Interview: Dr. D. James Baker

Dr. Donald James Baker earned his B.S. in physics from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in experimental physics from Cornell University. He was a post-doctoral fellow in oceanography at the University of Rhode Island under John Knauss, who later preceded Baker as Under Secretary of Commerce and administrator of NOAA. He was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship to work with Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California on photosynthesis. In 1964, he moved to Harvard University, where he served as assistant and associate professor of oceanography. From Harvard, he joined the University of Washington in 1973, where he held a faculty position and co-founded and served as the first dean of the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences. During that period, he also served as a group leader for Deep-Sea Physics at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. He was appointed as Under Secretary of Commerce and administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by President William J. Clinton in 1993 and served until 2001.

Dr. D. James Baker: Well, NOAA provides the weather forecasts. And everybody is aware of that. That is something that I think is a big part of NOAA that people are aware of. But what they’re not aware of is really the oceans and fisheries environmental monitoring that goes on. NOAA incorporates the National Ocean Service. It does all the coastal measurements. They manage the Coastal Zone Management Program that interpolates between states about what should be done. And NOAA is heavily involved in all commercial fisheries management. People don’t think about that. But all the ocean fisheries and the salmon fisheries that have to be managed are handled by NOAA. NOAA is also the representative, internationally, to the Whaling Commission. So, NOAA is engaged in managing whales. And then I guess the largest thing one thinks about is that NOAA is heavily involved in climate issues, all the way from research to monitoring, and then trying to make the case for the fact that this is an important problem.

So, it’s a good question, because when people think about NOAA they think about weather forecasts. And obviously that is more than half of the NOAA budget, and it’s a big, joint, private-sector TV stations enterprise. But the other part of NOAA, and one of the reasons NOAA was formed, was to have this emphasis on the ocean issues, and that’s something I think people are not so aware of.

NOAA was put together from existing agencies in 1970. But the biggest piece of NOAA, the Weather Service, is one that had existed ever since the 1860s, roughly. The oldest part of NOAA is the National Ocean Service and the Coast Survey that was established by Thomas Jefferson in 1807. So it has a heck of a long history. But I think there is no question that NOAA has become more important, because we are finally recognizing the importance of the environment to society and the importance of trying to be sustainable. And you can see that. When I first got involved in politics, I tried to do some environmental work with the Dukakis campaign and they told me that no, environmental issues were not going to be important to the public. And even during the midterm Clinton elections, when I volunteered to do some politicking related to the environment, I was told the public was not really engaged. But you take a look today and you look at the Democratic debates – everyone on the stage has a plan for climate change. This is simply amazing to see that. And NOAA is right at the centerpiece of measuring, monitoring, and understanding, and then providing solutions to climate change issues. So, I think there is no question that NOAA has become more important as time has gone on.

Yeah, I was really interested in being the head of NOAA. So, I was on the transition team for the Clinton/ Gore administration. When they came in, I was able to help make political appointments there at NOAA, which was a big help. And then I stayed until the very end. So, I served the full eight years. It’s only Bob White, who was the original administrator at NOAA and had served in some previous leadership capacity for the previous organizations, that has served longer than I did. But I think what we could see there was a growing interest and attention from the Congress on both atmosphere and ocean issues. Al Gore was a big help in that, because he promoted those things. But what we saw, I think externally, was the fact that the world went from not having much more than telephone communication to being fully on the internet. That was the big change over that period of 1990 to 2000, roughly 1993 to 2001. I think in 1997 only 2 percent of the world was on the internet when I arrived at the Department of Commerce. We had all these old bakelite telephones on the desks. There were no computers anywhere. And we started with beepers. Cell phones started to appear in the mid-nineties. The whole idea of using the internet and transforming information and doing this electronically was something that a few smaller research groups had been involved with, but that really transformed over the period. We even went to the point of having to sequester, as it were, the NOAA.gov website, because somebody had tried to steal it and use it toward the end of my term. So, the whole internet question was the big change.

I think the other thing that we saw was a slowly growing recognition of the importance of environmental issues and the impact of trying to become sustainable. President [Bill] Clinton had established during his term the Clinton Council on Sustainable Development. That was the first time, I think, that you really had the environmentalists, and you had people from industry, you had the president of Exxon Mobil, and you had the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and other groups, the state and local representatives, all coming together to really look at these issues of how do you make cities, states, and the nation sustainable. That was a really important impact there.

I would say we had two challenges. One thing I really wanted to work on during my time at NOAA was to try to reconcile and rationalize the satellite observing systems for weather forecasting, because we basically had three groups doing this. You had the Department of Defense – the Air Force was flying defense meteorological satellites. You had NOAA flying civilian meteorological satellites, and you had NASA flying experimental satellites. And my goal – since I had just written a book on satellites and I was really interested and had spent a lot of time on this topic – was to see if we couldn’t have some kind of convergence of the military, civilian, and NASA satellites. We thought if we could do that, we would bring along the Europeans at the same time. There already had been some cooperation there, but not full convergence. So we spent a lot of time working on trying to get that convergence, and we started a program that included the military. After I left, it turned out not to work well. We couldn’t get the two cultures to work that well together. But today there is a joint polar operational system which is joint between NASA and NOAA which did not exist before, and that came out of that discussion. So I’m really pleased that we were able to get that convergence. It’s difficult to get these different cultures that have different technical backgrounds to work together. And I think they made an important step there. That was one step. Another thing that we did at NOAA was to complete the modernization of the Weather Service – that is, to put in modern weather radars all around the country. And we went from something like 360 radars to something like 180, which meant there were a lot of communities who lost their local weather, area weather station, and they lost their local radar. So they were concerned about not having the same kind of weather coverage. So before me, a lot of work had been done on this. We had the final few places that were the most difficult ones to finally finish up. And I remember a long discussion in the White House with Larry Hagman, of Dallas fame, who was fighting having a weather station because he was worried about cancer effects. So, there were a number of impacts like that. We finally got it through and finished it at the end of like a ten-year process. with floats, called the Argo floats. These are floats that float along the surface and then they descend into the ocean, and they drift along for awhile, and then they come back up again. They monitor ocean circulation and ocean temperature, and today there are 3,000 of these continually monitoring exactly what is happening in the ocean, watching the climate change, watching the ocean currents, adding this to weather forecasts. We started that. It was a bootstrap operation. I got a little bit of money from the White House. And then I went to the UK and I got the science advisor who I knew there to agree to buy one, since I said, “We’re buying some, we want you to buy some.” He agreed he would buy a couple of floats. Then we went to France and we got the science advisor there. I had known these people from previous interactions. We got them to buy a few. We came back to the U.S. and we said, “Look, we have this great international cooperation and we need even more money.” So, we were able to bootstrap it and get this start on this large forecasting problem.

And another thing that we did that had not been done before was put in place an institute for forecasting El Niño. With El Niño, every five to seven years you get this big warming in the tropics and lots of storms in California. It’s a big weather event, and there is a lot more information about how it can be forecast and how it can evolve. We took that community interest in doing that and turned it into a formal institute, which we established at both Columbia University and with a foreign office in Brazil. But it was that recognition of the importance of trying to go just beyond the short-term weather forecast to somewhat longer things like El Niño, and then getting more recognition with climate issues was another important topic.

Well, that was a really important event. You know, one of the things that has been true about NOAA for a long time, although it was established as an agency to focus on oceans – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – and it brought in the ocean parts to the weather service to form NOAA, there never was that much attention [to oceanography]. One of my hopes – knowing Al Gore and meeting President Clinton – was that I could get them really involved with the oceans. This is a true story. I went to the White House, and I said, “I’m trying to get more attention to the oceans. How can I get the president to show up at an event?” The people in the White House said to me, “Well, you’ve got to have a photo op. You know, think of a good place for a photo op.” And I said, “What do you think about having an event in Monterey, where you’ve got the setting sun?” President Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, was going to Stanford [at the time]. And then if you did it towards the end of the year, they might be willing to go out and meet her there and so on. They thought that was great – having an event in Monterey.

So, we said OK, we’ll have an oceanography conference in Monterey, and we’ll get the president and the vice president, and other leaders out there and the senators from California, and so on. Sam Farr, who was the congressman from Monterey, was really interested, so we started to build this up. It was the year of the ocean that year, 1998, and I talked to the Office of Management and Budget, and they said, “If you’re going to have this conference, the president will want to announce a major budget initiative, so what would you like to see in terms of budget initiatives?” We actually ended up with 60 million new dollars and a new research ship because of the National Oceans Conference. These things all came together in the right way. I think the administration was looking for a good way to promote basically noncontroversial issues. Clinton was very interested, Gore came, we had all of the senators, we had all of the local people, Leon Panetta was out there, and it was an important step in terms of getting NOAA even more involved. And the research program – the new ocean exploration program that came out of that ocean conference – is a major part of the ocean budget today. One of the things the research community always complained about was that NOAA was not playing their role. [National Science Foundation] was a stronger player. But with the National Oceans Conference, we were able to make a strong step towards increasing that NOAA role.

I think you may have already touched on some of these things, but what achievements are you most proud of that came about during your term as administrator?

Well, I think one of the things is we literally laid the groundwork for understanding the basis of climate change and what should be done. I think that was a key element. We were also a major player on the President’s Council on Sustainable Development in trying to look at these issues as fisheries catch declined and as invasive species came into the Great Lakes – zebra mussels, for example, that grow really, really fast and are bad for fouling ship bottoms. They come in on the ships there and grow rapidly. Trying to mitigate that and to deal with that in general, I think, was a critical thing.

We also expanded and really worked well with the Coastal Zone Management Act, getting states to work together. And in fact, at the beginning of the time that I came into NOAA, the state of Texas – at that point George W. Bush was the governor – had written to me and said, “We do not want to be part of the Coastal Zone Management Program. We don’t need federal help in managing our coast.” But in fact, by the time I left, Texas had changed their mind. And I have another letter that says, “We would like to join the Coastal Management Program because we would like to be fully part of the federal program helping protect our beaches.” Interestingly enough, the Texas Coastal Zone Management Program is now managed by a nephew of George W. Bush. But that change, that recognition of the importance of managing, and managing in a larger context, is something that we pushed hard. And it’s something that has, I think, developed well over the years.

I think the biggest problem that we face is how to make the world sustainable. In almost every area that we look, we’ve seen our natural resources decline. And we have not been able to find a good way to keep those stable. We see this in fisheries as most fisheries’ catches decline. We’re seeing this in air pollution and water pollution. We’re seeing that now with climate change in the rise of CO 2 . We recognize the problem, but we haven’t been able to come up with good solutions. And it’s because these are gradual changes that people don’t see an immediate impact from. Each generation sees a small change from the previous generation, but they are not excited enough to try and do something. It’s not like a river catching on fire, and then we go establish EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency]. So, trying to make a sustainable world from gradual changes. Another way to think about it is shifting baselines. Each generation sees a new baseline that’s a little bit below the one before, and it doesn’t think of it so much. That’s one thing.

The other thing I think that we really need to do is to have a full observing system. We need to look and monitor completely all the time what is happening with our atmosphere, our ocean, and our Arctic and Antarctic ice and the ice around the world, and the ecosystems – how they are changing. We’re only scratching the surface of what we can do, but trying to really observe and see that it’s really critical. So those two things I think are the critical challenges for the future.