Are you a journalist looking for climate experts? We’ve got you covered

We’ve got lots of media trained climate change experts. If you need an expert for an interview, here is a list of Caboteers you can approach. All media enquiries should be made via Victoria Tagg, our dedicated Media and PR Manager at the University of Bristol. Email victoria.tagg@bristol.ac.uk or call +44 (0)117 428 2489.

Climate change / climate emergency / climate science / climate-induced disasters

Dr Eunice Lo – expert in changes in extreme weather events such as heatwaves and cold spells, and how these changes translate to negative health outcomes including illnesses and deaths. Follow on Twitter @EuniceLoClimate.

Professor Daniela Schmidt – expert in the causes and effects of climate change on marine systems. Dani is also a Lead Author on the IPCC reports.

Dr Vikki Thompson – expert on climate extremes, particularly heat extremes. Follow on Twitter @ClimateVikki

Dr Katerina Michalides – expert in drylands, drought and desertification and helping East African rural communities to adapt to droughts and future climate change. Follow on Twitter @_kmichaelides.

Professor Dann Mitchell – expert in how climate change alters the atmospheric circulation, extreme events, and impacts on human health. Dann is also a Met Office Chair. Follow on Twitter @ClimateDann.

Professor Dan Lunt – expert on past climate change, with a focus on understanding how and why climate has changed in the past and what we can learn about the future from the past. Dan is also a Lead Author on IPCC AR6. Follow on Twitter @ClimateSamwell.

Professor Jonathan Bamber – expert on the impact of melting land ice on sea level rise (SLR) and the response of the ocean to changes in freshwater forcing. Follow on Twitter @jlbamber

Professor Paul Bates CBE – expert in the science of flooding, risk and reducing threats to life and economic losses worldwide. Follow on Twitter @paul_d_bates

Professor Tony Payne – expert in the effects of climate change on earth systems and glaciers.

Dr Matt Palmer – expert in sea level and ocean heat content research at the Met Office Hadley Centre and University of Bristol. Follow on Twitter @mpclimate.

Net Zero / Energy / Renewables

Professor Valeska Ting – Engineer and expert in net zero, low carbon technologies, low carbon energy and flying. Also an accomplished STEM communicator, is an BAME Expert Voice for the BBC Academy. Follow on Twitter @ProfValeskaTing.

Professor Philip Taylor – Expert in net zero, energy systems, energy storage, utilities, electric power distribution. Also Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Bristol. Follow on Twitter @rolyatlihp.

Dr Colin Nolden – expert in sustainable energy policyregulation and business models and interactions with secondary markets such as carbon markets and other sectors such as mobility. Colin will be at COP27. Colin will be in attendance in the Blue Zone at COP27.

Professor Charl Faul – expert in novel functional materials for sustainable energy applications e.g. in CO2 capture and conversion and energy storage devices.  Follow on Twitter @Charl_FJ_Faul.

Climate finance

Dr Rachel James – Expert in climate finance, damage, loss and decision making. Also has expertise in African climate systems and contemporary and future climate change. Follow on Twitter @_RachelJames. Rachel will be in attendance in the Blue Zone at COP27.

Climate justice

Dr Alix Dietzel – climate justice and climate policy expert. Focusing on the global and local scale and interested in how just the response to climate change is and how we can ensure a just transition. Alix will be at COP27. Follow on Twitter @alixdietzel. Alix will be in attendance in the Blue Zone at COP27.

Dr Ed Atkins – expert on environmental and energy policy, politics and governance and how they must be equitable and inclusive. Also interested in local politics of climate change policies and energy generation and consumption. Follow on Twitter @edatkins_.

Climate activism / Extinction Rebellion

Dr Oscar Berglund – expert on climate change activism and particularly Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the use of civil disobedience. Follow on Twitter @berglund_oscar.

Air pollution / Greenhouse gases

Dr Aoife Grant – expert in greenhouse gases and methane. Set up a monitoring station at Glasgow for COP26 to record emissions.

Professor Matt Rigby – expert on sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances. Follow on Twitter @TheOtherMRigby.

Land, nature and food

Viola Heinrich – expert in emissions and climate mitiagion potential within the land use sector in the tropics, especially the Brazilian Amazon. IPCC author. Follow on Twitter @vh_trees.
Dr Jo House – expert on land and climate interactions, including emissions of carbon dioxide from land use change (e.g. deforestation), climate mitigation potential from the land (e.g. afforestationbioenergy), and implications of science for policy. Previously Government Office for Science’s Head of Climate Advice. Follow on Twitter @Drjohouse.
Dr Taro Takahashi – expert on farminglivestock production systems as well as progamme evaluation and general equilibrium modelling of pasture and livestock-based economies.
Dr Maria Paula Escobar-Tello – expert on tensions and intersections between livestock farming and the environment.

Climate change and infrastructure

Dr Maria Pregnolato – expert on effects of climate change and flooding on infrastructure. Follow on Twitter @MariaPregnolat1.

Plastic and the environment

Dr Charlotte Lloyd – expert on the fate of chemicals in the terrestrial environment, including plasticsbioplastics and agricultural wastes. Follow on Twitter @DrCharlLloyd.

Climate change and health

Dr Dan O’Hare – expert in climate anxiety and educational psychologist. Follow on Twitter @edpsydan.

Cabot Institute for the Environment at COP27

We will have three academics in attendance at the Blue Zone at COP27. These are:
Dr Alix Dietzel, Dr Rachel James and Dr Colin Nolden. All are media-trained and feature in the list above.

Read more about COP on our website at https://bristol.ac.uk/cabot/what-we-do/projects/cop/

Watch our Cabot Conversations – 10 conversations between 2 experts on a climate change issue, all whilst an artist listens in the background and interprets the conversation into a beautiful piece of art in real time. Find out more at bristol.ac.uk/cabot/conversations.
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This blog was written by Amanda Woodman-Hardy, Communications and Engagement Officer at the Cabot Institute for the Environment. Follow on Twitter @Enviro_Mand and @cabotinstitute.

Canada’s flood havoc after summer heatwave shows how climate disasters combine to do extra damage

People living in British Columbia will feel like they have had more than their fair share of climate disasters in 2021. After a record-breaking heatwave in June, the state in western Canada has been inundated by intense rain storms in November. It’s also likely the long-lasting effects of the heatwave made the results of the recent rainfall worse, causing more landslides – which have destroyed highways and railroads – than would otherwise have happened.

In June 2021, temperature records across western North America were shattered. The town of Lytton in British Columbia registered 49.6°C, breaking the previous Canadian national record by 5°C. The unprecedented weather was caused by a high pressure system, a so-called “heat dome”, which sat over the region for several days.

Heat intensified within the dome as the high pressure compressed the air. Dry ground conditions forced temperatures even higher, as there was less water evaporating to cool things down. Although unconfirmed, it’s estimated that the heatwave caused over 400 deaths in British Columbia alone.

A helicopter flies over a burning pine forest beneath a blue sky.
Wildfires ravaged British Columbia during the hot and dry summer of 2021.
EB Adventure Photography/Shutterstock

The hot and dry weather also sparked wildfires. Just days after recording the hottest national temperature ever, the town of Lytton burned to the ground. The summer’s fires and drought left the ground charred and barren, incapable of absorbing water. These conditions make landslides more likely, as damaged tree roots can no longer hold soil in place. It also ensures water flows over the soil quicker, as it cannot soak into the baked ground.

The huge rain storm which lasted from Saturday November 13 to Monday 15 was caused by an atmospheric river – a long, narrow, band of moisture in the atmosphere stretching hundreds of miles. When this band travels over land it can generate extreme rainfall, and it did: in 48 hours, over 250mm of rain fell in the town of Hope, 100km east of Vancouver.

This much rainfall on its own would probably cause extensive flooding. But combined with the parched soil, the results have been catastrophic. Landslides have destroyed many of the region’s transport links, leaving Vancouver cut off by rail and road. But the bad news doesn’t end there; sediment washed away by these floods could make future floods this winter even worse.

British Columbia is in the grip of what scientists call a compound climate disaster. The effects of one extreme weather event, like a heatwave, amplify the effects of the next one, like a rain storm. Instead of seeing floods and wildfires as discrete events, compound disasters force us to comprehend the cascading crises which are likely to multiply as the planet warms.

How to understand compound climate disasters

The port of Vancouver is the busiest in Canada, moving US$550 million worth of cargo every day. Because rail links are damaged, ships laden with commodities sit offshore. Canada’s mining and farming industries are having to divert exports through the US. Depending on how quickly the rail links recover, significant economic impacts are possible.

Both the June heatwave and the November rainstorm are unprecedented, record-breaking events, but is their occurrence in the same year just bad luck? A rapid attribution study found that the heatwave was virtually impossible without climate change. The atmospheric river which brought the deluge is also likely to become more common and intense in a warming climate.

In British Columbia, future flooding is almost guaranteed to be more frequent and severe. This is life at 1.2°C above the pre-industrial temperature average, yet most politicians don’t seem too worried about taking the necessary action to prevent warming beyond 1.5°C – the limit which countries agreed in 2015 is a threshold beyond which catastrophic climate change becomes more likely.

Western Canada’s year of weather extremes did not come from nowhere. Past trends and future projections tell us to expect hotter summers and wetter winters in this part of the world, and record-shattering climate extremes are on the rise.

Worldwide, compound climate disasters are becoming more common as climate change accelerates. Risk assessments typically measure the impacts of one event at a time, like the damage caused by intense rain storms, without considering how the earlier drought influenced it. This leads to scientists and insurers underestimating the overall damage. With so many combinations of climate extremes – flooding following wildfires, hurricanes passing as cold spells arrive – we must prepare for every possibility.The Conversation

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Dr Vikki Thompson, Senior Research Associate in Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Vikki Thompson

The case for case studies: a natural hazards perspective

As I wander the streets of Easton, as I have done over the last 18 months, the landscape becomes more and more familiar. Same streets, same skies. Things seem flat and still.

Living in this mundane landscape, I find it hard to believe that we live on a turbulent, roiling planet. But the Earth is not flat or still! Natural events happen daily, and extreme climatic events continue to escalate – although all we see in England is a rainy July. Some people are more vulnerable to the Earth’s vicissitudes than others. Since 2021 began, volcanoes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Guatemala, and Iceland have erupted, and hurricanes have already gathered pace in the Atlantic. Many of these events have caused disaster for people living in these areas, losing homes, livelihoods, and lives.

Disasters erode and destroy, they leave scars and memories. We are fascinated by them: we seek to understand and to explain. How can we best do that? The case study is one way. Because of its in-depth nature, a case study is well-suited to describe disasters caused by natural hazards (earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods, droughts), allowing us to tell a rich and nuanced story of events. However, we have to be prudent. There are many more natural hazards than we have scope to investigate. A good subject for a case study offers the possibility of new insights that other, limited methods have missed. Many, many times an earthquake or flood does not cause disaster. In choosing a good subject for a case study, we are looking for that event which is particularly interesting to us, and which we hope can tell us new things.

I am currently working on three case studies of disasters in Guatemala. Why and how did the disasters happen?

Coming from an Earth Sciences background, I’m not sure where to begin. There are no obvious blueprints. Why is there so little guidance on how to do a case study in our field? I think there are two reasons. Earth Sciences has always generously included other physical and social sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics, geography), while a disaster caused by natural hazards involves both physical and social factors. So while this supports disaster’s suitability to the case study method, both science and subject use multiple philosophies and methods. It’s harder to make a cookbook with mixed methods. Secondly, Earth Sciences looks at the mutual interaction between people and nature, who operate on different timescales. Tracing a disaster through a case study requires uniting these timescales in a single narrative. That union is a difficult task and often context-specific, so not generalizable to a single blueprint. (Strangely, in an interdisciplinary case study of a disaster it’s the physical scientists who seem to study events over shorter timescales, for example on the physical triggers of a volcanic eruption. A few years ago in my undergraduate I remember tracing the story of Earth’s evolution across billions of years; now we’re operating over days and hours!)

There have been many criticisms levelled at case study research: that you can’t generalize from a single case, that theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge, that case studies tend to confirm the researcher’s biases [1]. I have also read that case studies are excellent for qualitative research (e.g., on groups or individuals), but less so for quantitative research (e.g. on events or phenomena) [2]. I think these points are rubbish.

“You can’t generalize from a single case”, goes the argument against case studies. But generalization is not the point of a case study. We want to go deeper, to know more intimately, to sense in full colour. “Particularization, not generalization” is the point [1], and  intimate knowledge is worthwhile in itself. However, I also think the argument is false. Because it is such a rich medium, the case study affords us a wealth of observations and thus interpretations that allow us to modify our existing beliefs. As an example, a case study of the Caribbean island of Montserrat during an eruptive crisis showed Montserratians entering the no-go zone, risking their lives from the volcano to care for their crops and cattle [3]. This strongly changed the existing reasoning that people would prioritize their life over their livelihood during a volcanic eruption. How could you deny that this finding is not applicable beyond the specific case study? True, it isn’t certain to happen elsewhere, but the finding reminds us to research with caution and to challenge our assumptions. A case study might not give us a totally new understanding of an event, but it might refine our understanding – and that’s how most science progresses, both social and natural. This ‘refinement’ is also a balm for people like me who might be approaching a new case study with trepidation, concerned we might be going over old ground. Sure we might, but here we might forge a new path, there dig up fresh insights.

On the grounds of theoretical versus practical knowledge – we learn by doing! We are practical animals!

Context-dependent knowledge and experience are at the very heart of expert activity.

(Flyvbjerg, 2006) 

Does a case study confirm what we already expect to find? I think the possibility of refining our existing understanding can encourage researchers to keep our eyes open to distortions and bias. I think this final criticism comes from a false separation between the physical and social sciences. Qualitative research is held up as a contrast to “objective” quantitative research in the physical sciences, focussed on hypothesis-testing and disinterested truth. But any PhD student will tell you that the scientific process doesn’t quite work that way. Hypotheses are revised, created, and abandoned with new data, similar to how grounded theory works. And you can find any number of anecdotes where two scientists with the same data and methods came to two different interpretations. There is always some subjective bias as a researcher because (a) you’re also a human, and (b) because the natural world is inherently uncertain. (I wonder if this is an appeal for those who study pure maths – it’s the only discipline I can think of that is really objective and value-free).  Maybe qualitative/quantitative has some difference in the degree of researcher subjectivity. This would be a fascinating subject to explicitly include in those interdisciplinary case studies that involve both types of researcher – how does each consider their inherent bias towards the subject?

After flattening those objections above, I really want to make three points as to why case studies are so great.

First, they have a narrative element that we find irresistible. As Margaret Atwood said,

You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

A case study is not just a story, but it does have a story woven into its structure. Narratives are always partial and partisan; our case studies will be too. That’s not to say they can’t be comprehensive, just that they cannot hope to be omniscient. I love this quotation:

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene, The End Of The Affair 

It certainly applies to case studies, too. We may find the roots of a disaster in political machinations which began decades before, or that the journey of a mudslide was hastened by years of deforestation. Attempting to paint the whole picture is futile, but you have to start somewhere.

Second, a case study provides a beautiful chance to both understand and to explain – the aims of the qualitative and the quantitative researcher, respectively. Each may approach truth and theory differently: the first sees truth as value-laden and theory to be developed in the field; the second, as objective and to be known before work is begun. It’s precisely because it’s difficult to harmonize these worldviews that we should be doing it – and the disaster case study provides an excellent arena.

Finally, the process of building a case study creates a space for dialogue. Ideas grow through conversation and criticism, and the tangle of researchers trying to reconcile their different worldviews, and of researchers reconciling their priorities with other interested people, seems both the gristle and the fat of case study research. In the case of disasters, I think this is the most important point which case study research wins. Research can uncover the most wonderful things but if it is not important to the people who are at risk of disaster, we cannot hope to effect positive change. How can we understand, and then how can we make ourselves understood? For all the confusion and frustration that it holds, we need dialogue [4]. A really beautiful example of this is the dialogue between volcano-watchers and scientists at Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador: creating a shared language allowed for early response to volcanic hazards and a network of friendships [5].

I’ve grappled with what products we should make out of these case studies. What are we making, and who are we making it for? From the above point, a valuable product of a case study can be a new relationship between different groups of people. This is not really tangible, which is hard to deal with for the researchers (how do you publish a friendship?) But a case study can produce a relationship that benefits both parties and outlasts the study itself. I think I’ve experienced this personally, through my work at Fuego volcano. I have found the opportunity to share my research and also to be transformed in my workings with local people. This has lasted longer than my PhD, I am still in touch with some of these people.

I believe in the power of case study to its own end, to create dialogue, and to mutually transform researcher and subject. And, if a new relationship is a valuable product of the case study, it is made stronger still by continued work in that area. To do that, the relationships and the ties that bind need to be supported financially and socially across years and uncertainty, beyond the current grey skies and monotony. When we are out, we will be able to renew that dialogue in person and the fruits of our labour will blossom.

[1] Flyvbjerg, 2006

[2] Stake, 1995

[3] Haynes et al., 2005

[4] Barclay et al., 2015

[5] Armijos et al., 2017

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Ailsa Naismith from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. Ailsa studies volcanic hazards in Central America.

Ailsa Naismith