BAMOS
Jun 2020
6 News
Panel Pledge by ARC Centre of
Excellence for Climate Extremes
Alvin Stone
In recognition of International Women’s Day, the chief
investigators at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate
Extremes (CLEX) have signed up to the Male Champions of
Change Panel Pledge. This commits the chief investigators to
bring gender balance to every forum with signatories agreeing
to:
• Only speak at events if they include a diversity of speakers
• Raise issues of gender balance
• Actively encourage women’s voices
• Not accept any excuses
“This is just one step to increasing representation of women
as authorities and key spokespeople for the science,” said CLEX
Centre Director Prof Andy Pitman.
“By exercising their influence, our climate champions
for change can encourage other senior researchers,
scientific organisations and conference organisers to
place women front‐and‐centre in some of the important
scientific discussions of our time.”
The pledge is one of many initiatives by the Centre of
Excellence. Its Diversity and Culture Committee has been active
in promoting a wide range of equity, diversity and inclusion
initiatives spanning gender equity, ethnic diversity, kindness
in science, mental health and wellbeing, among others. Other
examples of the centre’s efforts to invest in the careers of
future female leaders include helping fund a participant in
the Homeward Bound initiative and creating the CLEX Career
Development Award for Women and Underrepresented Groups,
which can be used to fund career development opportunities.
Currently, the Centre of Excellence has gender parity amongst
its student and early career researchers but, as is often the case
in science, women are underrepresented at more senior levels.
The Centre has therefore set targets to have equal gender
representation at all levels and continues to strive towards this
goal.
“One of the five key pillars of the Centre’s strategic plan is to
create an outstanding environment for everyone in the centre
and, furthermore, for CLEX to be an exemplar in this space,”
said Chief Operating Officer and Co‐chair of the Culture and
Diversity Committee, Mr Stephen Gray.
“We are working hard to equalise the playing field,
recognising that for women and other traditionally
underrepresented groups in STEM this often requires
conscious effort to overcome structural disadvantage.
Having a diversity of speakers at internal events is already
a part of the fabric of our Centre culture. By signing the
panel pledge we are committed to taking conversations
about the importance of gender equity—and diversity in
general—into the broader research community.”
Remembering John Houghton
Adapted from words published by granddaughter of
John Houghton, Hannah Malcolm, on her Twitter feed
John Houghton passed away in mid‐April 2020 from
COVID‐19. He was an atmospheric physicist who devoted
his career to climate justice, including in his role as Co‐chair
of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Climate Change science assessments from 1988 to 2002.
At Oxford he studied Maths and Physics, and specialised in
atmospheric physics. He became a professor at Oxford in
1958. In the late 1960s the Global Atmospheric Research
Programme was set up and he became chair of its
successor—the World Climate Research Programme—in
1980.
He was Director General of the UK Meteorological Office
from 1983, and in 1987 he and Michael Fish were blamed
for a failure to predict the big storm that hit the south of
England. Readers of The Sun voted that he and Michael Fish
should be sacked, which he remembered fondly.
In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
was created. He was Co‐chair of the IPCC's scientific
assessment working group until 2002 and lead editor of
the first three IPCC reports. In 2007, he collected the Nobel
Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC alongside Al Gore.
He got to live his final years by the sea in Wales, which
was perhaps the place (apart from dragging people up
'shortcuts' on Welsh mountains) that he loved most of all.
He slowly lost a lot of memories and faculties to dementia,
but the sea remained with him. A good life.
A note from the Editorial team: Thank you to David
Karoly for sharing this with the AMOS community.
NCI connecting women in HPC
Aidan Muirhead
NCI has recently started bringing together women from across
our High Performance Computing (HPC) community to meet
and learn from each other by video chat. This new forum is a
great way to meet your peers from different scientific and
technical backgrounds. Please register for the zoom meeting
if you would like to join in each fortnight! NCI is working to
establish a formal chapter of WHPC (Women in HPC).
Through collaboration and networking, WHPC strives to bring
together women in HPC and technical computing while
encouraging women to engage in outreach activities and
improve the visibility of inspirational role models. WHPC is
stewarded by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh.