A visit to Mount Kilimanjaro spurs a career pivot

Twice in his life, theoretical physicist Cyrus Taylor has stood at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The first was in July 1984; he had hoped to reach the rim of the volcanic crater but was thwarted by a bout of malaria.

Taylor returned in July 2017, this time with his daughter. She was a recent graduate of Case Western Reserve University, where Taylor has been a faculty member since 1988. On their first morning in base camp, when the clouds finally parted to reveal the mountain’s face, Taylor cried. “Most of the glaciers that had been there in 1984 were gone,” he says.

He arrived home with a newfound purpose. “I’ve always been interested in problems that are important and where there may be things I can contribute … that might not get done otherwise,” Taylor, also an APS Fellow and member, says. Climate change, he decided, was one of those problems.

Back at Case, Taylor stepped down as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He began overhauling his department’s climate change curriculum, creating a new course, “Introduction to Climate Change: Physics, Forecasts, and Strategies,” which earned him Case’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Taylor also carried his new calling into his research. When 2023 and 2024 saw record-breaking surface temperatures and heat waves worldwide, Taylor wanted to try something new to assess the models that scientists use to predict climate patterns. He started with the typical approach used by scientists, subtracting real data from a “smooth running average” to yield a collection of residuals. He then factored in fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide and validated his model by reproducing the standard scenarios considered by the IPCC.

Taylor found that existing models can reproduce recent extreme heat events, meaning these models aren’t missing an unknown factor. While that’s good news for the scientists modeling climate change, it’s bad news for the climate: Yes, 2023 and 2024 were unquestionably the two hottest years on record.

And because “the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is continuing to increase roughly exponentially,” he says, scientists’ prediction that the rate of temperature increase will continue to accelerate is valid, too.

From 1960 to 2010, it was reasonable to model the rate of increase as linear. It wasn’t a “bad approximation,” says Taylor. “But it was just an approximation to this underlying logarithmic behavior of a constant plus an exponential.” After all, climate-warming emissions are produced by an exponentially increasing, and industrializing, human population.

“Until now, it’s been slow enough that changes occurred gradually over the course of a person’s entire lifetime,” he says. This has made it hard for many older adults to appreciate the magnitude.

But for the 20-year-old students in Taylor’s course, “about one-third of the carbon dioxide that we’ve put into the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution has been during their lifetimes.” They’ve witnessed extreme shifts in climate and weather on the order of years, not half a century. To them, climate change feels immediate and urgent.

This social perspective on climate change — how real people perceive it — interests Taylor. Since 2019, his team has used surveys and working groups to study the effects of climate change on the students and faculty at Case and in the community. These efforts require deeper insight into why some remain skeptical of climate change. “Our ability to intervene against climate change involves issues of trust, particularly misplaced or displaced trust,” says Taylor.

While this research may seem like an odd choice for a theoretical physicist, Taylor’s story reveals a path of many distinct but parallel interests that eventually join.

In high school, Taylor served as a voting member of the Fairfax county school board, in Virginia. As a physics major at MIT, he leaned into that experience to argue in an application for a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which supports undergraduates committed to public service, that the study of physics was fundamental to the public good. He received the scholarship.

In 1983, about a year before completing his doctoral studies, Taylor switched from quantum field theory to the young field of string theory. His new interest secured him a postdoc at Rutgers, where he remained in that “heady” space for four years. Starting his faculty position at Case in 1988, Taylor once more redirected his interests — this time, to experimental design in high-energy particle physics.

The experimental team on one of his projects, MiniMax — which Taylor describes as “small, underfunded, and on a wildly aggressive timeline to completion” — took advantage of a new technology: the World Wide Web. “We ended up with what was surely one of the first 100 websites in the world,” he says. “I missed the broader interpretations because I was focused on the physics … but the students on MiniMax ended up going off to internet startups in the 90s.”

In their new tech roles, some invited Taylor to collaborate. He realized that the kinds of skills physicists have — “like the ability to reason in the presence of incomplete, noisy, and inconsistent data” — were useful at startups too. So, at Case, he tapped recent alums to help build a new physics entrepreneurship program.

Taylor went on to become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences — for more than 12 years, until 2017, when he witnessed the lost glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro.

At every juncture in his career, Taylor has been certain of one thing: He has been doing work that, unquestionably, a physicist should be doing — regardless of whether his methods were quantitative or qualitative, or whether he was researching string theory or climate change.

“I’ve always called myself a physicist.”