Welcome back to One Thing.
I'm David Rind.
And this former NASA climate scientist felt like she was on another planet.
It is cowardice to retreat from asking the basic scientific questions because you fear that they might anger somebody in power.
Why she left and what it could mean for the future of government research.
Stick around.
Is it true your office was above the diner from Seinfeld?
It was Tom's Diner on 112th and Broadway.
Kate Marvel worked at said office for a decade across two different stints from 2014 to March 2026.
But unlike the TV show, the work she did there was definitely not about nothing.
Kate is an accomplished climate scientist.
She has a PhD in theoretical physics.
She's also the author of the book, Human Nature, Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet.
She now works at the nonprofit Project Drawdown.
But up until a few weeks ago, she was doing climate research for the federal government.
So I was a research physical scientist at NASA and it was my job to help understand, using both models and observations, this amazing planet that we live on.
I think some people might hear NASA and think what does that have to do with climate change, climate science?
Can you just explain some of the Goddard Institute's history specifically where you were?
Of course, yeah.
So NASA is in the business of studying planets, and it just so happens that there is only one planet out there that we know of that is capable of supporting life.
And so NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies really represents the pinnacle of what happens when you turn all of that expertise you have in studying planets and their atmospheres and how they work, back on our own home.
So We didn't necessarily set out to study climate change.
It's just that when you look down from space at our own planet and you understand physics, you can't help but see that planet change and you can't help but understand why it is changing.
Like, so your job is to study the planet and there are changes happening to the planet.
And that's kind of how NASA ends up studying climate change in a way.
That's exactly. the right way to put it.
This doesn't come from a place of political motivation.
This doesn't come from, you know, a deep-seated need to get into political trouble.
This is just simply the consequence of what happens when you're able to look at our planet and you see it changing.
At the end of March, Kate resigned from her job at NASA.
She joins roughly 95000 employees one nonpartisan organization found who have left federal science agencies between September 2024 and December 2025.
Many of them have left since President Donald Trump started his second term through resignations, buyouts or firings.
In her resignation letter, Kate said she was leaving because she wanted to tell the truth.
She cited the Trump administration's attacks on science and climate priorities, which have only ramped up in his second term.
This climate change, it's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.
President Trump has stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of its most powerful tool to regulate air pollution and greenhouse gases.
That's why in America I withdrew from the fake Paris climate accord.
The administration's social media accounts have also been pushing the president's energy goals, including this post from the Department of Energy supporting Trump's mission to boost power from coal.
It shows a glimmering lump of coal and describes the fossil fuel as an icon, a legend and the moment.
Kate says.
For her the trouble really started in May of last year, when she and her team were kicked out of that office above Tom's Diner in Manhattan, a space shared with Columbia University.
The Trump administration was feuding with the university at the time.
A NASA spokesperson said in a statement that it was evaluating options for a new space, and the Goddard director told CNN that the work would continue, because science is done by people, not by buildings.
We were sort of institutionally couch surfing.
We had office space at NYU.
We had some office space at Columbia, office space in City College, scattered all around the city, just kind of trying to do our best to keep the ship running through turbulent waters.
I mean, tell me more about the turbulence, because you know you've been working at NASA basically since 2014, right?
You were there for the entire first Trump administration.
So how did things change between then and now, during this period when you were kicked out of the office, couch surfing?
I think we expected because we're scientists, we're nerds, but we're not naive.
We expected some sort of political pushback on our work when Trump was reelected.
But I think what we failed to anticipate this time around was the antipathy to science writ large.
We would write research proposals saying this is a really interesting question.
I think I have the tools to answer it.
I would like to do this research.
We would write those proposals and they would either go be sent off into a black hole or Or they would be reviewed, peer reviewed, as research proposals generally are.
And, you know, you would get reviewer reports back that would say this grant is selectable.
It should be funded.
But there is so much budgetary uncertainty and chaos that we don't know if this will be funded.
And so trying to operate under those conditions saying well, what am I supposed to be doing if the things that I am proposing to do, that other scientists are saying are worthwhile and feasible and interesting, are not being funded?
And I don't really know why.
So there was no reason given, like related to the subject matter or anything like that?
No, we were never explicitly told, you can't do this.
It was just death by a thousand cuts and a complete chaotic environment.
Can you give me an example of something you wanted to study that you felt like didn't have a chance of advancing?
Sure.
I was very interested in things like how do we make the future electricity grid more resilient to extreme events?
When we have more wind, more solar on the electricity grid, which we will have because it is economical to do so.
Now you want to make sure that your grid is resilient to things like wildfires, to things like earthquakes, changes in cloud patterns.
And so that was something that I wanted to work on that I didn't think could get funded in this particular environment.
I also think it's very important for there to be a government-funded, as neutral as possible arbiter of science.
That is policy relevant.
So I was interested in studying, not because I think it's necessarily a good idea, not because I support it being deployed, but it's studying geoengineering, this notion of slowing climate change or stopping climate change by spraying sulfate particles in the atmosphere to block the sun.
That is an idea that is on the table.
And if we do not have publicly funded, trusted scientific bodies doing the basic research that enables decision making, whether there's going to be a moratorium on even thinking about this, whether we're going to proceed with it.
That is not my role as a physical scientist to decide, but there absolutely needs to be a trusted source of information that is going to aid in making those decisions.
The thing that I think really pushed me over the edge was an interview that the administrator of NASA gave to Science Magazine, which is a very widely read scientific journal that also has a news section that's widely read by scientists.
And in this article he said well, I don't think that it helps the NASA mission for scientists to publish on politically controversial topics or assemble scientists to work on politically controversial topics.
And that just felt so deeply alienating that the head of this unbelievable organization that has really driven forward so much of the science that allows us to understand this planet was just saying no, you can't do that anymore because it's politically controversial.
Yeah, I mean I think from their perspective, the focus seems to really be on space exploration, like we just saw with the Artemis mission.
And I actually have part of that quote here that Jared Isaacman said.
He said, you have a previous administration that puts on NASA letterhead, the world is going to end.
And then you have the next administration put out on NASA letterhead that this is all hope.
How is that useful to anyone right now?
I mean, like, how do you interpret that?
I don't recall there ever being put out on NASA letterhead that the world is going to end.
I'd like to see some evidence.
I feel like that would make some news.
That would make some news, right?
But I do think that it is.
It is cowardice to retreat from asking the basic scientific questions because you fear that they might anger somebody in power.
I think.
You certainly can have debates about how do we frame this?
How do we talk about this?
How do we communicate our results?
But to say certain topics are off limits, either because the administration that I work for doesn't believe that they exist or because I have quibbles with the past administration's framing, I think is just an abdication of scientific integrity.
We asked NASA about whether scientists are being discouraged from pursuing climate-related projects.
They said in a statement that NASA's mission does include studying Earth and that Administrator Isaac Minn has been clear that NASA's role is to provide objective, high-quality data and scientific insight.
We've got to take a break.
When we come back, why Kate says her anger is a gift.
Stick around.
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So I've interviewed a lot of federal workers over the last year who have resigned or were fired and I've basically asked all of them some version of this question.
Why not stay on and try to effect change from the inside?
What a good question.
I thought about this very hard.
And the conclusion that I came to is that it really depends on your role within the organization.
I think if you have supervisory responsibilities, I think if you are in charge of a particular program, if you're guiding and shaping what the agency does, if you are protecting the employees of that agency.
I think it does make a lot of sense to stay on.
My role at NASA was to do science.
I was supposed to find out things about the world and tell people about them, which is an incredible dream job and such a privilege.
But it was getting harder and harder and harder to do that.
And so I thought hard about well, what is the best thing for me to do, given the position that I have?
And I made the really difficult decision to leave in order to do science on the outside and tell people about the science on the outside.
When you resigned, you got a write-up in the New York Times, among a lot of other media coverage.
No offense.
It just doesn't seem to me like every day.
The departure of a single climate scientist at a little-known NASA agency warrants an article in the paper of record.
Were you surprised by the amount of attention your move received?
Oh, absolutely no offense taken.
It was bananas.
I did not anticipate that it would sort of make this big a splash.
And I don't think it has to do with me personally.
I think you are absolutely right that the departure of a single scientist should not make the newspapers.
What I do think it is, is just...
I am an emblem of what is happening across the federal government.
The federal government has lost 10,000 PhDs since Trump took office.
10,000.
Wow.
And it is that hollowing out of what has for so long been this sort of bipartisan consensus that America should lead the world in research and development.
America should attract the best and the brightest.
America should have a robust, publicly funded scientific infrastructure.
I think the scale of that is really very difficult to contemplate.
And I think media seizing on the stories of individual scientists is a way to try to put a human face on that.
But I don't think it's important because of me.
I think it's important because I am one of so, so, so many others.
I was writing another interview you gave to the climate site Grist, and I was struck by this quote.
You said, I don't think we rebuild science without getting mad.
What did you mean by that?
So I...
As a scientist, I struggle a lot with also being a human being and having feelings, because we are trained to try to be as neutral and objective as possible.
And for a long time.
That has meant suppressing our feelings, pretending we don't have any, in order to enhance our credibility.
And then I kind of realized that, oh, no, that doesn't enhance our credibility directly.
Because it makes us liars.
If we pretend we don't feel anything, if we pretend we don't have values, we don't have preferences, we don't have emotions, then we are pretending something that just isn't true.
And so I think it is important to acknowledge that we are human beings and, at the same time, get the math right.
The physics doesn't care about how we feel.
We have to get that right.
We have to understand that.
But I think we also have to acknowledge that we are thinking, feeling human beings as well.
And I think, yeah, we don't rebuild science without saying, no, this is important.
This is wrong.
And we're going to fight for it.
How do you do it, though?
Do you run the risk of coming off as just kind of someone who's super angry and without much of a point to it?
I guess, like, how do you make it stick?
I mean, you work in the media.
You could help me.
Well, I was going to say what you're talking about does resonate with a debate that goes on in my profession all the time about journalists.
You know, trying to be objective and the pretending that they don't have feelings is, I think, kind of an outdated way of doing things.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think journalism and science are really trying to do the same thing on different timescales.
We are trying to find out what's true and we are trying to tell people about it.
The fact that you, as a journalist, are also a human being with your own values, with your own feelings, that doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to find out the truth.
It doesn't mean that you can tell untruths.
It doesn't mean that you can abandon that goal.
But it does mean that acknowledging what is important to you and acknowledging how that motivates you is important, right.
We live in a time when both journalism and science are under attack because they are ways of finding out the truth.
And sometimes the truth is inconvenient to people in power.
And as a journalist and as a scientist, I actually don't think we come across as kind of inchoately angry.
We don't come across as too scattered and untrustworthy when we say no.
I believe it is important to find out the truth.
I believe it's important to change our minds in the face of new evidence.
And that belief that that's something important and worth fighting for doesn't make me untrustworthy.
But how do you do that when you have an administration that you get a range of climate denialism?
The carbon footprint is a hoax.
Ranging from outright, like, this isn't happening at all, President Trump calls it a hoax.
If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
Yeah, the climate may be changing, but there's no imminent danger.
So we should, you know, prioritize how we're spending money.
Try to tackle some more pressing issues.
Does the anger, does the passion cut through any of that in the near term?
Or is this a longer project for you?
How do you look at that?
I think it's both a short-term and a long-term project.
I think right now you have a bunch of scientists who otherwise would have been very comfortable just staying in our labs and staying in our computer rooms and and doing our science.
You have this kind of realization that we can't take the bipartisan consensus that has underpinned American prosperity for so long.
We can't take that for granted anymore.
And we are going to have to organize.
We are going to have to make the case for what we do.
And I think in the short term that is actually a really important thing that scientists are waking up and realizing that we need to defend what we do.
In the long term.
I think that there is a new relationship that we need to be forging with the American public.
We need to articulate, instead of just taking for granted, why it is important to have federally supported science.
Amid all the cuts to climate science and research programs since last year beyond your own team, is there one cut that really stands out to you as being especially harmful?
I'm going to cheat.
I'm going to say two.
One is the firing of early career researchers across the federal government, but particularly at NOAA, where people on probationary status so people who have been civil servants for less than two years were just summarily fired.
This is really indicative of the short-sightedness of all of this, because that is the future scientific pipeline.
Those are the people who are going to be making the discoveries of the future.
I also want to call out the attacks on NCAR in Colorado.
NCAR is a jewel of world climate science research.
And that's the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
And I believe OMB Director Russ Vogt called it one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.
Yes.
What a silly thing to say.
It's one of the largest sources of objective climate science in the world.
I guess finally, you talk about that pipeline of early career research scientists.
Are any of those people going to want to come in and do this kind of work for the federal government?
They hear stories like yours and you know just the frustration and the roadblocks and may just kind of look elsewhere.
Yeah, that's what I worry about.
You know, there's been a lot of reporting, a lot of stories about brain drain, about people great US scientists leaving to go to other countries.
And I think it's important to point out that there's not enough places for everybody to go.
When the US loses scientists, all of those scientists don't necessarily go to China or Europe.
They leave science.
And so the world is starved of this talent, and we lose out on potential discoveries that we'll never know about.
Kate, thank you very much for talking to me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
All right, that's all we got for today.
Thank you as always for listening.
If you have 10 seconds, maybe 15, leave a rating or review wherever you listen.
It really helps us out.
I'll talk to you later.
I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.
This week on the podcast, Terms of Service.
What do we know about how much AI is contributing to energy consumption, energy demand right now?
And how does that compare with other industries?
The best resource for that is the International Energy Agency, which is sort of the global energy think tank that collects data on all of this.
And what they predict is that about 8 of the additional electricity that we're going to need by 2030 that will be for data centers.
The other 92% is for other things, industry electrification, electric vehicles, solar.
And AI is really only driving part of that increase in demand.
Listen to CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.
