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"A Grave Mistake"


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Why?  Because Trump knows better. 

To all Trump supporters:  make sure your grandkids know you supported such actions.

 

Trump Administration Axes Funding For NASA System That Monitors Greenhouse Gases

The Trump administration has quietly eliminated funding for NASA’s research program that tracks greenhouse gases around the world.

According to Science, the Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) tracks the world’s flow of carbon dioxide from space. Such a system is critical to monitoring any improvements — or failures — in attempts to cut the pollution linked to climate change.

NASA spokesman Steve Cole told the magazine that the program was canceled due to ”budget constraints and higher priorities within the science budget.” Usually, Congress battles such cuts, but this time, there was simply no mention of the program’s $10 million annual budget in the White House budget.

Although existing grants will finish, Cole said, no new projects will be undertaken. NASA’s budget report for fiscal year 2019 assumes the “termination” of CMS.

Many of the projects CMS has tracked involved how effectively forests, including tropical forests, trap carbon dioxide. Carbon measurements were also critical for compliance with air pollution reduction goals, such as those required by the Paris climate agreement. In June 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the accord.

“If you cannot measure emissions reductions, you cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement,” Tufts University environment professor Kelly Sims Gallagher told Science. She also called canceling the NASA program a “grave mistake.”

Climate change expert Rachel Licker of the Union of Concerned Scientists also told the BBC  that “dismantling CMS will adversely affect our ability to track flows of carbon through our land, oceans and atmosphere.”

Europe has one carbon-monitoring satellite of its own and is on track to develop more. As the U.S. under Trump turns increasingly to fossil fuels, including coal, experts warn that it will cede developing cutting-edge technology focusing on pollution reduction and alternative fuels to other nations. 

“We really shoot ourselves in the foot if we let other people develop the technology” and lose that edge in the economies of the future, Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, told Science.

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7 hours ago, AdamsHouseCat said:

Bus measuring greenhouse gases is not consistent with NASA'S primary mission of Muslim outreach,  or even its secondary  mission of exploring space.

 

Come back when you're sober.

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You're new here.  You can edit your posts to fix typos - like Bus when you presumably meant "But".   

Regarding NASA's mission statement:

In February 2006, the phrase "to understand and protect the home planet" was quietly removed from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s official mission statement. Because agency mission statements are routinely used to justify research and funding decisions, many scientists were not only surprised to discover the change, but also concerned that the change meant more funding would be shifted away from studies of Earth, including climate change research, and redirected to NASA's planned new series of manned space missions.

A NASA atmospheric chemist commented, “We refer to the mission statement in all our research proposals that go out for peer review…as civil servants, we’re paid to carry out NASA’s mission. When there was that very easy-to-understand statement that our job is to protect the planet that made it much easier to justify this kind of work.”1  NASA scientists responding to a Union of Concerned Scientists survey also expressed concerns that changing priorities and lack of funding were seriously undermining the agency’s ability to continue with high-quality research into climate change.2 

The agency’s current mission statement calls on the agency “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”3  It is the first time since NASA’s founding in 1958 that the mission statement does not explicitly include mention of the Earth. A NASA spokesperson was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the mission statement was rewritten “to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.”4 

Scientists’ funding fears are already more than hypothetical. A 2006 report by the National Research Council (NRC, a part of the National Academy of Sciences), noted that funding cuts currently in place at NASA will mean canceling or not replacing several of the agency’s Earth observation satellites. This will, in the words of the NRC report, cause a “severe deficit” in Earth observation capabilities and compromise the government’s ability to “fulfill its obligations in . . . [the] Climate Change Science Program”5 

NASA’s previous mission statement was adopted in 2002 in an open process with input from across NASA’s 19,000 employees. In contrast, NASA researchers said the new mission was revised with no discussion or public announcement of any kind.6 

https://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/at-nasa-earth-is-removed.html#.WwVyv-4vyM8

This change in policy is exactly what is meant by the title - "A Grave Mistake".

Now if we are going to limit NASA to wasting money on manned space flight, we need to create a new agency with comparable near-earth space capability to take up the mission of Earth sciences.  Doesn't sound very efficient to me, but that is what's required.   

To simply deny or ignore the need for Earth science is beyond ignorant.  It's a deliberate choice to avoid knowledge you don't want to hear. 

The earth is essentially a spacecraft for us all.  To deliberately avoid understanding it, while sinking money into largely worthless manned flight capability is both ironic and criminally stupid.   

 

 

 

 

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