Science communication

Citizen science: how can we all contribute to the climate discussion?

Marion Ferrat April 4, 2014

Until the turn of the 20th century, science was an activity practiced by amateur naturalists and philosophers with enough money and time on their hands to devote their lives to the pursuit of knowledge and the understanding of the natural world.

Hand-colored lithograph of Malaclemys terrapin, in John Edwards Holbrook’s North American herpetology. Source – Wikimedia Commons.

Today, scientific research is an industry of its own, carried out by highly trained and specialised professionals in academic institutions and research laboratories. From the outside, the world of science can sometimes seem like a mysterious one. A world that conveys wonder yet can feel impenetrable and somewhat detached from the reality of our daily lives.

But science is not that far removed from us, and anyone with an interest in anything from astrophysics to ecology and climate change can get involved and become a citizen scientist.

Citizen science is the engagement of amateur or nonprofessional scientists in scientific research, either through observations in nature, data analysis, or loaning of tools and resources such as computer power. Though the concept has picked up in recent years, citizen science is nothing new: Charles Darwin relied on the observations of amateur naturalists around the world to develop his theory of evolution.

1837 sketch by Charles Darwin of an evolutionary tree. Source – Wikimedia Commons.

From bird watching to galaxies

Citizen scientists can get involved in a number of projects, depending on their interest, how much time they would like to spend, and what facilities they are prepared to loan.

The spiral galaxy NGC 1345. Source – ESA/Hubble/NASA.

Astronomy lovers can participate in the Galaxy Zoo project, where members of the public are asked to help classify galaxies. Humans are much better at pattern recognition than computers, and scientists simply to not have the time and resources to analyse the thousands of images of galaxies captured by telescopes. Amateur astronomers participating in Galaxy Zoo lend their eyes to carry out this task and millions of classifications have been carried out through the project.

Citizen science doesn’t just happen on people’s computers. In the spirit of Darwin, many ecology and wildlife scientific projects make use of thousands of amateur observations. Since the launch of the Garden Birdwatch in 1994, bird lovers help the British Trust for Ornithology understand how birds use our gardens through weekly observations of what species fly into their back yards. For the BioBlitz project, professional and amateur naturalists get together for an intensive 24-hour classification of all species of mammal, bird, insect, plant and fungus found in a particular space.

Great tit in a garden in Broadstone, UK. Source: Ian Kirk, Wikimedia Commons.

Many people have the desire, ability and tools to contribute to research activities. By facilitating the communication between research, policy and the public, citizen science is another instrument for public engagement, with potential mutual benefits for all.

How can citizen science help with climate change research?

In the wake of devastating events such as storm Sandy, typhoon Haiyan, Australian bushfires or the recent floods in the UK, the big question on everyone’s lips is this: Is climate change to blame for more frequent and powerful extreme weather events?

Typhoon Haiyan captured MODIS on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Source: NASA, Wikimedia Commons.

The process of linking specific extreme weather patterns to global climate change, what scientists call attribution, can be tricky. In order to define a causal relationship (did A cause B? Did climate change cause the UK storms?), climate scientists need strong statistical proof. This requires thousands and thousands of simulations of a particular set of conditions, so that any interesting climate trend can be established enough times to be “statistically significant”. But extreme weather events are, by definition, a result of rare and unusual weather conditions and so a great number of simulations have to be run to produce statistically relevant data.

Such a large number of simulations takes time and produces terabyte after terabyte of data that must then be analysed. This requires huge computing resources and universities and research centres often do not have the physical resources to carry out all these simulations rapidly.

UK Floods, Staines-upon-Thames. Source: Marcin Cajzer, Wikimedia Commons.

The new weather@home project, set up by a team of Oxford climate scientists, asks interested members of the public to loan their spare computer time to help climate scientists run more numerous and faster climate simulations. It specifically aims to determine whether the UK’s wet winter and unusually strong storms were triggered by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and associated climate change.

How does it work?

For climate simulations to work, scientists have to tell the model where to start. For a chosen period of time to be modelled, they enter the set of particular conditions (“initial conditions”), such as atmospheric temperature, humidity, wind speed and greenhouse gas levels, that was observed at the start of the chosen period. They might decide to start their model one particular month and will use relevant data for that month as the model’s starting point.

Using these initial conditions, the model will then calculate how weather conditions evolve over time. Looking at the specific period of time when an extreme weather event occurred, scientists can model that same period thousands of times over in their climate model to see how often the model predicts the extreme event, and how often weather patterns unfold as normal, with no extreme event.

To determine whether this winter’s storms are linked to human-induced climate change, the weather@home team is running their model with two different sets of initial conditions.

– Real conditions that were actually measured (with high levels of greenhouse gases).

– ‘Natural’ atmosphere and ocean conditions that would have existed without the influence of human emissions.

By running thousands and thousands of these simulations, the Oxford team can then compare how frequently the extreme events occur in both sets of simulations and see whether the impact of human emissions have made these events more likely and/or stronger.

The weather@home project is on going, and the more simulations are carried out, the more robust the conclusions will be.

The first results are in!

The scientists are analysing the model results as they come in from citizen scientists’ homes, and anyone can monitor how the data evolves as more results are published on the website. Their first four batches of results are online here and it is possible to observe first hand how the plots are slowly building up as more and more data comes in. Thousands and thousands of simulations are still needed in order to acquire statistically significant results, and it is still time to join the project. The more the merrier. And the better scientists’ understanding of last winter’s extreme weather.

Has climate change changed in the media?

Marion Ferrat January 14, 2014

Whether in a concerned, neutral, alarmist or sceptical tone, climate change is often reported in the media. But has the press approached this subject differently over the years? Marion Ferrat takes a look at the UK press coverage of the last two IPCC reports and investigates how the treatment of climate change has changed in British newspapers.

Glaciers outside of Ammassalik in Greenland – Source: Christine Zenino, Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, polling expert Leo Barasi posted the results of a very interesting study in his public opinion blog Noise of the Crowd. Following the waves of flooding that have hit the UK – and been at the centre of the UK press coverage – for the past month, he analysed the trends in flooding stories in the newspapers since 2005. He found that the number of news articles about flooding that also mentioned climate change dropped from 25% in 2009 to 11% last year.

This result reflects a broader trend in the public perception of climate change. Since the 2009 Copenhagen climate change conference, there has been a decrease in the number of people believing in human impacts on climate, and a rise in climate change scepticism.

One of the triggers of this change was the unfortunate email hacking incident at the University of East Anglia, commonly referred to as Climategate. In November 2009, over 1000 private emails between scientists of the Climatic Research Unit were stolen and released online. Some of these emails were interpreted as scientists hiding data in a bid to convince the world of the dangers of global warming. The controversy took the internet by storm and, although a careful investigation later showed that the scientists had not behaved in an untrustworthy way or manipulated any data, the damage was done.

The London Times, 6 July 1863 – Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After the release of the last IPCC report in September 2013, I carried out a similar analysis of climate change coverage in the UK press. I compared the press coverage of this fifth Assessment Report (AR 5) with that of the previous report (AR 4) in February 2007. Using a newspaper database called Factiva, I read all the news articles published in eight UK daily newspapers during the week of the two reports’ release¹. Here is what I found.

News coverage of IPCC AR 4 and AR 5

The 5^th Assessment Report (2013) saw less coverage than the 4^th Assessment Report (2007), with 22 and 33 articles, respectively. The majority were published in The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph. Over 80% of the news stories were covered by specialist science or environmental correspondents in 2013, against 48% in 2007.

What type of climate change?

I was interested in what was actually being reported in the press. Were journalists more concerned by air temperatures or ocean warming, or perhaps extreme events?

In 2007 and 2013, all newspapers talked about changes in temperature (64% in both years). Discussions of changes in sea level increased from 36% to 45% in 2007 and 2013, respectively, and climate extremes from 15 to 27%.

Coverage mentioning the oceans trebled from 9% in 2007 to 27% in 2013. This is interesting given the controversy surrounding the so-called “warming hiatus”. Global atmospheric temperatures have been relatively stable since 1998, and climate sceptics argue this is evidence that CO2 emissions do not dangerously affect temperatures. Scientists have suggested that the oceans have a complex role to play in modulating atmospheric temperatures.

But the most obvious change was the number of articles mentioning climate models. Despite being a central component of scientific results in both reports, references to models in the press were made in only 9% of the 2007 articles against 45% in 2013.

From scared to sceptical: a changing tone

In 2007, 42% of the articles across all news outlets but The Daily Mirror described the report as bleak, sobering, gloomy, frightening, grim, stark or terrifying. These adjectives were absent from the 2013 coverage, which rather used more neutral words such as most comprehensive, most authoritative or making the most overwhelming case (27% of the articles).

One big difference was the number of direct references to climate change scepticism or denial, which doubled from 30% in 2007 to 59% in 2013.

From cataclysm to careful concern in Britain

Newspapers such as The Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Sun were most concerned with consequences of climate change in Britain. Interestingly, these concerns were different in 2007 and 2013. The references were very sensationalist in 2007, with reports in The Daily Express, The Daily Mirror and The Sun that climate change “would devastate Britain”, which would face “disasters similar to the devastation […] caused by Hurricane Katrina”. They were more moderate in 2013, referring only to Britain likely experiencing “wetter winters and drier summers”.

Says who?

Quotes are an important part of a news article. They give weight to particular aspects of a story and enable journalists to convey opinions whilst maintaining the objectivity of their reporting.

In 2007, 39% of all articles contained quotes from scientists, rising to 55% in 2013. The percentage of articles containing quotes from politicians also rose from 36% to 41%. Most quoted politicians in each case were the Environment Secretary David Miliband (2007) and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Davey (2013), both stressing the importance of climate change mitigation.

The largest change can be seen in the percentage of articles including quotes from climate change sceptics, which increased from 6% in 2007 to 27% in 2013.

What has changed?

Overall, the coverage of both IPCC reports was factual, detailed and accurate across all newspapers studied. The 5^th Assessment Report saw less coverage than AR 4, suggesting a general dip in public interest in climate change. One interesting point was the discrepancy between the articles’ content and their titles in tabloid papers. Although the articles themselves were generally quite neutral, their titles voiced a much more pronounced scepticism. Given that most people would first and foremost read and remember an article’s title, their wording can have an important impact on public opinion.

The tone of the 2013 coverage was both less sensationalist (e.g. minimal use of words such as stark and terrifying) and more likely to include mentions of- and quotes by climate change sceptics.

In terms of scientific content, the main difference was the inclusion of the concept of climate models and their limitations and strengths in the 2013 press coverage (in 45% of articles against only 9% in 2007). This is possibly also in response to the ‘warming hiatus’, rather than because climate models have been a larger part of AR 5.

The political nature of the climate change debate was seen in the coverage of both IPCC reports, with over one third of the articles quoting politicians in both years.

The biggest difference was the much larger place given to climate change sceptics in the news coverage, nearly doubling from 30% in 2007 to 59% in 2013. Despite the increased certainty of the IPCC results from AR 4 to AR 5 (moving from 90% to 95% certainty that humans are influencing climate), it is clear that there is more room in the media today for uncertainty and climate change scepticism.

Marion

¹This study covered the release of the Working Group 1 reports. News articles were selected from the News sections only, by searching for the terms climate change and either IPCC or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

What’s Geology got to do with it? 3 – Christmas! Part 1

Flo Bullough December 20, 2013

Dear Readers!

Christmas is almost upon us and so at Four Degrees we decided to devote our next post in the ‘What’s Geology got to do with it?’ series to Christmas! Marion and I have selected varying aspects of the festive season from trees to biblical stories and common Christmas presents, and linked them to geology (some tenuous, some not so tenuous…). We hope you enjoy!

The Journey to Bethlehem

The story of Joseph and Mary’s hallowed journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem is an intrinsic part of christmas festivities. But what route did they take and what landscapes would they have seen?

Map of the Holy Land showing the Old Kingdoms of Judea and Israel drawn in 1759. Source – Wikimedia Commons

As a distinct geographic area, the description “Holy Land” encompasses modern-day Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and sometimes Syria. The geology of the Holy Land is characterised by the Judean Hills which run North to South through the centre of the region exposing Cretaceous age limestones and sandstones. The rocks reach down to the western banks of the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley Rift valley which marks the modern border between Palestine and Jordan. The Judean Hills mark the highest area in the region (an area Joseph and Mary may have been trying to avoid!) and the topography then lowers to the Mediterranean coast to the west and the Dead Sea to the east.

Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem began in Nazareth in modern day Israel and ended in a manger in Bethlehem, which is in modern day Palestine. The route taken between the two, and indeed the time it took them is oft disputed. Given the mountainous nature of the central Holyland which is dominated by the Judean Hills and the reality of transporting a pregnant woman on a donkey, it is possible they would have avoided the mountains and travelled southeast across the Jezreel Valley, connecting with the Jordan Valley to the East, down to Jericho and then across to Bethlehem. This route would have looked something like this.

Image of the Judean Hill taken in 1917. Source – Wikimedia Commons

The area they may have wanted to avoid, the Judean Hills, is formed from monoclinic folds and relates to the Syrian Arc belt of anticlinal folding in the region that began in the Late Cretaceous. These are the same hills that include the famous Mount of Olives, and the location of the story of David and Goliath which occurred in the Ella Valley in the Judean Hills’. It is also home to Bethlehem which stands at an elevation of about 775 meters and is situated on the southern portion in the Judean Hills.

By contrast, the Jordan valley encompasses the lowest point in the world, the Dead Sea (sitting at 420 below sea level). The valley was formed in the Miocene (23.8 – 5.3 Myr) when the Arabian tectonic plate moved away from Africa. The plate boundary which extends through the valley (and houses the Dead Sea!) is called the Dead Sea Transform. This boundary separates the Arabian plate from the African plate. For more on the geology of the Dead Sea region see this earlier Four Degrees post.

Lego

Christmas tree made of Lego at St Pancras Station! Source – Wikimedia Commons

As children (or adults!) many of us will have experienced unwrapping various Lego sets on Christmas Day. Its popularity has been sustained over the last 50-60 years whilst the company has continued to grow; Lego never goes out of style! But did you know that Lego has been manufacturing its hugely successful interlocking toy bricks since 1949 and as of 2013, 560 billion Lego parts have been produced! But what does any of this have to do with geology?

Lego blocks! Source – Wikimedia Commons

Well, Lego started off as wooden blocks and toys in the workshop of inventor Ole Kirk Christiansen, before moving onto manufacuring the blocks out of cellulose acetate. But since 1963 the blocks have been made from a resilient plastic called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). As with many plastics, the Butadiene and Styrene components of ABS are formed from a process that begins with the extraction and cracking of crude oil. Oil consists of a mixture of hundreds of different hydrocarbons containing any number of carbon atoms from 1-100. Butadiene is a petroleum hydrocarbon that is obtained from the C4 fraction of steam cracking (more on steam cracking here ) and styrene is made by the dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene, a hydrocarbon obtained in the reaction of ethylene and benzene. Lego is just another manufactured product who’s journey began in the rocks!

Wrapping Paper

Christmas wrapping paper! Source – Wikimedia Commons

The use of wrapping paper was first documented in ancient China where it was invented in 2nd century BC but it was the innovations of Rollie and Joyce Hall, the founders of Hallmark Cards that helped popularise the idea of wrapping in the 20th Century. Wrapping paper is made using specially milled wood pulp, this pulp is made from a special class of trees called softwoods. The paper is then bleached and decoration and colours are printed onto the paper using dyes and pigments.

Whilst many dyes that are used in the modern day are synthetic, originally all dye materials were sourced from natural materials. Here we focus on how to make the dyes and pigments for christmassy colours!

Powdered Alizarin dye. Source – Wikimedia Commons

There are a variety of natural materials that can be used to make red dyes including lichen, henna and Madder. Madder, made from the dye plant Rubia tinctorum, has been used as a dye as far back as 1500BC it was even found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Madder was also used to make Alizarin, the compound 1,2-dihydroxy-9,10-anthracenedione. Alizarin was a prominent red dye until synthetic Alizarin was successfully duplicated in 1869 when German chemists Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann found a way to produce alizarin from anthracene. A later discovery that anthracene could be abstracted from coal tar further advanced the importance and affordability of alizarin as a synthetic dye. This reduced cost caused the market for madder to collapse almost overnight. While alizarin has been largely replaced by more light-resistant pigmens it is still used in some printing. (QI – it is also used in classrooms as a stain to indicate the calcium carbonate minerals, calcite and aragonite!)

Other more exotic inks and pigments used in wrapping paper such as metallic pigments are also made through mined raw materials. To produce metallic pigments, materials such as Aluminium powder (aluminium bronze) and copper-zinc alloy powder (gold bronze) are used to produce novel silver and gold inks!

Christmas Trees

800px-Julgransförsäljning_utanför_Lunds_domkyrka

Abies Nordmanniana on sale as christmas trees. Source – Wikimedia Commons

Christmas trees are an iconic part of Christmas, whether at home or in your local area its hard to go far in December without seeing one most days! In fact they are so popular now that Christmas trees are farmed specifically for this purpose. While the best selling trees in North America are Scots Pine, Douglas-fir and noble fir, in the UK, Nordmann fir is the most popular species due to its low needle drop feature.

As with all crops, Christmas trees require a specific set of nutrients to thrive and these are provided by fertile soil which is controlled by the underlying geology. Elements that are required for health growth include Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium, Magnesium, Sulphur, Boron, Copper, Manganese, Molybdenum, Iron and Zinc which are all obtained from the soil.

Where this isn’t available or in areas of intensive farming these elements are derived through the use of fertiliser which relies on mined phosphate for mass production (more on the link between fertiliser and mined phosphate reserves here). In terms of soil types, pine trees are usually better adapted to a sandy or sandy loam soil, while White Spruce trees and fir trees, prefer fine-texture loams and clay loam soils.

800px-Abies_nordmanniana_@Kurtbeli-Alucra-Giresun

Abies nordmanniana trees located in the Black Sea region of Turkey. Source – Wikimedia Commons

The popular Nordmann fir used in the UK, or ‘Abies nordmanniana’ is native to the mountains to the east and west of the Black Sea in an area which covers Turkey, Georgia, Russian Caucasus and Armenia. They grow at high altitudes of 900-2200 m on mountains and require plenty of rainfall (~1000mm).

The distribution of the species around the Black Sea and its absence in other local areas of similar, suitable climate is thought to be due to the forest refugia that formed during the ice age. Refugia is the term used to describe a location of an isolated or relict species population. This can be due to climatic changes, as with Nordmann Fir, geography (and therefore geology) or human activities such as deforestation. The forest refugia that caused the limited spread of the Nordmann Fir was caused by the glacial coverage during the Ice Age in the eastern and southern black sea which cut off many areas restricting the spread of the species. Indeed the presence of these refugia is the reason many forest tree populations survived at all!

Stay tuned for Marion’s Part 2 of the Christmas Post next week…

Flo

Snacking on climate

Marion Ferrat December 10, 2013

ClimateSnack is a new initiative for early-career climate scientists around the world to improve their writing and communication skills. Snackers get to write tasty climate blogs and discuss them in a friendly and interactive environment. Marion talked to three members of the Imperial College London group for the latest issue of GeoQ!

Good written and oral communication skills are quickly becoming a pre-requisite for early career scientists. Writing, presenting, interacting and collaborating are important for making contacts, developing research proposals, applying for fellowships and communicating one’s work. This is particularly true in a very publicised field such as climate change research, where inter-disciplinarity reigns, and the ability to convey ideas to wide ranging audiences is crucial.

But gaining these skills is not always straightforward. Writing and publishing online can be daunting, so can interacting with researchers outside of one’s field.

Born in January 2013 at the University of Bergen, ClimateSnack brings together postdoctoral and PhD scientists across climate change disciplines, and helps them improve the way they communicate their work in a friendly, interactive environment. In July, Imperial College London became the second institution to join what has now become a global network of hungry climate snackers.

Panorama of Bergen – Source: Sindre, Wikimedia Commons.

I joined ClimateSnack back in August and have really enjoyed chatting about climate change research with so many PhD and postdoctoral students across the college departments and climate disciplines. When thinking of what to write for the Young Scientists section of the GeoQ issue on climate change, I decided that it would be great to discuss this initiative that has taught me very much about communicating climate change research. So I interviewed three core members of the London snacking team and asked them to tell me more about what ClimateSnack is all about. Here is what came out of our interview!

“ClimateSnack is essentially designed to help early-career researchers develop their writing skills and their communication skills in general”, says Dr Will Ball, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Physics and the founder of the ClimateSnack group at Imperial College London.

“At each institute that we have set up a ClimateSnack group, we physically bring together people in different areas of climate research. They will write thousand-word blogs about their work, keeping it very simple. In fact you want to keep it at the level that any other climate scientist in a different area of climate research would be able to understand. So as a solar physicist, I should be able to communicate my work to somebody working on, say, atmospheric dust”.

These blog pieces are the climate “snacks” that eventually get published online:

“Then we have a centralised hub that all the institutes publish through, which is the website”, Will continues. “Through that, people will be able to interact, get to know each other and give feedback on the actual writing. So they get better at writing, and also learn about the science that’s going on around them. That’s the concept”.

Sian Williams, a PhD student in atmospheric physics looking at dust plumes and land-atmosphere interactions, runs the day-to-day climate snacking affairs in London:

“We have a meeting once a month where people from different departments across Imperial College come together”.

London snackers Rachel White, Will Ball and Sian Williams.

“Every time, we have a few snacks. I try to encourage people to write them and then send them out to anyone who is coming to the meeting in advance, so that people get a chance to read what has been written and give feedback”.

Writing a snack can be a daunting but rewarding experience. Each author reads out his or her piece and the floor is then open to discussion. I remember that reading my own piece out loud was really quite scary! But it helped very much with improving the post, because one instantly picks up on sentences or expressions that don’t quite fit or contain too much jargon.

“People who have come together from different institutions say what they like about the articles, how they think they can be improved. Normally when you write something, be it for a journal or a website, you never really get that direct feedback, so I think it’s a really great opportunity”, Sian continues.

Dr Rachel White, a postdoctoral researcher in regional climate modelling, has recently published her very first snack, writing about the difficulties of simulating global rainfall patterns: “I actually found that it was easier to write than I thought it would be”.

Detail of the portrait of a young woman with writing pen and wax tablets, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli – Source: Wikimedia Commons.

But putting pen to paper is just the first step: “Trying to check that you have really written what you wanted to write, and that people are going to understand what you meant, is the really interesting process”, Rachel adds. “That’s where the ClimateSnack meetings come in. Different people will have got different things from your article. You have to be quite careful so that everybody understands what you meant. That is a really interesting concept to learn and try and get you head around”.

Will is now an experienced snacker: “Publishing online was nerve-racking, but I developed a better sense of confidence in what I’m doing and in my writing”.

These meetings are not just useful for improving one’s writing, but also for placing early-career researchers in a safe, productive environment where they can hone their discussion and personal engagement skills.

“It’s not just writing. At these meetings you have to communicate, debate, argue, discuss, and you get better at that. And it’s in a safe environment. That’s where you build the confidence and then start moving out”, Will explains.

“Important, imaginative work comes out of collaborating with people who aren’t in your field”, Rachel adds. “Being able to discuss your research and describe it clearly to someone who is in a different field is incredibly important, at conferences, over the internet, everywhere.”

For Will, these communication skills are valuable even within one’s own field: “How many abstracts, how many summary papers have you read that are difficult to understand, even in your own field? [ClimateSnack] makes you more aware of the phrases and the words you use. I’ve noticed that in the way I write. I’m just a little bit more aware of what might confuse somebody.”

Source: Daniel Schwen, Wikimedia Commons.

ClimateSnack has grown at an incredible pace since January. “We are setting up at many other institutes in the UK, and have interest from several others in Europe and in the United States”, Will tells me. “So it’s going to expand very quickly in the next coming months”.

The success and uniqueness of ClimateSnack lies, I think, in its open and constructive environment, and in the opportunities it creates for early-career researchers to forge international collaborations with other climate scientists.

Concluding our interview, Sian adds: “There are opportunities for climate snackers to go on residential courses across Europe, which is really exciting because it’s not only building skills but again building collaborations with different people. And I think the main exciting thing is more people from different universities getting involved”.

Source: ISS Expedition 34 crew, Wikimedia Commons.

I have certainly loved being part of this exciting group and have learned so much about other branches of climate research. It has been fantastic to meet so many climate scientists from different departments and universities and I look forward to hearing about upcoming snacks at the next meeting!

Marion