Her Message About Climate Change: It’s Not Too Late
Kate Marvel is an energetic spokeswoman for climate science at a time when misinformation about climate change seems to be at its peak and world leaders appear confused about a way forward. , an associate research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, has committed herself to clearly communicating to the public the facts about a changing climate through her writing and talks. Her was watched by more than a million people and she writes the for Scientific American . She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and did postdoctoral research at Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . I got my Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge. Then I got kind of frustrated with the field that I was in while I was in graduate school and I wanted to do something more applied. I wanted to do something that was more relevant to peoples lives and would make more of a difference. And I got a postdoc fellowship at Stanford, where they let me work on whatever I wanted as long as it had a science component and a policy component. I dabbled in a couple things and then I found climate science and I havent looked back since. I love that everything on the planet is connected. I love that things are both predictable and very complex. I say I went to grad school to study the whole universe and then I realized that this is the best place in the entire universe. Things like the fact that the rising air from the tropics sinks and when it sinks thats where it creates the great deserts of the world. So we wouldnt have deserts if it werent for the tropics. I think thats beautiful. My research goes in two directions. One is this question of what does climate change look like and is it happening. That means how is climate change affecting the variables that we care about. Not just temperature, but things like rainfall, globally and locally, things like cloud cover. So a lot of my research is focused on understanding the changes that we are experiencing and putting them in context. Im also interested in something called climate sensitivity, which is basically: How hot is it going to get? The number one reason we dont know how hot its going to get is we dont know what were going to do. We dont know what emissions are going to look like. Even if we were to remove that uncertainty, we still couldnt say with 100 percent confidence how hot it was going to get. Thats because there is a lot we dont understand about a changing climate. Im teaching in the Columbia masters program in climate and society right now. Im just teaching one class. And then I am mostly focused on my research. I am basically a computational and theoretical scientist. I work with models, I work with satellite observations, I work with paleoclimate reconstructions to look at what the climate was like millions of years ago or thousands of years ago. I am not a field scientist, I dont go out and collect samples. I love teaching, but I really love talking to other scientists. Ive been incredibly lucky where I am pretty much supported to do whatever is interesting to me. So Ive been able to work on a really wide variety of different projects that interest me. There are definitely structural barriers: the structure of the academic career track, where generally you are expected to move to wherever there is a job and you are expected to be very portable. And you are expected to do short-term contracts, during the time when a lot of people are interested in building families and settling down. It can be a major disincentive for not only women but anyone who is not economically comfortable or has a certain degree of privilege. I think there is so much focus on how do we get girls interested in science? Girls are interested in science! We need to focus on systemic changes. Ive definitely had gendered pushback. But I also think being a woman in climate, being a woman scientist, I am in just fantastic company. The other women scientists who work in climate who have public profiles, theyve all had pushback as well, but we support each other. Im just incredibly fortunate to know a lot of these people. It definitely helps when people are calling you ugly things on the internet. The more Ive been talking about climate change in public, the more Ive realized my urge to counter that by giving people facts and figures and graphs and equations, that doesnt really work. People dont reject climate science because they need more facts. A lot of times, rejection of climate science comes from another place, it comes from this is fundamentally conflicting with some deep organizational principle that I believe, the story that I tell myself that makes everything make sense. Im really not always going to be able to change someones mind. Ive also been kind of forgiving myself; youre not going to get to everybody. We can be doomed, if we choose to be. I think it is true that our choices in this coming decade really, really matter. We have to take drastic action A.S.A.P. That is true. A lot of people say catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Climate change is inevitable; its already happening. But there is a difference between bad, disruptive and completely catastrophic. And we still have time to prevent that catastrophe.