Despite the turn of the page on the monthly calendar this past weekend, we again began a week with snow and ice. For yet one more Sunday evening, our Buildings and Grounds crew worked until 1 am to clear roads and walkways, and they returned at 7 am Monday morning to continue the task. Yesterday, with a new snowstorm that forced an early closure of the Observatory, they were back on the job. To Lenny Sullivan, Bruce Baez, Tom Burke, Carmine Cavaliere, Bob Daly, Tony De Loatch, Charles Jones, Stevenson Louis, Mike McHugh, Ray Slavin, Eric Soto, Kevin Sullivan, and Rick Trubiroha, an entire campus is once again in your debt. Thanks, guys!
On Sunday, even before the week’s snow, several Lamont scientists served as judges at the New York City Science and Engineering Fair, a city-wide science competition for high school students. The group of judges from Lamont included Allison Jacobel, Einat Lev, Kira Olsen, Dan Rasmussen, Jack Scheff and Natalia Zakharova. By all accounts, the judges may have enjoyed the day even more than the student competitors.
On Monday, alumnus Colin Kelley – now at the University of California, Santa Barbara – along with Mark Cane, Richard Seager, Yochanan Kushnir, and Shahrzad Mohtadi from the School of International and Public Affairs, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences arguing that the three-year drought that began in Syria in the winter of 2006-2007 contributed to subsequent political unrest in that country. The group further demonstrated that the drought was the combined result of natural variability and the response of the climate system to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases. A press release by Kevin Krajick was posted Monday on the Lamont web pages (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/did-climate-change-help-spark-syrian-war), and the story drew widespread media attention, including a New York Times piece (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-syria-conflict-to-drought-caused-by-climate-change.html?_r=1). Richard was interviewed by WNYC on Tuesday morning (http://www.wnyc.org/story/could-climate-change-spur-revolutions/).
Other news stories this week in which Lamont scientists were quoted also dealt with droughts. In a story Monday in USA Today, Richard Seager questioned the conclusion of a Stanford-led study – also published that day in PNAS – that human-induced climate change contributed substantively to the current drought in California (http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/03/02/california-drought-climate-change-global-warming/24262559/). A Washington Post article that same day cited the prediction of Ben Cook and Jason Smerdon that megadroughts would be more common in the western and central U.S. in the second half of this century (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/02/californias-terrifying-forecast-in-the-future-it-could-face-droughts-nearly-every-year/).
On Tuesday I was in Washington, D.C., to meet with the heads of several other oceanographic institutions, including Mark Abbott, Dean of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University; Susan Avery, President and Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Bruce Corliss, Dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island; Kate Miller, Dean of the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University; and Lamont alumnus Brian Taylor, Dean of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii. The group met with Sherri Goodman, the new President and CEO of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. We also met with Shirley Pomponi and David Titley, co-chairs of the committee that authored the recent National Research Council report, Sea Change: 2015-2025 Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences (http://nas-sites.org/dsos2015/), along with Ocean Studies Board staffers Deborah Glickson and Susan Roberts. A scheduled discussion with Rick Murray, Director of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Sciences Division, was scrubbed at the last minute after he was called to another meeting.
One of the agenda topics at the meeting of the Council of Deans yesterday was measles, and specifically the actions that Columbia would likely take in response to a reported case of the disease on campus, as Princeton University experienced last month. Later in the day, the Provost circulated a memo that I shared with the campus this morning urging everyone to locate and keep handy his or her personal immunization records should Columbia be faced with a similar situation.
On Wednesday afternoon next week, Lamont’s Advisory Board will meet at the Columbia Club in Midtown. The Board will hear from Sonya Dyhrman, who will give them a glimpse into Lamont’s programs in the biogeosciences with a presentation on “The unseen majority: New tools track the microscopic world from Antarctica to Hawaii and beyond.” Following the Board meeting will be a Director’s Circle lecture by Heather Savage on the timely topic of “Induced seismicity.”
On Friday next week, Jason Bordoff will be giving the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Lecture, jointly sponsored by Lamont and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (http://eesc.columbia.edu/events/storke-lecture). Jason is a Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs and Director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy (https://sipa.columbia.edu/faculty/jason-bordoff).
In the meantime, this afternoon’s Earth Science Colloquium will be given by David Keith, the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University (http://www.seas.harvard.edu/directory/dkeith). Prof. Keith will be presenting “An environmental case for solar geoengineering.” In a week when news of winter storms has become tiresome for all, the topic of geoengineering is at least a change of pace. I hope that you can attend the talk.
Sean