By Emma Conkle and Kimberly Henrickson
Dec. 28, 2025
After honing his analytical skills in the finance industry on Wall Street, Vince Cooper now applies his talents to help predict abrupt climate change in a warming world. But that’s not the only superpower he brings to climate science – he credits optimism and reliance for motivating him to continue this challenging but crucial work.
“It’s easy for me to keep going every day because I know that there is no immediate doomsday where we have to throw in the towel and say, ‘The world is completely ruined,’” Cooper said. “Any action that we do that reduces CO2 emissions will make our future better.
Cooper uses mathematical modeling and statistics to predict how the Earth will respond to current warming at levels that are accelerating compared to the past. After starting his career in investment banking and private equity, his passion for the environment and desire to better the world led him to climate research.
“I went into finance and worked on Wall Street for four years,” Cooper said. “I learned a lot about how the world works, but I also had an inside look at the economic machine that relies so heavily on both economic growth and CO2 emissions,” a thermostat for global warming.
After leaving Wall Street, Cooper completed a PhD in atmospheric and climate science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow focused on climate dynamics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
“It’s not that easy to even consider working in the climate space unless you have someone open the door for you,” said Cooper. “It’s amazing that for me, somebody who is very interested in the natural world and thinking about climate change, it took a really long time to find the right fit.”
Cooper combines global climate models and proxies of instrumental data to understand how the climate changed in the past, which allows scientists to predict how they expect the climate to change in the future, as current trends show an accelerating pace of climate impacts.
One of the primary metrics Cooper and other climate modelers analyze is climate sensitivity. According to Cooper, it is the most synthesized, top-down metric for how the Earth responds to a forcing. A forcing refers to the introduction of something that changes the Earth’s energy balance. In the context of modern climate change, the most important forcing is the addition of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere due to fossil fuel emissions from gasoline, coal and natural gas.
Another salient issue is how the melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which is linked to CO2-driven global warming, will impact the climate.
“[Ice sheets] are melting, and it will take them a while to completely melt,” said Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University. “As they do, the water eventually gets to the ocean and raises the sea [level]. Even if we can stabilize the climate right now, we would see more rise from the melting of the edges of the ice sheet and the mountain glaciers and the expansion of the ocean water. The big unknowns are the ice sheets.”
Cooper’s findings may impact the way paleoclimate scientists evaluate their reconstructions of past climate periods, and the way that climate parameters, like climate sensitivity, are interpreted for the future, he said. Much of his research has found that past temperature changes were due to events other than rising CO2 levels. He evaluated the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which was the peak of the most recent Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago, and the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, 3 million years ago.
During the Last Glacial Maximum, he found that sea surface temperatures decreased as ice sheets melted. While today’s CO2 levels are higher than any point in human history, atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period were about as high as they are today. At this time, a strong amplification of warming in the North Atlantic and Southern Oceans was not just due to carbon dioxide levels but was associated with ice sheet topography and vegetation changes. Cooper’s findings attempt to predict how future “big unknowns” will affect the Earth.
“The ice sheet impact was just a lot bigger than we thought. That means two things. It means that we have more confidence in the projected range of temperature response to CO2 levels. But also, if we start changing ice sheets in a drastic way, that’s going to kick in even larger climate changes than what we previously thought,” Cooper said.
Cooper also works with historical records from 1850 to the present. Using a statistical method called data assimilation to combine models and data, he constructed a complete picture of every month during that period using data that was collected by seafaring vessels.
The data, Cooper said, gives scientists more confidence in understanding the past natural fluctuations in the climate system. It confirms that, “what we’re seeing over the past few decades is especially unique and unlike anything that occurred over the past 170 years,” he said.
Despite what his work reveals, Cooper refuses to give up.
“I’m an optimist,” Cooper said. “I always have a lot of faith in humanity for the long term, and I think that not everybody necessarily feels that way who works in climate science. But that’s kind of my natural disposition, and I just really try to keep my eye on the hope for the future.”
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Photo at Top: Cooper recently shared his Ph.D. work on paleoclimate statistics and modeling at the annual Comer Climate Conference in southwestern Wisconsin. Compared to prior eras, rapidly rising Co2 levels in recent decades show an accelerating pace of climate change. (Emma Conkle/MEDILL)