The Bridge: Connecting Science and Policy

February 10, 2014

Citizen-Scientists Find a Receptive Climate in Congress

Residing in a state that is about as blue as they come, I had reservations that participating in AGU’s Climate Science Day to visit offices of my Massachusetts congressional delegation would involve little more than preaching to the choir. Although that was mostly true, the staffers we met did sincerely seem to appreciate the visit. Still more rewarding for me, I was paired with a New Hampshire scientist and got to tag along on his visits to a mixed delegation. Well, it is mixed in terms of political parties, but, curiously, all four of NH’s senators and representatives are women. What’s that got to do with climate change science?

January 24, 2014

The Biggest Surprise

The safe confines of my coffee shop and flashing terminal screen became the mainstay during my doctoral studies at Purdue University. As a computational modeler you spend days buried under lines of code trying to find a bug that you think exists somewhere between line 200 and 1000. I loved every minute of it, especially the times when you had a breakthrough, which could be as simple as watching the climate model produce output without crashing. I walked away from this world in August to head to Capitol Hill as a Congressional Science Fellow sponsored by the American Geophysical Union.

January 13, 2014

The Polar Vortex Gets Its 15 Minutes of Fame

Every science has its own language and terms, and meteorology has more than most. It’s strange though how every now and then, a scientific term you’d only hear if you were listening to a group of meteorologists discuss weather gets turned into a water cooler topic. In 2012, it was the term DERECHO (dah-ray show), when one came through the mid-Atlantic (and knocked down a million trees and power lines from Ohio all the way to the Eastern Shore of Maryland).

Now, the polar vortex has gotten its 15 minutes of fame. The cold outbreak at the beginning of the year was certainly one of the more severe chills in a couple of decades, but by no means as bad as what we saw during several winters in the1970’s and 1980’s. In the past few days I’ve seen images on TV news of snow, frozen lakes, and high winds that were labeled as the polar vortex, but they were wrong. The polar vortex is high above the surface and what you were seeing in those news reports was, (wait for it), snow, frozen lakes, and high winds!

While my fellow meteorologists have cringed as the public tries to make sense of this new word in the public’s weather dictionary, I think it’s a wonderful teaching moment. Albert Einstein said that science should be made as simple as possible, but no more so, and I cannot accurately explain the polar vortex in one sentence (or even one paragraph), but I can do it in three or four. So, if you will bear with me, I promise it will be quite interesting and you’ll never look at a TV weather report the same again!

January 8, 2014

The Recent Cold Snap

Over the last weekend, the temperature in the vast middle of U.S. suddenly dropped to a record low. This extreme weather is a result of a nonlinearity in the weather system, specifically a wave breaking event in the upper atmosphere. Usually the air motion in the mid-latitude is moving very rapidly within a narrow band, called the Jet Stream, which predominantly flows west to east but also contains waviness. It …

November 22, 2013

Speak science to me: AGU’s expert outreach network

Let me tell you… “People should know about this!” That comment, or a variation on it (“More people should know about this!”; “Why don’t people know about this?”) is one that comes up often when talking about science. It’s a phrase I used a lot when I was still studying marine invertebrates, and it was one of the main reasons I went into science communication and outreach. Whether it’s about …

November 19, 2013

Make STEM Education a Priority

I feel so lucky to be working at AGU as an intern in the Science department, but my geoscience career has not been without challenges and struggle. Through my inherent passion for Earth science and the confidence that a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degree could provide job security, I fought to attain a B.S. from the Department of Geosciences at Penn State University. If not for the encouragement …

November 12, 2013

New Website Wants to Encourage Public Discussion of Climate Change by Scientists

What are your thoughts on the new Climate Change National Forum and Review (CCNFR)? According to the website’s founders, the forum offers one way for scientists, and eventually policy makers, to join the discussion on climate change. The organization’s founders, Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, Dr. Barry Lefer, and Prof. Tracy Hester, developed CCNFR to educate the American public on the science of climate change and its policy implications. CCNFR’s main vehicle …

October 28, 2013

The Bridge Joins AGU’s Blogosphere

Welcome to The Bridge: Connecting Science and Policy! We are excited and honored to join the AGU Blogosphere family. Our goal is to provide readers with a deeper understanding of how science and policy intersect and to encourage discussion about how those intersections can be enriched. Scientific research is often far removed from policy, which in many instances makes sense. Research itself should be isolated from the influence of …

August 1, 2013

A Policymaker Walks Into The Forest…

A recurring challenge for scientists talking to policymakers is finding the match between the details that the scientist focuses on and understands, and the details that the policymaker needs to make their decisions. I often see scientists struggling to calibrate their message to the right level of specificity. Missing the mark on this can kill an otherwise promising conversation, but more importantly, increases the probability that you will squander real …

July 11, 2013

Accomplishments and Future Needs of Science in the United States

The first full day of the 2013 AGU Science Policy Conference, on 25 June, began with a plenary session that provided a frame for discussions throughout the day. The plenary session, Preparing for Our Future: The Value of Science, not only elucidated the myriad of economic and societal contributions of science in the United States, but also issued a call for scientists to communicate their contributions and defend their role. …