Bio: Dr Bauer is a NASA physical scientist and an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University. Her group is responsible for the aerosol research and modeling at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Work involves the development of process-level aerosol physics and chemistry-resolving numerical tools, with the goal of building fast but physically realistic climate models that can be applied to technology and society-based research questions and decadal-long climate simulations. PhD in Earth Science, Hamburg University, Germany, 2000.

2022-08 Abstract Title: Chemistry and the Climate’s Backseat Drivers

Abstract Body: The climate would be a much easier system to study if there was only one thing going on at a time including the Sun, greenhouse gas emissions, or a big volcano going off. Since different external drivers (“forcings”) happen independently and many of them happen at the same time, and while it is still a good approximation to say that the whole is the sum of the parts, the non-linearities loom larger. That means in the future we are going to need to be more careful in judging the different drivers in climate change and using chemistry as a key tool to discern how a number of drivers all interacting together explain the climate’s erratic journey.