that you're using data in the past, you're moving away from what that system would be. And it's changing through time. So the the question is how do we both use the high quality uh observed data of the last several decades, let's say, but also take into account the fact that the climate system is changing. We know this, we monitor this, we've been measuring it for decades and decades. Especially as if you're building civil infrastructure, some of these projects are intended to remain, you know, viable for a hundred years. Well, what's the climate going to be in a hundred years, right? So you don't want to be designing it to just handle today's weather. You want to figure out, hey, what types of meteorological variables is this project going to experience? You know, what's important? Rain? Is it rain, wind? Are you an area where there's storm surge, whatever it may be? You have to figure out what those most important meteorological variables would be that might impact this particular infrastructure project. But you have to think what it may be very well into the future. Um, not that's a tricky thing to do because engineers and climate scientists think a little bit differently. And then then there's a whole industry gets skeptical about things because it's going to cost more money if you make the building codes higher, the design standards inform the building codes. It's not just a scientific conversation, it's also a policy conversation. Just like with global warming, right? There's a science conversation, and then there's a, okay, if you do agree that it's happening, what can you do about it? It's similar in this way. It's like a microcosm of that. And so there are challenges there, both scientifically and policy-wise, but it's not just an interesting problem. It's something necessary uh because we're behind the curve in our climate adaptation, right? Because we focus so much on mitigation, we're we're behind on adaptation. I mean, and even the fifth national climate assessment that came out uh a year or two ago, which shows this. It shows that the actions that we've taken in each state, it shows all the states' actions. It has a bar graph. And we've done way more on greenhouse gas mitigation than we have on adaptation. And my fear is that we're just we're just not doing enough to bolster our defenses against what's coming over the next three quarters of this century, coming up with better ways to design the buildings that you spend like over 85% of your life inside. We need to make sure that they're able to withstand all the extreme events now and in the future. And so that's a very important area of work that they're looking at. But it's one thing to develop the science that can inform that. It's an entirely different thing to then have the policy discussions because that's where cost comes in, et cetera. And sometimes there are very legitimate um issues, right? With you may have the science that says you should do this, but if it's going to cost X, but you have to make value judgments about cost, et cetera. And so that's where the politics comes in, right? Because the policy will dictate that. It's quite a different story to get a community of people who have different perspectives to agree how you should use that science. I mean, that's just how the world is these days. So always a very interesting conversation, even if you have. Some scientific backing that you're bringing to that conversation.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

And I'll just throw out a w a weather term because it perfectly describes your situation, your experience. You have people from the science world, climate, meteorology coming together with engineers, and then also people from the politics world converging on this triple point. I don't mean to throw out the weather pun, but it's a perfect description of what you were doing at the National Institute of Standards of Technology. What's the most surprising thing that you've learned from that triple point that is carried over to your role as the executive director of meteorology at the White House?

SPEAKER_01 22:40

It's all about trade-offs, right? Like I could think, as scientists, we could think like, hey, this is what we know. You people need to know about this. You know, you're the problem solvers. Here's the science. But it's not just science that gets folded into a given situation, right? There's a lot more to think about if you're making decisions for the country or if you're in a political leadership role. It could be anything. You could be making decisions for a company and you have to weigh trade-offs, right? And so the interesting thing to me was let's say 10, 15 years ago, when I was just buried in my research science, right? I had tunnel vision. I was just focused on some of these real fundamental questions about how our climate system works and how the weather events respond to changes in the overall climate. I didn't think much about what are the actual policy implications of what I'm what I'm working on. Are there policy implications, which hopefully there are, because that's really where the rubber meets the road, right? What I've learned actually is something that may sound a little bit controversial. What I've learned is that, especially in today's world, people might not believe this, that if we're talking about politics, we're talking about two sides, right? One of the really neat things I got to learn, both by working in the White House, but also I've testified in Congress three times in bipartisan hearings about weather issues, about disaster issues. And when it comes to the sort of, let's say, not hot button issues, there's a lot more collaboration and respect and even agreement amongst different political stripes when it comes to a lot of these issues. And I don't think the American public sees enough of that, like sees enough of the collaboration that actually does go on. Um, they think that the two parties just will never agree on anything. And that's mostly on the hot button issues that you see on TV at night, right? It's not necessarily on some of the day-to-day bread and butter. So I mean, there's always disagreement. But if you see something like, I mean, I'm just going by my personal experience. What I witnessed testifying in the House Science Committee is that from what I see, a lot of people on both sides of the aisle respected each other, who you could tell liked each other, and who crafted bills together to advance the US leadership in all aspects of meteorology, not just modeling or satellites, but everything. Uh coordination, you name it, all different kinds of radar, satellite, modeling, uh, our observational infrastructure, how we partner with the private sector. The private sector plays a much bigger role now than they did 10 or 20 years ago. That's changed completely. Um, but in any event, I see a lot of collaboration in that space. Now it might not be happening in other spaces, but that was surprising to me, right? Because I guess I was of the mind like, oh, they just never agree on anything, but I've seen a lot of collaboration, really good spirited work around these issues. It could always be better, but I'll take it. You know, I'll take any kind of collaboration. So that's very surprising to me.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Yeah, definitely. A lot more collaboration than people may think in terms of when they think about politics and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Yeah, yeah. When they when it comes to an issue, like there isn't a lot to be controversial here. Like we need better weather predictions. That's not usually a controversial statement, but it it it it it is because sometimes climate is there, right? Because you you can't completely dissociate weather from climate, right? They're obviously interconnected, we know this, right? But in the policy world, they are separate. Okay, that's the rub, right? Is that scientifically, when you go from short-term phenomena like today's weather to years and decades, it's a continuum, right? It's not fractured into two separate spaces, but from a policy standpoint, we do fracture that. In some ways, that could be good because it keeps some of the weather aspects out of it. That's not as politically of a hot button as climate. Uh, but sometimes it could also be bad because we're separating out our science a little bit too much. There's there's like two camps. There's like a weather and a climate camp. And I think that's that we do a disservice, right? When you when you look at the Europeans, you look at a place like the United Kingdom and their meteorological services, they keep everything under one place, right? They have weather, climate variability, and climate change housed in one entity that are together. So you have people in the same place that are working on slightly different things, but it it causes there to be more collaboration. They have one model that goes across timescales, they focus on that. Uh it's just a little bit more efficiently run because they don't separate out their weather and climate. And I'll just say that's where I came up with the name for my consultancy. It's not climate, like the way you don't spell it the regular, it's C L I for climate and then M E T for meteorology. It's climate and meteorology. So this is speaking to that, that a fractured policy produces fractured science. And I think that's an issue that we could do better on in the United States. The problem is we the the other problem we just do so much, which is great, right? Like in other words, you have NASA doing weather stuff, you have the Department of Energy, you have NOAA, you have NSF, and then you have agencies using some of this stuff like FEMA. In any event, there's a we do a lot, but that also causes us issues. You're trying to coordinate this large enterprise, whereas maybe some aspects of the European model, and when I say model, I mean model and how they approach their organization, is a little bit more efficient, but I would say we overall we do more, we bring more to the table. The problem is making it efficient and actually marshalling all those resources to be the best, right? That's what we're after here. Sometimes I take a little bit of umbrage when people say we're not the best because I think it really means it depends on your perspective. You've probably heard this, like the Europeans are better at us, right? Better than us at at weather prediction. They have a model that's better at predicting the 500 millibar height level. I I don't know if that means their entire meteorological services enterprise is better than the U.S. entire meteorological service enterprise. I mean, you you could nitpick, and and again, I'm not trying to start some like international war. I think everybody brings some great things to the table. I I mean I'm very impressed by the efficiency and the way some of the European meteorological services organize themselves. It's fantastic. We should learn a lot from that and and try to try to approach it in the same way. And and we're doing that. NOAA has been trying to develop their unified forecast system, which is trying to have a model that works across all timescales. One of the issues I saw in the White House was just the kind of fractured coordination, which is not surprising when you have such a large apparatus in the federal government with all these different agencies bringing all of these really great capabilities to the table. They just need to be coordinated better.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Yeah, and to harp on what you said earlier about your surprise of the collaboration within our government, I think we need that a little bit more on the international scale because the weather and climate affects us all.

Potential of AI in Weather Forecasting

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Yeah, and we have the World Meteorological Organization, which helps with a lot of that. They do a fantastic job. And there are liaisons between the European services and the American services. There's also different systems of government that get involved here. Remember, all the federal agencies, they're funded by Congress, everything. So you can't always just take what's happening one country and say, oh, that's how they do it. Let's do it. That might not work exactly. But there are certainly a lot of lessons we can learn from the way, like the AI stuff. Look, I'm not deep in the technical weeds on AI and how it works at the what the micro level, like how these things work. When I was doing research, even just I got out of the research part of my career, let's say seven years ago, maybe I started, I was transitioning into more executive leadership roles. AI wasn't even a thing then. That's not even that long ago. In terms of research years, that's a blip. And so things are happening very fast. And what you'll see is the UK Med Office in Europe, right? They jump on these things much quicker. Like they they already have an AI model, they're running it in parallel to their dynamical model. We're still like figuring out what our strategy is going to be around AI. And that's not, we'll see in the end, right? This is like trying to decide if you made a football trade between two teams, people want to know who won the trade like two months into the seat. Like, you don't know that for years, right? So we don't know what the best approach is here. But and and like I said, sometimes having strategy first is a good thing, but uh it's also really nice to be nimble and to be able to jump on potentially revolutionary ideas, which this could be, to jump on those quickly and get them into operations. And and right there, you're seeing the difference between the mindset in Europe and the United States, right? They're just like ready, fire, aim. They just go and they worry about issues later, and they're just much quicker. And then the private sector too are running AI models. Being deliberate is also part of our system of government, right? Our our system is not set up to have rapid change of anything, and that's by design. It's hard to enact change quickly, at least we think it is. Maybe people find out. But in this case, uh, yeah, it the word's still out. We'll see down the road. Was it better for us to take a slower approach and think through this a little bit more, or should we have hopped on right away? But we'll see how it goes. NOAA is a great agency, it's a big agency. In my opinion, it doesn't have enough money, but nobody does. And so they have a lot to work with. Congress keeps just putting mandates on them and other federal agencies, and they they often don't add funding for some of these things. So it makes it challenging to respond to all of the mandates you have. In any event, though, it'll be really interesting to see what becomes of this AI uh situation here in the United States and especially with NOAA. And fortunately, I'm gonna be I'm actually gonna be serving on a group that advises NOAA. I'm I'm hopeful to learn more about this and hopefully help NOAA think through uh the best ways to approach problems like this.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

As far as with AI or problem solving in general?

SPEAKER_01 32:38

In general, but this is obviously a hot topic, right? I mean, this is something it's happening so it's you know, it's one of those things that's happening so fast, it's hard to we're always behind the curve on it. Think about it. If some of the claims about AI and how it's more accurate than our dynamical models for weather forecasting, if some of those claims turn out to really bear out, right? Like there's only a couple papers on this right now, right? But if it turns out that these AI models are better, you got to start thinking about really big strategic and investment questions about the US federal meteorological enterprise. And I don't mean to scare people or anything, but like what does that mean for the workforce? If you have all these people developing dynamical models, like what does that mean if you have a simpler but better way now? I mean, one of the things I think is like, wow, well, we can go start solving other problems. We have those people, we don't need again, this is all speculation. I don't want this to get out that I'm saying trash the dynamical models and go with AI. That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I doubt that will ever actually happen. But it does beg the question that if this becomes the revolution that some think it is, you're gonna have to start thinking about redesigning your workforce, repurposing. What are the new priorities? It could shift strategic landscapes. I don't know if it will, but it's certainly gonna be really interesting to watch unfold over the next five to ten years, that's for sure.

This Day in Weather History

Welcome Back & Guess the Quote

SPEAKER_00 34:02

It's gonna be a brave new world. Hopefully, it doesn't lean towards this the uh the Skynet route of the future where AI takes over everything, but it's gonna be very interesting regardless. And we haven't even talked about your stuff with Climat. We've got a lot more to talk about. We're gonna take a quick break right here, but don't go anywhere. We've got more with Dr. Scott Weaver coming up in just a little bit. In the days around Christmas, a cold front swept across the eastern United States. It eventually continued sweeping east, passing Bermuda on December 25th. The next day, an area of low pressure began to develop from the tail end of the cold front in the central Atlantic. This area of low pressure gradually developed in an area with unusually favorable conditions and became a tropical storm around December 30th. The tropical storm moved southwestward and gradually strengthened to reach hurricane status, a very rare occurrence in the months of December and January. The hurricane continued tracking southwestward, eventually passing through the Leeward Islands on January 2nd. Shortly thereafter, the hurricane reached its peak strength with winds up to 90 miles an hour. The hurricane started to turn south and encountered cold air, and it eventually dissipated on January 6th. The hurricane produced heavy rainfall and moderately strong winds across several islands along its path into and through the Caribbean Sea. The islands of Saba and Anguilla were impacted the most from this hurricane, with total damages estimated to be in excess of 600,000 US dollars, almost 7 million US dollars in 2024. What made this hurricane unique was both its lifespan stretching over two calendar years and its eventual discovery through reanalysis. The hurricane is the only known Atlantic hurricane to span two calendar years, and only one of two named Atlantic tropical systems to do so, with the other being Tropical Storms Data in 2005. This rare hurricane was also not fully discovered until a reanalysis of data was completed. Because of a lack of definitive data available to the US Weather Bureau, the precursor to the National Weather Service, the hurricane was not fully discovered and declared a full-fledged hurricane until January 2nd. Because meteorologists thought that the hurricane formed in 1955, it was given the name Alice. However, reanalysis found that Alice had actually formed around December 30th in 1954. This presented a unique scenario since the name Alice was also given to another hurricane that formed earlier in the hurricane season in June of 1954. This marks the only occurrence in history where two distinct tropical systems share the same name in the same season. He is the Chief Science Officer at Climate Consulting, and he's also done a lot of work in the political world with the White House, with the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. We've been talking a little bit about his experiences. We're going to get into that conversation once more. But first, I've got another fun game for you, Dr. Weaver. We've got Guess the Quote. So some of these are going to be weather themed, some are not weather themed, because I've shortly found out that if you use all weather quotes, we're going to run out of this real quick. With that said, are you ready? I'm ready. Alright, your first quote is a weather-themed quote. Meteorologists see perfect in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. Where is this quote from?

SPEAKER_01 38:24

Is it from a movie?

SPEAKER_00 38:26

From a movie and a book. The perfect storm? You are correct. It is from the perfect storm. I don't remember if this was said word for word in the movie, but it was word for word in the book. Yeah. So got that one right. Next one up is a non-weather themed quote. I feel the need. The need for speed. Which movie is that from?

SPEAKER_01 38:50

I know this and I don't remember. I I know the quote. I know I've heard the quote, but I do not remember the movie. You're gonna have to tell me.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

Would you like a hint? Sure. It is a military-themed movie. I think it came out in the 80s, somewhere around there.

SPEAKER_01 39:07

Military-themed. Well, it's not full metal jacket, is it?

SPEAKER_00 39:12

No, it is not full metal jacket. Alright, and I won't know. Alright. The correct answer is Top Gun, and that line was said by Tom Cruise's character, Maverick.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Of course, of course. I guess for some reason I didn't think of that as like a military movie. I think of it is a military movie. When I heard military, I was thinking war movies. So I was thinking like Apocalypse Now, Casualties of War, whatever the one I said, I forget already. But anyway, that's that my brain was thinking a war movie. But yes, of course that's Top Gun.

SPEAKER_00 39:41

Yeah. Alright, quick one then. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Which one is that from?

SPEAKER_01 39:46

Apocalypse now? Yes, that happened now. Okay, that's getting a little I was I was very young when that came out. I probably saw it before I was old enough to really be allowed to see it. But yeah, great, great movie.

SPEAKER_00 39:57

I'm sure there's a couple of movies that I've done like that. I've watched it before I should have seen it. Alright. Next one up is a weather themed quote. It's the Fajita scale. It measures the intensity of a tornado by how much it eats. Oh, that's a twister. You are correct. You know who said it.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Is it I forget his the character. Is it Bill Paxton's character?

SPEAKER_00 40:20

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:21

Bill Paxton's her character. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

Bill Hardinger.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

That's right. His name was Bill in the movie, too. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

Yeah, very easy to remember. Alright. Your last one is a non-weather themed quote. It's just a flesh wound.

SPEAKER_01 40:35

I know this one too.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

I could tell you the actor that said it. Maybe it's a little bit more. Tell me the actor that said it. John Cleese.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

I know who John Cleese is. I don't remember the movie. I know the quote. I know the actor don't remember the movie.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

It's a very quotable quote. Uh, but it is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Of course. That one's a deeper one.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

It's deeper, but yeah, but I shouldn't yeah.

Hurricane Experiences and Weather Irony

SPEAKER_00 40:59

Anyway. It keeps things interesting and stuff. But that is our last guest to quote. And before we get back into our conversation, I wanted to take this moment to uh talk about scheduling our interview uh for this recording. Because we had previously scheduled this back in September 2024, and that had to be postponed because of Hurricane Helene, because of where you are, and then we rescheduled it for another time, and then Hurricane Milton came into town. So I wanted to share that little bit of weather irony. The weather postponed the recording of a weather podcast interview. And I wanted to real quick go into that. What was your experience like with Milton and Helene?

SPEAKER_01 41:41

Yeah, so first of all, so I I grew up in New Jersey for the first 27 years of my life. I lived in Maryland for the next 24 and just recently moved to the Tampa area of Florida, just south of Tampa. And so I get the question all the time: why does why would a meteorologist or someone who knows about climate move to Florida? And the the answer to that is we're tired of winter. But anyway, so we move here, and actually there was even another hurricane. The day before we moved here, the town we were moving to got 17 inches of rain from Tropical Storm Debbie. Okay. And so we weren't even sure because there was so much flooding. Like, should we go? Should we postpone it a couple days? That's hard to do when you're moving. So we didn't postpone it. We moved. Fortunately, we were able to get here. The house survived the 17 inches of rain, which I believe was somewhere in the area of seven or eight inches above the previous record. Not above the average, above the previous record. So it's totally smashed the record. So that's a great climate test for the house we're gonna be living in, right? Then we had Hurricane Halim, which stayed offshore, but we live about 10 miles inland. So not far from here, just along the coast. They got massive storm surge. So while we were okay from that, there were no effects. It was the eye was 100 miles off the coast. The storm surge was such that it just devastated the coastal areas. You couldn't even go visit them. It was really awful. People flooded homes, everything. Then, as you mentioned, we've been trying to do this for a while. Then we had Hurricane Milton, and the eye of Hurricane Milton came right over the town that we moved to. Look, we were moving to Florida, you know, you're gonna have to deal with hurricanes. We didn't think we would have such proximity to three of them right away, like the within the first two months that we moved there. So that is still surprising, even for a hurricane-prone place, and especially this area. And I hear people around here talk about it, and it really is interesting about the human psyche. This area has not received a direct hit, I think, since 1921. So Milton was the first direct hit on this area in over a hundred years. And I will tell you that actually has affected the way people think about hurricane risk in this area. I mean, I heard a few people, I mean the days leading up to the storm, well, we don't really get hit here with hurricanes. And I would have to tell people the fact that you didn't have one has nothing to do with anything. Like, it doesn't change your risk. It's like flipping a coin a bunch of times. Like let's say you flip a coin six times and you get heads six times in a row. When you go to flip it the seventh time, the probability of getting heads is not higher because you just got heads six times, or vice versa, the probability is not lower. So uh it's still a 50-50 probability. It's interesting how that works. But I think they did a really good job here evacuating people, et cetera. Uh, like I said, we're inland and the building codes in Florida are extremely high. They're very stringent. The home we're in fared very well. Uh, very minimal damage. One of the screens ripped. That's it. Really wasn't much. There are no structural damage. Some trees down, of course, lots of trees down in the area, that kind of thing. Um, but if you're inland, we tended to fare pretty well. Granted, we didn't get 150 mile an hour winds here or anything. The estimate from the engineering models, which are very different, said it made landfall as a category three. In actuality, the winds were probably a little less here because that wind speed is one minute sustained wind over open water. Once you get buildings and trees and friction and ground, there's friction, it it slows it down a bit, right? It slows that it can retard the wind a bit. So I think the estimates were somewhere around 105, 110 from the engineering community that we got here, which is still pretty good. So another climate test for the home we're in, right? We've been tested already. So that's the positive we're trying to take out of it. Personally, I will tell you that it's very different when you're in the hurricane zone and you're trying to think about having to make decisions. It has a different feel, obviously, than when you're up in Maryland looking at this on the news. Very different when you're in it. And so that was something I wasn't used to, was like really trying to weigh the options of what we should do. Other than that, fared very well.

Role at NIST & Transitioning to Consulting

SPEAKER_00 45:38

And there's a little bit of irony there too, as well, because you were talking about the structural codes of your home as well. During your time with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, you worked with people to help develop similar things. Uh, I'm just curious, were there any moments where you thought back to that role in this these situations with Milton and Helene?

SPEAKER_01 45:58

Well, not only that, but I'm very grateful that I've had that role in general because it really took me from just being a meteorologist and climatologist into my first career experience where I understood how that stuff can be actually applied, right? Like instead of trying to understand why there's variability in rainfall from year to year over the Midwest, which is an important question, but this was like where the rubber really meets the road, right? Like you're actually trying to apply this stuff for real world use to help people or to make people safe, right? So I'm really grateful for that role. And you said is ironic. When we were moving here, having that role helped me really figure out where we should move. Because of course, I'm not going to move to a place that's prone to the house being destroyed, you know. So um having that knowledge of the codes of how far inland you should be, what hurricanes do to certain kinds of structures, et cetera, really helped inform the choices we made for the location we would live in, the kind of home we would have live in, all of that stuff, right? So that really played a significant role in even just keeping my own family safe. And so really grateful to have done that. So we chose a location, and in Florida, you don't get that high above sea level anywhere, really. Maybe in north north central Florida, you do. So, but we found that we picked a place 50, 60 feet above sea level, right? And we're 10 miles inland, we're not near any rivers out of a floodplain, although we know nowadays that doesn't necessarily mean you don't get flooding, but we had 17 inches of rain and didn't flood. So hopefully that doesn't happen again. But in any event, yeah, it's been really instrumental in even our just our own personal journey here into hurricane country.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Yeah, and I think Florida's the flattest state in the country. Probably.

SPEAKER_01 47:45

It's extremely flat. In fact, it's so flat you don't realize how much you take hills for granted until you come here. I I had the opportunity uh about a month ago to travel back north to Lehigh, Pennsylvania. I was at Lehigh University, and it's very hilly there. There are mountains, small mountains, but nonetheless there are mountains there. And I found myself spending quite a bit of time looking at the mountains. I guess it was because there it's just flat as a pancake here. Oh well.

SPEAKER_00 48:13

Yeah. It's very pretty up here with the mountains. My area, it's not as mountainous, but I see what you mean by you take those hills for granted and for it. Certainly. Let's get back into the conversation because we haven't even talked about your work at climate consulting. You're the chief science officer there. Yep. Tell me a little bit how you got involved with starting that up from being the former director of meteorology at the White House to starting this up.

SPEAKER_01 48:39

Well, I like change. I like to do different things. I like variety, right? Earlier in my career, I didn't have much variety. I was a research scientist, super interesting. Like, don't get me wrong. In some ways, it was the best time of my professional life because there's just something about doing research and the struggle that comes with it sometimes. Research is not always fun exercise. There's struggle. You're coming, you're you have a hypothesis, you're not coming up with what you thought. So it pushes you in a different direction. That's what science is. That's the beauty of it, right? It's also the frustrating part of it. But when you find something out, right? Like when you're looking for an answer and you find something and you're analyzing data and you're doing all the statistical analysis and something comes out that's new, it's extremely exciting. So don't get me wrong about that. The issue was I felt like my career wasn't going to be as impactful as it could be. So I had a choice to make. Do I stay in a traditional research science career where I build a deep expertise over decades and that's my lane? Or do I broaden out and learn about all of these different things and take a chance, really? That's what it looks like when you're in that research role. And that's what many, if not most, of your colleagues are aiming for, and the older ones have already done, right? Like that's the model. So to upend that is a little scary, uh, it turned out to be amazing. So what happened? I started working in different roles. I went from the federal government research science to a nonprofit for a few years where I was working in science, but in a different way, started to learn about policy, then came to NIST. And that's where it really started to broaden my horizons and see how the meteorology work could really be applied. And what happened was over time, I really started to adapt to change, to having things not stay the same. And I started to crave that. And so after having a great experience at NIST and then being able to spend a year and a half at the White House leading federal agencies on coordinating meteorology, which was very exciting, also very challenging at times, right? It's hard to do things in such a large bureaucracy. It's hard to make change quickly. While that was exciting as it is, I need to feel like I'm being maximally impactful. And I also like to do different things. And I thought there was a space for me to create a private practice, if you will, in climate and weather consulting. And so I just decided to go for it. And I'm I still consider myself in a transition period because most people in the community know me as someone who's worked in government their whole career and not really somebody who's part of the private sector. I know a lot of folks from the private sector, obviously. That's what also got me interested in this. But I just started to think like, wow, I could probably do a lot more and have a lot more impact from the outside than from the inside, if you want to know the truth. And part of this is yes, I'm running a business and I'm doing consulting, and obviously that you get paid for that. But not everything. I do quite a bit of pro bono work. I'm just about to begin serving a three-year term on the NOAA Science Advisory Board's Environmental Information Services Working Group, right? So I'll be help helping NOAA, advising NOAA on their strategy for how to move forward on things like satellites, weather prediction, anything the National Weather Service is doing in terms of their service architecture, social sciences, whatever it may be, trying to help them. And so I'm very excited about the prospect of that kind of work. Because I'm definitely a proponent of the private sector because of the changes that have happened over the last couple decades. I also feel there's obviously a huge role for government and that it can be better. And any way I can help that, I've always felt very committed to.

Challenges in Climate Science & Engineering

SPEAKER_00 52:07

Absolutely. And you mentioned a lot of different things there. You know, sorry about I actually want to dive into that a little more because you have a very diverse experience in the weather and climate and experience doing multidisciplinary work. What unique challenges and opportunities have you encountered in your time bridging these different worlds together with the field of meteorology and climate science?

SPEAKER_01 52:31

Well, one example I could definitely um give. Remember, this is not so when I talk about the climate science aspect and how they're trying to work with engineers, or I should say how engineers need climate information. See, engineers, they're held to a very high standard. I don't know if if if the public knows this. Like they actually have like the American Society of Civil Engineers has, I've read materials that come out of that organization that talk about the moral imperative for engineers to be designing things that are safe for the public. And not, it's not just a moral imperative. Sometimes they're subject to litigation if something goes wrong, right? It is so they really have to make sure that they're accounting for every possible situation, both morally and legally. Whereas, like my work as a climate scientist never had that hanging over me, right? The standard they're held to is very high. And so they they need information to be reliable. And so it's not just that we're trying to figure out how we can use climate science for engineering. The biggest challenge is there's a cultural difference between the two fields. You would think both of these fields are very highly technically capable. Like if you think of the coursework you have to go through to get a degree in engineering or meteorology, it's a lot of the same physics and mathematics. We take engineering calculus when you're a meteorology student. You there's no meteorology calculus, it's engineering calculus, right? There's like a business calculus, but then there's the engineering one, which is a lot tougher. We all know this. They're very highly technical fields, but they think differently. Of course they do. They have uncertainty that they deal with the that's not. But I've been in rooms where we're talking about how to use climate science for engineering. And I've had an engineer like, not like yell at me. It was like spirited talk, right? Like this is it was very exciting, actually. I love when people get animated and really you could tell they're passionate. And he was like, I just need a number. I need a number at this location. And I tried to explain to him, as a climate scientist, I would be very uncomfortable giving you a number. I give you a distribution, right? I'll give you a distribution of what the possibilities are in a given scenario. Not like it's it's not 1.5 meters per second that you have to, whatever it may be. That is antithetical to how a climate scientist thinks, but it's not antithetical to how an engineer thinks because they're building things that keep the public safe, right? So it's a very different threshold for them. So they have much higher their their quantitative needs are much more challenging because of that. They need more dependable information. And when you're talking about climate models, you can get some what we consider to be to be dependable information, but there's a lot of work climate science has to do to get better at that attribution question, right? How will things change in weather as a result of climate changes? There's still a lot of work to be done there. So when you hear people say the science is settled, like I don't like when people say that only because it's both true and not true, right? The science is settled. There's global warming, we monitor this. But there's still a lot of work that needs to be done in really getting quantitative information about what will hurricanes be like 100 years from now. Like what is the distribution going to look like? That's still kind of an open question. We have some indications, right? But that still needs more work. And that's okay. That doesn't mean climate science is doesn't do anything, right? No science is 100% nothing. The medical field will tell people they have X months to live, they live five years, vice versa. It's happens sometimes. Nothing is perfect, right? So I think some of the bar, the high bar we hold climate science to sometimes is different than maybe some other sciences and how we trust people in in some of the other uh scientific uh endeavors that we have in this country.

SPEAKER_00 56:09

Absolutely. And in your experience with multiple disciplines, how can the meteorology and climate world build up that trust like other disciplines have or are starting to?

Importance of Interdisciplinary Education & Knowledge

SPEAKER_01 56:19

So it right now it's more of a coalition of the willing. It's people, people like me who are interested in it, and there are a lot of these people, and there's some movement organizationally. Like NOAA has a uh a memorandum of understanding, they call it an MOU, right? Which is like an agreement where they are working together. So NOAA and the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Meteorological Society are all trying to work together on this. But right now, it's more of like, oh, let's have webinars about climate science and at the end in years in the room, like it's a little bit more of just information sharing right now to try to kind of soften the space, try to get a little bit of understanding, get some common terms. When you're talking about different disciplines, you're speaking different languages. I'll give you a perfect example. And this may not sound like a big deal because you can always figure out what the context you're talking about it, but when we talk about climate mitigation, that typically means reductions in greenhouse gases, right? You're trying to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If in the disaster world, mitigation means making our infrastructure stronger, which in the climate world would be adaptation, right? So even things like this, you could be at a meeting where I could be using the words mitigation and adaptation, and for 45 minutes, an engineer is thinking I'm talking about something else. So even in this case, you need to have some commonality of terms or at least understand each other. It's very important to have common terms. And then things like the engineers, we're trying to help them understand the climate models are scenarios that we're guessing at, like how the economy is going to change, how much greenhouse gas emission, all that stuff. We have to educate each other on the process. Like I need to be educated on how engineers figure out how to design certain things for hazard. Where are they actually getting that information? How do they put it into their designs? If we could start to understand each other's processes, then we could start developing shared research targets that move towards that. And that's really where we need to go. I when I was in grad school, they had to change a curriculum in my department. It was the meteorology department, and then they changed it to be more interdisciplinary. And at that time, when they meant interdisciplinary, they meant like atmospheric science will partner up a little bit more with physical oceanography. To me, now those two are the same discipline, essentially, right? In climate, ocean, atmosphere interaction. Again, you have people who focus more on physical oceanography and other people who focus more on atmospheric science, but they're so coupled now that I don't even really think of them really as seriously separate disciplines. Now, interdisciplinary is like what I'm talking about, the climate community, which has its own small interdisciplinarity within it, coordinating with an entirely different field, not just like a shoot-off of the field, like an entirely different field. So that is the new interdisciplinary. And I remember back then when they were trying to do this interdisciplinary amongst the hard sciences, if you will, there was some pushback on that even back then. It's really changed, and we need to start developing our curricula at our universities to reflect this. And there is some movement towards that at many universities. If you're really going to solve a problem, you need people who are trained in that problem, not just trained in a discipline that can then coordinate with that. You need to educate a workforce that's going to be thinking about this from day one in an interdisciplinary way.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

And on that note, if you had to pick one course that was mandatory for all undergraduate students or any student in general, even like high school, middle school, what would you pick? Or what would you have them do?

SPEAKER_01 59:55

Statistics 101. And the reason for that, it may sound boring and dry, like, oh, why didn't he choose like intro to meteorology where it's really exciting, especially the intro courses, because they're not very technical yet. Those are your intro to meteorology course is one of the most fun things ever, right? Because you're learning at in like a qualitative level about all these different things in the atmosphere and how it works, and it's great. Lots of really cool diagrams to help you understand, not a lot of math. But that sounds great. As I mentioned before, I think a lot of our I noticed this kind of anecdotally. A lot of people think determinalistically in their lives, not probabilistically. And I think it's it's black and white, it's A or B, it's one or two, it's never, but that's not how the world is, right? We we you'll hear like the world is not black and white, it's gray. And so to me, the sort of propensity in our society to think determinalistically instead of probabilistically is actually quite a quite a big problem. So uh if I had to say we had to mandate a course, it would be just basic statistics. It doesn't have to get too technical, at least just understanding and getting people to think in a more probabilistic manner and be comfortable with that. Being comfortable with thinking like the probability that something is gonna happen is 60%. You know, that's a weird number, right? It's more than half, but there's still quite a lot of no out there. And getting comfortable with that kind of thinking, I think would just help in general. Never mind for science, just in in families, it would even help. And trying to make decisions for your life, it would even be helpful. But especially for people who are engaging with science on policy, etc., it's a really important way to be able to think about things.

Final Thoughts on Climate Adaptation

SPEAKER_00 1:01:37

It's a very good pick for a course, not just for anybody going into meteorology, but anybody because numbers are very important. Yep. In the spirit of forward thinking, you've done a lot with research, policy, consulting, a whole bunch of different things. What insights can you offer about the current trends of weather consulting, climate change, sciences, disaster impact reduction, all that you've done, what are some insights that really excite you? Or trends that excite you?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:09

So there are trends that excite me, but there are also trends that are concerning to me. So I one of the things I like to talk about when you talk about climate, there's really three responses to climate, right? We have climate mitigation, which is reducing greenhouse gases, greenhouse gas emissions, which we're as a country, we're doing okay on the worldwide emissions are going up. We're trying to do our part, obviously. Climate adaptation, which are things like design standards and building codes. There's a lot more, obviously. There's all kinds of natural ecosystem ways that we could mitigate, or I shouldn't say mitigate, we can adapt to the climate. See, this is a I I spend half my time in disaster and half my time in climate. So I even start to get confused between me. So so you got mitigation, which is reduction in greenhouse gases, adaptation. And then the third rail of response to climate change is climate intervention, which we didn't talk much about. But one example of that is solar radiation management, where we reflect uh sunlight away by putting sulfur into the stratosphere. This is technically doable. This is not science fiction. This is feasible uh right now. And so it begs the question that we need to be not considering its implementation yet, but we certainly need to be researching what would be the unintended consequences that could possibly happen as a function of that. Um, and so the reason I bring these up is it's very controversial. I'm concerned about what we call the adaptation gap. The adaptation gap is essentially we haven't invested enough in adaptation. I think we can do a lot. And things like this climate science for engineering design standards is a really practical way. Um, and I think in sort of a weird way, it might not fully be bipartisan, if you will, but I feel like adaptation is a place where you might be able to make inroads on people who believe climate change is a thing, but aren't really sure what to do about it and maybe are concerned about if, you know, what for whatever reason they're not a proponent of extreme greenhouse gas mitigation. Okay. And now we're getting into the what do you do about climate change? And I'm for all of the above. There's not enough money to do all of the above, right? If we had infinite money, obviously we'd be able to solve the problem. So I I want to be very clear here. I'm definitely all for climate mitigation and whatever we need to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It's not happening fast enough. It's just not. And that's we need to be honest about that so that we can lessen the adaptation gap. We're not up to snuff in this country in terms of climate adaptation in many different ways. If you just take the building stock alone, it's it's not prepared for the climate of the future. So if we know that and we know that greenhouse gases are not being reduced fast enough, we really need to step into that adaptation gap a little bit more strong. And it saying that doesn't mean you don't think the greenhouse gases need to come down. The issue is it's just not happening fast enough. And you can argue why, but I just haven't seen enough to give me personal confidence that is going to solve the problem on its own. It may solve the problem, the climate change that's gonna happen 100, 200 years from now. That may, as we wind those emissions down, we'll get benefit then. But I'm concerned over the next 50 to 100 years, we're not reducing them enough to actually affect what we need to affect in terms of weather disaster. We're not doing that. I feel like we're whistling past the graveyard with both adaptation in terms of implementing adaptation and research on climate intervention. We're gonna be with this climate for quite a while. And so my advice in that space is to bolster our adaptation. That adaptation gap both concerns me and I also think is a very exciting space where we can make significant progress and significant inroads to at least protect ourselves against what's coming in the future if we're not going to mitigate the problem away, which I don't think we are in the near term.

Weather or Not Trivia

SPEAKER_00 1:05:52

Yeah, definitely. With that said, that's our last question, but we still have time for one last fun game. This is whether or not this is weather themed and non-weather themed trivia questions that have come up with your interests in mind. With that said, are you ready? Yep. All right. This is whether or not your first question is related to hockey. Which team has won the most Stanley Cup championships? Is it A, the Boston Bruins, B, the Detroit Red Wings, C, the New York Rangers, or D, the Montreal Canadiens?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:27

As much as I would love it, absolutely love it to be C. Well, I think I think they have 24? 24 25. 26, somewhere in that range. I'm not sure that they're like the Yankees basically. They're right around the same amount of the Yankees have 27. I think Montreal has somewhere maybe 25 or 26, somewhere around there.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:47

So your final guest is Montreal Canadians? You are correct. This is the Montreal Canadiens. This is whether or not your next question is related to severe weather. When a severe thunderstorm warning is issued three taglines are added to the text warning to communicate threat indicators. Which one of these is not one of those taglines? Is it hey A hail B winds C tornado or D rainfall? I'm guessing but it's C. Final answer? Yeah. You are incorrect it is D rainfall. You're this is whether or not your next question is related to rock music. Who is the lead guitarist for the band Led Zeppelin? Is it A, David Gilmore? B Jimmy Page C Zach Wilde or D Brian May?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:41

They're all great but it's Jimmy Page final guess.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:46

You are correct it is Jimmy Page and I will agree with you on that they are very excellent guitarists. This is I'm just curious do you know each of the bands that they're in?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:55

Oh yeah. Wait what are so Zach Wild well Zach Wilde's in he was in Aussie and then he had his own thing going on I'll get to different things. Yeah Black Label Society maybe was one of them or something like that. Obviously Paige is in Zeppelin, Brian May's in Queen and Gilmore's in Pink Floyd.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:10

So you know you're rock music oh yeah oh yeah all right this is whether or not your next question is related to hurricanes Hurricane Milton was the fifth most powerful hurricane on record in the Atlantic basin. Which hurricane holds the record for top most powerful hurricane in the Atlantic is it a Wilma B Gilbert C Labor Day Hurricane or D Michael?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:35

Fuck it's Alan it's one of the top ones okay it's not Michael um because I think Wilma had like 180 It's Wilma or Labor Day? I don't know. I'm gonna go with Labor Day since I don't know anything about that one. How about that?

Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:08:50

I guess it's Labor Day? Sure. You are incorrect it was Wilma. It was Wilma okay I I Labor Day I don't quote me on this is the third on that list and this is by wind speed in the Atlantic I didn't yeah some reason I thought Allen was more than Wilma's sorry I should have clarified that this is good stuff. Alright we've got one more for you this is whether or not your question is related to oceans and beaches which state in the continuous United States has the most coastline is it a Florida B Hawaii C California or D Louisiana Florida. Final guess? Yep you are correct it is Florida and what that is the last whether or not question and the end of the podcast interview but before you go Dr. Weaver how can people follow you and your work and keep in touch with what you're doing in the meteorology and keep climate world?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:48

You can look for me on LinkedIn you can look for me on Twitter. On Twitter I'm at Climate Weave. I'm mostly active on LinkedIn though you can just search my name and then you can also go to my website climateconsulting.com all one word and it's C L I M E T climateconsulting.com perfect and we'll make sure to include those in the show notes for all of our listeners.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:08

Thank you so much Dr. Weaver for joining me on the podcast and thank you to the listener for listening to the Everything Weather podcast and we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for having me Kyle take care