The New York Times
A Biden administration strategy: sending scientists
More than a decade ago, a woman at a bar near the Columbia University campus turned to Gavin Schmidt and asked if he knew the main component of air. “Yes, nitrogen,” he replied. His answer made her miss the chance to know if the common stranger at the bar would know anything about atmospheric chemistry. Two years later, they got married. Sometimes, nerds win. Today Schmidt is one of the most prominent scientists warning the world about the risks of global warming. He was recently appointed to a newly created position as NASA’s senior climate adviser, a job that comes with the challenge of bringing NASA’s climate science to the public and helping to figure out how to apply it to save the planet. Subscribe to the New York Times Schmidt’s The Morning newsletter, which since 2014 has headed NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, will work with a government that is making the fight against climate change one of its priorities. The Biden team is adding positions across the government to policymakers and experts like Schmidt, who understand the threats facing our planet. “Climate change is not just an environmental issue that belongs to the EPA, it is not just a scientific issue that belongs to NASA and NOAA,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. “Climate change is an essential issue,” she said, and “needs to be considered by all federal agencies.” President Joe Biden returned the Paris climate deal to the United States on his first day in office and signed piles of executive orders to begin undoing the Trump administration’s reversals of more than 100 environmental rules. In announcing Schmidt’s appointment, NASA’s acting administrator, Steve Jurczyk, said: “This position will provide critical information and recommendations from NASA leadership for the entire spectrum of climate-related science, technology and infrastructure programs.” new position, which does not come with a separate budget or team, Jurczyk said the job will be to “promote and engage in climate-related investments” in the agency’s earth science work and help explain to the world what is NASA research related to climate and technology development yes. The space agency, which launches satellites that monitor conditions in the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, snow, ice and more, is one of the sources of pure science that informs us about climate change. But their leaders sometimes have a hard time talking about it. “Not every government was interested in calling it ‘climate change’, especially the Trump administration,” said Lori Garver, a former NASA assistant administrator who is now CEO of Earthrise, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of satellite data to deal with global warming. Garver said she was “thrilled” about Schmidt’s appointment, calling it a message that “this will be a priority for NASA”. She said that while the agency provides important scientific data to help understand the warming, she has not been deeply involved in finding solutions. She compared the situation to what could happen if scientists at the National Institutes of Health studied cancer, but did not try to find cures. With a more aggressive attitude, she said, “we can count on NASA’s brilliant scientists to do more than just take measurements.” Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson called the new position “too late”, but added that the position would be more significant if Schmidt “has routine access to Congress and the president”. Because? Because “NASA” itself, he said, “is not the one who needs advice on climate change.” Schmidt has written about 150 scientific articles and has an active and sometimes fierce presence on social media. At the Goddard Institute, he led the development of one of the most reliable models of the Earth’s climate system. When scientists tell us that climate trends can be attributed to human-generated greenhouse gases, they are partly relying on Schmidt’s work. On a recent bright and cold morning, Schmidt sat down for a socially distant interview on a bench overlooking the Harlem Meer in Central Park in New York and talked about his new job. “Climate change changes what you need to worry about,” he said, and the space agency can help the nation, and the world, find out what we all need to know. This includes things like “How can we speed up the information you need to build better coastal flood defenses?” and “What do we really understand about the intensification of precipitation – how can we predict this going forward?” He will have no budgetary power or armies of workers under his command. Instead, he will have to rely on his voice. “Having people who know from the start how science works is useful when you’re in a room full of legislators.” If the authorities ask, “could science provide this?” he said, “the answer may be ‘well, yes, no. In fact. But we could do that – that’s the kind of question we could answer ‘, ”and suggest the parts of NASA that could work on the problem. Schmidt did not always seem destined for such heights. He grew up in a village outside Bath, England, and his initial ambition was to live elsewhere. Being good at math took him to Oxford on a scholarship. When he graduated, he wasn’t sure what to do next and “wandered the world” for two years, working on a variety of jobs – driving cars for Avis, picking grapes in Australia. After a while, he admitted to being bored. “I said, well, the most intellectual thing I’m doing is The Guardian’s weekly crossword puzzle.” So he went to University College London, as he says, and asked if he could join a doctoral program. They scoffed, since the deadline had passed, but suggested that he speak to a researcher who happened to need a graduate student. “He said, ‘So, when can you start?'” The researcher needed someone with mathematical skills to work on the waves of the underground ocean. Schmidt found that he liked the research and also found that “people are much more interested in the oceans than in mathematics”. He would lead the development of the Goddard Institute Earth System Model, a huge computer program that can simulate the planet’s climate system and can show how phenomena like rising carbon dioxide levels cause warming. Over time, he began to dedicate himself to so many fields that he had to become a climate polymath, broadly focused instead of delving into a single topic, as many experts do. This helped make him a talented science communicator. In 2004, he helped start a blog, Real Climate, hoping to explain climate science to the general public and science journalists. But an additional audience was paying attention: other scientists. “One of the big surprises that emerged from this was how many other climate scientists really needed help to understand climate science” in addition to their own fields, he said. When the American Geophysical Union awarded its first climate communication award in 2011, it went to Schmidt for “transforming climate dialogue on the web,” the group said in its quote. Everything Schmidt did came along, he said – and that even includes his skill in juggling, a hobby he started in high school, thinking about at the time, he recalled: “Oh, this is going to be useful with women”. He has honed his juggling skills over the years, starting in Australia, when he lived with a street artist. Today, he attributes the hobby to helping him build the confidence he needs to perform in front of the crowds – his 2014 TED talk was watched 1.3 million times. “It turns out that the things I spent time doing, learning or practicing contributed to helping this evolution,” he said. He also learned the unicycle, which in turn led him to the sport of unicycle hockey, which is basically what it looks like. He played on the British national championship team for the sport, breaking an arm at one point. Joshua Wolfe, who wrote a book with Schmidt on climate change and is a member of the Carmine Street Jugglers group in Greenwich Village, said Schmidt’s efforts to teach the world about global warming were not free. Schmidt, like other great climate scientists, was attacked by the denying community, which was subjected to efforts in the courts to gain access to his private email accounts, allegedly to discover evidence of scientific fraud. These harassment processes were unsuccessful and no fraud was shown, but the attack campaign hurt. “He paid an emotional price,” said Wolfe. “It is exhausting to be the target of lawsuits” and to be attacked on social networks and by hackers. Wolfe helped found the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which helps targeted scientists. “With his modeling skills, he could have earned 10 times his salary 130 blocks south of Wall Street. He chose to communicate science, despite the very real personal costs of doing so. ”Now, every year, on Tuesday, two weeks before Good Friday, the anniversary of the night Schmidt met his future wife, he posts innocuous tweets about nitrogen, with the hashtag #NitrogenTuesday. Sitting on the bench, Schmidt pointed to a fluttering cardinal and worried out loud that people were testing their luck as they stepped on the frozen surface of the Harlem Meer. “I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” he said, and spotted another hiker on the ice. “There are a lot of people who are not making sensible decisions,” he said. This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company