Previous: Chapter 1. Our travels take us further North
Chapter 2. There’s a lot of opportunities
If there aren’t, you can make them (Pet Shop Boys, “Opportunities”)
Helensburgh, March 2024
It was a day very similar to today, cold early spring weather — or late winter; in Scotland, winter has a long arm. It was my habit to set a morning aside every week for reading papers, a very enjoyable activity: easy chair at the window, nice cup of coffee, looking out over the rain-swept Gareloch. That morning, I didn’t get very far. The Ditlevsen paper shook me. Not that it was a new notion, the possibility of collapse of the thermohaline circulation had been raised already in the late nineties. But the confidence levels on the estimates in this latest work were really high, and I trusted the authors. It was a wake-up call.
And yet, it would not be enough to move the world into action. Politicians were bound to assume the best possible case, which was 2095. The public would have forgotten the news tomorrow.
I didn’t know what had come over me. I had never felt the need for direct action, feeling that I was doing my part already. But this time, I couldn’t just move on. Maybe, getting older, I had gotten more radical than I realised. I felt strongly that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The threat was very real and the consequences would be quasi-immediate, widespread and devastating. Without action, people would literally freeze to death. Huge areas of land would become too dry to farm. All that was needed was for the public to accept what the science told us. Then politicians would have to follow suit, else they would lose out. So I got thinking about how we could make them listen. I felt it could be done. After all, they had listened to the scientists in the pandemic, and thanks to decisive actions on vaccination, masking, testing and ubiquitous air filtration and ventilation, the virus was now a thing of the past.
What was needed most of all was a more precise timing of the AMOC collapse, with a scientific consensus. The research would need to be done by many different teams who would share best practice but keep their own models and methodologies, with the results published in a joint paper. The top teams would likely not be interested, although there would be no harm in asking them. There was always the off-chance that one of the big shots prioritised the greater good over their career. Anyway, I was fairly confident that using my network I could build an international consortium of five to ten teams that were capable of doing the job.
The main problem would, as always, be funding. Research funding agencies were unlikely to fund this project because they don’t react to emergencies. They would simply say “this is currently not a priority” and add “but you can always go for an open call” — with a success rate of four percent and a processing time of at least a year, but they didn’t need to spell that out. Also, national agencies usually only provide grants for their own teams, and the risk of not getting funding for one of the international collaborators would almost certainly kill any such proposal.
So we’d need different sources of funding. We would need additional crowdfunding; it would be a very tall order, but I could see no other way. Assuming every team had two postdocs and we needed funding for three years (that should be enough for two iterations), we’d need about six million pounds. Hopefully some of the teams would have other sources of funding, but we’d still need to raise several millions.
For crowdfunding to work, lots of people would have to be made aware of the AMOC collapse and its consequences, and what could be done about it. We would have to spread a message of urgency as well as hope. And it was all a gamble: with the earliest date for the collapse set at 2025 by the Ditlevsen paper, the whole effort might come too late. Still, chances were that we had a few more decades, so we had to make the most of a very short window of opportunity. I had to get cracking, and soon.
I realised how poorly I was suited for this kind of project: I, an introverted, low-profile academic, a middle-aged woman of colour, must be one of the most unlikely people to start a successful international large-scale fundraising activity and media campaign. Luckily, I knew at least one person who I thought was much better suited, and might be up to the task. And he might know others.
Anyway, I decided to start within my comfort zone, by building the research consortium. I’ve always thought that a rather grand term for what is hardly more than arranging some chats with a few friends. For this particular research, there were three scientists I knew well who could do it: Li-Zhen Lai, Mirza Hameed and Eza Shaarani.
Li-Zhen was of Chinese origin, a solid state physicist by training. She had done her PhD in Belgium and I had met her at that time, years ago, at a conference where she presented a paper co-authored with her mother, who was an atmospheric scientist. They had repurposed a semiconductor metallisation simulator to solve the Navier-Stokes equation. It was a tour de force. She’d explained how that came about: “Because I am Chinese, they really didn’t take my PhD seriously. I had to do way more odd jobs than the other PhD students, and hardly got any supervision. But it also meant they left me alone, so nobody questioned me when I used the modelling workstations in the evening to work on mom’s project.” On the strength of that work, she got offered a postdoc at the University of Ottawa, and she now led a team at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria.
When I called her, Li-Zhen was her usual force-of-life self, glowing even on Zoom, her strong-boned features softened by the Canadian morning sun, her black hair shining with a reddish halo. She was brimming over with ideas and enthusiasm. It was almost as if she’d been waiting for my call. “As soon as I read that paper, I started thinking of a confirmation study. I have some ideas for other teams to involve; I even think I see my way to get my institution to fund part of the research. It wouldn’t be enough though, so getting the funding sorted is the key priority.”
I explained my idea for a media campaign and a crowd funder. She considered it briefly, nodded and said “I might know a few people who could help, I’ll put you in touch with them.”
Mirza was an Indian expert in ocean circulation models who had emailed me one day out of nowhere with a question about acceleration of numerical models and, in doing so, had inadvertently switched the direction of my career irreversibly onto the track of efficiency of computational models. That had led me to work with engineers and computing scientists all over the world, collaborations which I found very rewarding even though they had proven hard to fund and publish. Despite all the talk about the importance of interdisciplinary work, funding agencies and journals are rather insular. Still, I had no regrets.
At the time, Mirza had been working at a small private university in the south of Japan. I had visited him there once for a few months in summer and had fallen in love with Japan forever. He in turn came to Scotland and we had great times hillwalking. Later, he and his partner moved to Korea, and he now had a large group at the APEC Climate Center in Busan.
Talking to Mirza was always slightly odd, in a hard to define way. He looked rather gaunt with prematurely greying hair, had an intense stare and was slow to smile. Despite his important position and academic reputation, he was always very careful not to push any agendas of his own, and yet in the course of a conversation we would generate lots of new and often crazy ideas. He carefully assessed the options for my proposal, and said “I suggest it might indeed be good if I could work with other teams, but for practical purposes it might be better to keep the efforts decentralised and loosely coupled.”
He also pointed out the politics of the situation. “There are many countries, especially in Asia, that think they would benefit from an AMOC collapse, as it would weaken the US and the EU considerably.” As a climate scientist, and one who had pointed out the connection between the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean dipole, he of course knew better. “I think the message about AMOC collapse should have a strong global dimension, making it clear that everybody would lose out.”
“I don’t think APEC will fund this work, and I can’t commit to it unless there is another source of funding. But I will approach two other teams. There’s one in Japan and one in Australia. They might have a more favourable funding situation.”
Finally, I called Eza. I had gotten to know her while she was doing her PhD at our Institute. She was Malay, from Sarawak, so we spoke the same language, and we found that we had a lot more in common besides that. She had a baby, wee Nur, during that time. Her mom came over to help her in the first few months, but after that I often helped out. I knew from personal experience how hard it is to combine a PhD with looking after a baby. At least her husband was doing his part, but he also had a full-time post-doc job. So I became a bit like an adopted aunt, and she became one of my best friends. We had maintained a close bond after she returned to Malaysia. She was now a Professor at the Universiti Malaya and lead their Climate Change Network. She specialised in ocean transports around the Maritime Continent.
Meeting up with Eza always felt very cosy, maybe because we spoke Iban together. She also had a very warm personality and a knack for making me forget my troubles. She looked the way I’d always wanted to look, every feature just a little more defined than mine: eyebrows a bit stronger and much more expressive; nose a little straighter, mouth a little wider; and of course twenty years younger.
As always, she was very practical: “I have already thought how I could justify working on AMOC as an extension and validation study for the techniques used in my main research on thermohaline structure of ocean transport in the Southeast Asian Seas. It would bear out the claims on its effect on the global climate. Funding is actually not a problem: Malaysia has just received close to a hundred million dollars from the Global Environment Facility, and part of that funding has already been allocated to the Climate Change Network. I have worked with a team in Oman on circulation in the Arabian Gulf. The Sultanate has realised the importance of the ocean for their economy, and the inevitability of climate change, and consequently it is one of their priority areas for funding. So they might have a good chance of getting a grant for a follow-on study.”
“You’re amazing!”
They all were. I marvelled how lucky I was to have such friends.
Next: Chapter 3. The wheel is turning