Dr Emily Shuckburgh’s childhood ambitions did not involve climate science for the simple reason that, back then, climate change was largely unheard of. In fact, it wasn’t until the early 1990s, as Shuckburgh was embarking on her university education, that the first IPCC climate change report came out. As she studied the maths and physics of how the Earth’s atmosphere interacts with ocean dynamics, she began to realise the immense implications of a warming planet — and how she could use her skills to study them.