The available evidence overwhelmingly suggests that global warming is a burgeoning environmental crisis. The Bush administration has decided to take action — it wants to collect less evidence.
America will lose much of its ability to monitor global warming from space unless the Bush administration reverses course and restores funding for the next generation of climate instruments, according to a confidential report prepared by government scientists.
Cost overruns and technology problems recently caused the federal government to cut the number of planned monitoring satellites from six to four. Those four will focus on weather prediction rather than climate research, according to the report.
“The recent loss of climate sensors … places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy,” said the report, which was drafted by government atmospheric and space scientists for the White House Office of Science and Technology.
Climate Science Watch, a DC-based watchdog group that obtained a copy of the administration’s report yesterday, told the LA Times that the cancellation of these satellites would undermine NASA’s ability to “recover information about ice sheets, the surface levels of lakes and seas, and atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
For that matter, the White House report noted that the next generation of satellites will not have instruments to measure solar energy, climate energy, ocean topography, and aerosols.
“This is going to create a crisis in the science community’s ability to monitor global warming, starting in 2010,” said Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch. “This gives the lie to the idea that the Bush administration is placing a high priority on climate change.”
The timing on this is perfect. Bush is poised to tell his G8 friends how he’s finally ready to express interest in global climate change. One assumes they’ll now know not to believe him.
And as long as we’re on the subject, let’s also not forget about our old friend Michael Griffin, Bush’s NASA administrator.
Last week, Griffin stunned a lot of Americans when he told NPR that the science about global warming might very well be right, but we shouldn’t do anything about it. “To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change,” Griffin said. “I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”
When non-crazy people rushed to point out how painfully stupid this is, Griffin didn’t back down, but did say that his perspective on the issue is irrelevant — because addressing global warming is outside NASA’s purview.
“The agency is responsible for collecting data that is used by the science community and policy makers as part of an ongoing discussion regarding our planet’s evolving systems,” Griffin said in a statement. “It is NASA’s responsibility to collect, analyze and release information. It is not NASA’s mission to make policy regarding possible climate change mitigation strategies.”
First, as we learned in the satellite story, NASA’s responsibility to collect information is about to be hindered dramatically. Second, as TP explained, NASA, up until quite recently, had an entirely different mission.
From 2002-2006, it was. Part of NASA’s mission was to “protect our home planet”: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”
In Feb. 2006, the mission statement was “quietly altered” to remove the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet.” Even a year ago, NASA scientists predicted that because of the mission statement revision, there would “be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.” Top NASA climatologist James Hansen called the deletion “a shocking loss,” because he had “been using the phrase since December 2005 to justify speaking out about the dangers of global warming.”
In contrast to the previous mission statement, the 2006 revision “was made at NASA headquarters without consulting the agency’s 19,000 employees or informing them ahead of time.”
I’m looking forward to NASA changing it back. I expect it to happen around January 2009.