In 2008, she joined the Met Office soon becoming a Senior Climate Scientist, specialising in Climate Impacts and Disaster Risk Reduction. In 2010, she was seconded to London to advise the UK Government Department of Energy and Climate Change on policy matters relating to weather and climate, including renewable energy provision. On her return to the Met Office she worked as Private Secretary to the Met Office Chief Scientist Prof. Dame Julia Slingo and became the first to hold the post of Expert Scientist in Communications. In 2009, she established ExCite Poetry, the Devon arm of the UK Poetry Society. Within six months of its formation, ExCite Poetry became the largest regional arm of the Poetry Society by a significant margin with well over 200 members and was consequently the focus of the first of a series of poetry workshops with Ruth Padel on BBC Radio 4. Between 2009 and 2013, she co-hosted a monthly arts-review show on Phonic FM, hailed by The Sunday Times as "providing some of the most inspiring broadcasting in the country". In 2013, she became Director of the Exeter Poetry Festival. which saw its international inclusion and work with children escalate. This was the first time it made substantial profit, reinvested in the community programme. In 2015 McCarthy won the first Laureate's Choice Award. In 2016 she converted the research behind the book into a one-woman multimedia experience called 'Alphabet of Our Universe' with numerous shows across the UK and an exclusive interview with McCarthy in The Guardian on Alphabet's Oxford premiere. The same year she was appointed as an Expert for the European Commission, to advise on the scientific validity of projects submitted under the EU's H2020 Climate Programme; the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years.
Honours and awards
In 2015, she was chosen by Poet LaureateCarol Ann Duffy as one of four of the most exciting new voices in British poetry that year. Her first pamphlet "Element" was published in June 2015 by Smith Doorstop under the imprint of Laureate's Choice, taking its impetus from the naming and properties of the transition metals of the periodic table. The Laureates Choice scheme continued for a further four years and to celebrate the culmination of Carol Ann Duffy's tenure as Poet Laureate eight of McCarthy's poems and an interview were published in 'The Laureate's Choice Anthology' in 2019, which anthologised the work of all twenty 'exciting and eclectic new voices in contemporary verse'.
Published works
Poetry
Anthologised in The Laureate's Choice Anthology
On Preservation .
Element - Laureate's Choice Award
Anthologised in the Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets''
McCarthy, R., 2015: "Climate Communication: Bringing It All Together" - presented at Our Common Future Under Climate Change Conference, Paris, July 2015",
Met Office., 2014: "Too hot, too dry, too wet, too cold: Drivers and impacts of seasonal weather in the UK"
Met Office., 2013: "The recent pause in global warming: What are the implications for projections of future warming?"
Met Office., 2013: "The recent pause in global warming: What are the potential causes?"
Met Office., 2013: "The recent pause in global warming: What do the observations tell us?"
Palin et al., 2013: "Future projections of temperature-related climate change impacts on the railway network of Great Britain", Climatic Change, 120, 71-93
Articles and essays
Postcard from a Floodplain Near You.
A Different Sort of Provocation.
Climate Variability and Change: Migration and the Changing Concepts of Identity and Home in the Poetry of European Women.
