Is Trump Going To Gut NASA Earth Science? Who Knows.
Trump’s space policy reaches for Mars and the stars, Space News
“NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies.”
“Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’, The Guardian
“Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”. “We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission. “My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing Nasa programs but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies. I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing. Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”
Yes, Donald Trump did call climate change a Chinese hoax, Politifact
“At one point, Clinton said, “Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.” Did he? Yes, though he later said it was a joke. The original source of this claim was a tweet Trump sent on Nov. 6, 2012, as we noted in a January 2016 fact-check of a similar claim by Clinton’s Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders.”
Trump admits ‘some connectivity’ between climate change and human activity, CNN
“President-elect Donald Trump conceded Tuesday there is “some connectivity” between human activity and climate change and wavered on whether he would pull the United States out of international accords aimed at combating the phenomenon, which scientists overwhelmingly agree is caused by human activity.”
Keith’s note: Last week a number of articles appeared with the startling (at least to the authors) news that President Trump was going to cut all of NASA’s Earth science programs. The authors based this arm waving on quotes in the Guardian by on-again/off-again/on-again Trump transition team advisor Bob Walker. This is not the first time Walker has said something like this. Back in the middle of October, in a Space News op ed, Walker made similar comments. Other than these two comments by Walker we have little else to go on except some off-handed, indecisive quotes from Trump himself on climate change. So – will Trump gut NASA space science? We only have some hints from someone who may or may not actual know what Trump is going to do. If Trump does take a run at NASA’s Earth science programs he’ll have allies such as Sen. Ted Cruz and House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith who have been going after climate-based research funding for years. Then again, Trump may find himself consumed by far more pressing issues. We won’t know until a Trump space policy emerges and a Trump team is installed on the 9th floor at NASA Headquarters.
Space Act of 1958 includes earth science (Bolden said it is NASA’s mission to protect earth) and the cost of continuing earth observation and data collection is not that expensive. It also provides opportunity to test new techniques at close range instead of first doing these 10s of millions of miles away. But then as we have seen many choose or ignore laws that suit their personal agenda. I’ve found many space advocates are climate change deniers. I also expect we will soon many NASA and NOAA personnel will jump on this same bandwagon.
Stephen Colbert said “reality has a well known liberal bias.” Of course, he wasn’t talking about NASA, but the point stands anyway. Science is the domain of liberals and Democrats, and we can’t have any of that stuff at NASA. Of course Trump will try his best to get rid of it.
If Trump really wants to restore coal mining he would have to deny climate change. Of course its difficult to point to any campaign promises he has not reversed. But Trump is on record as favoring golf courses over wind farms, and that’s one thing I don’t see changing.
It’s going to take decades before climate science will regain credibility with the general public. You can thank the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University for this state of affairs. They started the whole dismal rain dance.
Having been caught with their pants down skewing or suppressing data, concealing critical details of their climate models, and conspiring to prevent publication of papers critical of global warming — if those people had decided to destroy climate science, they could hardly have done a better job of it. Nor were/are they alone in behaving like this.
That’s the reality for the general public that elected Trump — and probably also a great many others who normally vote liberal but who have caught a sense that there’s something fishy about global warming.
Whatever Trump does or doesn’t do to NASA’s climate-related research is beside the point at this stage. We’ll need to see productive vineyards in central Sweden before the public will go along. Nature is going to have to make statements that everyone can see and feel personally before it’ll be believed.
And in case anyone hasn’t caught the drift of the public mood that produced the election results, let’s just say that testimony by experts is viewed dimly these days, most particularly when it’s a lead-in to asking for more centrally directed political power over the economy and peoples’ lives.
I work with geoscientists, and one of them —a young postdoc — told me he’d love to go into climate science, but he said the field is too tainted right now. So he’s studying other planets instead.
My own view is that scientists started out as honest advisors to policy makers, but somewhere the field crossed a divide, seduced by both grant money and the chance to sit at the Big Table and write policy. Call that sin if you like (or not), but I think it describes how we got where we are.
I can recommend this article as a useful perspective: http://www.thenewatlantis.c…
I was waiting for the climate deniers to show up. People who use fake names on blogs expect to be taken seriously when they use verbiage to try and contradict established science. FInd another blog for your next post on this topic.
Just curious, but have you made any attempt to look at actual data, such as the atmospheric CO2 concentrations measured by observations in Hawaii for more than half a century? http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gm…
That said, he’s correct in that what came out of East Anglia, and the initial reaction, poisoned the public perception well. It spawned articles like Peter Keleman’s piece in Popular Mechanics, which called aspects of the story troubling, and there were many others. Then it snowballed.
In parallel, we have articles in both science and popular science publications about the reproducibility problem; studies which cannot be reproduced, up to 60% in some fields. Add to that wild oscillations in accounts of what’s good for you to eat, what drugs work, and so on. These all get lumped together in the publics overall perception of “science.”
Result: many people are simply shutting out much of what the science community says, more so if it’s gloom & doom. “It’ll change next week/month/…” etc. And some of this is self-inflicted damage.
Americans are too easily convinced by social media that that information that is obviously false or misleading is actually true. Like the claim that climate science has been discredited by “East Anglia”. Americans now accept fake “news” as long as it agrees with their preconceptions, without exercising any critical thinking or making any effort to gather credible and accurate information. That isn’t the fault of science.
Just to clarify, have you had a look at the actual climate data archives maintained by NOAA? What is your opinion of the currently available data on climate change? Do you agree that atmospheric CO2 is increasing, or do you consider this a fabrication by dishonest scientists?
I agree it’s warming and CO2 is increasing. I have doubts about the models being correct as regards the degree of forcing by the sun and other factors not involving CO2. As in medicine, we don’t know what we don’t know and models are just that – Sim Earth.
Is do support the electrification of transportation (as much as possible), solar power, next-gen reactor techs and an electrical storage moon-shot program. Not just for climate and air quality but for national and economic security.
Now for where things go wonky,
Optics matter as regards the publics trust; well meaning proclamations that X condition will exist within Y time period are risky; when it’s wrong, or perceived as wrong, it drives the Chicken Little meme. Not helpful.
Another problem is how climate science is being represented in social media, and this is where “friends” can be your worst enemies. Too many supporters make climate science political or part of the culture wars; a well meaning question or disagreement is greeted by a rant storm that quickly goes political with name calling and socio-religious disparagement. This just amps up more opposition, which is likewise not helpful. Unfortunately, some of these climate warrior types are in the science community.
Hint: patience is a virtue, yelling and attitude are ignored more than a patient voice, and you sell more cookies made with sugar than salt.
If you want to convince religious people go to churches, mosques etc. and *calmly* make your case. Advocates do it all the time, and I don’t mean just conservatives. Many churches are middle road politically and rather more open to science than outsiders think. If you don’t, then don’t complain when they don’t think you’ve made your case.
As a specific example, models predict a threshold level of warming, above which things would start changing much more rapidly. Having some experience with complex, global simulations (admittedly of space weather rather than climate), I know that is the sort of result which is fairly robust and reliable. But I also know it is extremely hard to quantify that threshold. Convincing me it is 2 deg. C, not 1.75 or 2.25, would take work. I’d at least want to see error bars, hear how they were calculated, and some discussion of what a single value means. (It’s a global average, the real planet doesn’t heat uniformly, and it seems absurd to say the temperature distribution doesn’t matter.) Claiming 2 deg. without qualifications is politically dangerous. If we hit 2.1 and nothing much happens, the whole idea could lose credibility. They we could hit the real threshold (2.?) and really be in trouble.
It’s my recollection that 2C was selected because it was felt to be the “best case scenario”, i.e. the minimum level of increase that was inevitable, therefore selected as the best achievable target, not necessarily a tipping point where change would suddenly accelerate.
Climate change encompasses continuous changes such as sea level rise and (in some areas) desertification, and intermittent effects such as storms and droughts. I’m not aware that either has a specific “threshold”, both simply get worse as the world gets hotter.
As to social media, this is social media. I’m not aware of any rant storms generated by actual scientists.
Finally, there are few factors affecting climate that are monitored more precisely than solar luminosity. The new GOES-R carries a new sun sensor for this specific task. To the degree that the sun is driving climate, it is already incorporated in the principal models.
“we don’t know what we don’t know and models are just that – Sim Earth.”
While this statement might or might not be true, repeated by a non-scientist is about the same as a kid growing up Methodist because her parents were Methodists.
It’s true nonetheless that climate modeling has some problems. Deniers love to point out the so-called ‘hind casting’ by models designed as predictors somehow weakens the usefulness of this research technique.
Regarding your story of the young postdoc : For every one or two young scientists thinking of working in atmospheric science but cowed by the task of facing the wrath of the interests who denigrate scientific inquiry in the area of climate, there are one or two who are ready to work in an area which they see as critically important for the advance of humanity. People make sacrifices, are willing to stand up for their findings, and find the science of Earth’s atmosphere to be highly rewarding and an area worth contributing their lives work.
The field is “tainted” rather by total hogwash and bunk heaped upon it, now from the highest political levels imaginable, and not by the hard and continuous efforts that have yielded remarkable progress and incredibly solid findings. NASA Earth Science is a big part of this success story.
Great reply!
Years? I think not. Severe storms are real. The fires in Tennessee. Drought in California and Texas. People will give a rat’s tail about the politics when their cattle are dying, water supplies are dwindling, and beachfront properties are getting destroyed year after year.
The arguing about man-made or not is stupid. Utilizing space-based assets to provide better data is just plain good common sense. And use of taxpayer money.
I’m replying to myself as a way of responding to all those below who did not read what I actually wrote. I’m not in any way a “climate denier,” and my comment was not to say that climate science is in essence a fraud.
What it did say is that the climate science community has a gigantic public image problem on its hands. This problem is of a nature that, in the present politcal environment, it cannot be solved by statements from relevant authorities because it involves a loss of public credibility by those very authorities.
Terry Stetler gets it right. This is a self-created problem in public relations, a field that I work in at an institution. Because I enjoy and value my job, there’s need for a pseudonym when discussing these matters — as indeed the knee-jerk misreadings of my comment clearly show.
At this point, nature itself is going to have take up the job of making arguments to convince the public. And it won’t be done by cherry-picking among the data. As that postdoc said to me, “Well, when Miami goes underwater I’ll just be saying, ‘I f**king told you!'” And he’d be right.
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Mr Cowing, you can publish this or not, as it’s your blog. But please don’t mischaracterize me.
Sincerely,
PubliusII
Rubbish. Since the mid-’80s there’s been a well-funded campaign by industries that feel threatened by any proposed remedies against CO2 emissions, using tactics perfected by the tobacco industry in the decades before. (Sometimes actually using the same pay-for-opinion “scientists” to front them that the tobacco companies used.)
No field of science has ever been so heavy attacked. The sheer funding involved means it eclipses even the attacks against evolutionary biology/geology and against animal research.
The field is “politicised”, but that’s not the doing of anyone in the field. It’s entirely coming from one-direction, the people attacking the researchers.
At least Eumetsat will still be flying… And the USAF, so weather forecast is good. Goodbye A-train: Hello Sentinels.
A more general point and not wishing to get partisan on this but the anti-science bias that seems to be taking hold in the anglosphere is surely a long term security issue? Science ultimately doesn’t care about opinion. I keep being reminded of the whole Klipper chip affair. If the US opts out of science then the rest of the world will move on without them. Instead of following them and their cutting edge technologists. Other members of the world community will take science into profitable realms while the anglosphere will sit it out having angels on pin head arguments. Something the US once loudly and rightly rubbished. For example the obvious solution to ”climate change” is in new technological approaches. Something that the US and its workforce have been historically adept at exploiting (even if it was developed elsewhere). It is not like there is a surplus of ideas doing the rounds on how to exploit that workforce at the moment. I doubt that protectionism will work: Stable door and bolted horse. Whether you believe of not about climate change, acting as if you do believe in it and planning accordingly is likely to be more profitable in the long run. At the very least sooner or later we will use up all our HCs then who ever holds the keys to the next power source will be king. With this line of reasoning driving national policy that won’t be the US.
There are two problems. First, the rest of us can’t “build a wall” around the US and trap your emissions. The US is a huge nation with a high-emission population. (Something like double the per-capita emissions of Europe, from vague memory.) US inaction will not only hurt in practice, but will create a massive disincentive for others to act. Remember, the denier movement isn’t just limited to the US, every nation will have industry lobbyists and their pet politicians arguing “What’s the point of acting without the US? (And we’ll be making our industries uncompetitive.)”
The second problem is that the US isn’t going to just withdraw. That same people who just won power will want to use that power to sabotage any international agreements that might happen, not just “we won’t participate”, but actively use US political and economic clout to undermine them from within.
Essentially, the US will play the role of Japan in the International Whaling Commission. As it has in the past, but on a much grander scale.
I may only be a first-year college student but the facts are not hard to spot. Stripping NASA of its Earth science programs will cost more in the long term. To appoint specific tasks for different science agencies, and fund them for restructuring to accommodate the ongoing Earth research needed, will be a monumental undertaking. It is common knowledge that NASA has been under-budgeted for years. I know I’m just stating the obvious but why spend more tax payer money to establish programs in other agencies. Give NASA the funding they need to continue the research they do.
Programs that boost public opinion of science and space might be another issue to consider. I had a disheartening discussion in class today. The consensus from fellow students left me with an impression that young people have a lack luster approach to NASA. With statements being tossed around like, “science is stupid”, and “space, right now is boring”, caused me to realize that there has not been enough effort made into bolstering young adults to become enthusiastic about space exploration or even Earth related research. When it comes to the topic of NASA’s Earth centered sciences, my mind tends to over simplify things with a litany of “don’t fix what isn’t broken.” Leave the programs where they are and instead, strategize on how to inspire the next generation of scientists.