The bill proposes to cut Earth science so it makes perfect sense to talk about it and therefore it is not off topic. It is important to understand the motivations along with the pros and cons of such a bill. It’d be better to have a well thought out conversation rather than throwing sound bytes but it seems to be very difficult.

“I don’t really like the options presented. It is like people saying the first thing to cut will be firefighters and teachers. Perhaps the place to start cutting would be administrative costs.”

This is only grand theater so to speak, nothing else. Don’t you see?

“You are essentially saying we don’t know for sure that global warming is caused by man. An implication of that, is that you can’t say with any certainty that carbon credits or any other of the recently proposed remedies will fix the problem. You want people to have blind faith in the green movement.”

No you see, here is what bothers me with people “like you”: You tell me what I “essentially” say. Unbelievable. Where did I say that you have to have blind faith? What I did somehow say is that there is a scientific process, part of which is NASA. This process of studying the climate change will help us understand what is happening. CO2 or not CO2 there are many other reasons why there may be warming. HOWEVER we do know that CO2 is a gas that induces green house effects. At the very least therefore it makes absolute sense with what we know today that we try to curb emissions. We also know what happens to CO2 rich atmosphere planets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus) Of course for Venus it is compounded with its proximity to the Sun. Now if you admit an increase in solar activity with an increase in CO2 in our atmosphere there is a reason to “believe” we are headed towards the same direction. How long would it take? Who knows.

“It is possible to not buy into the green movement and not be pro-pollution.”

Who said otherwise. However it’d be nice you propose more than just rhetoric. How do you plan to curb pollution then?

“Some of us don’t need an apocalyptic end of days scenario to have an appreciation for nature and human impact on it or want to study how our climate works.”

Some of you need to understand what is at stake rather than putting their heads in the sand. And then wonder how it could have happened.

“Considering the accuracy of climate models predicting the frequency and intensity of hurricanes (the have all been dismally poor), it is all the more important that we continue to lob satellites into space.”

Yes but not just that. We need to better our models bearing in mind, once again, that there is NO deterministic approach to the problem. Which is in part why the models are not that “good” according to you. Since they are not deterministic said models will give general trends. They give you an idea of what may happened. They will NOT tell you with great accuracy what the temperature on your driveway will be in 3 days nor in 300 years.

“Although, at some point we could very well have more than enough satellites and then it will be more important to analyze the data. Other groups might be better suited to that than NASA.”

So what number of satellites is good enough according to you? Is the problem the number of satellites or their performance? Do you think that the satellites is the only answer to that problem? Bluntly, what do you know about climatology? Something? Anything? You made observations and reported them in peer-reviewed journals? Or do you take the -12F driveway observation and run with it?

“My apologies to Mr Foust for participating in the off topic conversation.”

It is not off topic if you equate Earth sciences with “global warming” and there is a bill proposing to cut Earth sciences. We are not debating “global warming” but rather the need, or not, to study Earth sciences part of which is climatology and therefore “global warming”.

A bigger issue, though, is that this letter may be indicative of a bigger battle some in Congress want to wage between human spaceflight and Earth science. Some members have openly expressed their skepticism about the validity of climate change research, questioning either the existence of global warming or the role of human activities in causing climate change.

I don’t really like the options presented. It is like people saying the first thing to cut will be firefighters and teachers. Perhaps the place to start cutting would be administrative costs.

Also, it is hard to avoid any comment on global warming when the blog post brings it up.

common sense wrote @ February 10th, 2011 at 11:56 am

@ Coastal Ron wrote @ February 10th, 2011 at 12:47 am

“Now I can understand if some people want to wait until we know for sure one way or the other, ”

Well here is the risk: Once you know it may be too late for any countermeasure. So I personally do not understand why we would wait.

You are essentially saying we don’t know for sure that global warming is caused by man. An implication of that, is that you can’t say with any certainty that carbon credits or any other of the recently proposed remedies will fix the problem. You want people to have blind faith in the green movement.

It is possible to not buy into the green movement and not be pro-pollution. Some of us don’t need an apocalyptic end of days scenario to have an appreciation for nature and human impact on it or want to study how our climate works.

Considering the accuracy of climate models predicting the frequency and intensity of hurricanes (the have all been dismally poor), it is all the more important that we continue to lob satellites into space.

Although, at some point we could very well have more than enough satellites and then it will be more important to analyze the data. Other groups might be better suited to that than NASA.

My apologies to Mr Foust for participating in the off topic conversation.

More clueless posts. There is no duplication between NASA and NOAA. NASA only aids in placing space based instruments into orbits. Transferring these tasks to NOAA would cause duplication, since NOAA would have to employ personnel with experience in spacecraft development and launch vehicle integration. And no, it is not just like taking the NASA personnel and changing them to NOAA. The NASA personnel support multiple programs.

“Now I can understand if some people want to wait until we know for sure one way or the other, ”

Well here is the risk: Once you know it may be too late for any countermeasure. So I personally do not understand why we would wait. The NASA’s charter is #1 about Earth science and therefore they MUST perform in that area. That is for the law. Then if you were to mitigate a potential disaster on Earth or send a BEO mission what would YOU do?

I know people don’t like this reference BUT people wanted to wait before fixing the levies in New Orleans. Well they waited. What is the cost today? And btw that may be an effect of climate change, warming, that induces stronger storms. How long do we need to wait until the “big one”. See, there are other “big one”s not just quake in SoCal. What if we get hit one season with several very strong hurricanes in a row. Who is going to pay?

Earth sciences is NOT about global warming, it includes global warming. NASA mission is tremendously important to our survival in that regard. Bear in mind further that the weather disruption also creates problems for farming. So it may as well disrupt food delivery.

And so on and so forth.

Now the lack of a mission to the Moon? What does that do to us? I mean except that it frustrates our pride? WHAT?

It was so popular, hardly anyone knew it existed until it was cancelled.

– Earth Science missions do no equal climate change research. Research funding is tiny compared to mission funding. Climate research is a subset of that. Climate change research is a subset of that.

– If these politicians want to change the scientific community outlook on climate change, they need to fund Earth Science missions that return data relevant to climate change research.

– It’s amazing that the Florida and Alabama representatives want to cut Earth Science capabilities that deliver products especially useful to their constituents. Hurricane data comes to mind.

– They claim that “Our nation’s ability to access space is a critical national security asset and plays an important role in our future economic competitiveness.” I think we can take it for granted that the representatives from Utah are talking about Shuttle-derived HSF rockets, not, say, commercial crew and cargo. Shuttle-derived HSF rockets are not critical national security assets. They do not play an important role in our future economic competitiveness. The EELVs and similar rockets that the Earth Science missions use and thus help are critical national security assets and do play an important role in our future economic competitiveness.

– Spending another decade building an SLS rocket to nowhere does nothing for national security. Flying an Orion around in circles with no ability to do anything useful, or to funding such an ability, does nothing for national security. Does a battlefield soldier need an SLS or Orion going nowhere? How about an anti-terrorism agent, or a natural disaster warning system or disaster emergency responder? These all use Earth data – Earth Science data, or data from similar operational military and civilian missions. The NASA Earth Science missions help build the industrial capability to develop the satellites, sensors, and analysis capability used by spy satellites, military ground observation satellites, military launch-detection satellites, military weather satellites, etc.

– The situation is similar for economic competitiveness. NASA Earth science missions help maintain economically important industrial capabilities in commercial satellites, sensors, etc. The Earth Science data helps the value-added data processing industry. The Earth Science data itself is economically useful in many ways. The same is not true for an SLS rocket to nowhere.

– If you check out the NASA Earth Science missions page, you will also see some new, affordable efforts using Global Hawks for things like hurricane studies. This is much more affordable, and much more useful as a national security industrial base helper, than SLS and Orion.

– NASA is not the same as NOAA. NASA does research missions; NOAA does operational missions. It’s not duplication. In fact, there are lots of gaps after the Constellation budget raids, NPOESS Constellation-ish debacle, OCO launch failure, etc. Even if we pretend that the NASA Earth Science work belonged in NOAA, moving it there still wouldn’t make sense. The same budget-cutting effort described in this post is going after NOAA.

– Let’s just cut the budget on real waste: Constellation (still wasting away!), SLS and MPCV. If that’s not enough, let’s go after JWST.

Never under-estimate the determination of corporate lobbyists and the politicians they support. The old maxim “follow the money” is very true for a reason.