[2026 08 05] August 5, 2026
AIAA Houston History Committee Chair: Douglas Yazell
Contact: history@aiaahouston.org
Other Members: None as of August 5, 2026
AIAA Houston History Committee mirrors the AIAA History Committee. Here is a link to the web page of the AIAA History Committee.
The older AIAA Houston History Committee web page is archived using this link. It contains articles from 2015 to 2024. It also contains helpful documents about AIAA Houston. The links for those helpful documents can be found at the bottom of that web page.
[2026 08 05] August 5, 2026
The Climate Catastrophe, NASA Earth Observation, & the Broader NASA Mission
[Douglas Yazell, August 5, 2026]
Above: Downloaded from the NASA climate science web page August 5, 2026.
Here is a short part from the Heated Substack email note dated May 28, 2026. The email note used the subject line, “Kate Marvel on the nerd purge.” In the notes below, Kate Marvel is a climate scientist. Emily Atkin is the host of the “Heated” Substack. I emphasized some parts using bold font. Here is a link to the Kate Marvel Wikipedia article. By the way, I liked the Netflix 2021 documentary, “Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space.” It has five episodes. It was a good way to get to know Jared Isaacman, who is now the NASA Administrator.
[Start email excerpt]
Begin forwarded message:
From: HEATED <heated@substack.com>
Subject: Kate Marvel on the nerd purge
Date: May 28, 2026 at 12:24:47 PM CDT
[Emily Atkin] “So you were at NASA during the first Trump administration as well, correct? What was different then between that administration and this administration?”
[Kate Marvel] “Yes. The first time we had an administrator who was essentially a NASA fanboy. He really loved NASA and he wanted to take care of NASA. And we were very largely protected from political interference the first time around.
“This time around it felt distinctly different because of the chaos. We had an administrator who was nominated, then he was un-nominated. And after he gave a million dollars to a Trump PAC, and he was renominated. [Editors note: It was actually $2 million].
“One of the last straws for me was reading an interview with him in Science Magazine, which is one of the leading journals for nerds. It’s a nerd newspaper. And in this interview, he said, well, it’s just not good for NASA to be seen convening scientists or publishing papers on politically controversial topics.
“And I was like, it’s not our fault it’s controversial, Jared.”
[Emily Atkin] “Of course his name is Jared.”
[Kate Marvel] “I’m sure there are nice Jareds out there! But this particular Jared just did not give me a lot of confidence that he was going to stand up for our science.
“[Editor’s note: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s full quote was: ‘For NASA to assemble scientists and put out papers on politically charged issues, whether or not this is an impending climate catastrophe, is not helpful to the broader NASA mission.‘]”
[End email excerpt]
I (Douglas Yazell) wrote about NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel here on January 1, 2020 on our AIAA Houston website, after she was interviewed by Ezra Klein. She was the guest of the Ezra Klein Show podcast of October 28, 2019. Here is a short part of that conversation.
[Ezra Klein] “…how do you think about the question of living morally in a very high-carbon society, a high-emission society, even as you, like, walk around every day with the knowledge of what that might mean for future generations?”
[Kate Marvel] “In a very scattered and a not very coherent way. This is something that I struggle with a lot, and it really upsets me, and I think maybe the closest I’ve every come to finding the framework for understanding that is realizing that I am a white person.
“I am a white person in America, and that means I carry with me a sort of privilege. You know, we as white people, we benefit from white supremacy, even if we didn’t actively choose to participate in it. By not actively working to dismantle it, we are hurting people.”
Above: Downloaded from the World Atlas web page August 5, 2026. I am comparing the age of the oldest human fossils (315,000 years) to the 800,000 years of climate data (carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) from the prior image.
[Notes from Douglas Yazell, AIAA Houston Member, Retired. Chair of the History Committee]
I often refer to this 2021 quote from the AIAA Executive Director on page 7 of the April issue of Aerospace America, “Reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 requires the ultimate sense of urgency – it’s only 30 years into the future.“
Kate Marvel mentioned race matters above. The NASA Watch website recently published this news:
“The Order states, and NASA firmly agrees, that a ‘bedrock principle of the United States is that all citizens are treated equally under the law. This principle guarantees equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes. It promises that people are treated as individuals, not components of a particular race or group. It encourages meritocracy and a colorblind society,’ not race-, color-, or national-origin-based favoritism. 90 FR at 17537. And adherence to this principle, including in the issuance of grants, ‘is essential to creating opportunity, encouraging achievement, and sustaining the American Dream.'”
In this 90-second 2012 PBS YouTube video, race matter experts Tim Wise and Michelle Alexander comment on what race matter expert George Lipsitz (a former professor of the University of Houston Clear Lake) calls, “the cynical strategy of ‘color blindness.'” That quote is from the introduction to his 2011 book, “How Racism Takes Place.”
A few years ago, AIAA Executive Director Dan Dumbacher used public AIAA notes or articles to address both race matters (June 2, 2020) and climate change (April 21, 2021). He wrote that we need to make “the ultimate pivot” on race matters, writing just a few days after the death of Houstonian George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. On the climate change subject, he wrote that we need to reach net zero by 2050 with “the ultimate sense of urgency,” since 2050 was only 29 years into the future.
To conclude this blog post, the above paragraph is part of connecting AIAA (public policy & more) to both race matters and climate change. These will always be AIAA subjects, despite the 2025 censorship by AIAA of the above 2020 note by Dan Dumbacher on race matters. This URL shows the censored publication at Archive dot org. On the website (AIAA dot org for 2024 at Archive dot org), I found the censored article by clicking on “News”, then going to June 2, 2020.