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Professor Emerita Gautier Reports from Paris


Professor Emerita Catherine Gautier-Downes has been in Paris during the  2015 Paris Climate Conference, acting as a Special Correspondent for the Santa Barbara Independent. As an introduction to her reports, she commented: “The 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held in Paris Nov 30 – Dec 11, 2015. Its goal is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the goal of keeping global warming below 2°C. The conference is expected to attract close to 50,000 participants including 25,000 official delegates from government, intergovernmental organizations, UN agencies, NGOs and civil society.”

“The French government and the civil society are taking France’s role as host country very seriously and proudly (no surprise there), as if they were hosting the Olympic Games. With extensive pre-meeting media coverage and every science communicator on deck, France is helping her citizens better understand what is at stake with climate and how to act to face climate change. Climate scientists are intervening in schools (from primary grade to university level) and giving conferences in all corners of the country. Several of them will even embark on a specially chartered train as ‘Messengers of Climate’ (www.messagersduclimat.com), going through the major cities of France from Oct 6-25 offering the public at large the opportunity to learn, ask questions and contribute to the general discussion” (source).

Gautier posted several blogs (links below) regarding the events, which are well worth reading:

  • December 11: “Climate Change may affect us All in the Long-term: Fate of Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets”
  • December 9: “Sneak preview of Exxon Potential Trial for ‘Climate Crimes’”
  • December 4: “Scientific education … A social experiment in the Paris subway”
  • December 4: “Four climate scientists talk about Nuclear Energy in Paris”
  • December 1: “The Sun that connects us all”
  • November 19: “Can the upcoming Paris Climate Summit be a Peace Summit?”
  • November 15: “Paris attack and COP21”

Editor’s note: Hats off to Catherine for her dedication and insights, and many thanks to Pete Peterson, Computer and Network Technologist with UCSB Geography’s Climate Hazard Group, for drawing our attention to this material.

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Dr. Catherine Gautier received her doctorate degree in Physics/Meteorology from the University of Paris in 1984. She spent several years in Quebec as a professor of Physics at the University of Quebec, Rimouski, and then accepted a position as the Associate Director for the California Space Institute at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography of the University of California, San Diego, where she worked as a Research Meteorologist. She has also served as the CEO for two independent businesses (Metsat Gautier and Planet Earth Science Inc.) and worked at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Catherine served as the Director of the Institute of Computational Earth System Science (now the Earth Research Institute) at UC Santa Barbara for eight years. During that time, she continued to be a professor at UCSB in the Department of Geography where she taught for twenty three years.

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