‘Science in the United States is being destroyed’: NASA scientist Graeme Stephens

NASA scientist Dr Graeme Stephens - a recent recipient of the Companion of the Order of Australia - says US institutions and their research have been left on the verge of ‘total collapse’.

Dr Graeme Stephens. Picture: Christopher Michel

Dr Graeme Stephens has spent the past 40 years in the US, but has clung fast to his Australian accent and his love of the AFL. Now the NASA scientist has another reminder of home – the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), the highest Australian honour, awarded recently in the King’s Birthday Honours List.

How do you feel at the moment, Australian or American? In some ways I am both, yet in others I’m very much an Aussie. I bleed green and gold. I’ve received many awards but to me the AC is probably the most meaningful of all. My old buddy, a former Mt Eliza neighbour of mine [retired businessman John Combes], led the nomination. That makes it even more meaningful for because it came from someone totally unconnected to my work.

You are a renowned atmospheric physicist who has spent decades studying clouds. What is it about clouds? The simple answer is, if we didn’t have clouds we wouldn’t be here as a human race. Clouds are part of the process of bringing water up from the surface and bringing it back down to Earth. They deliver the fresh water that sustains life. It was in about my third year at Ballarat East High School when I realised I wanted to do science and I got attracted to studying the atmosphere. Then it was really as a PhD student at the University of Melbourne that I focused on clouds as a component part of the atmosphere.

One of Graeme Stephens’ cloud paintings

As if that wasn’t enough, you also paint clouds... I’ve written articles about the intersection of art and science, and clouds are a fantastic example. Basically science is about trying to explain the world, and art is an expression of the world around us. It’s the same pursuit, in a different dimension.

What were the first steps you took on your journey towards a career at NASA? I’m the second youngest of four boys. Our father died when I was six and my mother, a nursing sister, spent all her time working as a single parent. At high school my life was just study and football. I got a Commonwealth scholarship to go to uni. In those days, university was far more uncommon – I think I was the first in my family to go.

How good a footy player were you? In my first year at uni I played four practice games for
St Kilda and they wanted me to play with the under-19s and work my way up. One of my teammates was Mick Malthouse. It was a fork in the road for me. I thought, “Do you want to go down that path, or do you want to go the academic path?” Sometimes when I look at Mick [one of Australia’s most celebrated AFL players and coaches] I wonder what would have happened if I’d gone on!

Stephens’ painting of NASA’s CloudSat mission

You were headhunted to join Colorado State University as a faculty member in 1984. What did that shift to America mean for your work – including your key role with the CloudSat Earth observation satellite, which operated for almost two decades? I first visited the US in 1979, and that’s when I realised I wanted to study Earth at a large scale, beyond the vista of aircraft. I realised the only way to create such a global-scale view would be from orbiting satellites. That led me to the last 20 to 30 years working with NASA, designing missions for NASA. My vista started with clouds and radiation, and then it broadened to the hydrological cycle of the whole planet.

How much of your work tackles the issues of climate change? I was always working on climate change – clouds act like a thermostat. They can either dial up the heat or cut back the heat. But climate is much broader than clouds; my area of research has broadened massively in recent years to encompass the whole water cycle, from the rise and fall of water in the atmosphere to its run-off in rivers and ice melt to the oceans, leading to the rising of sea level.

With his wife-to-be Jan at uni in the early 1970s

You and your wife Jan – also a research scientist – went through a terrible experience during the recent wildfires. What happened? When we moved to LA in 2010 we bought a beautiful old Spanish-style house in Altadena that took us 10 years to fix up. On January 7, at about 4pm, the winds were blowing at 90mph [145km/h] and the power was shut off. Our son lives nearby and he didn’t have any power either so we went with his two kids to dinner at a restaurant in downtown Pasadena. Then we got messages on our phones – Evacuate, Evacuate – so we rushed up the hill to our house. It was dark so we grabbed a few things and took our two cars and off we went, not thinking the fire would get to us. But in the middle of the night, the wind switched and the devastation was truly unbelievable. We lost it all. It was like a bomb dropped on Altadena.

A home in Altadena is consumed by the January wildfire. Picture: Josh Edelson / AFP

How are you now after that trauma? It comes and goes; you don’t really recover. Every day you remember something that’s gone.

Was the LA firestorm a result of climate change? You can’t really assign one event to climate change. It was a perfect storm – you had this massive weather pattern that set up the severe Santa Ana winds, and you had a fire that had already broken out in another part of LA the day before, and all the resources were over there to fight that fire. All of a sudden we had a major transmission power line that sparked this fire. So it was a series of events that may become more frequent in the future – but this particular situation was a confluence of events that conspired to make the fire as dangerous as it was.

How damaging are the current cuts to research in the US? Tremendously damaging. Science in the US is being destroyed and is in a state of collapse. I’ve been involved in laying out the roadmap for the direction of satellite measurements of Earth for the next decade. It’s mandated by Congress but now it has been scrapped so there’s no roadmap, there’s no funding. The entire program, which typically involves 10 years of planning, is gone – and once it goes, you can’t just turn it back on.

An aerial view of an Altadena street after the fire. Picture: Mario Tama / Getty Images

It is an attack on science? It is a concerted attack on the activities in society that seek truth and knowledge. Science is not political – politics is what you do with the knowledge science provides, but science itself is about truth-seeking. All the US science agencies have been cut drastically. The cuts to NASA’s budget mean turning off about 70 per cent of its Earth observation program; the program is collapsing.

Will you come back to Australia? I think with the attack on science I might just retire, and then I will spend time back in Australia. I could probably still get funding in the US, but why should I? It means I take money away from middle- and early-career people. I’ve always been conscious of mentoring those coming behind me – and my worry, with these cuts, is what’s going to happen to their careers. I want to spend more time in Australia but a complicating factor is that we have four kids and 11 grandchildren in America.

How have you managed to hold onto your Aussie accent? It’s called strength of character.