To climate scientists, Isaac Held probably needs no introduction. He is one of the deepest and clearest thinkers in the field, and his insightful research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate has earned him immense amounts of respect and appreciation.
Isaac spent most of his long and distinguished career until his retirement in 2020 at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, one of the pioneering centers for climate modeling. He was born in 1948 in a refugee camp in Germany, from where his family emigrated to the United States just a few years after. Isaac’s father soon died, and so he and his brother were raised mostly by their mother, who always encouraged the two of them to do well in school – a “job” that Isaac took seriously, and that led him to discover and develop his natural talent for mathematics.
At the University of Minnesota, he became fascinated with theoretical physics as a “wonderful application of mathematics to the real world”, and he went on to go to graduate school in statistical mechanics at Stony Brook in New York. With the Vietnam war raging, however, Isaac started to question the importance of the research he was doing, and he eventually decided to switch to atmospheric and climate science. The rest, as they say, is history: Isaac produced field-changing contributions to topics such as the Hadley circulation, deep convection and tropical meteorology, water vapor and climate feedbacks, and tropical cyclones.
In this episode, Isaac also talks about the importance of good writing in science, and how he has always aimed to explain his scientific research and ideas clearly and concisely. This aspiration becomes evident when reading one of his papers or his blog on climate dynamics (see here for a complete archive of blog posts), which is widely acclaimed both for its thought-provoking content and its lucid style of writing.
His own life story has made Isaac keenly aware of the importance of random events and tipping points, which limit one’s control in ways both liberating and frustrating:
“Something happens and your life goes one way or the other and that happens to all of us in one sense. […] Some of life’s unpredictability can be these huge events affecting large parts of the world, but it could also be these little things in your individual life that make a big difference as well, which are uncontrollable.”
Finally, Adam and Isaac talk about the interaction of science and politics, and about the possible impacts of climate change on human societies, on which Isaac has a slightly more optimistic view than Adam:
“I think I’m a little bit of technological optimist, I don’t know if that’s quite the right word, but I can’t believe that I can visualize what we’ll be capable of in a hundred years, technologically, if I go back a hundred years.”
The interview with Isaac Held was recorded in September 2021. Image credit: NOAA