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Perched above the New York City diner made famous by the TV show Seinfeld, Tom’s Restaurant, a small research laboratory became, improbably, crucial to humanity’s understanding of our changing climate and of the universe itself.
Now, it is being shut down by Donald Trump’s administration.
Nasa’s top climate and space monitoring lab, called the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), has been housed in six floors of a leased building owned by Columbia University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side since 1966.
Since then, it has launched the career of a Nobel prize winner, aided missions to Venus and Jupiter, mapped the Milky Way and alerted the world to global heating by creating one of the first climate models. The climate model ran on an IBM computer, the fastest in the world in the 1970s and so gargantuan it took up the entire second floor.
But this storied history has meant little to the Trump administration, which is ending the lab’s lease on 31 May, releasing 130 staff to work from home with an uncertain future ahead. Donald Trump, who has called climate science “bullshit” and a “giant hoax” in the past, wants to slash Nasa’s Earth science budget in half.
“They are trying to kill the messenger with the bad news, it’s crazy,” said Dr James Hansen, known as the godfather of climate science and previously director of Giss for more than 30 years.
The Guardian talked to Hansen, who was wearing a trademark felt fedora, as he tackled a plate of eggs and bacon at Tom’s Restaurant, which sits below the Giss office. The eggs, as well as some pancakes for your Guardian reporter, were ordered at the barked behest of the manager: “$12 minimum on food! $12! Each!”
The diner is famous – its neon-lit exterior regularly appeared on Seinfeld (photos of Jerry, Kramer and Elaine, some signed, adorn the walls inside) and it inspired Suzanne Vega’s 1980s song Tom’s Diner and so is now regularly thronged by tourists as well as Columbia students, though perhaps less so by Giss staff.
“Are they going to destroy this place? Are they bombing it?” said Hansen about the dismantling of the institution above where we were poking at our food. “That’s the approach of Doge [Elon Musk’s so-called ‘department of government efficiency’] to blow things up, to use a chainsaw,” he said. “That’s a big mistake because science isn’t something you start over. You’ve got a lot of knowledge there.”
Hansen gave Congress and the world its first major warning of a climate crisis in 1988 but left Giss in 2013 to speak out more publicly about climate breakdown. His latent activism became so concerning to Nasa that, Hansen claims, it sought to install a camera outside his office to monitor his movements.
Giss’s independence and nimbleness allowed it to chart the dangerous heating of our planet but also spurred resentment from senior officials who long desired to subsume it within Nasa’s main Goddard space flight center campus in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“We survived under a non-supportive situation for decades,” Hansen said. “Somewhat it was a matter of jealousy, of scientists in Greenbelt thinking: ‘Why are these guys getting to this privileged position?’”
Ironically for a place that has produced world-leading climate science for a tiny fraction of Nasa’s budget, however, it will be closed down ostensibly for efficiency reasons. Last month, the US president signed an executive order calling for a review of all leased federal office space, particularly in cities, to slash costs.
“Over the next several months, employees will be placed on temporary remote work agreements while Nasa seeks and evaluates options for a new space for the Giss team,” a Nasa spokesperson said.
It’s unclear where, or if, such a space will eventuate. The move will likely not even save the federal government any money – the $3m a year lease is between Columbia and a different federal agency and cannot be broken early. Researchers, their books and equipment are being packed up and removed so that the US taxpayer can fund an empty building in New York City’s moneyed Upper West Side.
“Ours is not to reason why,” said Gavin Schmidt, the current Giss director who noted the lab was only recently renovated at a cost of several million dollars. “It is frustrating.” The final weeks of Nasa’s time in Armstrong Hall, the name of the Columbia property, have been marked by team picnics with a farewell party planned among past and present staff.
“There are a few wobbly lips, the contribution of this place to science has been huge and people are emotional about that,” Schmidt said.
“Giss has a unique culture of autonomy, there’s a special sauce here that’s responsible for some really great science. Everyone knows why they are here – they could’ve gone anywhere else but they stay in an office that is dedicated to public service. Science for the public good is imbued in the floors and walls and elevators here.”
The work will, for now, continue in a different, disparate form. “It’s doable but it is disruptive,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at GISS. “People would rather be doing science than thinking about moving. This is a building full of nerds who love doing science, love learning new things about our planet.”
But for how long, and from where? A best-case scenario could be that Giss goes into some sort of hibernation before being resurrected under a future administration. Or it could be a terminal end of an era, an apt outcome in an age of anti-enlightenment where climate science is torn from websites, scientists and their work are jettisoned, vaccines and even weather forecasting are eyed with suspicion and the president can opine that the rising seas will happily create balmy new beachfront property.
“I see this as an attack by this administration on climate science,” said van Diedenhoven. “We were afraid of something like this because we saw what was happening at other agencies, so obviously Giss is on their list because of the good climate science done there. I don’t see how it can survive without a building. It’s really quite devastating.”
After making the most of his eggs and bacon, Hansen wandered to the nondescript side-door that gains entry to Giss, to say hello to those who followed him. Shortly after he first came to Columbia, in 1967, the building’s second-floor windows were bricked up after student protests erupted over the Vietnam war. Today a different sort of tumult is in the air – before Hansen can walk in he bumps into a Nasa scientist who is delighted to see him but then swiftly asks: “Do you have space somewhere where I can work?”
Schmidt said he was unsure what comes next, but that he wouldn’t want to move to Maryland and that others at Giss will feel the same. “People have lives, some just won’t want to go,” he said. “The mission hasn’t changed, though. We’ve punched above our weight for a bunch of folks living above a diner in New York. We’ve had a good run. But it’s not over just yet.”
