I LOVE IT HERE.

On thermodynamics and grief

A slow-motion horror story

Personal essay about science, love, and choices

Will Nature save us from ourselves?

The role clouds play in climate change

I'm too busy doing science

Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi's splendid visualization of our data

Sporadically updated and deeply irresponsible

I study climate forcings (things that affect the planet's energy balance) and feedbacks (processes that speed up or slow down warming). Our work here has shown that observational estimates of the Earth's sensitivity to greenhouse gases are probably biased low: assuming climate changes will be small is not a very good idea.

My postdoctoral work identified a "fingerprint" of human influence on global precipitation patterns and showed that we are already changing rain and snowfall. This is both reassuring, because it suggests climate model projections are credible, and terrifying, because it suggests climate model projections are credible.

How much wind power could we theoretically extract from the atmosphere before severe climate consequences result? Our work showed that this geophysical limit is large- an order of magnitude greater than worldwide electricity demand. So go ahead and put those turbines in the jet stream!

As a Science Fellow at Stanford, I worked on policy-relevant scientific issues like nuclear power safety, climate model downscaling, and electrical grid resilience. Our work suggested that distributed grids, with electricity generated at local scales, can be inherently more fault-tolerant than centralized grids.