Culture

Making a contribution

Whilst Clive works with a business partner, and in collaboration with a number of different climate scientists and archives, his work has been largely solitary with significant amounts of time spent working in archives around the world.

Despite the solitary nature of a lot of the work, his underlying motivation is social in that he wants to use his skills to make a contribution and help scientists to understand the climate better:

“My key motivation is–, well, it may sound rather strange but I actually feel I’m doing something extremely useful... Well, climate change, environmental change, environmental risks, severe weather, I mean, these are all things we need to understand better and I feel I’m making a contribution to help the scientists do their work. So we all like to think we’re doing something useful.

“I can’t save the planet on my own. I can just do my little bit.”

Clive was deeply knowledgeable about shipping logs stored in archives. He gained his skills and knowledge from many years of experience in the field. He combined this experience with a curiosity driven method of discovery:

“My favourite research method is serendipity... detective work.”

This combination of experience and enjoyment in his work contributed to a confidence in what he was able to achieve, and a quiet pride in the rare contribution that he was able to make to climate science:

“If it floats and has a logbook I’ll find it.”

Preservation

Whilst some projects he worked on were driven by the information needs of climate scientists, the value of the ship log books found in the archives did not need to be immediate for Clive. For him, the archive records needed to be preserved and recovered for future generations even if their immediate use was not obvious:

“‘Oh, we won’t digitise that because that’s not of any interest.’ And I was saying, ‘Well, it might be of interest to somebody one day.’”

Historical connection

Through spending a lot of time in archives, Clive was familiar with many historical weather observers on ships and on land and demonstrated an affinity for their work. He talked enthusiastically about the work of early weather observers such as Charles Meldrum and Edmond Halley, and the crews of historical ships:

“Back centuries ago they were very good observers but they didn’t necessarily understand what they were observing. But their observations were excellent, make no mistake about that. It didn’t surprise me because the reason mariners took weather observations was for safe and efficient navigation, and so they were very keen.”

Frustration

Whilst climate scientists recognised the importance and value of Clive’s work, significant frustrations were present in terms of the funding environment for data recovery work:

“It’s very difficult to get funding for data recovery because people want scientific results. A lot of the funding bodies or people who make these decisions don’t realise that unless you’ve got the data, you’re not going to do any science, but they don’t want to fund the recovery. No one’s got any money.

“With the ACRE initiative, when we have our annual meetings we get people from all over the world, and the general complaint is no one’s got any money.”

When we spent time with Clive, he was working unpaid hoping that his investment of time would result in funding at a later date:

“At the moment I’m working for nothing, okay? But we believe in what we’re doing... and really no one else can do it because I know where all the data is.”

However, he perceived the dependency of the historic climate data infrastructure on voluntary labour as unacceptable:

“But again, it’s all voluntary and it’s a charity. Do we want to do climate research on charity? I have very strong feelings about this. I think it’s terrible that, you know, we’re doing this.”

Pragmatism

The frustration that he experienced resulted in a pragmatic response to financing work. Clive reported that he and his colleague had begun looking to the private sector for investment:

“My colleague and I are saying, well, where is the money? The money’s in private businesses. How can they benefit from what we’re doing? If we can show them the benefit, if they can have something that will help them manage decisions, then maybe they’ll fund this.

“With the ACRE initiative, when we have our annual meetings we get people from all over the world, and the general complaint is no one’s got any money.”

However, it is uncertain how reliance on private investments will impact on the shape of data recovery efforts in the future, and whether the funding of private investors will meet the needs of climate scientists.