US Climate Satellite Capabilities In Jeopardy

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "The United States is in danger of losing its ability to monitor key climate variables from satellites, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. The country's Earth-observing satellite program has been underfunded for a decade, and the impact of the lack of funds is finally hitting home. The GAO report found that capabilities originally slated for two new Earth-monitoring programs, NPOESS and GOES-R, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Defense, have been cut, and adequate plans to replace them do not exist. Meanwhile, up until six months ago, NASA had 15 functional Earth-sensing satellites. Two of them went down in the past year, and of the remaining 13, 12 are past their design lifetimes. Only seven may be functional by 2016, said Waleed Abdalati, a longtime NASA satellite scientist now teaching at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Taken together, American scientists will soon find themselves without the ability to monitor changes to key Earth systems at a time when such measurements could help determine the paths of the world's energy and transportation systems."

Comments

The "free market" will save us

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should government have to do it.

If it's truly important, then there must be money in it.....
If there's money in it, then some commercial entity make a business case for it...
If no company wants to do it, then it must not be all that important.

why would this matter?

[gearloos]

Most of the research being done isn't based on factual scientific evidence anyway, Mr. Gore probably won't even notice anything missing...