More than a decade ago, a woman turned to Gavin Schmidt and
asked if he knew the main component of air. “Yes, nitrogen,” he replied. His
answer lost her a bet about whether the average stranger at the bar would know
anything about atmospheric chemistry. Two years later, they were married.
اضافة اعلان
Sometimes the nerds win.
Today Schmidt is one of the most prominent scientists warning
the world about the risks of a warming world. Recently he was named to a newly
created position as senior climate adviser to NASA, a job that comes with the
challenge of bringing NASA’s climate science to the public and helping figure
out how to apply it to saving the planet.
Schmidt, who since 2014 had headed NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, will be working with an administration that is making the fight
against climate change one of its priorities. The Biden team is adding
positions throughout the government for policymakers and experts like Schmidt
who understand the threats facing our planet.
“Climate change is not only an environmental issue that belongs
to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it’s not only a
science issue that belongs to NASA and National Oceanic and Atmosphere
Administration (NOAA),” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas
Tech University. “Climate change is an everything issue,” she said, and “it
needs to be considered by every single federal agency.”
President Joe Biden returned the United States to the Paris
climate accord on his first day in office, and has signed stacks of executive
orders to begin undoing Trump administration rollbacks of more than 100
environmental rules.
In announcing Schmidt’s appointment, acting NASA Administrator
Steve Jurczyk said, “This position will provide NASA leadership critical
insights and recommendations for the agency’s full spectrum of science,
technology and infrastructure programs related to climate.”
In the announcement of the new position, which does not come
with a separate budget or staff, 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 NASA’s climate-related research and technology
development do.
The space agency, which launches the satellites that monitor the
conditions of the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, snow, ice and more, is one of the
wellsprings of hard science that informs us all about climate change. But its
leaders have sometimes had a difficult time talking about it.
Schmidt has written some 150 scientific papers, and has an
active and sometimes acerbic social media presence. At the Goddard Institute,
he led development of one of the most authoritative models of Earth’s climate
system. When scientists tell us that climate trends are attributable to
greenhouse gases generated by humans, they are relying in part on Schmidt’s
work.
On a recent bright, icy morning, Schmidt sat for a socially
distanced interview on a bench overlooking Harlem Meer in Central Park in New
York City and talked about the new job.
“Climate change changes what you need to worry about,” he said, and
the space agency can help the nation, and the world, figure out what we all
need to know. That includes things like “How do we accelerate the information
that you need to build better defenses against coastal flooding?” and “What do
we really understand about intensifying precipitation — how do we predict that
going forward?”
He will have no budgetary might, or armies of workers under him.
Instead, he will have to rely upon his voice.
“Having people that know from the ground up how science works is
useful when you’re in a room full of policymakers.” If officials ask, “could
science provide this?” he said, “the answer may be ‘well, yeah, no. Not really.
But we could do this — this is the kind of
question that 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 of Bath, England, and his early ambition was to live
elsewhere. Being good at math got him to Oxford on a scholarship. Upon
graduating, he was not sure what to do next, and “bummed around the world” for
two years, working a variety of odd 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
weekly crossword in The Guardian.”
So he went to University College London, as he tells it, and
asked if he could enter a doctoral program. They scoffed since the deadline was
long past, but suggested he talk to one researcher who happened to need a
graduate student. “He said, ‘So when can you start?’”
The researcher needed someone with math skills for his work on
subsurface ocean waves. Schmidt found that he enjoyed the research, and also
discovered that “people are a lot more interested in the oceans than they are
about mathematics.”
He would go on to lead development of Goddard Institute Earth
System Model, an enormous 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 came to draw on so many fields that he had to become a
climate polymath, broadly focused instead of drilling down on a single topic,
as many experts do. It helped make him a gifted communicator of science.
In 2004, he helped start a blog, Real Climate, in hopes of
explaining 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 out of that was how many
other climate scientists actually needed help to understand climate science”
beyond their own fields, he said.
When the American Geophysical Union gave out its first climate
communication prize in 2011, it went to Schmidt for having “transformed the
climate dialogue on the web,” the group said in its citation.
Everything Schmidt has done came together, he said — and that
even includes his skill at juggling, a hobby that he took up in high school,
thinking at the time, he recalled, “Oh, that’s going to be helpful with the ladies.”
He honed his juggling skills over the years, beginning in Australia, when he
lived with a juggling busker.
Today, he attributes the hobby with helping him build the
confidence it took to perform before crowds — his 2014 TED Talk has been viewed
1.3 million times.
“It turns out that the things that I spent time doing or
learning or practicing all played a role in helping that evolution along,” he
said.
.jpg)
.jpg)
