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

Maybe...

[sv_libertarian]

This will spark Congress to fund useful things like space exploration. Instead of stupid things. Like oh... pick something.

Re:Maybe...

[AnonymousClown]

This will spark Congress to fund useful things like space exploration. Instead of stupid things. Like oh... pick something.

You need to frame it differently. Find all the congressmen whose districts benefit from this one way or another and have them put in earmarks. Or spin it as some sort of Wall Street rescue package or bailout and watch the fat cats order Congress to fund it.

If you want to get something funded, go the route of pork or benefiting our financial overlords.

Re:Maybe...

[Sponge Bath]

Like oh... pick something.

4 billion dollars in corn subsidies for large farming corporations in 2009.

Re:Maybe...

[rgmoore]

This will spark Congress to fund useful things like space exploration.

You haven't been watching the way things work in Washington for very long, have you? Programs like this don't lose their funding because they're too expensive or bad ideas. They lose their funding because somebody doesn't like the science they're doing. In this case, it's probably the same gang of denialists who have been fighting tooth and nail against any substantive program to do anything about global warming. They see scientists being unable to tell us what's happening with global warming as a victory, so they'll fight harder than ever to keep denying funding.

Re:Maybe...

[smidget2k4]

Yes because NASA never invented anything we use every single day.

We get HUGE bang for our buck in NASA. If you want to cut wasteful spending, you could cut NASA's budget several dozen times over from the military and they'd barely feel it. NASA is probably the best example we have of a government organization gone right, and all people seem to want to do is cut it because they don't understand how science works. Things like NASA exist because all of their inventions came out of necessity of the incredibly complex things they were doing. Those inventions make billions of dollars for many companies. We probably wouldn't have invented half the stuff NASA has come out with because the current stuff we had was "good enough" for life down here on Earth.

Let's collaborate

[timeOday]

Environmental monitoring seems like one area where the US does not need to be self-sufficient. I wonder if we could work more closely with Europe and Japan so together we'd get all the data we need without having to foot the whole bill.

The sad part is...

[tiny69]

...someone probably received an award and promotion for claming they saved the government money.

Re:You are blind

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

This particular problem really can be blamed on the Bush admin.
You fail civics 101. The appropriations bills begin in the US House of Representatives. Which party has controlled that body since 2006? The Democrats. Ergo if it were truly important to them they could have restored or increased the funding upon gaining control of the legislature.

Re:You are blind

[JoshuaZ]

I'm not arguing that the Democrats didn't screw the pooch on this one. But budgets are always political compromises, and when the President pushes repeatedly for cutting funding of somethings, he's going to end up getting some of those funding cuts.

Re:Obama did try to cut it

[bussdriver]

His 1st state of the union speech he identified a few billion of wasted farm money to cut from the budget. I thought it was naive move that only a city politician would make. It died so fast and so hard it never was mentioned ever again; either it was bargained or dropped. I've never heard it come up again so it didn't gain anything to bargain with the last time. You can forget about fixing this until Monsanto has a BP like disaster that destroys a huge amount of land or kills a few thousand people THEN obama can squeak bye some tiny fix-- just watch this Oil lobby keep most their welfare despite BP... now that Obama is after their welfare money with (more) public support.

Senators of worthless states have too much power since the filibuster became the most successful DoS attack on democracy a few generations ago. These punks blackmail the whole country all the time to get such pork and it costs far more than the few cases often cited as justification for the filibuster. (not saying it has to die, but it would be far better if it did die than if left around; we are currently on the worst side of two extremes.)

In my state, all we hear is cut spending etc; and its largely fueled by those who want it permanent; completely unaware that they want to be like Alabama or Mississippi and those states suck; you don't get to the top by being cheap (or wasting too much; although CA does pretty good so far considering their huge mess that continues to pile up... which comes full circle because CA's system is caused by a filibuster like situation!)

Furthermore, the biggest thing slowing the recovery during the great depression was lazy states cutting services and using the new deal to balance their budgets not put anybody to work; now we are repeating the mistakes again. FYI: look at the debt to GDP for WW2; also, government debt is good for buffering hard times but we've been exploiting it for far too long.... that doesn't mean it shouldn't be used for when its actually a good thing, like restoring the economy. Don't get into Fed arguments and currency with me, I'm aware of that mess - seriously do you people think if FDR couldn't touch the Fed who caused the great depression ANYBODY can touch them today??

Re:anti-intellecutalism

[PenguiN42]

Yeah. It's more like "news for paranoid techno-libertarians" nowdays.