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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Cause actually carbon dioxide isn't all that strong of a greenhouse gas.
True, but the sheer magnitude of CO2 release dwarfs other greenhouse gasses. Further, it's not just the amount of CO2 (or water vapor which is another 'greenhouse gas' or methane) it's the rate of change of the concentration.
Yes CO2 can be 'useful' and plants like it. Yes, the planet had higher concentrations of CO2 in the past.
The big issue is whether or not a significant fraction of the human (and since we're an apex predator, everybody else's) population is at risk for near term major perturbations in the population's health and well being due to changes in climate that are in part due to rapidly rising CO2 levels which are most likely man made.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"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?
What the fuck does any of this shit have anything to do with spaceships? That's a job for diplomats, not the goddamned National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's in the goddamned name! They should be working on either space, planes, or fucking planes that go into fucking space!
Right now the only thing breaking the stratosphere is my goddamned blood pressure.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I apologize, but I must simply parse this most excellent post.
They should be working on fucking planes that go into fucking space!
Thanks to the wonderful diversity of the word fuck, I believe there are at least three acceptable interpretations of this sentence.
1. The engineers should be fucking planes that go into space.
2. The engineers should be creating planes that are capable of going into space and are capable of fucking people or things.
3. The engineers should be creating planes that go into space.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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?
Give a republican party who's stated primary goal it to make Obama a one term president, and the unprecedented use of the filibuster to block any progress and judicial nominations, and handed a depression from the previous administration and the Tarp debt and the need for additional stimulus spending to stop the free falling economy, I would say Obama has done a wonderful job and actually got some legislation passed that will do good. The auto industry was saved with all those jobs, pre-existing conditions are starting to be covered, many millions of people can now get coverage that they could not before. It is a start. It used to be that the Insurance companies could cherry pick their clients, and if you suddenly had a medical expense, find all possible ways to deny coverage, just to make a buck.
Health care and hospitals should not be for profit. It doesn't work and is why things are so expensive, that and the fact that so many people are outside the system but we have to (and should) give them care when needed. (It's the Christian thing to do).
One company that was given load guarantee's ( I don't think Solyndra got money, just loan guarantees) is one of a number of companies that are being supported towards that goal of energy independence. A worthy goal. If you think all businesses have to survive, your not living in the real world, this is just used as a right wing talking point to try to achieve that primary goal (listed above).
The idea that government picks winners is bogus. The winners or shall I say whiners are the ones benefiting from the governments support of oil and agriculture. You don't think banks with loans or private capital groups don't do the exact same thing?
And if you think SS is a ponzy scheme, you proably think your money is really in the bank too.
Wake up and vote your own best interests.