Science Friday - Texas Storm, NASA Climate Advisor, Mars Sounds. Feb 26, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

Does A Vaccine Help You If You’ve Already Had COVID-19? Vaccines doses have started to rollout and are getting into the arms of people. We know that if you already had COVID-19, you build up antibodies against the virus. So do the vaccines affect you if you’ve already had COVID-19?  Science writer Roxanne Khamsi talks about recent studies showing that a single dose of vaccine could boost immunity for former COVID-19 patients. She also discusses a study that found over 140,000 viral species in the human gut and Elizabeth Ann, the first cloned black-footed ferret. The Aftermath Of Texas’ Winter Storm While power has been mostly restored, journalists report Texans are now facing water shortages, housing damage, and crop losses.  Texas grocery store shelves have begun filling out again. But for the state’s agriculture industry, recovering from the winter storm will take time, and consumers are likely to feel it in their pockets. The historic freeze and power outages brought agriculture across the state to a halt. Dairy farmers were forced to dump gallons of unpasteurized milk for days as processing plants were left without power. Packing houses also shut down with machinery cut off from electricity and employees unable to make their shifts, said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. Meanwhile, the products on the market were quickly bought up by panicked Texans just before and after the storm. By Monday, Miller said he had seen the price of hamburgers go up to $8.50 a pound, and he expects prices to remain elevated as the food supply chain stabilizes. “It’s not going to be back to normal for at least six to eight weeks,” Miller said. “You’ll still see shortages of some stuff, and even though the shelves may be full, the prices will be high.” Read and listen to the full story in the State of Science series.  Keeping An Eye On The Climate, From Space The climate is changing, and so is the U.S. government’s approach to it. The Biden White House has made the climate crisis a high priority, and has created several new positions focused on climate science. One of those new climate posts can be found at the space agency NASA. While rockets and Mars rovers may seem far removed from climate issues, NASA is actually the lead federal agency in climate observations, with a fleet of satellites tracking everything from sea temperature to CO2 levels to chlorophyll. Ira talks with Gavin Schmidt, who has recently been named in an acting role to be the senior climate advisor for NASA. He’s also director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. They discuss upcoming climate-focused NASA programs, last week’s cold weather in Texas, and the challenge of making better decisions in an uncertain climate future. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I am Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, a closer look at the power grid problems in Texas and a conversation with NASA's Senior Climate Advisor. But first, an FDA advisory panel is meeting today to consider whether to recommend approval of the Johnson & Johnson one-shot coronavirus vaccine. A decision would come over the weekend. One question you hear over and over again from people about the COVID vaccines. Do the vaccines work free? you if you've already had COVID-19. There were recent studies looking at that question and here to talk about it is Roxanne Camsey, a science writer based out of Montreal who has been covering COVID-19. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. It's great to be here. We know if you had COVID-19, you naturally build up antibodies. So what would a vaccine do for these people? I mean, what did these recent studies show? It's a fascinating question. And essentially, what does this? the data is showing is, first of all, people who have had COVID should definitely get the vaccine, but that the second dose might not be as much of an essential as the first one. So if you've had COVID,

your body's already kind of revving up and built some lasting immunity against the SARS-CoB2 virus. But what the scientists have done is looked at the blood samples of people before and after they got their first shot and they see that the first shot makes their antibodies increase by like a thousand fold, but that second shot doesn't really make as much of an increase. And I can tell you more about like the ways in which that first shot helps people that have had COVID already. Yeah, go ahead. So it's, I kind of like to think about this, like your immune system is a little bit like the lottery. So, you know, there's 10 to the 18 different possible antibodies that humans can make, which I think is like a fascinatingly huge, huge number.

So if you get sick with something like SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus, your body is essentially trying its best to, like, come up with the best immune response. What a vaccine does, it's almost like giving your body the winning lottery numbers to play because it's really guiding your immune system to focus on specific parts of the virus that it can go after. So I think that's a really important thing to understand is that even if you've gotten sick with COVID, the vaccine's going to help you out. So does getting sick from COVID do the same thing as getting the vaccine? I hear what you're saying is no.

It's like, again, playing the lottery. Like if you're getting sick with COVID the first time, your immune system's doing its best shot by like pulling the lever on that slot machine and saying, here's the antibodies we can make now. But getting the vaccine is like getting a really targeted immune response. So because what the vaccine's doing is it's really showing your body that part of the virus that it can effectively go after. That explains it. I mean, do we do we know how long immunity lasts? What can this tell us about your immunity? One of the things that scientists really want to know is

how long are we protected against COVID if we get the vaccine? And what I've heard is scientists saying, you know, it's probably for at least a year, but we don't know if it's for five years or six years or how long. So that's something that we're going to have to study. And that's, um, that's, The hope, of course, is that it's going to last for a really long time. But it seems to be the scientists are saying we really shouldn't necessarily bet on that 100%. We need to find out by doing these studies over a long period of time. Speaking of studies, there was a study out of Israel looking at the effectiveness of just one dose of the Pfizer vaccine. These were people who were not previously infected. What did that study show us? So this is a really informative study that came out of Israel, and it looked and it found that amongst these 9,000 health care workers who were eligible for a vaccine at the country's largest hospital, they kind of track them over the course of a month. And they found that there was an 85% reduction in symptomatic infections with one shot of the Pfizer vaccine, which is huge, right? Like that's that's amazing. The caveat, of course, is that they only looked at symptomatic infections. So they didn't track people. infection in a more close way to see if there were maybe some asymptomatic infections going on. But I think it's hugely hopeful. I also think it's not reason to skip the second dose,

but it gives us a really good feeling that we're on the right track against this pandemic. We're hearing a lot about COVID-19 variants. There are reports of a variant in New York City. What do we know about this? I mean, aren't there always more variants coming out all the time? Yeah, and I think this is something so interesting that we're really starting to appreciate about viruses. So if you're infected with like basically any virus, your body is going to start producing different variants as you get infected. Like if you have HIV, you're in your initial infection phase or polio, there's going to be a bunch of different variants that are being spewed out of cells during that initial infection. But what we're finding now is we're doing so much sequencing with COVID-19 is that the virus, that causes COVID definitely generates variance. And we have to figure out what are what we call

variants of concern. And as you alluded to, in New York, there have now been reports of a particular variant known as B-1526. And scientists have seen that it kind of cropped up in November. And now it appears to account for one out of every four cases in the city. Let's move on to your next story. about the microbiome a lot around here on Science Friday because it's my favorite subject, the bacteria in our gut. And researchers, I understand, are looking at the viruses in our gut, the bacteriophages, as they call them, right? What are they finding out? Yeah, so, I mean, this is really interesting because here we are so focused on one virus this whole past year. But, you know, we are what I think of as, like, walking human petri dishes. And I love the microbiome, too.

I think that it is a fascinating thing to think about. And so bacteriophages, you're kind of mentioning, are these viruses that infect bacteria. What scientists have done is they analyzed more than 28,000 different gut samples from people and 3,000 samples of bacteria with individuals. And they found more than 140,000 different viruses that are bacteria phages, as you mentioned, that infect the bacteria in our gut. So half of those were ones that they'd never even known about before, which is just, I think, amazing.

It is amazing. It shows you how much wherever you have a bacterium, you're going to have a virus or more. Exactly. And these are healthy people, right? So this isn't like, we shouldn't be scared of the fact that we have viruses in our gut that live with us. It's just like with the microbiome, you know, 10, 15 years ago,

the idea that we were walking, you know, hosts to bacteria in our gut seemed kind of maybe scary to some people, but we got really comfortable with the idea. And now it's the same, I think, with viruses. I think it's great. Your next story looks at devastating fires in the Amazon rainforest in the last few years. We've known about fires in the Amazon for many years. What makes this story different? As you mentioned, like, we definitely have been hearing about worsening fires in the Amazon.

In 2019, there were so many. headlines about, you know, was it the worst year for forest fires in the Amazon, but kind of what might have gone a little bit under the radar is that 2020 was actually worse. So NASA found this out by using satellite data, and they found that there were like 1.1 million hotspots in 2019, but that increased to 1.4 million in 2020. And so that's like a 23% increase from 2019 to 2020. And it's hugely concerning because as you know,

the Amazon is the lungs of the planet. Yeah, and people are starting these fires, right? We're not talking about lightning, things like that. Absolutely. That's a great point. A lot of these forest fires are set by people to clear land for farming or for cattle. And so it's really a human-driven phenomenon to a large extent.

And, you know, the Amazon is a wet climate, but what's happening is that last year was a little bit drier, So certain these human set fires lasted longer, did more damage. And as you say, you talk about the Amazon as the lungs of the earth. It's important to have the Amazon healthy, like having your lungs healthy. Absolutely. And, you know, the thing is that we're watching the health of the Amazon decline a little bit, which is of concern. Because by scientific study, we've seen that, you know, its job or its role in the environment is to capture carbon.

And that's why we call it the longs of planet because it takes some of that global warming carbon dioxide out of our global system. But since the 1990s, it's taking about a third less carbon from the air. So that's something that scientists are really concerned about. Finally, we need to talk about Elizabeth Ann, which Elizabeth Ann is blowing up all over the internet. For people who are not paying attention, tell us who or what Elizabeth Ann is. Elizabeth Ann is the cutest thing that has happened to us at a really long time. So Elizabeth Ann is the first cloned black-footed ferret, and she is also the first cloned native endangered species in North America. So she is just this adorable little ferret who was born via C-section on December 10th, and scientists announced that she had been born this past month.

So everyone's really excited because there's a potential that she could help revive this endangered species. and the fact that she's cute does not hurt. And where did all of this happen? So this happened in the U.S., but what happened was that we thought that the black-footed ferret was gone, was extinct. And then in the early 1980s, there was a farmer who found some of these on his land. And what scientists did back then is they sent a sample of one of those ferrets named Willa to the San Diego Zoo because Willa was not able to breathe successfully.

but they thought that she might have something to hold for the future. So here we have these frozen samples at the zoo for decades, and her genetic material was taken, and they created an embryo and put it in one of the ferrets that has survived from the seven that lasted on that farm. They were able to get a surrogate to produce Elizabeth Ann. Do you think they're going to do this a few more times to help revive the species? Absolutely.

I mean, she's got sisters on the way coming, and they're hoping to breed her with. some of the other clones they've made and to reintroduce some of that really vital genetic diversity into the population of blackfooted ferrets that have been sustained from the only that the seven individuals that were able to breed that were found on that farm. Oh, it's good news for reviving other animals. It's fantastic. I think it's a little bit Jurassic Park seeming, but I think it's also, it's also just great, great news. It's cute. It's hopeful. I think that it puts a smile on my face one.

about it. Well, we could all use that these days, right? Absolutely. Thank you, Roxanne. Roxanne Camsey is a science writer based out of Montreal. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we know the power's back in most of Texas, but there are still water shortages, crop damage, and the question of, will Texas spend the money to prevent another disastrous failure? Stay tuned for a Texas State of Science on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio. Iowa Public Radio News. Local news with national import. When a disaster happens like the collapse of the electric grid in Texas last week,

the consequences can cascade and remain for quite a while. Probably the most visible consequence, people can't return to their flood-soaked homes. And safe drinking water is still a problem. But other longer term and far-reaching consequences are becoming evident. I want to bring in two reporters from Texas who have been in the field to discuss the challenges facing the Lone Star State. Maria Mendez is Business and Border Reporter for Texas Public Radio. She's based in Laredo. And Moschelle is senior correspondent for Energy and Environment at KUT in Austin. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Hi. Hi. Moes, let me begin with you.

This time last week, more than a half a million people in Texas still didn't have electricity. Cities were under boil water orders. How are we doing this week? Well, we're a lot better than last week, but we're still just kind of trying to figure out the extent of the damage. And frankly, you know, the extent of the human loss of life in this thing. You know, the last I heard there were over 30 people counted as victims of, of the storm and the loss of power. And so we in Austin just this week stopped needing to boil our water and we basically have power restored to everybody. But again, like the full measure of this

is still being calculated. Yeah. And that's what I want to talk about because it does extend to places we don't normally see covered in the news releases. Let's go back to the water question first. Can you explain to me why that happened? And I know it's it's not just because some water treatment facilities lost power, right? That's right. And, you know, one thing that really became clear in this is just how everything is so interrelated. We did lose power because of this severe cold front that comes through. So what happens then? You lose power. It starts freezing. And the pipes down here start freezing. Pipes in Texas are not built to withstand this kind of cold. And so your pipes freeze, they break, and then they start leaking.

You can add on to that the fact that a lot of people were dripping their faucets in order to try to stop the pipes from freezing. What that does is it depressurizes the entire water system. It's weird to think about, but the water systems, any water systems are essentially designed to leak. They need to leak in order to keep treated water in there. If they don't leak, there's a risk that some little microbes and stuff could get into the pipes through the hole. so it's better the water out than anything getting in. Suddenly you have a depressurized water system. That means water is not getting to a lot of places.

And where it is getting, there's a risk that it's contaminated. So, for example, what happened here in Austin happened all over the state. If you had water, you had to boil it. And a lot of people just didn't even have it because there was no pressure in the water systems. Interesting. Simple science about water pressure. Yeah, we're all getting a crash course in this stuff right now. And as far as insulating pipes, that was something that was never planned for in advance. And the question of infrastructure is interesting too because this extends from, say, the water pipes in your home all the way to the electric grid in the state and the natural gas pipeline system that we have in the state.

What happened during this storm is that this extremely cold weather system came in and it tested all of our infrastructure that just is not built for this kind of cold. and it broke tons of stuff. Natural gas wells froze up. Pipeline components froze up. Our power plants that run on gas could not get gas. Meanwhile, closer to your house, your pipes burst. It was just, it was this massive test of our infrastructure, and our infrastructure failed both at the local and the kind of statewide level.

And Maria, you know, when people think of Texas, of course, they think of oil and gas. but Texas is also a large agricultural state. So tell us what are farmers in your part of the state saying about the damage they're seeing? Yeah, so farmers are really bracing for a big toll from this extended cold snap that we saw. Texas actually has $1 billion in sales and produce alone, and that's just one sector of the agriculture industry here. And what farmers and people in the industry are saying is that a lot of, vegetables and especially things like leafy greens that are more delicate and, you know, sometimes

even wilt in our in our own refrigerators, we're definitely destroyed by the extended cold temperatures. But there's also concern about even other hardier items like onions and things like that. And citrus is a really big industry down in the Rio Grande Valley. There's a lot of concerns about one, some of the fruit that still hadn't been finished harvested. A lot of that was lost, you know, because it was frozen. Farmers can't necessarily sell that. One of their last resorts is to try to sell it for juicing as opposed to, you know, fresh produce. But that doesn't give them as much money if it survived at all.

But then the other concern is that this freeze came at a time whenever farmers for citrus, one, were harvesting fruits already on the tree, but their trees were also starting to bloom for next year's crops. And so it was a double hit for them. This is Dale Murdon. He's the president of Texas Citrus Mutual, which is an industry group. And he's also a citrus grower. And he was telling me about, you know, why this freeze came at the worst time for them. Our trees also vary in March.

That's when we start to grow next to the crop. So the significance of this freeze is I had two crops on the tree, the current crop, which would be the 2021 season. and then next year's crop, which would be the 21-22 season, this freeze couldn't have come along at a worse time. Some people are calling this the St. Valentine's Day freeze or massacre just because it came right on the heels of St. Valentine's Day, and the impact is definitely going to be felt by the industry. And you're really talking about an economic disaster that might stretch a long time,

not just the crops, but the people whose work depend on the crops. Exactly. This is a clip from Dante Galeazzi. He's the president and CEO of the Texas International Produce Association. And he was telling me about, one, the impact of, for farms. There are about 6,000 farms in Texas involved in fresh produce, and then about 30,000 farm workers. He was telling me about the economic impact for those workers, but also adjacent related industries. They're all going to be without work for about several months before the next crops come up. And hopefully those crops do come up. And that isn't even anything to say about all the other folks in the surrounding industries that rely on that business, right? Your seed, your chemical, your transportation, boxing, the folks that work at the warehouses that pack and clean and cut and sort all that produce, the guys that do the sales, marketing, final lake delivery. I mean, it's, you know, it's an economic disaster. I was talking to a group that helps farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley to community union.

And they were telling me that, you know, a lot of their members who are farm workers may have to, you know, follow crops in other states. They might have to look for jobs elsewhere because they know that the citrus fields here aren't necessarily going to be giving them jobs right now. Moes, this is not the first, I can't believe I'm going to say this to a Texan, this is not the first rodeo for a lot of folks. You had a winter storm 10 years ago, right? That's right. Were there not lessons learned from that? Yes, there were some lessons, but I'm not sure if they were learned. It was 10 years ago, yeah, that we had our last rolling blackouts.

And again, they happened in the wintertime. Now, this is one strange thing about this. Texas always plans its electric grid around summer heat. heat because that's when we use the most electricity. But now this is two blackouts in a row that have happened in the winter because of the cold. After that last blackout in 2011, there were federal reports that were made that said Texas had to get serious about winterizing its infrastructure. And there were some kind of gestures made towards that.

But what we're realizing is that none of that was really mandatory regulation. It was kind of protocols or suggestions. there didn't seem to be any desire on the part of regulators or lawmakers to really put any teeth into this. And so when we were confronted this winter with an even worse storm, our electric grid infrastructure kind of fell apart. And that brings us to this week because state lawmakers began hearings this week about reforming the energy system in Texas. Are they talking about that? What kinds of changes are people asking for? Right now, there are all sorts of things on the table.

I think that the kind of low-hanging fruit by a lot of people's estimations is winterization. They don't want to see gas wells freeze up again ever. They don't want to see gas pipelines and components freeze up. Components at power plants, they don't want to see those freeze up to the same level. A trickier thing is just reforming the market that we have in Texas. we have a really unique electrical market here. This is a grid that is an island. Texas is the only state with its own electric grid.

It's part of that kind of Texas like independent spirit, I guess you could say. And so it is deregulated. So basically it's a private market where all these companies kind of compete to buy power and then sell it to customers. And it is what they call an energy only market. So private power plants in most case, private companies that own power plants, they only make money if they sell electricity on the grid. Put all this together and what is created is a system where Texas is running with a very small electric capacity, right? We very rarely do we have much extra electricity in reserve?

So if we're confronted with something like this storm, there aren't a lot of other power plants to fall back on. And one thing that everyone's talking about is whether we need to change that, whether we need to have more capacity online. Another thing, just to add quick, I said that we're an island here in Texas. Some people are saying that shouldn't be the case. We should link up with the other grids in the country so that maybe we can pull some power off of those grids when we need it. That means Texas would have to give up some of its lone star ideas about not being regulated. Absolutely. The reason that we have this independent grid here in Texas is because it keeps federal regulators at arm's length.

Is that worth it in the wake of what we just saw? That's something that everyone is asking. Maria, we should note that this storm did not stop at the Texas border. How was Mexico affected by this? Yeah, so Mexico actually imports a lot of natural gas from Texas, and natural gas is a really big part of their energy source as opposed to us in the U.S. And so almost five million Mexican consumers also lost power early Sunday and then Monday. And it was initially mostly in the northern border states where we see a lot of those natural gas imports because the natural gas pipelines froze. And so they couldn't really get that source into the country.

And then after that, you know, some producers also started shutting down. Also, what ended up happening is that to try to deal with a situation, Mexico ended up trying to ration their energy. And so I believe around 26 states out of... Mexico's 32 states in the country ended up having some sort of outages, you know, whether they were because of, you know, the issues with infrastructure or because of the rationing, you know, with rolling blackouts. This extended way beyond Texas, you know, it also impacted our counterparts in Mexico. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Besides the power reforms that Moses talking about have people express the need for any other change.

in the wake of this store? I think we're starting to hear a lot of, you know, people, especially a lot of Texans, you know, everyday Texans, look at this and point to, you know, climate change and whether that relates to, you know, the need for some of these regulations in the energy field, but also, you know, some people I've heard them talk about, just in general, also the socioeconomic toll that climate change takes on lower income, already underserved communities, for example, down here on the border, even though we didn't get

the snow that Austin and some of the other parts of Texas did get, you know, a lot of people were affected by these outages and it was compounded by the fact that a lot of these homes, especially down here in the border, sometimes aren't well insulated or well built, you know, because of the poverty levels that we do see down here. And so a lot of people have kind of started talking about how this showed kind of what some people in Texas already go through day to day, you know, just because of our socioeconomic disparities. And so I think it's going to be an interesting wake up call in both how we talk about climate change and then also socioeconomic disparities. Underserved communities like you have down there. people are getting a little feeling of what it's what it's like to live in one.

Exactly, yeah. And so, you know, maybe this will push for more momentum to address some of these underserved communities that, especially unincorporated territories where, you know, there's regularly a lot of issues with, you know, infrastructure and utilities because they're not necessarily connected to really big, large power grids or utilities. Most, let me end with a political question for you because, as the saying goes, all politics is local. Yeah.

The governor of Texas, I understand, is running for election in the next election cycle, which is what, year away. Does he feel the pressure of getting something done with the state legislature so that he has some positive news to run on? Yeah, I think that every elected official. in the state right now is really feeling the heat. The last thing you want to be if you're the leader of a place is to watch the lights go out around you, the power go out, and all of your constituents freeze for days and days in the freezing cold.

He was very quick to start kind of assigning blame to some groups that have to do with managing the grid. But that type of finger pointing is really, I think, just starting. We're hearing more and more talk about other regulatory agencies and other groups that may have kind of not had their hands on the wheel, so to speak, when this whole thing came to us. And the political fallout, I think, could really be severe. Well, they always say they do things big in Texas. So thank you, Moshell, senior correspondent for energy and environment at KUT in Austin and Maria Mendez, business and border reporter for Texas Public Radio based in LaRado. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

Thank you. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, a conversation with climate researcher Gavin Schmidt, now in an acting role in a new post as senior climate advisor to NASA. Wherever we are and whatever decision we're making, we can make decisions that are going to be more climate friendly and less climate friendly. And there's never going to be a point where it's not worth making a better decision. What role does NASA play in our climate crisis? We'll find out when we come back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Unprecedented cold weather, snow, ice, and heartbreak in Texas.

Connected to climate change? Well, we know the climate is changing, and so as the U.S. government's approach to it, the Biden White House has made the climate crisis a high priority, going so far as to create a position of NASA's senior climate advisor. And joining me now is Dr. Gavin Schmidt. He's recently been appointed in an acting role in the newly created position. He's also director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Good to talk to you again, Gavin. Thank you for having me.

Yes, thank you. First of all, let's talk about what happened in Texas. I know that we don't usually point to one weather event like the cold-gripping Texas as an example of climate change. And you tend to shy away from that also. So obviously this was a very big impact on Texas. You know, a lot of systems were stressed beyond breaking point. But the kinds of phenomena that we're looking at,

the kind of the waviness of the jet stream, is one of those things where people have been looking for signals of climate change, perhaps making the jet stream wavier. but we haven't really come to a very strong conclusion about that. It's, as they say, an area of active study. But would this be the kind of thing you might see, in other words, extremes of hot and cold in climate change? So there are some kinds of extremes where you have a very clear and direct impact because of climate change.

So heat waves per se, we're seeing more and more extensive heat waves all across the world. And those are expected impacts of the fact that the planet is warming at the rate it is. We're seeing more intense rainfall events. And again, that's an expected behavior because there's more water vapor in the atmosphere. So there's a number of things where we have a very direct link. And then while we now understand, you know, everything that's going on is being affected by climate change. The system has changed over the last 50 years. Every extreme event really has to be looked at in its own context.

You know, tornadoes are different from hurricanes, are different from cold air outbreaks, different from heatways. And we really need to look specifically at a specific extreme event to make that attribution. And that has not yet happened in a way that would convince everybody with respect to these kind of cold air outbreaks that we saw in Texas. Okay, let's move on to your new role, which is kind of interesting. I mean, why does NASA need a climate advisor? Well, so NASA spends billions of dollars on climate science every year. We have the most extensive satellite network that's circling the globe in multiple

configurations that's measuring things like water vapor and ozone and temperature and cloudiness and radiation and sea surface height and groundwater depletion and ice mass loss on Greenland and Antarctica. So we have this massive architecture that's very focused. on climate questions, not just how things are changing over time, but the processes that underlie all of those changes. And NASA's investment in that makes it the chief climate agency of the United States. I don't think most people realize that. I agree. Most people don't realize that. And so I think that people need to know more about where the data that underlies our conclusions

about climate change come from. And part of the new administration's efforts to make climate change and dealing with climate change a higher priority, one of the things that NASA would like to see happen is that decisions that get made, they get made using the best available science. And since NASA is providing a lot of that science

and may be able to provide more, we would like that to be part of the solution going forward. So you see that NASA is going to be increasing its emphasis on Earth observation as part of its activities under this new administration. We have a very large Earth observation portfolio right now. We're in the process of what's called the Decadal Survey, where every 10 years we assess what missions are needed, what observations are needed, and then kind of build the teams and the hardware that would be needed to measure those. things. And so we're in the middle of that right now. We have a number of new missions that are on the drawing board to improve our understanding of atmospheric particles and clouds and how they interact and how they're going to interact. Because we have an aging fleet of things that are in orbit right now. And they're reaching the end of their lives in terms of how much fuel they have on board and how their instruments are working. And, we need to be thinking about what's the next stage? How do we continue those measurements? Do we need to be making new measurements?

How do we kind of plan for that going forward? Is NASA's role in climate then just in observing and documenting climate effects? Or is there something NASA can do to help decrease emissions or to mitigate climate change? So the answer is, yeah, I think NASA can be helping. I mean, one of the things that we can do is that we've built tools that are, allow us to interrogate the climate system working out what's going on right now, but also project what's going to happen in the future. And those changes in the future are going to depend on decisions that many people and, you know, the administration themselves are going to make.

NASA doesn't make those decisions, right? So NASA is not a policy agency, and I don't think it wants to be a policy agency. But there is science that underlies policy decisions. You know, if we decide to do this versus that, what are the impacts going to be? on climate or air quality or public health or crop yields or coastal flooding. All of those things can be looked at in a scientific way using the tools that we've already developed that can be useful for people who are making decisions about what to do next. And then there's things like NASA as an institution. What are we doing with the amount of money and people and infrastructure that we have?

what are we doing to either make our institutions more resilient to climate change and reduce the carbon footprint of the institution itself? So those are three different ways that I think NASA can be contributing. Daydream with me here a little bit, if you will. If the president knocked on your door and said, Gavin, I'd like you to write the climate science section of next year's budget, what would you put in there? Besides an aspirin that you needed to take at the time.

at that moment. Nah, you know, that, that's really not fair. I mean, like, everybody who's listening to this who gets some of that money is going to be saying, oh, say the right thing, say that. Fund me, fun me. You know, there's a reason why the budget process is a very, very complicated multi-person and multi-institution negotiation. And, you know, I mean, there's a few things that I would like to see

funded. I'd love to see more funding for the translation of science to decision-making. Like how do you take those observations and that understanding and make it more useful for policy? And we do a little bit of that. But I think we could be doing a lot more. We could be doing a lot more to elevate the best available science for environmental impacts. We could be doing a lot more to... kind of connect the needs of groups like the weather forecasting community to the observations

that we're building. We could be investing a lot more in kind of data analytics, setting up all the different data streams, not just from the US, but from Europe and from Japan and maybe even from China, and have all of that data sitting in one place where a supercomputer can be looking at it and finding correlations and interesting patterns and interesting processes. We could be doing a lot of those things. And so, you know, nobody's going to knock on my door and ask me these questions. But there are a few things that I think we could be doing much better. And hopefully we will be.

There are a lot of people who think and are fearing that we have reached a tipping point in climate, that it doesn't matter what we do anymore. We're not going to stop the worst effects of flooding and hot seasons and things. things like that. Do you think we still have time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change? So I think that we always have the choice to make better decisions, right? And wherever we are, you know, and whatever decision we're making, we can make decisions that are going to be more climate friendly and less climate friendly. And we're going to need to keep on doing those things, not just this year, not just this administration, but for not just this decade, but for the rest

of this century. And there's never going to be a point where it's not worth making a better decision. Now, are we going to see more climate change? Yes, yes, we are. You know, climate change is already having impacts. We're seeing the impacts on, in coastal flooding. We're seeing the impacts in heat waves and an intense rainfall, as we've mentioned. And is it likely to get worse? Yes, because of the inertia of the system, both our economic systems and the Earth system itself. You know, we're that we're going to continue to warm beyond where we are now. But there's a huge gap between the worst-case scenarios and the best-case scenarios that we can get to.

And the decisions that we make are the difference between, you know, a little bit more warming and a little bit more damage and absolutely massive amounts of warming and massive amounts of damage. the worst-case projections, you know, we could have, you know, another three, four degrees of Celsius warming by the end of the century, you know, if we suddenly decided to burn all the fossil fuel that we had. Or we ramp down to net zero emissions relatively soon, and then the changes are much, much less. There are people who are not convinced, and I know you know this, and may never be convinced of the seriousness of the problem. What do you say to them or do you just

give up trying to change someone's mind? So there are some people who have genuine questions or who've been confused by things that they've read in whatever outlet they read. And I think that they're certainly worth talking to. When people do have questions, the science is generally dealt with most of these questions. And so there are good things to show people. people, there are interesting things to validate those questions as a whole and help people see why we've come to the conclusions that we have done. But then there's, there are some people who just don't want to deal with the consequences of our understanding. And that's, that's a much harder, that's a much harder conversation. And mostly it's, it's pointless.

I'm Ira Flato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Do you think there may be any positive pass-through from the COVID-19 science? And go with me on this because I think about this a lot is that if the science gets right on COVID-19, and it looks like we're coming up with vaccinations and the scientists are being proven correct in their work about how they're battling this virus, do you think that science may benefit and all scientists in all fields may be looked at? in a more positive light about the science that they do, and that may spill over into climate change? That's a great question, and I would love to have the confidence to agree with you,

but I don't think so. I think one of the things that the COVID situation has shown is that no matter the urgency of the problem at hand, there will be people who will reject it for other reasons. And I used to think that climate was unique in its ability to be rejected because of its long time scales and the generational issues and the global nature of it. But we've seen all of those things with COVID, but kind of squeezed into a much, much shorter time scale. And we see exactly the same kinds of people, sometimes the same exact people, you know, dismissing the science, wishcasting for what is going to happen and an aggressively undermining confidence in the scientific process. So, you know, I think there are connections there, but I think they go,

the wrong way. I think they demonstrate that people as a whole you're never going to convince everybody. There's always going to be voices that have their own reasons for rejecting what it is that you're saying or the implications of what you're saying.

And I think that we will come out of this with a stronger realization that that's just the human condition that we just have to deal with and not focus perhaps so much on the contrarian voices who are just going to be contrarian because they're contrarian

and focus much more on, you know, the people in the middle who have the questions or who are confused. And, you know, and that's true for climate and COVID and all of these other topics as well. Thank you, Gavin, for taking time to be with us today. And good luck to you in your new role. Thank you very much. I think I'll need it. Dr. Gavin Schmidt, acting senior climate advisor for NASA. He's also director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. One last thing before we go. This week, NASA released a recording of the wind on Mars, recorded by the Perseverance Rover. And it got us thinking about how things might sound on the surface of another world. Quieter, frequency shifted a bit due to the planet's thinner atmosphere. NASA compiled,

common earth sounds and adjusted them to approximate how they would sound on Mars. We turned those sounds into this week's SciFri soundscape. Listen for a whisper of wind at the end. Species of explorers and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation, but as humans, will not give up. The human grace will always persevere into the future. Those last sounds. were the first sound sent back from the surface of Mars. That soundscape was created by SciFrize Daniel Petershmidt. That's about it for this hour.

Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Alexa Lem is our senior producer, contributing producer, John Dan Koski. BJ Leideman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts,

or ask your smart speaker to play science. Friday. Also, you can email us SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. I'm Ira Flato, wishing you a super weekend.