Media Dinner with Dr. Gavin Schmidt

Our first Tech / Media Dinner of the year was one of our favorites of all time thanks to our incredible guest speaker, Dr. Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Here’s what we learned from one of the world’s leading experts on climate change models:

• Historically, climate models have been incredibly successful at predicting the impact of carbon emissions.
• But that streak of “success”—quotes because the predicted warming is generally bad!—ended in 2023, which was way hotter than anyone expected.
• Scientists still don’t know why, but variables like a ban on sulfur in shipping fuel in 2020 and the Tonga eruption of 2022 may have something to do with it.

We’d like to give special thanks to our co-organizers, the amazing Laurel Touby & Jon Fine, and to our fantastic guests, including Oisin Hanrahan, Samantha Stokes, Daniel A. Gross, Sujeet Indap, Emily Cohn, Julia Black, Nicole Goodkind, Nick Lichtenberg, Jess Jiang, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Michael Kaminer, Michał Borkowski, Christopher Zara, Emily Glazer, Talib Visram, Raymond Zhong, Jamie Smyth, and Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins.