John C. Mutter
My work
If you are very determined you can discover what I do and have done by slogging through my CV on the opening page. But, to save you the trouble here is an abbreviated version:
1. In my early career my studies were largely in marine geophysics where I employed acoustic imaging techniques to study the formation of Earth structures such as the mid-ocean ridges and continental margins. This occupied more than 30 years of my academic life. I have spent many months on ships like the Robert D Conrad seen below at left. I was chief Scientist on that vessel when it reached its highest northern latitude --76°20' N in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea-- where I did my PhD dissertation research. That meant crossing the Arctic Circle which I have done a few times. For this I was awarded the Bluenose certificate. The ceremony involves kissing a dead cod on the lips and drinking a shot of a liquor called Screech which is so discussing that many people cannot hold it down. I did, only just and have the certificate to prove it. The vessel on the right is the oldest vessel I have served on--the VEMA. It was owned by G, Unger Vetlesen a Norwegian shipping magnate and the name is a construction of his name, Vetlesen and his wife's name, Maude Monell. The vessel looked nothing like the picture when I sailed on her. The masks were removed. I believe the picture dates from a a time when the ship was loaned by Vetlesen to the US Navy as a training vessel. Columbia purchased it in the 1950s.
Other US vessels I have sailed on are the Maurice Ewing and the Marcus G Langseth. All have the designation R/V for Research Vessel. I was chief scientist on the Ewing when it achieved its highest southern latitude off the Antarctic Peninsular. I don't recall the latitude. That gave me the Order of the Penguin, and I have the certificate to prove that also. Most of my journal publications date from these experiences and are listed in my CV.
2. As I progressed on in this research I began taking administrative positions. I think the first was Associate Director for Marine Geology and Geophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, then Deputy Director of Lamont, and then Interim Director on two occasions. Oddly enough I found I quite enjoyed those positions and that if you put your mind to it in the right way you could actually do some good in those positions. Among other things I started an on-site daycare center on the grounds at Lamont. I also successfully solicited the gift that made the full construction of the Monell Building possible ($2.25 Million, recall the name from above) and a lesser amount that I don't remember to establish the G. Unger Vetlesen faculty chair. There was, at the time, a Monell Foundation and a Vetlesen Foundation, neither of which exist today.
Later Columbia established The Earth Institute with Jeff Sachs as Director, recruited from Harvard. I was Deputy Director to Jeff for the first five years. During that time I was asked to join the faculty of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) by Lisa Anderson, the Dean at the time. Under Jeff's direction and Lisa's enthusiastic engagement we established the first PhD in sustainable development and I am now the Director of Graduate Studies for that program.
3. For the last 20 years or so much of my attention has been focussed at SIPA, especially after the start of the PhD program that had its first intake in 2004. It is the first in the country--a PhD in sustainable development. In the beginning I thought I could easily maintain my work in Marine Seismology and my work at SIPA and for a while I could. Then there first of these started to get more difficult to maintain, I moved from Rockland County near Lamont to New York City after being divorced from my second wife. Just a few years after the start of the PhD program at SIPA I was asked to be the Director of that program which I have done since then.
4. My research at SIPA is very different from my earlier work. For one thing, I don't need a ship to do the work and I don't need to compete for research funding from the Federal Granting agencies. So it costs a lot less. I have always been quite successful with securing research grants but it is quite an arduous process and success rates have been reducing over the years. Proposals are often declined on first submission and may take more than a second or even third submission to be funded. That can be very disheartening for people starting out in research.
Most of what I publish today is in long form, meaning books. Publishing in book form is much more common in the social sciences and in some branches of the social sciences is required for a PhD and a second book required for tenure. In the natural sciences journal publications are the norm. Books are much less common and are never a consideration for tenure. At first I thought that writing a book would be something like writing several papers and stringing them together. It's definitely not. For one thing, scientific papers usually end with a conclusion while a lot of writing for books begins with a conclusion and is followed by material that establishes the case for the conclusion. It's not a style that comes naturally to a scientist. And, of course, the chapters have to relate to one another in a sensible way and not repeat too much.
The two books with Columbia University Press are Primers, very concise text books. They were easier to write and in length they are about the size on a very long review paper for a scientific journal, around 40,000 words. Each one supports a course at undergraduate and Masters level. The Climate Change Science Primer is in its second version in which I added a chapter on Geoengineering and a section on Attribution Science, as well as many updates.
5. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that a lot of focus of my work and that many others is on climate change and its consequences. Whether or not climate is changing is a matter for the physical sciences. Although I line up as a seismologist my academic trying is in Physics and Math and in its essential form climate change as a science problem is a physics problem. Many who go under the title of Climate Scientist have PhDs in Physics or Applied Math. The Climate Change Science Primer is really a little physics text book with climate as a topic. The very clear conclusion from these studies is that climate change can be achieved by altering the composition of the atmosphere. In fact, it is the composition of the atmosphere that governs why the Earth has an average temperature of around 16°C and not a much lower temperature as it would were there no atmosphere. The basic physics of the phenomenon was established at least 150 years ago with the birth of quantum mechanics. Neils Bohr could have lectured on the Greenhouse Effect (though he would not have used that terminology). But most of the physics needed to grasp climate science derives from classical or Newtonian mechanics and integral calculus. Nothing very new.
Understanding what humans might do in response to a changing climate is not a physics problem, but physics can help some. One of the expected responses to climate change is migration. Some parts of the planet may become essentially unlivable while others may become a bit more livable. High latitude grain producing regions are expected to benefit, especially in the northern hemisphere where most of the world's land is located. That means we know that the migration vector points north in the northern hemisphere and south in the southern hemisphere. Animals and plants are doing this already. It is even possible to calculate the distance a person would need to go to reach a place where the temperature was the same as their preferred temperature before the climate changed. Soil Hsiang, a former student in the PhD program and Adam Sobel at Columbia did this calculation. Of course, there are a multitude of reasons why a person decides to leave home and move and a multitude of constraints on people's movement. The wealthiest people can move freely as they wish. Poor people tend to move only when they are forced to and their initial move is relatively short and the reasons are seldom climate related. More likely violence or other form of coercion.
People are now, and have in the past, moved as their physical environment has changed. People are beginning to move away from coastal regions. This, in many instances is more for concern about increasing storm activity and strength than for sea level rise. Concern about sea level rise is paramount for many small island states. Physical science can help here. Physical science can provide quite accurate predictions of sea level rise--where it is happening at the greatest rate and by the greatest amount. The thermal expansion properties of water are well known, if a little strange--water expands when it freezes. These properties, along with wind patterns and ocean currents ensure that sea level is anything but level and will not change level uniformly. In places sea level is expected to fall. Tropical cyclone strength and frequency is also a bit strange though understood. Contrary to what you commonly hear, the total number of cyclones is likely to decrease as the world warms. But of the fewer number a greater proportion will rise to high category events. So, fewer overall but a greater number of large ones. And it's only the large ones that matter.
6. Unbearable choices. What will happen to the future of humanity? To suggest I know the answer would require immense vanity. Vanity is one of the seven deadly sins. What I think I can be sure of is that it will require choices. The choice of whether to migrate is one. For some that may not be much of a choice. In fact, there may be no choice.