Todd Ringler

An Introduction to the Science of Climate Change
 

It is hard for me to imagine my life without science. Whether at home, at work, in the woods or strolling around town, trying to figure out how things work is always a part of my day. My life would be much poorer and the world would be much less exciting without this curiosity.
 
I grew up in rural Appalachia. My dad is a civil engineer and my mom a teacher. School was always important in our family. Thinking back to those childhood days, the natural curiosity is obvious. I can recall trying to figure out how to build a stronger dam to hold back more of the water flowing down the an ephemeral stream, or annoying my parents to help me build a better paper airplane that would fly farther and longer, or coaxing my dad to explain to me what �meters per second squared� meant and why was it important to building model rockets. The fact that I did not have the tools or knowledge to understand these things irritated me greatly, but it also energized me. The more I learned, the bigger and more exciting the world became. And that excitement continues to this day.
 
I worked my way through an undergraduate program in aerospace engineering at West Virginia University. I spent each summer working with a small crew to build, from beginning to end, a single home. Building houses let me see real-world applications to many of those college courses. One of the senior crew members (and former high school math teacher) once said in a moment of true frustration that I was "impossible to teach". While he did not intend it as a compliment, I took it as such. Finding the answers on my own has always been the most rewarding part of science.
 
As a senior in college I was astonished when a professor told me that engineering departments actually paid salaries to their graduate students. The thought of getting paid to learn seemed just too good to be true. So my fate was sealed: gradate school at Princeton and Cornell, a research scientist position at Colorado State, then on to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The path from aerospace engineering to climate science was mostly a gradual transition. It turned out that for me the most exciting part of aerospace engineering was the fluid motion and the ability to simulate that fluid motion on computers. Once I realized I could meld my curiosity of fluid motion with my love for the natural world, a career in atmospheric science was clear. The transition and broadening from atmospheric science to climate science has been driven mainly by the problem of global climate change.
 
Global climate change provides us all with a problem of enormous scientific and social complexity. So even though my passion for science is largely a selfish pursuit, the fact that I can work on a small part of this huge problem is really icing on the cake. Being a scientist working on a problem that is so centrally relevant to society is truly a dream come true.