Gavin Schmidt: Climate Scientist

- [Narrator] Funding for The Secret Life of Scientists, is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

(dramatic music) (soft music) - I work on trying to understand the climate and that means trynna create like a virtual reality planet that has the evaporation from the oceans, the formation of clouds, the rainfall patterns, changes in the sea ice in the Arctic, fit it into a computer, and trying to see if we can prod it and poke it, and work out why climate change in the past, why it's changing now and what that means for the future.

(soft music) (dramatic music) (soft music) The scientists who are studying the climate, are very much in the same boat as a doctor who you go and see and he says, "Well you know, you're slightly overweight, your cholesterol is high and you don't exercise enough.

If you continue down this road, you're gonna be in trouble."

And the patient doesn't want to hear this.

He goes to another doctor, he goes to another doctor, and each doctor tells him pretty much the same thing.

For the patient it's like I realize I should probably lose a little bit of weight, and I should probably do more exercise.

But it's not an acute problem.

It's not like they've broken their arm, and they need to get it fixed today.

It can always be started tomorrow.

There's lots of people who don't take their doctor's advice and who get fatter and who do get diabetes, and who do die of heart attacks.

And so what we have is a very similar situation with climate change.

The scientists who are studying the climate, are telling the planet, "You need to get off your carbon diet, right?"

You need to be doing something a little bit more renewable and people are saying, "Well I'll start that tomorrow."

I'll just build a couple more power stations, and say, "Yeah that's great," but this is what's gonna happen.

- There's global warming fact or fiction.

- Changes that we're seeing in the climates, are outside of what we would expect.

These things are really happening now.

- The carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas issue is there, every day, every year, every decade, and isn't gonna go away unless we really think strongly, about how to make it go away.

(soft music) (dramatic music) (soft music) When I was in high school, I had a friend who I suspected was doing better with the girls than I was, and he could juggle.

(soft music) In my scientific way, I put these two things together and I thought, oh there must be a correlation.

So I thought if I can teach myself to juggle, then I'm gonna be able to do much better with the girls.

And so I taught myself how to juggle.

That hypothesis was falsified.

Subsequently when I was doing my PhD, I kind of started hanging out with a crowd of unicyclists and jugglers and circus people, and I got much better at juggling, and I learned how to ride a unicycle.

You hang out with jugglers, you have a good time.

What tends to happen is that, for the first few years, you'll get better, you'll add to your repertoire, and then there's a point where you have a balance between how much you need to practice, and whether you're gonna improve.

And then you have to decide, do I wanna increase the amount of practice that I'm doing and get better, or are you kinda happy at that level?

And so right now I'm kinda happy at my level.

(soft music) There's always people that can juggle 13 objects, and it takes them years and years, and years, and years of practice to be able to do that.

But they're also kind of dull right?

Because that's all they can do is concentrate on having 13 objects in the air at the same time.

And then there are people who are extremely funny, and who build in a little bit of magic and they're great.

They're people that you really wanna spend time with.

I try to keep balance in my life.

The way to do it is just to do it.

If there's something better for you to be doing than fixing a little bit of code, yeah then go and see Shakespeare in the park.

The computer will still be there when you come back and I can work for hours and stay late, but then I can also just cut it out and go and hang out.

(soft music) (dramatic music) (soft music) US but British crosswords.

Who, yeah I dunno.

(laughing) Oh, twister.

The day after tomorrow was so appallingly bad.

It was that that prompted me, to become a more public scientist.

- Nothing like this has ever happened before.

- At least not in the last 10,000 years.

(soft music) - London pub.

You can sit there with your crosswords, and a pin of beer, and nobody's gonna bother you.

In a diner, it's just bad food.

Broken arm while playing unicycle hockey.

I refuse to answer that on the grounds it might incriminate me.

Good beer for obvious reasons.

Gotta say Carl Sagan.

He wrote possibly the best book about the scientific process that's ever been written.

Mill's mess.

That's just a mess.

Pretty cool.

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