“Hey Gopal, I want to apply my skills at data science to do something in climate. Where do I get started?”
Here are 4 simple steps I wrote up to “break into climate” for a data scientist/ data nerd that will help you move from learning to application over the next 2–4 weeks:
1️⃣. Learn.
➡️ Watch the Climate Solutions 101 videos by Project Drawdown and Jonathan Foley
Climate Solutions 101 presented by @ProjectDrawdown
Presented in six video units and in-depth expert conversations, this free online course centers on game-changing…drawdown.org
Great landscape overview and their downloadable slides give you the impact and size of each market in a perfect overview. It will give you a sense of which areas are most interesting to you, it is totally ok to have more that one area of interest as you begin to explore.
➡️ Read the Climate Casino book by William Nordhaus
The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World
The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World [Nordhaus, William D.] on Amazon.com. *FREE*…www.amazon.com
Excellent coverage of key concepts, including tipping points and equilibrium scenarios. Will get you to appreciate how multi-disciplinary the whole climate space is. The “Discounting and the Value of Time” chapter is truly inspiring. Also, very logical and organized systems level thinking → no surprise, coming from a Nobel Laurette.
2️⃣. Engage.
➡️ Join groups like MCJ Collective, Terra.Do, Work.on.Climate and connect into technical groups like ClimateChangeAI
MCJ Collective: Unleashing Climate Innovation
Our platform enables the flow of information, ideas, and capital necessary to accelerate individual climate journeys…www.mcjcollective.com
Terra.do: Climate Jobs, Climate Education, and Climate Community
Learn about climate change and start working on climate change solutions today with the Terra.do community.terra.do
Join conversations and set up 1-on-1 chats with members of these communities. People and their experience are a huge source of new knowledge in this space. Tap into that knowledge and build your connections. Talk to other data scientists, domain experts and product managers in your areas of interest
3️⃣. Build.
Build on your climate expertise. While you could always find data challenges/kaggle and hackathons to work on, nothing more like doing your own bespoke analysis and curiosity driven exploration. Collaborate with a domain expert to work on specific data related problems. I am a fan of exploring datasets on Google Earth Engine (the novelty of the datasets and breadth of the catalog keeps growing and surprising me).
Google Earth Engine
Powered by Google’s cloud infrastructure watch video Google Earth Engine combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite…earthengine.google.com
Climate Change AI
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learningwww.climatechange.ai
I would encourage reading through and watching presentations at the latest workshops from ClimateChangeAI and reaching out to the presenters whose data problems are interesting to you. I’ve personally presented at multiple of these workshops and have found them to a be a great source of constructive critique on bleeding edge research and learning what others are doing in the community at the intersection of data+ML+climate. Build intuition on the datasets and data streams in your area of interest
4️⃣. Share.
Share what you are learning and building. I spent the last 3+ years talking to hundreds of people across many different aspects of climate ecosystem and received so much help.
We are all busy and I’ve stopped seeing that as an excuse to not share and engage. I’ve opened up multiple windows on my calendar to pay it forward over the past months. DM me and I’m happy to share a link to my cal. We can talk about anything from starting your own climate company to climate datasets to why you think a specific modeling paradigm better suits a specific climate data problem.
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More on what I am building with climate data:
The software of climate adaptation
Getting to the building blocks of sustainable capital allocationmedium.com
