My original title said “NASA Cuts Funding for Global Warming Research,” but lets be honest. We all know where the responsibility for decisions that eliminate basic and important research about the earth’s climate lies. And a very bad decision it is:
NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth’s changing climate and environment.
The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture — a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.
And in its 2007 budget, NASA proposes significant delays in a global precipitation measuring mission to help with weather predictions, as well as the launch of a satellite designed to increase the timeliness and accuracy of severe weather forecasts and improve climate models.
The excuse given by NASA officials was that something had to be cut in order to meet the President’s goals of completing the International Space Station and returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. So naturally they cut funding for climate change projects. After all, getting back on the Moon is far more important than say, understanding global weather systems, or better accuracy on hurricane forecasts.
“Today, when the need for information about the planet is more important than ever, this process of building understanding through increasingly powerful observations . . . is at risk of collapse,” said Berrien Moore III, director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire.
Moore is cochairman of a National Research Council committee that will recommend NASA’s future earth science agenda later this year. It is unclear, however, whether NASA will follow those recommendations.
Bush and his friends in the oil industry don’t want further clarity about the reality and causes of global warming. They are quite happy with the current state of affairs where they can continue to claim ambiguity and controversy regarding the anthropogenic basis for climate change. It’s why their media mouthpieces continue to compare Al Gore to Hitler and the Nazis. God forbid we get more data to make the case for global warming even more convincing than it already is.
Come to think of it, considering Bush’s propensity for consulting with a higher power before making decisions, maybe he really does believe God forbids scientific research on climate change. God or Exxon Mobil, which in BushWorldTM may amount to the same deity.
Federal Budget Cuts for Scientific Research