Zack Labe (NOAA) -- Just Fired by DOGE

I recently wrote a piece on this site that examined the concept of climate tipping points. In that piece I focused on two climate change features that have the potential to give us an early warning on climate disaster: the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, and Arctic sea-ice collapse.

After a lot of searching around for a banner image, I settled on a beautiful data visualization showing arctic sea-ice coverage as a function of decade, created by Zack Labe, a Research Physical Scientist at NOAA. Zack’s expertise is in one of those key climate change issues: arctic sea-ice and climate modeling.

Dr. Zack Labe was just fired.

One of hundreds in the latest carnage at NOAA by DOGE.

I want you to know who is being fired.

I don’t know Zack Labe personally. We’ve never met, we’ve never spoken, we’ve never collaborated. I emailed him last fall just to let him know I used one of his illustrations on my blog.

Zack was an undergraduate at Cornell University with a major in Atmospheric Science. He got his Ph.D. in Earth System Science at UC Irvine where he was a National Science Foundation fellow in data science. He went on to a Postdoc position at Colorado State University where he started his research to develop machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to distinguish human-caused climate change from natural variability. A critical issue I confronted in my tipping points piece.

In 2022 Zack joined Princeton University and became an Associate Research Scholar affiliated with NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. In June of last year (2024) he was hired by NOAA as a Research Physical Scientist. His role there is to advance AI and ML tools for high-resolution climate models focused on prediction and risk assessment.

Zack has published 33 peer-reviewed scientific papers, He has been a leader in communicating complex climate issues to the public through his data visualization on social media, a reach with over 100,000 followers. In fact, I first bumped into Zack’s work because of his presence on Mastodon.

That’s who was just fired by DOGE.
Fired by Elon Musk.
Fired by The Sharpie Weatherman.

Why was he fired?

The reasons I was given:
-> I did not demonstrate that my work was in the public interest, and my ability, knowledge and/or skills did not match NOAA’s needs.

You be the judge.

I am outraged.