Ask Dr. Bryan Killett About Climate Change and GRACE

Bryan Killett is a physicist working on the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. GRACE is a joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center which collects satellite data to learn about Earth's changing gravity field, specifically the high frequency changes associated with ocean tides. As the high tide comes in, more water is present, so gravity in that location is temporarily strengthened. These changes are detected with GRACE and used to improve ocean tide models. Dr. Killett provides the open source (GPLv3) code used to process GRACE data on his home page. Bryan has agreed to take a break from measuring gravity fields and answer your questions about GRACE and the climate changes it has revealed. Feel free to ask as many as you like but please confine your questions to one per post.

Comments

Climate Change

[sexconker]

Why are aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, rocket scientists, etc. involved in perpetuating a political agenda based on bad "science" for an administration that refuses to fund the organization's actual purpose?

Re:Climate Change

[rrohbeck]

But, but, but... the Heartland Institute tells us otherwise!
You can't prove that a specific cigarette caused your cancer, you can't prove that *my* SUV causes global warming and you can't prove that global warming causes this year's crops to fail!
So take that, scientists!
Duh. Next thing you want to tell me that the Earth is round, that we landed on the moon or that there are no chemtrails. Jeez, libtards.

Re:Climate Change

[sexconker]

Because it isn't bad science. Just like it wasn't bad science that cigarettes cause lung cancer despite what tabacco industry-funded scientists and think tanks wanted us to think.

No testable hypothesis
No repeatable experiment
No science

Global warming, anthropogenic climat change, or whatever else they want to call it is nothing but shifty statistics applied to old, unreliable, disparate, inconsistent, and intentionally-altered data in a concerted effort to reach a predetermined conclusion in order to support a political agenda (which ultimately is designed to let assholes usurp power and money from other assholes, all at my expense).

Re:Climate Change

[Curunir_wolf]

Scientific discovery using spaceborne instruments, such as GRACE, is part of NASA's core mission.

But this isn't scientific discovery, since gravity was already discovered 150 years ago. "NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

Some tortured logic could be conjured up to claim there is some blue-sky "discovery" that has some chance of being made on this mission, but meanwhile the rest of the explicit mission seems to be getting swept under the rug.

Re:What does this have to do with Climate Change?

[Spy Handler]

NASA has double-downed on AGW, then went all-in on Climate Change. So anything they do nowadays is related to Climate Change at some level.

NASA is often called a civilian agency, and that is correct, but that just means it's not controlled by the military (Army Navy etc.). It's still a political agency; the people there are picked by politicians, so it tends to reflect political tastes of whoever put them in place (currently Demoliberals)