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NASA Slashing Observations of Earth
mattnyc99 points us to a new report by the National Research Council warning that, by 2010, the number of NASA's Earth-observing missions will drop dramatically, and the number of operating sensors and instruments on NASA spacecraft will decrease by 40 percent. The report says, "The United States' extraordinary foundation of global observations is at great risk." Popular Mechanics asks an MIT professor what it all means. From these accounts it is clear that the Bush administration's priorities on a Mars mission and a moon base are partly to blame for the de-emphasizing of earth science. Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming.
when a country spends 500 billion a year on the military (more than the rest of the world combined spends) and 8 billion a month on killing^Wliberating people in a foreign land while their own people starve in New Orleans its quite clear where a nations priorities lie and Space and the advancement of the Human race comes way down the list
i wonder how long it will take after this regime has gone to recover from the damage, methinks it will be several decades if ever at this rate
shame, no really a damm shame
Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming.
Can we mark a submission, as -1, Unnecessary Trolling?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
i've been a slashdot fan since 1997. seems like the submissions, and comments, are getting further and further left. wow. seems like there's no centrists any more. or maybe all the conservatives have moved on to other sites. Or maybe they just all got sucked into the big-oil conspiracy vortex.
Not to mention troll bait (but just the fact that certain words ARE troll bait should tell you something) but global warming is just one of them. why is this a Michael Crichton (the Harvard-educated scientist who wrote Coma, Jurassic Park and A State Of Fear, among other things) vs Al Gore (inventor of the Internet) battle? If we're scientists, where is our skepticism? For that matter, where are our manners? Are we unwilling to admit that we might be incorrect?
(..Wait, I forgot. Sorry. Please don't revoke my geek card.)
What I really don't understand is why all the surprisingly non-geek-oriented but heavily political stories are appearing on Slashdot.org. Anyway, back to finishing my TPS reports..
"Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming."
/. for balance...
Must editorial opinions mark every bit of tech news here on Slashdot? Maybe Andrew Rosenthal should be granted an editorial position here at
Why the hell would we ratify Kyoto? It basically gives India and China a free pass (giving a competitive advantage to countries who are very serious competitors to us), and only slows the increase of CO2 (as opposed to keeping levels the same, or reducing it).
Clinton was right in refusing to sign Kyoto. It was basically a bill that punishes the first world for pollution, while the worst offenders get a free pass.
Everyone sane realizes that global warming is happening, but the problem is the solution seems to be to cripple the first world, without also holding the poorer countries (who are the ones eating our manufacturing sector lunch due to lax work/environmental laws) to any sort of standard. That is why I am convinced that global warming will not be really addressed without some sort of global govt (which will never happen). No matter what the first world does, there will always be some country offering a free pass on environmental/work laws, and corporations that need to pollute/abuse workers will flock there. And the more countries that try to stop that, the more powerful the financial incentive for a country to break tghe "cartel" of countries bound by environmental law. And if you are expecting the UN to do anything about it....well, im sure you can count on a strongly worded letter.
How much of the Earth do you think DigitalGlobe images each year? (~3%) How much does NASA image each day? (>90%). Granted it's at different resolutions, but that underscores the point that NASA's remote sensors have different capabilities than DigitalGlobe's (or GeoEye's). Next question: who buys most of the high-resolution commercial satellite data? (The U.S. government via the Department of Defense(in fact, the DoD and congress forbid NASA from making high-res observations)). Do you think NASA's satellites are better calibrated than the commercial sensors, which is critical for studying long-term trends? Maybe NASA is capable of taking many more types of measurements, with spaceborne radars, lidars, scatterometers, thermal infrared sensors, gravity sensors, etc?
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Have you ever tried to buy an acquisition from DigitalGlobe? Do you have $10,000? If you have more questions, read the NRC report itself:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11820
or read about NASA's current Earth science research:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/
They keep telling us that there are all these other countries out there -- has anyone proposed that some of the others could possibly do this, since it's so, y'know, important? Neither article quite says that, either.
I would rather have other countries show us how it's done rather than tell us how it should be done, but it seems rather unlikely. If they try and fail, they can get laughed at, but if they tell us to try and we fail, they can laugh at us.
Inappropriate ideological sniping. That is a stated opinion on a highly disputed theory among experts in the field, not science.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
First, the chunk of the federal budget that NASA "eats up" is minuscule. $16.8 out of $2656.0 Billion in 2007.
I don't think handing that money over to Congress will lead to anything tangible for you or I.
Second, think about the peripheral benefits of everything NASA has done, not just the pretty pictures. Subtract the Voyager probes. The science section at Barnes and Noble is a whole lot thinner ehh? How many books have been published, how many scientists have been educated, how many television shows have been produced based on what those two probes discovered? Suddenly, we know virtually nothing about the moons of Saturn and I don't get to wonder if there is life under the seas of Europa.
Subtract some rocket science that was pioneered by NASA and the Soviets during the space race. Perhaps your cell phone can't call Australia anymore, hurricanes give us less warning and HBO does not have quite as many options. I doubt private industry would be quite so far along in communication satellite technology were it not for the feasibility of such demonstrated by NASA.
Subtract some planetary and atmospheric science regarding Venus. The Global Warming theory suddenly has holes in it's foundation and we couldn't have half the arguments we do on Slashdot.
Subtract Hubble. Suddenly the official stance of the Vatican's is that we are at the center of the universe, we have a few million less interesting web pages and my desire to learn more and educate myself regarding astronomy are greatly diminished.
Despite NASA's budget being slashed and despite their priorities being subject to the whims of politicians, they've done quite well in educating and inspiring all of us who care to pay attention.
The fact that the number of Earth-observing missions will drop is interesting. The fact that the submitter sees some wierd link between that and the global warming bandwagon is not.
Instead of using the logic of "10 million lemmings must be right", global warming advocates would do well in looking at the underlying scientific knowledge instead. The measurements are scientific and wholly honest for the most part, but the popular interpretations are not scientific at all, and should be ignored by those who value science above advocacy and social posturing.
There is a very wierd popular meme that the fact that a large number of scientists *THINK* that there is a substantive correlation between CO2 levels and the melting ices indicates that there actually *IS* a causal effect. Well, science doesn't work that way. The number of adherents to an interpretation has absolutely no bearing on science, despite the popular feeling that "it must be right".
The simple fact is that the various intrepretations are all within the same error bounds, and manmade CO2 has been demonized for no good scientific reason at all, mainly because of lack of alternatives it seems. Well that's just not good enough. The real demon is our lack of knowledge about what's going on. Blaming CO2 doesn't absolve us.
Anyone who is still wholly convinced by the CO2 agit prop ought to take a look through Earth's history, back to a time when the CO2 levels were hundreds of times what they are now, and yet the Earth was a solid block of ice.
That's one important piece of evidence to the contrary, but when it comes to science, there is a vastly more important issue to consider, and it has nothing to do with observations.
Science is based on mathematical models that are the basis of our theories, and the use of hypotheses derived from those theories by which the theories can be tested. Well, in climatology, those theories are embodied in computational models, our many Global Climate / Circulation Models (GCMs) --- and not a single one of those GCMs predicts the extreme temperature oscillations between glacial and inter-glacial periods that have been occurring with total regularity every 100,000 years over the recent million years of Earth's history.
When the theory doesn't match observations, then the theory is wrong. Yet, people are basing their predictions about the effect of manmade CO2 on those blatantly non-working models.
Well sorry, but that's scientifically invalid.
I have no personal axe to grind either way, being just an observer with a good scientific background. But I take great exception to science being used to underpin political agendas (in either direction) when it is not yet able to model even the most large-scale parameters of climate. That's not science.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Clinton was right in refusing to sign Kyoto. It was basically a bill that punishes the first world for pollution, while the worst offenders get a free pass.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
1) Clinton signed Kyoto.
2) The worst offendors are first world countries (like US, the worst polluter & Australia, the worst per-capita polluter)
3) India/China are not projected to reach the US's level of greenhouse gas contribution for 20 years. Per Capita equivilance is even further away.
4) Kyoto wasn't supposed to be a solution - it was supposed to be a first step. Anyone thinking otherwise is deluded.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
"From these accounts it is clear that the Bush administration's priorities on a Mars mission and a moon base are partly to blame for the de-emphasizing of earth science. Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming."
A quick glance reveals that one article never mentions Bush by name, the other only in that they are calling for more emphasis on global warming research and that real scientists (not /. scientist wannabes) are happy they really are funding the Mars missions.
What is this, really? The New York Times (not exactly known to have a major conservative slant) doesn't bash Bush so instead the /. article has to insert in a completely unsupported accusation?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
actually,leave europe out of this. What you mean to say that it punishes America. America != all of First World.
The point is, Kyoto was a *start of a long process, which America has successfully sabotaged, mostly because the US government hasn't got the balls to try and persuade it's country to stop running SUVs and the like. With America, we'd probably have some kind of working process and maybe, like with CFCs, some sort of handle on the problem. Without America, we cannot persuade nations like China or India to start reining it on it's pollution.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
But then the rest of the world viciously attacks the US on Kyoto which is the worst thing they could have done if they wanted to get the US on board. It invoked nationalism and the us-vs-them mentality in the US which made the global warming debate shift sharply to the right.
Once the rest of the world decides to treat the decisions of the US as that of a sovereign state then they can possibly get the US into the debate again. Calling Americans idiots and SUV drivers will do exactly the opposite. The rest of the world complains that the US isn't listening, but they aren't either. It might just be that with a population density of about 30 people per square kilometer, effects like Kyoto on transportation will hurt the US drastically more than European countries which have population densities typically four times higher. Do I expect Europe to listen to this little tidbit? No. Nor do I expect the US to listen to Europeans offering their advice after their taunting and harassment.
The US doesn't have the budget to play with and fritter away on pointless shit. We just do anyway.
ResidntGeek
I'm really tired of kdawson's stories always blaming Bush for everything he disagrees with in American government. This isn't simply because I disagree with his politics; it is foolish and irresponsible to blame one person (either individually, or by using the surrogate term "administration") for the problems of a government of hundreds of movers and shakers. Keep the partisan bull-droppings off of Slashdot, and especially out of stories about politically neutral topics like space.
It seems to me that for global warming all you need are the temperatures everywhere. Since, you know, that's how they came up with that idea in the first place. Someone looked at the (incomplete) temperature data for about a century and noticed, basically, "Hey, wait a darn minute, the averages rose by a whole 1C." Some of that data is from the 1800s, before anyone had even figured how to do a good ballistic rocket, much less launch anything into space. All that later satellites and scientists added to that was more data, as we started to know the temperatures in other parts of the globe too. The original data was lacking, say, such stuff as what were the temperatures in China in the 1800's, but now the Chinese too do meteorology.
So it seems to me that to keep plotting that you don't even need one single space mission. You just need to take the temperatures from all those meteorology stations all over the world, take an average, plot it. How can the big oil stop you from doing that? No, seriously. I'm curious. And even if you need data from meteo satellites, why do you need NASA there? By now there are enough sensors up there to forecast the weather, which starts by telling you exactly what is happening with the weather right now. (Forecasting then just feeds that into a model and tries to predict what will happen tomorrow.) How can the big oil stop you from using data from those?
I'm sure there must be some other science data that we're going to miss, maybe even for modelling the atmospheric phenomena, maybe even something that might help understand better _how_ that global warming is or isn't happening. But stop you from collecting the evidence? How would they possibly do that, anyway? Shoot every single meteorologist on Earth, or what? Bear in mind that that doesn't only include the mouthpieces presenting the weather forecast on TV. The Air Force in every country, for example, is extremely interested in the weather too, because their air missions depend on it. Plus a lot of other commercial and government stuff. Even if you shot all meteorologists, the air force and governments and everyone else will just train more, because they really need that data.
That's what annoys me about conspiracy theories, including the trolling in the submission: they propose that the big bad conspiracy is doing something impossible, pointless and stupid to even try.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm not an expert on the mechanisms of global warming. But there are just a few things that I heard which might convince you otherwise.
Most time there is any serious scientific conference on the matter, it seems that the concern is getting larger and larger. Most climatologists believe that anthropogenic global warming is a huge threat to society and which needs to be acted on urgently. All evidence seems to be pointing clearly in one direction.
There have been a few changes in regional climate patterns in the past thousand years, but it seems that CO2 levels are higher than ever, and we already seem to be experiencing some of the effects, which are only the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the numbers and predictions, we are headed for one heck of climate change.
And it is true that the climate changes naturally, although very slowly, and there have been large climate changes in the past. What we also know is that it sucks to be alive when it happens. Mass extinctions and huge land desertification may be comfortable when it happened to dinosaurs millions of years ago, but I would like to prevent it if I can.
Obviously there are a lot of groups who stand to lose out if the government were to enforce controls on emissions, so there is much resistance, and the article you cited is from an unqualified organisation with the specific goal of "debunking" global warming. There is a huge industry based around this denialism, and it would be very dangerous to simply believe anything called a "paper" by an organisation with a name like "global warming research" or similar, that is meant to give people with little knowledge of the academic world a belief of authority or qualification.
Have a quick look at this and do a text search for "Seitz", the man on the front page of the site you linked to. Read the next few paragraphs after that, it should be a little revealing.
Basically, anybody with a degree, it didn't matter if they had anything to to with climatology, was invited to sign a petition, which he then presented as proof that the scientific community didn't see global warming as a problem.
I think the carbon markets in the EU were the actual start of the long process. Let's face it, Kyoto was and is a failure. Stop whining about how the US sabotaged it. Especially since I haven't heard a good reason why the US was in the wrong here.
All true. The difference is that Al Gore is not claiming to be an expert. Gore is pointing to, and deferring to, the mountain of evidence, along with the consensus of the climatological scientific community, the community that was persuaded by the very evidence he is pointing to. Gore is acting as a loud, strident, eloquent, persistent voice for the scientists, whereas Crichton is telling you that he's smarter than all the scientists. Al Gore is trying to get us to hear what science is saying, while Crichton is saying "nah, it's all hooey." One of these positions involves humility and knowing one's limitations, and one does not.
There are plenty of reasons (budgetary, political, etc.) that NASA is reducing these missions, but the big one always seems to slip through the cracks: its not their job. NASA has been tasked with EOMs (Earth Observation Missions) by members of Congress for years, (mostly out of ignorance) when Earth Observation is strictly the role of NOAA and USGS, not NASA. That's right, kids, NOAA maintains or operates 3 separate constellations of spacecraft(GOES/POES/DMSP), each with several operational and spares. They range from low, to mid to geostationary orbit. USGS operates the famous LandSat constellation (the one that produces the pretty false-color images of rice paddies or road construction or whatever). The point is, the work isn't going away, its just going to more appropriate government agencies that are already doing it anyway. NASA may not be operating these anymore, but they'll still be around to develop the essential technology that these missions use.
Well, it seems you are somewhat behind the times. It's pretty well established that there is a warming trend, so we hardly need the network of sensors you propose. There is some questions about how to set and interpret the errors bars, and the statistical significance of the warming trend depends on how you answer those questions. But sticking weather stations around the globe isn't going to make any difference to how those questions are answered.
The really critical questions relate to the mechanics of climate change. Questions about the magnitude and nature of human contributions to climate change vs natural factors. Having even marginally better answers to these questions is of immense public value, because they bear on policy questions with massive economic impact. For example, changing our use of fossil fuel even slightly would probably cost far more than the sum total of these missions. It follows that it would be good to know what precise impact of a marginal unit of change in petroleum use would be. It may be the optimal change would be zero (there is no chance of affecting anything), or it may be that we should reduce our use of petroleum considerably, until the net economic impact of slowed climate change equals the net cost of fossil fuel reduction.
In order to address these policy questions, we need climate models. The climate models are useful to the degree they are appropriately calibrated and tested. The most economical way to do that is with your space program.
Derek Bok once said, "If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance." Environmental research is educating ourselves on how the planet works. Thus, if you think monitoring the Earth is expensive, you will find that not monitoring the Earth is much, much more expensive. Suppose the truth is that the Earth is getting dramatically warmer, but there is nothing we can do about it. As sea levels rise, inundating lower lying areas, as breadbasket regions become arid, as Europe starts to become very cold, there will be politically impossible not to do something about it. The conclusion the populace will draw is that the change is purely anthropogenic, and whether or not that is true there will be irresistable pressure to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped. Thus we will compound the tremendous impact of climate change with futile but very costly effort to fix the problem.
No -- more knowledge is better than less. In this case, it is hard to think of a better bargain than a tiny fraction of the GDP spent on remote sensing missions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's sad to say, but there is no way to convince most countries to do anything
I think it'd be more accurate to say there's no way to convince most countries to do things that are against their own self-interest. That's simply logic at work - why agree to do something you think will be a net harm to your nation? The challenge is in persuading the numerous countries of the world to agree that A) something is indeed a problem for them, and B) a given solution will be effective and fair.
Item A is hard enough. B is even harder. Hence our problems herding cats at the UN.
I am not quite as skeptical about our chances of addressing global warming. If global warming is truly as dire as Al Gore and company claim, nations should start to feel the impact over time and become more motivated to deal with it. They won't deal with it as quickly as they should, and the solutions will be more painful because of the delay, but that lack of long-term vision seems to be the rule in politics.
Just look at the Social Security mess in the United States - we've known the system is heading for ruin if we do nothing, but yet we do nothing because nobody's feeling the pain yet. When taxes start skyrocketing to cover the increased costs, then I think we'll see action. But not until the politicians' jobs are at stake.
Truly revolutionary ideas comes out of new ideas, that challenge the incumbent ideas. While scientific research has gotten much more complicated, making it harder to enter without the education required of a PhD, the PhD worship is a little twisted.
There was a time that people we're allowed to spout out ideas that the Church opposed, and only the Church could approve ideas, and only the Church chose who was in the Church. This period of time is generally considered to have been bad for human advancement and is called the Dark Ages.
We now have the Academy, and only people allowed by the Academy are allowed to question science. The Academy controls who gets the credentials.
As Climatology coalesced around global warming, how willing to fund and approve PhD research that questions it happens. It's wonderful to say that scientists want the truth, which is true in the abstract, but at the individual level, academics want to publish, because publishing gets them tenure. To publish, they do research, which requires funding, which requires grants.
The Academy has become one giant mess of group-think. Also, while current PhD students may enter the program out of a love of science, the previous generation entered out of a love of draft deferments, which is why you have a collection of leftists professors (the few conservative professors out there would be considered liberal Democrats or liberal Republicans, depending on the state) there to collect checks, ride out their time, and be embittered that there school chums outside make more money than them because they didn't waste their time chasing a tenured professor track. Read Philip Greenspun's essay on the economics of the university and how it enforces the gender divide.
Those that are doing political incorrect research are outside the Academy, often at industry jobs, and are attacked as being on the payroll of corporations. Never-mind that University professors are on the payroll of government bureaucrats or non-profits, non of which are neutral opinions. Both fields attract a combination of incompetents and do-gooders that love to spend other people's money on themselves... ask anyone good that works in non-profits, they want to pull their hair out.
Stop elevating science to a religion, with challenge-proof dogma. Scientific inquiry MUST stand on the merits of the data and strength of arguments, not the credentials of those giving it.