BAMOS
Mar 2020
Speech by Neville Nicholls (pictured above)
I’m sorry I can’t be with you today to accept this award (for
which I am very honoured). Firstly, thanks to my colleagues who
nominated me, and the AMOS Awards committee and National
Council for conferring the award on me. Next month will mark
my 50th year as a meteorologist and climate researcher. I’ve
had a fulfilling and immensely enjoyable career. But I have been
lucky in so many ways.
Just for starters, I’m a white, male, anglo boomer, born
and raised in a wealthy country. I benefited from a young
generation of sputnik‑inspired science teachers, oodles of
university scholarships, cadetships that paid us to be university
students and guaranteed us jobs when we graduated. And jobs
back then were careers, not something you needed to change
every year or so as funding fluctuated. It was before unpaid
internships and underpaid part‑time work and flatlining wages
and over‑priced housing and HECS and GST. So I was blessed to
be born where and when I was.
And I’ve been just as lucky in my career. My Bureau bosses Henry
Phillpot, Peter Price, Bruce Neal, Reg Clarke, Doug Gauntlett,
Neil Streten and Mike Manton all gave me the freedom to
choose research topics and attack these in my own fashion
and in my own time. I owe a great deal to John Zillman who,
amongst many other things, introduced research scientists
into the Bureau. This meant that we could have long careers in
research in the Bureau.
I’m so grateful to Nigel Tapper and Amanda Lynch who, when
eventually I left the Bureau, arranged things so I could spend
the last 15 years of my career at Monash. And I have to say that
being a professor at an Australian university in the 21st century
is the bestest job ever!
AMOS has been a big part of my life, especially over the last
decade or two. Many thanks to Jeanette Dargaville and Susan
Karoly—can I call them the AMOS CEOs—who I worked with
through my AMOS years. Only the AMOS President gets to see
how dedicated they are and how hard they work for our society.
And how brilliantly effective they are!
I’ve been lucky in the students I have supervised and taught
(undergraduate and graduate), my post‑docs, and my Bureau,
CSIRO, and academic colleagues, as well as my international
colleagues, especially Mickey Glantz, Chris Folland, Tom Karl,
Peter Webster and Sonya Seneviratne, along with the many
scientists I have worked with through the IPCC. But I want to
thank two colleagues especially: Mary Voice and Christian
Jakob. I have worked with them both for decades and they have
inspired me and encouraged me, and set me demanding tasks,
and cheered me up when things didn’t go so well, and gossiped
with me, and grizzled with me, and have been the perfect
collaborators. I owe them so much.
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to you guys, the
post‑boomer generations. Scientists rely on the science of the
past, but we also rely on the science of the future. My generation
relies on your generations to take our work, critique it, refine it,
confirm it, correct it, expand it, improve it, quietly ditch it where
it is wrong, apply it wherever possible, and use it as a launch
pad for your own work and your new ideas and theories—the
work that will then inspire another generation. And you do this
work better than we ever could, and faster, and you will have
more impact. I expect great things from you all, and I’m already
seeing these great things. But I expect even more from you in
the future. Thank you all.
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