Why Climate ?

People often ask me why I study climate, because it seems so unusual a career. The answer is simple : I just rode the wave.

As a kid going on vacation to Carcans every summer, I had plenty of time to seat on a dune and watch waves crash on the shore on the backdrop of a beautiful sky. I pondered a lot about why this all happened, but never thought physics and mathematics could hold the answer. In high school, I spent most of my time trying to emulate Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, but somehow was always better at science than guitar, though most of highschool science is hopelessly boring. I was an absolute disaster in mathematics, but that changed when i was introduced to probablity theory. I majored in biology in college, which in French prep schools meant that every week our minds would be bathed in 6 hours of biology, 6 hours of physics/chemistry, and 8 hours of mathematics (not counting weekly oral exams). After getting my stubborn brain hammered with math for long enough, I eventually got a taste for it. When I entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure, it was originally to study neuroscience and become a teacher. However, there were far too many bright people going into that field, and somehow the Earth Science department was the only one where they would let me do math (a dummy like me was not deemed smart enough for the physics or mathematics department). I had little how all of this related to waves and clouds until I sat in my first meteorology class by Frédéric Hourdin.

All of a sudden, these years of abstruse mathematics, arcane fluid mechanics, tedious thermodynamics, not so straighforward optics and computer science just coalesced onto the one system I had always wanted to understand: geophysical fluids. I was officially hooked.

In 2000, I had the opportunity to go study abroad for 6 months, and there was no doubt in my mind that i was going to New York - it did not really matter the subject, as long as I could hear some damn good jazz.

I had the amazing luck of being connected to Alexander van Geen by far less than 6 degrees, and he set up a collaboration with Mark Cane's group at Lamont for an internship in oceanography. I had never heard of Columbia University, but I sure had heard of the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note and Small's, where the likes of Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jason Lindner and Chris Cheek played regularly. As Humphrey Bogart would say, "That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship" between New York and I . In 2000, I came back to France to finish my program at the E.N.S. and had the chance to do a fantastic internship with Gurvan Madec (modeling the abyssal oceans with OPA).

In August 2001, I returned to New York to begin a PhD program at Columbia University, upon Professor Cane's invitation. Under his patient guidance and that of Dr Richard Seager and Prof. Peter DeMenocal, I worked on ENSO, which is a beautiful love story between the ocean and the atmosphere: that's climate right there. My Earth Science bent led me to look at past changes in ENSO - over the past 20,000 years, roughly. I also did a lot of Aikido, which along Zen Buddhism taught me another meaning of the word enso. Then the nonlinear dynamics of existence took me to a postdoc in Atlanta with Prof. Kim Cobb. A decade later, a lot of time spent behind a computer screen, quite a bit in the dojo, and countless nights in jazz (and other) clubs, I believe more than ever that the Past is the future of climatology: we can only hope to predict future climate states if our crystal balls (climate models) can reproduce past variations, and the past millennium is an ideal playground to test them.