Julia Slingo
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2014
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jim Al-Khalili's guest this week is Dame Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office. The conversation ranges from her childhood wonder of clouds to climate change's part in this winter's floods.
Julia Slingo's fascination with meteorology began as she, as a sixth former, gazed out of her bedroom window and wondered what controlled the shapes of clouds and why the clouds usually came from the west. In the 1970s she was one of the few women scientists at the British Meteorological Office and worked in the early days of computer modelling of weather and climate. As the first female professor of Meteorology in the UK, she crusaded for greater computing power and capacity to improve both weather forecasting and global climate models.
Julia Slingo took up the job of the chief scientist at the Met Office in 2009. Her profile has been high in the last few months following her remarks that the persistent heavy rains and storminess of Winter 2013 to 2014 were likely to be linked to anthropogenic climate change.
Transcript
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| 0:10.0 | I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas. |
| 0:16.4 | Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth. |
| 0:23.0 | Discover more of our biggest podcast from 2003. |
| 0:27.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.0 | Thank you for downloading The Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:34.0 | My guest today is named Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the British Met Office, |
| 0:38.8 | where in fact she started her career as a meteorologist in the mid 1970s. Julia became the UK's first female |
| 0:45.8 | professor of meteorology when she was at the University of Reading during the 1990s |
| 0:49.7 | and most of the 2000s. There she directed two major atmospheric and climate research |
| 0:55.4 | institutes. She's one of the country's foremost experts on climate modeling, in |
| 0:59.5 | other words, simulating climate systems in supercomputers and did many years of |
| 1:04.4 | research on tropical climates including the Indian and Chinese monsoons. Her job as |
| 1:09.6 | the Met Office's chief scientist has brought her into the public spotlight and firing line, |
| 1:15.0 | dealing with complaints about Met Office forecasts of barbecue summers which turned out to be |
| 1:19.3 | cold damp squibs, and weathering criticisms and personal attacks from climate change sceptics. |
| 1:25.0 | Her most recent clash was over remarks she made about the likelihood of the exceptional rains and storms of last winter |
| 1:32.0 | being linked to man-made climate change. |
| 1:34.8 | Julia, welcome to the Life Scientific. Thank you very much. It's nice to be here and to |
| 1:39.8 | talk to you. Well, lots and lots to talk about. Can you first sum up what you do as the Chief |
| 1:46.1 | Scientists at the Met Office? It's a big job. First of all, I have 500 scientists who work for me and it's my job to direct them in the science they do |
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