Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Oceanographer who discovered climate change impaired the Southern Ocean's carbon sink and founded the Global Carbon Budget.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:48How do you stop yourself being dragged into what you call climate doomism?
I try to be as much as possible in touch with nature. I like the weather, so just looking out the window for me is calming. Being in the environment, in the forest or on the sea, in a kayak, is really extremely important because unless you focus on the good things, you just get so anxious with climate change on your daily basis that you can't function.
Presenter asks
7:14You've described your mother Nicole as a very special person. Tell me about her. She grew up on a farm, didn't she?
She did. She grew up on a farm and her dad was a blacksmith. And when the horse went out to be replaced by the car, then he had to go on a farm and they were very poor. And she always wanted to go to university. She was very good at school. She told me recently that she was ranked first in Quebec for French and math when she was 16 years old. But still, in spite of this, she wasn't able to go to university because that wasn't the done thing. It costed too much money. What really impressed me about her life is that she went and got what she wanted. She wanted to go to university. And when my younger brothers or youngest son went himself to university, she went with him.
Presenter asks
8:34The book
The Atlas of the World's Oceans
it is big, it has the deep sea bottom, it has the ocean currents, it's beautiful.
The luxury
You were very sporty as a young girl. So when it came to actually playing sports competitively, what did you do?
I picked water polo as being my sports. I always was very comfortable in the water, but my team never won a tournament. There was this team from Montreal. They were just better than us. And we lost a lot of finals as a result. So I have a lot of silver medal, but never an actual gold medal. And this frustration of being almost there, but never quite reaching it, was very formative to me. I know the feeling of kind of failing, but you haven't really failed. If you lost on a final and you have a silver medal, you haven't really failed, but you still haven't won. And so going back home and thinking, okay, what am I going to work on next? What's the next strategy, the next tactic? Who do I get on my team? How do I try again so that next year I try to beat that team who always beat us? And this recovery mode was really important and became very present in my life. And I learned to enjoy the successes when they happened.
Presenter asks
11:15How did science capture your imagination and why physics specifically?
It's mostly because I had a good teacher. I had this great physics teacher. He made it very real to us. He made us participate. And you learn by experience. So, you're the one making the demonstration. And it's not until you have taken the apple and dropped it on the floor that you can understand that there's gravity. And I respect that. It was tangible, it was demanding. You could see what happens in a physical environment. It was logical. I love all that.
Presenter asks
17:04What happened? How did you do it? [discovering that climate change affects the Southern Ocean carbon sink]
At the beginning of the modeling of the carbon cycle, the community mostly focused on how much of the emissions of CO two that we put in the atmosphere is going to end up in the ocean. On an average year, it's about a quarter, so it's pretty big. So it's a service that the ocean does. I actually looked and focused at the carbon that is already in the ocean. So there's 50 times more carbon in the ocean than in the atmosphere. And if you destabilize the ocean, if you change the ocean currents, if you warm the ocean, if you change the ecosystem, this carbon is not going to stay in the ocean. So this is what I did in my research: I looked at how climate change is affecting the storage of carbon in the ocean. And this was quite novel at the time because the assumption then was that it wasn't going to move. So we had this stock in the ocean, that's it, we can forget about it, and the ocean will forever take more. And I showed that actually a problem, that carbon stored in the ocean is not there as solidly as we thought. So it can be released into the atmosphere and then presumably that can exacerbate climate change.
Presenter asks
21:28[Climate science was and is still pretty male-dominated.] Has that caused any problems for you during your career?
On and off, especially 20 years ago when I started, there was this event where the opening ceremony of one IPCC authors meeting where the chair had asked the chapter lead to show a figure that represents the results of their chapter. And the chair was a woman, but they were all male, the other ones. And chapter 13 came and showed a picture of a women's swimsuit gets smaller and smaller and said, 'Well, this is the proof of climate change.' And I felt really shocked because I was a single parent at the time. It was hard for me to go to meetings. You know, there was a cost arriving at the meeting. I already had worked really hard. And to have this sexist joke thrown in my face, and everybody laughed. And I had to say something. … I stood up at the end of the questions and I said, you know, I thought this was really totally inappropriate. And then the chair said, okay, let's break for a coffee. And we did. And during coffee, of course, I wanted to disappear. I was mortified by what I said. And then person after person, they were all men, all white men. Several of them came to me afterwards and said, 'Really, really thank you. I couldn't say it myself, but you were completely right.'
“I try to be as much as possible in touch with nature. I like the weather, so just looking out the window for me is calming. Being in the environment, in the forest or on the sea, in a kayak, is really extremely important because unless you focus on the good things, you just get so anxious with climate change on your daily basis that you can't function.”
“I know the feeling of kind of failing, but you haven't really failed. If you lost on a final and you have a silver medal, you haven't really failed, but you still haven't won. And so going back home and thinking, okay, what am I going to work on next? What's the next strategy, the next tactic? Who do I get on my team? How do I try again so that next year I try to beat that team who always beat us? And this recovery mode was really important and became very present in my life.”
“I discovered with my collaborators that because the winds had increased, the uptake of carbon by the Southern Ocean wasn't as fast as we had expected, so it was leveling off. And that that was due to human activity? Exactly. That was due to that speed up of the winds, and that was related to the depletion of stratospheric ozone.”
“I had a duty to go and share the findings of the science with people who ought to know.”
“I don't want to convince people of something. People have liberty of choice. I don't want to force things onto people. I have come to the conclusion that this is an extremely important problem. And I hope that people who spend the time to look at the problem come to the same conclusion.”
“We brought very old ice. That's when I was working at the British Antarctic Survey. 100,000-year-old ice in a thermos. And when you get it out of the thermos, because it's under pressure, this ice it pops like rice crispies. And so this is quite impressive. So we brought that to just show what it's like.”