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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?"
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? I mean, debate is great and all, but I'm getting a little creeped-out by the way the Chinese are laughing at us.
You know things are getting pretty bad when you start longing for the days when a former Nazi was giving NASA moral leadership.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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.
To this site and promptly commit suicide? From that site:
Earth and its inhabitants need more, not less, CO2.
More CO2 means:
More Plant Growth
Plants need less water
More food per acre
More robust habitats and ecosystems
CO2 is Earth's greatest airborne fertilizer. Without it - No Life On Earth!
A site with a banner that says "Warmer is better than colder." and "CO2 is Green." and "Climate Change is the Norm." really just makes my head hurt. The arguments presented on this site seem to imply that policy is to completely remove all CO2 from Earth. That is not true. It also grasps at hilarious straws:
In addition to increasing the quantity of food available for human consumption, the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is also increasing the quality of the foods we eat. It significantly increases the quantity and potency of the many beneficial substances found in their tissues (such as the vitamin C concentration of citrus fruit), which ultimately make their way onto our dinner tables and into many of the medicines we take, improving our health and helping us better contend with the multitude of diseases and other maladies that regularly afflict us. In just one species of spider lily, for example, enriching the air with CO2 has led to the production of higher concentrations of several substances that have been demonstrated to be effective in fighting a number of human maladies, including leukemia, ovary sarcoma, melanoma, and brain, colon, lung and renal cancers, as well as Japanese encephalitis and yellow, dengue, Punta Tora and Rift Valley fevers.
Climate warming increases the quality of your food! Burn all the shit you want, folks! Hey, if CFCs make the planet warmer and this site says "warmer is better than colder" shouldn't we be purposefully releasing those things up into the ozone?
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.
"Okay, if you want to complain about us doing science, then do it in the methods that science accepts complaints." A letter like this is the equivalent of a toddler stamping its foot because its mother told him that cookies will make him fat.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Roughly half of Americans deny global warming; not restricted to blue-collar workers.
Film at 11.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
but James Hansen, the Head of NASA's Goddard Institute coming out and saying that Oil CEOs should be tried for crimes against humanity for emitting CO2 very much hurts NASA's credibility on science.
Are any of the signatories to the letter actually climate scientists? I recognize that shuttle engineers and astronauts from 40 years ago are probably interesting people to hang out with, but do they have any personal expertise on which to base their argument? 'cause otherwise it sounds like a bunch of grumpy old dudes whingeing.
I take some relief in noting that these are "ex-NASA" employees.
Per the article, it seems that these guys mostly worked at the Texas-based Johnson space center:
"Keith Cowing, editor of the website NASA Watch, noted that the undersigners, most of whom have engineering backgrounds, worked almost exclusively at the Houston-based Johnson Space Centre, a facility almost entirely removed from NASA's climate change arm."
Figures.
Why is it that there are so many amateur climatologists in Texas who know so much, but publish so little? I wonder if these gentlemen even bothered to visit the site of the "Plants Need CO2" sponsor, Leighton Steward, to see who also agreed with their opinions. I'm not linking to that site, and I'd surely want to avoid association with anyone with ideas like that.
Maybe Steward just punked them. Yep, that's go to be it.
The Internet has no garbage collection
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.
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 counter-argument presented in the post states that the signatories of the letter are not "climate scientists." Well, this argument holds about as much water as the argument that NASA is not a climate agency. Climate research encompasses efforts which require expertise in a number of sciences. When anyone with an expertise in one of the necessary science branches decides to weigh in on arguments, it makes no sense to outright dismiss him as a non-climate-scientist. In fact, it seems like the only ones defending this AGW position are those blessed by the priesthood of the climate scientists or members of the media. Well, if you dismiss an astro-physicist weighing in on results of temperature distribution studies (as seen from space) because he is not a "climate scientist", why listen to NASA which is not a "climate agency"?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The first question I ask myself is to what extent it's proper for NASA to engage with public politics. (Of course survival requires it to play politics all the time, but my question is about influencing public debate.)
If NASA's function is to study climate change, then of course it has a duty to report its findings. The ethics are straightforward, but they don't apply here. However, NASA does have scientific and technical expertise which may qualify it, or even oblige it, to share its knowledge with the public, especially as NASA receives substantial public funding.
Also, NASA's prominence in the aerospace industry should make it especially conscientious concerning adverse effects of that industry. And aerospace is a significant contributor to greenhouse emissions. So again, it has an ethical obligation to inform itself about the effect of such emissions on climate change, and to share its findings.
As to whether or not NASA is taking the correct position, that's really a secondary question. Certainly NASA is saying nothing controversial in warning about climate change. It's an altruistic position, in line with most of the scientific community. Conversely, it would be at least moderately suspicious if NASA were to dismiss the issue as unimportant, given that this position is directly self-serving.
Now, a group of people want to disagree with NASA on this issue, that's fine. We can let their claims stand on their own merits, while noting what company they keep with what vested interests. But calling to silence NASA is just plain inappropriate.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
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.
A layer of paint is typically 1/8 of a millimeter thick, and is close to 100 opaque to visible light. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere amounts to 4 kg per square meter. If condensed, it would be a layer 2.6 millimeters thick, or 20 times thicker than a paint layer. It should not be hard to understand a layer that thick being able to absorb a significant amount of infrared light. The fact that it is distributed vertically does not change the absorbing power of the molecules, you still have the same number per unit area to run into.
Expressing the numbers as percentages is a way to make them seem small, and ignores the fact that the whole atmosphere has a mass of 10.3 tons per square meter, and would be about 9 meters thick if condensed. It's fairly amazing that thickness only absorbs about 27% of total incoming sunlight.
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.
That not really true yes. Although methane is about 37 times more potent a green house gas than carbon dioxide, the concentration in the atmosphere is still so very small that the effect of carbon dioxide predominates. However, as more clathrates sublime that probably won't be true in 100-200 years time given its ultimate effect on forcing.
If you look at the recent coring data its abundantly clear that carbon dioxide increases preceded both warming and methane ending the last ice age, which is what you would expect if carbon dioxide provides the trigger. This is precisely what is being seen now. Methane is only now starting to outgas excessively in the permafrost and under the Arctic ocean as the temperatures have warmed sufficiently enough to start the sublimation process of existing methane clathrates. The problem now is that as carbon dioxide continues to climb there is no way to reverse the cocking the trigger on the clathrate gun. By letting carbon dioxide rise, we are effectively pulling the trigger.
The really scary thing is that from the onset of the height of the last ice age to its end carbon dioxide only increased carbon dioxide concentrations went from about 220-300. Whereas, within only the past 100 years we have gone from about 320-almost 400 and are on track to reach 500 by the end of this decade at current rates of accumulation. This is about 1000 times faster than the spike seen in the Middle Eocene Thermal Maximum, the most rapid rise in temperatures recorded in prehistoric times. This means that we are already experiencing the warmest climate in recorded history and we have problem even though we have not yet begun to feel the full effects of the amount of carbon dioxide that has recently accumulated. If you think it got hot in West Texas last year. Just wait a few years and it will be that way in Kansas City far to the north.
When one realizes that the past 15 years have produced all the top 10 warmest years and now the first quarter of 2012 is the hottest on record once again (by >5F), there's little or no point at further debating if there is global warming, only the question now is what are we going to do about it, other than face almost certain extinction within 200-300 years time?