Episode 4: Kate Marvel

On her website, Kate Marvel describes her research like this: “I study climate forcings (things that affect the planet’s energy balance) and feedbacks (processes that speed up or slow down warming). Our work here has shown that observational estimates of the Earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases are probably biased low: assuming climate changes will be small is not a very good idea. We’ve also shown that human influences are already apparent in global drought patterns, cloud cover, and in the timing and amount of regional rainfall.” You can tell from that summary that Kate, besides being an excellent scientist, is also exceptionally good at communicating her work to the public. Kate has been on tv, on radio, in print, and in countless online fora, talking about the climate problem, as a whole, and many specific aspects of it. Kate translates the science, but more than that, she communicates the emotional reality of being a climate scientist who feels the urgency of global warming, in a way that’s honest and personal. She’s clear, compelling, and funny, and you’ll hear all that in this conversation. You might think that becoming famous for communicating effectively to large, broad audiences would help in one’s scientific career, but that isn’t necessarily the case. While many of her colleagues admire Kate’s public persona, she has the distinct impression that some disapprove, and that that has held her back professionally. Adam and Kate talk at length about that, and about how the bias in academia against popularizers is a special case of a more general problem: Namely, that scientific institutions prioritize research far above all else, and don’t know how to value many other kinds of work that make the institutions themselves better, and that increase the benefits that our research brings to the larger society. Kate came from theoretical physics, with an education in the US and the UK, and a stint in Zimbabwe along the way, before she made it into climate science and then to NASA GISS, down the block from Columbia in New York City. She thinks that the experience of working her way into climate science has sharpened her already existing ability to write and talk clearly, and to not be afraid of asking seemingly simple questions: “I think a lot of it came from very openly being an impostor. Being new to the field, coming into climate science from theoretical physics and not really knowing the jargon. Not really knowing the important questions in the field. […] And that, I think, forces you to be good at eliciting information, and it forces you to be good at communicating. […] And I do think that having no idea what was going on for a really long time and blundering my way around has forced me to get good at figuring out how we talk about what’s going on.” The interview with Kate Marvel was recorded in November 2021. Kate’s website at Columbia University, and her personal website  Kate giving a TED Talk in 2017, on “Can clouds save us from climate change?” (that’s where her picture in this blog post is from) and here she is on Twitter: @DrKateMarvel