The science behind a climate headline - Rachel Pike

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[clapping] I'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper. Headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change, and headlines that look like this when they have to do with air quality or smog. They're both two branches of the same field of atmospheric science. Recently, the headlines looked like this when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system. That report was written by six hundred and twenty scientists from forty countries. They wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic, and all of those pages were reviewed by another four hundred plus scientists and reviewers from a hundred and thirteen countries. It's a big community. It's such a big community, in fact, that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world. Over fifteen thousand scientists go to San Francisco every year for that. And every one of those scientists is in a research group, and every research group studies a wide variety of topics. For us at Cambridge, it's as varied as the El Nino oscillation, which affects weather and climate, to the assimilation of satellite data, to emissions from crops that produce biofuels, which is what I happen to study. And in each one of these research areas, of which there are even more, there are PhD students like me, and we study incredibly narrow topics, things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules. And one of the molecules I study is called isoprene, which is here. It's a small organic molecule, probably never heard of it. The weight of a paperclip is approximately equal to nine hundred zeta illion, ten to the twenty-first, molecules of isoprene. But despite its very small weight, enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet. It's a huge amount of stuff. It's equal to the weight of methane, and because it's so much stuff, it's really important for the atmospheric system. Because it's important for the atmospheric system, we go to all lengths to study this thing. We blow it up and look at the pieces. This is the EUFA Smog Chamber in Spain. Atmospheric explosions or