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Ex-NASA Employees Accuse Agency of 'Extreme Position' On Climate Change
grumpyman writes "A coalition of 49 ex-NASA employees, including seven Apollo astronauts, have accused the U.S. space agency of sullying its reputation by taking the 'extreme position' of concluding that carbon dioxide is a major cause of climate change. Is the claim in this letter opinion or fact?"
Is the claim in this letter opinion or fact?
Well, from the letter itself:
March 28, 2012
/s/ Jack Barneburg, Jack - JSC, Space Shuttle Structures, Engineering Directorate, 34 years
/s/ Larry Bell - JSC, Mgr. Crew Systems Div., Engineering Directorate, 32 years
/s/ Dr. Donald Bogard - JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 41 years
/s/ Jerry C. Bostick - JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 23 years
/s/ Dr. Phillip K. Chapman - JSC, Scientist - astronaut, 5 years
/s/ Michael F. Collins, JSC, Chief, Flight Design and Dynamics Division, MOD, 41 years
/s/ Dr. Kenneth Cox - JSC, Chief Flight Dynamics Div., Engr. Directorate, 40 years
/s/ Walter Cunningham - JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 7, 8 years
/s/ Dr. Donald M. Curry - JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Leading Edge, Thermal Protection Sys., Engr. Dir., 44 years
/s/ Leroy Day - Hdq. Deputy Director, Space Shuttle Program, 19 years
/s/ Dr. Henry P. Decell, Jr. - JSC, Chief, Theory & Analysis Office, 5 years
/s/Charles F. Deiterich - JSC, Mgr., Flight Operations Integration, MOD, 30 years
/s/ Dr. Harold Doiron - JSC, Chairman, Shuttle Pogo Prevention Panel, 16 years
/s/ Charles Duke - JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 16, 10 years
/s/ Anita Gale
/s/ Grace Germany - JSC, Program Analyst, 35 years
/s/ Ed Gibson - JSC, Astronaut Skylab 4, 14 years
/s/ Richard Gordon - JSC, Astronaut, Gemini Xi
The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Dear Charlie,
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA's history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.
As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA's advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA's current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.
For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.
Thank you for considering this request.
Sincerely,
(Attached signatures)
CC: Mr. John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for Science
CC: Ass Mr. Chris Scolese, Director, Goddard Space Flight Center
Ref: Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, dated 3-26-12, regarding a request for NASA to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims that human produced CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on climate change.
My work here is dung.
"The 49-person letter was organized by Leighton Steward, chairman of Plants Need CO2, a non-profit with ties to the coal industry."
And thats all I needed to know before I stopped reading.
They would but 49 members of the engeniering branch, with no climate experience, quit and now work for a non-profit with ties in to the coal industry. Oh they also wote the letter in question for the article.
Or even scientists, "Most are not even scientists in the sense that they have pursued scientific research during their careers, in any discipline."
Ah lobbyists, is there anything they won't say...
So what? You could find numerous doctors and scientists with ties to the tobacco industry trying to tell us that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer and how second-hand smoke is safe just a couple decades ago. There is nothing novel about a group of people with financial ties to industries peddling fossil fuels to be spreading FUD over climate research.
They would but 49 members of the engeniering branch, with no climate experience, quit and now work for a non-profit with ties in to the coal industry. Oh they also wote the letter in question for the article.
False, unless you have a different source from TFA. The letter was organized by someone from that non-profit. There is no indication whatsoever that all or the majority of the individuals who signed it are otherwise affiliated with that organization (Plants Need C02). Also, only most of them had engineering backgrounds, not all (one of them at least was a meteorologist). Link to fill text and signatories.
Spreading falsehoods is not the way to invalidate climate change deniers.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Yeah, it's great that this is somehow your big issue now. But would it pain you all too much to get together and maybe concentrate on making the U.S. a country capable of putting a man into space again?
Space is only half of NASA's mission.
The other half is "outreach to the Muslim world". Priorities, man, priorities.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"There are way worse greenhouse gasses that don't even get filtered most of the time. Cause actually carbon dioxide isn't all that strong of a greenhouse gas."
This is an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. What you said it true, but basically irrelevant. Carbon dioxide might not be the worst greenhouse gas, but (A) we release orders of magnitude more of it than any other green house gas. You could eliminate every methane emitter on earth and not make a dent in global warming because well over 90% of it comes from the CO2 we release. (B) Carbon dioxide-caused warming lasts far longer than any other green house gas. If we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, the warming we have caused will not dissipate for nearly a millenia.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
So you've got a bunch of space shuttle guys from Johnson Space Center, which does pretty much zero climate science, asking the administrator to censor the group at Goddard Space Flight Center, which is co-located with NOAA and is the center for earth sensing and earth science about an earth-science related topic? Really?
And yes, I happen to be a former NASA/Goddard principal engineer with a whole wall of mission paraphernalia on my office wall. So, hey, JSC can suck it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The amount of money going into earth science, let alone AGW, is trivial compared to to human launch and deep space missions. So, basically, you have a none issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually we do. That has been the point of all that research published recently. What is somewhat debatable is how quickly the Earth will warm if we do nothing and what actions do we need to do NOW to reverse the trend.
Fossil fuel people are all for keeping the status quo. The rest of would like to start changing things now.
Moron. NASA isn't about making fireworks. its about putting things into space. Like WEATHER SATELLITES that give us the data that this is all about. And the analysing it, which is wha the denialits are trying to bury under a pile of irrelevant shit. And, from TFA:
The 49-person letter was organized by Leighton Steward, chairman of Plants Need CO2, a non-profit with ties to the coal industry. ...âoeWhat these men and women are not is climate scientists,â wrote Houston-based science writer Eric Berger in a Wednesday blog post. âoeMost are not even scientists in the sense that they have pursued scientific research during their careers, in any discipline.â
Funny how the submitter omitted that. Astronauts aren't climate scientists. They're being cited as celebrities, not scientists.
You might want to take a look at methane. You might want to compare the percentage in the total effect versus the concentration. It contributes about 10% of the greenhouse effect while it has a concentration that's roughly 200 times lower than carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide only accounts for roughly 30% of the greenhouse effect. So even a minor increase in the concentration of methane has a far larger effect than that of carbon dioxide. And there is almost no effort to stop the emissions of methane compared to those of carbon dioxide.
But atmospheric methane has a lifetime of about 10 years, because it reacts with water vapor. It's a short-term problem, but it doesn't create the long-term trends that are making climate scientists nervous. In contrast, the lifetime of atmospheric carbon dioxide is almost 100 years.
It's the long-term trends that will kill people, not the short-term blips. Methane is a short-term greenhouse gas. It is a large fraction of the problem, but the majority of the problem comes from carbon dioxide.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Actually, water vapor is the most common and (cumulatively) most potent greenhouse gas and is given off in roughly the same quantity as CO2 by most combustion and cellular respiration. CO2 is a distant second, not 90%. The difference is that water vapor has a fairly dynamic and self-regulating cycle where excess quantities of it fall out of the sky as rain. CO2 kinda just sits there until plants can extract it from the air.
Here is my gripe with that: all of modern civilization is built on fossil fuels. Unless those power sources are replaced with something else, any effort you make to limit their use will have a direct impact on human populations around the world. So when people argue for dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, they are in effect arguing that we should take steps that we know will cause suffering on a large scale because it may prevent uncertain suffering in the future. I say it may prevent it because we don't know if efforts to reduce emissions would happen quickly enough to have an effect, or if it's already too late. And I say that the future suffering is uncertain because we don't know exactly what the effects will be.
I can't see pulling the trigger on a "solution" that will definitely devastate the world's economy, when other solutions will be available in the near future. Solar panels are now less than $1 / watt, and they will be even cheaper in the next few years. Wind power is already incredibly cheap. Moreover, I can't see why we are so insistent on a solution that probably won't actually solve the problems of increased flooding and water shortages decreased snowpack. We already know that large scale civil engineering projects will solve those problems, and that we should be investing I'm them already to address cycles of poverty and famine that already exist in poorer countries.
Anybody who still recites this incident as anything more than a gaffe induced by peer pressure, which was immediately retracted, is just trolling.
I'm sorry you failed logic.
Your position holds only if A and B are both provable conditions.
The definition of a square and rectangle are sound.
Your position does NOT hold when you are considering a point where A is a provable position and B is a course of action or other consequence following.
"If X is a square, then X is a rectangle" requires the definition of a square to be "also a rectangle."
In the case of "stating the contrapositive", Republicans are taking their desired policy position ("we should not do anything about climate change") and using it as PROOF of their claim that climate change is unrelated to human activity. The problem is that the A/Not-A relationship (e.g. Climate change is/is-not related to human activity) is provable and scientifically investigable and all available reputable science points to A: climate change is related to human activity. The Republicans' B is a mere policy position, which cannot be proven for it rests upon no fact and, in fact, the "fact" that they claim it is related to (that climate change is unrelated to human activity) is completely false according to all available reputable research.
"Stating the contrapositive" sometimes and ONLY sometimes works in math when dealing in defined quantities; it fails miserably in discussing public policy, where it quickly descends into the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent aka Converse Error.