Coronavirus Is Turning U.K. Residents Into Climate ‘Citizen Scientists’

(Bloomberg) -- Well before Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a stay-at-home order for the U.K., Professor Ed Hawkins of the National Center for Atmospheric Science at Reading University recognized that people might have some extra time on their hands. He put his thought into a tweet: “Right, would anyone be up for a challenge by helping us digitise all this historical rainfall data over the next few weeks/months?”

The U.K. has detailed data on annual rainfall going back to the early 1960s, but before that all the records were kept by hand, making that information difficult for climate scientists to analyze. With so many Britons suddenly shut up at home with little to do except binge-watch Netflix, however, Hawkins and his colleagues suddenly had an army of analog transcribers just waiting to be tapped.

Hawkins himself is already well-known to the British public for his dazzling infographics, which visualize global warming over time — his “climate spiral,” for instance, shows month-to-month temperature increases and was featured in the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games. This year, he was honored by Queen Elizabeth II for his work in climate science and communication.

The response to Hawkins’s initial tweet was immediate and enthusiastic. By the time he was ready to start signing up volunteers, the official lockdown had been put in place and the response was “overwhelming.” Thousands volunteered to become “citizen scientists” and help sort through the records, some of which go back more than a century. Hawkins has dubbed the project Rainfall Rescue.

Jess Shankleman: Can you briefly outline what it is that you’re asking people to do?

Ed Hawkins: So the aim is to transform our paper records of rainfall across the U.K. into something useful for climate scientists to use in our efforts to reconstruct how rainfall has changed in the past. Understanding those will help us plan better for the future, to manage our water supplies and stop homes getting flooded.

We’ve run three of these projects before over the last couple of years and they’ve been very successful. We ran one where volunteers rescued weather data taken from the top of Ben Nevis [Britain’s highest mountain] in the 1880s and the 1890s. We also took data collected from the Met Office in 1960s and digitized that from the original paper records as well. This is the next project in that series — and it’s particularly relevant now in these difficult times.

When most people think about a scientist, they think of someone with a PhD who’s highly skilled. You’re asking people to be citizen scientists. What does that mean? And can we trust citizen scientists?

We can certainly trust citizen scientists. Through our previous projects we’ve learned that anyone can contribute very helpfully and accurately. We’re asking very simple questions to read some handwriting, which the human eye is very well trained to do.

People obviously make the occasional mistake and that’s fine. We expect that.

You mentioned on Twitter you’d had an overwhelming response already, but you only put out the call this morning. How many people have signed up?

Yes, we have! Two-and-a-half-thousand volunteers already, which is extraordinary. [The volunteer count is now over 11,000.]

That’s gone up about 10 times faster than normal. To get that many so quickly is extraordinary.

So now you’ve got all these volunteers signed up, how are you putting them to work?

Currently our volunteers are busy rescuing and typing in the data from the 1950s. We’re making very good progress. We’ll then step back through time to the 1940s, and we’ll try and get to the 1820s, which is when a lot of these records begin. So we’ve got 140 years’ worth of records to get through, about 4 million observations to digitize.

At this rate, how quickly do you think you’ll get it done?

If we keep going at today’s rate, it will take a few weeks until we finish the whole thing.

You mentioned you’ve done this before, but this time around there’s a lot of people out of work. It’s great to have volunteers and keep people occupied, but do you think there’s a case for paying people or somehow rewarding them for doing this?

Oh. I’m not sure how to answer that. These are very difficult things to discuss.

Sorry, I don’t mean to put you on the spot  …

No, it’s a fair question. We don’t have the financial resources to pay people, and that’s fundamentally where we’re coming from. But people are very keen to do this to help science. We’ve seen people step up and volunteer to help the NHS at the moment. [More than half a million people have signed up to help the U.K.’s National Health Service drive patients to appointments, deliver food, and phone the isolated and lonely—double the government’s recruitment target.]

There are so many of these volunteer science projects available for people to help out with—it’s not just ours.

Obviously you’re a scientist, but more broadly, as someone who has been working on climate change for many years, how do you think we should be thinking about climate change during this current crisis, if at all?

That’s a good question, but tricky. My personal views is that we should let the government get through the current crisis, and when we get through this then, yes, we’ll get back to discussing all of these important issues and how to deal with climate change and all those risks in the future. Because those risks have not gone away.

Okay, here’s an easier question. Do you think this crisis could help push climate change up the agenda in the long run?

Potentially, yeah. It shows what can be done very quickly. That’s the key here. This crisis has motivated rapid and dramatic action from governments on this very important issue, and we may think about other topics like the environmental issues that we face and how they could benefit from similar efforts.

It shows how vulnerable society is to these types of disruption, as well. It’s a future we all face. Heatwaves and floods and being able to deal with them is going to be critical to how we get through it.

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