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Weather Satellites Lose Funding
ianare writes "Federal budget cuts are threatening to leave the US without some critical satellites, and that could mean less accurate warnings about events like tornadoes and blizzards. In particular, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are concerned about satellites that orbit over the earth's poles rather than remaining over a fixed spot along the equator. These satellites are 'the backbone' of any forecast beyond a couple of days, says Kathryn Sullivan, assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, and NOAA's deputy administrator. It was data from polar satellites that alerted forecasters to the risk of tornadoes in Alabama and Mississippi back in April, Sullivan says. 'With the polar satellites currently in place we were able to give those communities five days' heads up,' she says."
If these are the satellites that I'm thinking of, this would be very bad indeed. There isn't any inherent reason why the US needs to be the only ones with satellites doing this work, but the reason it's being cut is to appease climate change skeptics. And unless the ESA or somebody else gets satellites up there to prevent a potential gap in recordings we'll largely have to start over.
From the article, we're not the only ones with those sorts of satellites, there apparently aren't enough of them to fill the gap that we'd be leaving.
So let me get this straight. We're paying billions upon billions and sacrificing our constitutional rights to guard our airports from purely theoretical terrorist threats. Meanwhile, we're cutting funding for satellites that warn us about very real weather threats. Glad to see we've got our priorities straight.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
How many fighter bombers would have to be decommissioned to pay for them?
Defence is one thing, being the number one spender, by far, on the military on earth is something else entirely.
I'm guessing one*. F-18 Hornets cost $80 million per plane. The proposed NOAA budget cut is $57 million. There are 128 of these craft on order. So just buy 127 and NOAA can keep its budget levels intact.
*You're not actually going to save much decommissioning them. But you can cut back on how many you buy year to year.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There are plenty of joint ventures for weather satellite projects (JASON 3 being the current most visible project underway) as well as data sharing from foreign satellite programs to the US (MetOp for example), but basically it all comes down to money. We can afford to build them. NOAA has a long history of operating these polar orbiting satellites. The program under discussion here was called NPOESS. It was a joint project with DoD and it was more or less a complete disaster - after a decade and $11B spent, no satellite was ever launched, and the ground systems have been sitting idle for so long they're due for a technology refresh. So the White House blew up the program and NOAA took the valuable pieces and it became JPSS. So the budget cuts are a sort of "punishment" for mismanagement - basically Congress wants them to get the damn birds up already.
This article is nothing more than a troll from NASA to scare people into thinking that if they don't get ALL their funding, people will die in blizzards and tornadoes.
Or perhaps NASA is right to complain: people WILL die if they have to stop running those satellites?
People are not paying taxes, that's actually the problem. The middle class is being eliminated, poor people have no money to pay tax with and the rich get tax exemption.
Where do you think the money should come from?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If Big Weather (The Weather Channel, Intellicast, Accuweather, and a few others) start putting money into the system you know damn well that their first requirement will be to lockout anyone else.
Accuweather tried that one a few years back by buying Rick Santorum and getting him to start legislation (see S. 786) that prohibited the NWS from providing forecasts/data/whatnot to the public if a private corporation (*cough*Accuweather*cough*) could do it instead.
tax revenues pretty much always increase. there's are these thing, called inflation, population growth, productivity increases.. thing is, after tax cuts, you are increasing FROM A LOWER POINT. in other words, you're collecting less than you would have otherwise.
sound economic policy is very simple. rack up huge deficits in down times to keep the economy going. pay them down when things are going well. problem is, every republican administration since reagan has set massive record after massive record for deficit spending EVEN DURING BOOM TIMES. now when we NEED that spending, they cry about the deficit. it would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.
the stimulus spending has saved our auto industry (and in the end cost very little) though that was a republican, of course, that started it... Kudos to him. and the stimulus very certainly helped blunt the full force of this recession. Biggest boom ever to biggest bust ever, this very easily could have been the great depression, and I can say that stimulus projects were the ONLY thing keeping many engineering and construction firms afloat for the last couple of years. And those people are the people who drive the economy. They have mortgages and car payments and kids, suppliers and workers, and the cash they get flows through the economy very rapidly. Unlike tax giveaways to people who already have enough money.
The tax rates did not, but the tax laws have, in favor of the biggest earners.
Your "liberal source" graph is not nearly fine enough to prove or disprove my assertion. The data points are decades, for god's sake. Go look at one that shows the numbers by year and you'll see what I mean.
And Slate is every bit as corporate as CNN. They are not a "liberal source" unless you're from the Far Right. Here's an authentic liberal source that shows what I'm talking about. Drill down into the charts themselves.
By the way, you'll notice that even the source you cited doesn't claim that high taxes hurts GDP or that lowering taxes helps the economy. In fact, it shows the opposite, demolishing the most important "conservative" talking point of all: that we are "over-taxed" and that such "over-taxing" hurts the economy or stifles growth.
(note: I know the poster, so if you want to see the spreadsheet that created those graphs, along with the exact IRS, Census and Bureau of Economic Analysis sources that were used, I'd be willing to send them to you, as long as you're willing to admit you are wrong in a Slashdot Journal associated with your user ID.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
You missed what I said. It was the highest tax rates on the top income brackets that brought the years of economic growth, lowest unemployment and fewest bubbles, not total tax revenue over GDP.
During the dot bomb days, the top earners were paying 38% (if I remember correctly). The reason we had such high revenues is that we were well into the "Reagan Revolution" when the middle class was getting hit the hardest while the rich were skating.
If you really want to see economic growth and strong, stable economies, you have to look for the years where the top brackets paid over 50% in federal income tax. Strangely, those were also the years when the rich did the best, too - even after taxes. Overall, if you carefully analyze the data, you'll find that the nation's economy does best when the top brackets pay well over 50%, because they are more inclined to invest in their companies, add workers, and thus end up making more money in the long run. Unfortunately, it seems like the economic elite have lost all taste for the "long run" and are looking to bust out the country for everything they can and then hope there are enough police still around to protect them. They'll have to be private police, of course.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years. During the "Reagan Recovery" (sic) we were paying about 15 percent more across the board and the top tiers were paying more than that. Corporations were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today."
You mean we're paying less per person. While our economy doubled in the same time frame, actual US tax income has actually quadrupled $500Mil -> $2.5 Trillion from 1980 - 2007 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/U.S.-income-taxes-out-of-total-taxes.JPG
FYI that's well past inflation.
It's a tired and out of context argument that somehow we needed to keep these top tax rates (as much as 70%!) and that we've shortchanged ourselves, corporations are not paying enough, etc. Instead the truth is we've got about 100 million more people (and many more businesses) in the US than we did in 1980, and with more people you can lower the burden on all. In fact, if we had maintained government spending at 1980's levels (>$1 Trillion) and tracked to inflation we'd be just fine today - in fact we'd have a slight surplus. Instead, despite a doubling of the economy and the quadrupling of tax income, the government sextupled spending (>$1 Tril/year -> $6Tril/year)
The problem has not been taxes, instead it has been both parties spending far beyond revenues, and taking loans out to pay for it (or just pushing the bills into the future, which is why some reports have us at 70 Trillion in unfunded mandates)
Should these satellites go away? Probably not. But I'd like to see something else (or everything) cut first rather than to just add more tax burden.
Did anyone actually read the article? It was full of "what if" scenarios: If we don't get the funding... this COULD be an incredible loss. No one at NOAA would ever find a worthless waste of money like WEFAX over short wave that could be eliminated and no one would miss it, instead they go for the most popular, useful tool they have and threaten to kill that off if they don't get fully funded.
Doesn't anyone realize that the first line of defense for a bureaucracy is to find the most important program and threaten to kill it if it doesn't get what it wants?
Like every time someone mentions selling public land, the first thing some policy wonk at the Dept of Interior mentions is selling off Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. The government could make millions from selling off land around ski resorts that no one would miss, but it will never happen because the bureaucrats will always threaten the worst case scenario. NPR is all too happy to play along, since they have the same problem. I'm sure NPR could find 10% of their operating budget to cut and still provide 95% or more of their current offerings, but instead they go for the jugular and threaten to kill Garrison Keillor.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
As a ham I and a meteorologist. MacTO and DarthBart have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. DarthBart is able to use $200 worth of equipment because NOAA/NASA spent a few million dollars extra in terms of on-board equipment and satellite weight to maintain a signal they should dropped in 1975. No it isn't as easy as buying a cheap receiver and loading some software. The reason his images are poor is because it takes a lot of tuning and just the right timing to get a decent image. Having used APT imagery in the south Atlantic and in the North Pacific on field campaigns it takes a lot of effort and expensive hardware to get a clean image. An APT image once an hour is of little use when you are trying to tell which storm is moving where to give people more than a 30 second warning. MacTO: So I guess one of the AMSAT's has both 1km visible and 4km IR imagers? I guess one of the AMSAT's is in a Geostationary orbit so I can get imagery every 3 minutes? I guess one of the AMSET's has a profiler so I can receive vertical temperature, humidity and wind profiles every 30km every 3 minutes. Guess what AMSAT's are little more than a glorified repeater Since my students have built a cube sat I know that the bulk of the work has been done by NASA not hams. Hams serve an important role in society, to open them up to ridicule with foolish garbage does more harm than good