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Ted Cruz To Oversee NASA and US Science Programs
romanval sends word that U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) will become the new chairman of the subcommittee that oversees NASA and government scientific research. Cruz has both spoken in favor of NASA and attempted to cut its budget, but he's most notable for his opposition to the science supporting climate change. From the article:
His vociferous opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his support of extreme budget cuts could spell trouble for NASA's less prominent programs, such as its own climate research and sophisticated supercomputers. His role on the front lines of the 2013 government shutdown, which critics say had lasting negative effects on public safety, NASA research and EPA scientists' ability to visit contaminated sites, also suggests at best a narrow focus on NASA's largest projects and at worst a disregard for agencies that require science funding.
Hello pork projects for Boeing.
Joel Osteen to head committee on Evolution?
This is what democracy is all about.
If this wasn't so sad, it'd be funny. NASA's new prime directive: find evidence that God created the Earth 6,000 years ago. :(
Why do we keep putting people who have a history of being enemies of the scientific community to the scientific subcommittees in Congress? This does nothing productive except give people like Jon Stewart more material.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
After some thought, I think that would in fact be better than Ted Cruz. All we would have to do was tell him the commies are building X and we would get funding to build X twice as big.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
> Also, explain to this Canadian why NASA is researching climate.
Studying climate generally requires lobbing things into the sky.
That's covered by the ASA part of NASA.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
As most people don't realize that Muslims have contributed extensively to the sciences during the medieval age.
Who amongst us is the biggest bible thumper?
That would be Ted Cruz..
Good, he has the job.. Now we can blame all of the stuff Nasa doesn't do on Obama in the next election and cut Nasa funding at the same time!
But wait, you say, This is Obamas last term, he can't run again..
But you also forget, Jeb Bush is going to try to run for president so the republican mandate is to screw up as many things as they can while Obama still is president so the right wing can do what it has been doing since 2008, which is to blame anything and everything on Obama.
It does not matter that anything remotely scientific is so far out of Cruz's wheelhouse to be ridiculous.
I want out of this idiotic country!
NASA also has a hand in a variety of satellite projects which, while pretty uncontroversially 'space', mean that NASA data, if not necessarily scientists they directly employ, end up in terrestrial research fairly frequently. Lots of neat stuff you can efficiently keep tabs on from orbit, especially if you have coverage in a suitably broad assortment of wavelengths.
To the average American, NASA is just a huge portion of the budget (Billions! of dollars) spent to put some clown in orbit a couple of times a year. This is, in fact, exactly what they want based on their knowledge of what NASA does. All the technology gained by what NASA has learned over the decades by doing the hard and impossible things is entirely lost on Joe Sixpack. And, unfortunately, government / private interaction is not an efficient (in the economic sense) sense, so that the effects of cuts won't be felt where the average person lives for 20 years. It's our own damned fault for living in a country filled with morons.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Conservative" is clearly a subset of "stupid."
You've just put down 35% - 50% (depending on definition of 'Conservative') of your fellow countrymen. Good job.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You might not be excited about it, but Senator Cruz is ready to get to work! He's going to start by tasking NASA with finding where all those letters and numbers go when the teachers wipe them off the whiteboards, and if Obama is involved somehow.
Space flight happens because we want to study things from space. NASA is the "host" for principal investigators who often work outside of NASA. In fact, a major NOAA installation was constructed right across the street from NASA - Goddard (in Greenbelt, MD) to allow closer interaction between the two because their missions are so closely aligned.
The aeronautical and aerospace research NASA does isn't in a vacuum; it's meant to ultimately serve a useful cause, and that includes studying the planet. It does do wind tunnel research; it does explore other planets; it does advance optics, and thermal management, and fluid flow, and all the myriad pieces which go into spaceflight and airborne hardware requirements. And much of it happens to flow down to terrestrial uses.
And this is more about Ted Cruz, who doesn't believe that they do anything useful, in charge of their mission. Imagine if they put Aunt Jemima in charge of the Canadian strategic maple syrup reserve. Yeah, it's that crazy.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just because he doesn't want the EPA running around making overbearing rules that help no-one, doesn't mean he has anything against further NASA climate research and ESPECIALLY means nothing about being against a bank of supercomputers, which can you realize be used for any purpose?
The very fact he;s spoken in favor of NASA before is a GOOD THING. It didn't have to be that way and there are plenty (Democrat and Republican) that would not be nearly so favorable of NASA.
Bad press you see around Cruz in generally farmed up by people trying to prevent him running for president.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is what democracy is all about.
You get what you pay for - oh, you're not paying? Then you're probably not getting. Welcome to the Corporatocracy (tm).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Also, explain to this Canadian why NASA is researching climate. Isn't NOAA supposed to be the agency for that?
When I worked at a US Geological Survey office that also archives all the US Govt satellite and aerial imagery, there was a memo that was sent out around 1993 or so. All research projects had to show how they were helping the study of global climate change. If they didn't, they were candidates for having their funding cut. The only exceptions were the ones that were being paid by external agencies or governments. So NASA is researching it for the same reason other agencies are: they have some expertise that can be useful and the funding keeps other projects alive.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Unfortunately this is one of the reasons for all the cuts. Allowing NOAA and other agencies to commit heretical measurements whose results contradict both Industry and God is one of NASA's crimes, with their "satellites" and their "high altitudes" and their "data".
As most people don't realize that Muslims have contributed extensively to the sciences during the medieval age.
And so did the Catholic church. Between the two of them Muslim scholars and Catholic monks are pretty much single handedly responsible for salvaging much of the collective knowledge of the classical world.
Worse, their political leaders insist on blaming outsiders for the collapse of their civilization rather than turning inward to rebuild their civilization.
NASA won't get shut down. Rather we will just see peer reviewed science squeezed out to fund more pork-barrel spending of the type created by Roger Wicker, who forced NASA to complete the construction of a tower-vacuum chamber at the Stennis Space Center for $350,000,000 that was then mothballed the day it was completed. The modern GOP have become what Lysenko was to Soviet Biology, where ideology becomes paramount to actual fact and science.
The reason that NASA and just about every other scientific organization in the world is now focusing on climate change results from the fact that the rate at which the Earth is now heating is 36 times faster than it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago, when in just a mere 10-30,000 years, Wyoming went from having redwood forests to having palm forests and nearly entire mammalian fauna in the Northern Hemisphere died out and was replaced by other species. Keep in mind that the current 36 times rate is just the current rate, which is increasing exponentially. Based on simple extrapolation, by the end of the century with just an increase of 1.5 deg C, some 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide will be released by melting permafrost and another trillion tons will be released as a result of increasing peat and coal seam fires more than tripling the annual production of human generated greenhouse gas, which is now about 33.5 Gt/yr. In some areas such as Indonesia, where slash and burn agricultural practices have caused peat deposits to combust spontaneously, such fires already account for about 7-10% of greenhouse gas production.
The good news is that this won't raise the global mean temperature much beyond 4-7 deg C in the next fifty to hundred years, but it will increase the temperature beyond that by about 7-15 deg C in the second hundred. If this news wasn't bad enough, with most molecules of carbon dioxide going into the oceans, the pH of the oceans will likely become about 30% more acidic than they are now, having increased hydronium ion concentrations about this much over the past 150 years. This rate of change should worry everyone, since humans derive about 50% of their protein from the world oceans. As if this weren't bad enough news, in 200 years temperatures of the relatively shallow arctic sea will begin to reach the point at which the 10-11,000 Gt of methane will be released from marine clathrates, where it is presently stored in cold sediments, so that in as little as 300-500 years, global mean temperatures will accelerate towards those seen on Venus if present trends continue unabated.
At least all those biologists wandering around will have something to study, the greatest extinction on planet Earth since the Permian. So no, it isn't just you, there are plenty of uneducated people out there. The good or bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that there will be plenty of seats at the School of Hard Knocks.
"Saving?" They didn't just save, they actively advanced. Who do you think was at the forefront of medical, technological, scientific, and mathematical research in the middle ages? Who was it that was actively trying to understand how nature worked, because they believed it to be the way to get closer to god?
weinersmith
I find that very hard to believe, especially given the obvious focus of hte USGS on studying geology, not the climate.
Did the memo say that non-climate change programs were candidates for having budgets cut, or was that the office scuttlebutt?
Did the memo go out to all of the USGS or just the library?
What happened afterwards - did all non-climate change programs have their budgets cut? Most? More than average?
Or is it possible that some climate scientists wanted to know what input the USGS could give to their work and sent a memo around to get an idea what was out there?
I voted for Kodos.
Imagine Eisenhower was in today's Republican party and put forth his policy list...
Taxpayer-funded road construction to link up the entire country - what, like Hitler did?!?!
Taxpayer-funded road construction to allow the military to move easily across sections of the country.
Taxpayer cash going to fund improved science teaching - SOCIALISM!??
The science funding happened to be critical to boosting America's technical superiority over the Russians and Chinese. NASA was created during the Sputnik Crisis, when Eisenhower and other Americans feared that lack of US involvement would cede space to the Russians.
Support for social security - MORE SOCIALISM?!?!
Well, got me there. :-)
Setting up NASA? - Since when is space rockets in the Constitution!???
See above. NASA was in response to a perceived military threat. Once the Russians were 'beaten,' all that impetus for space exploration evaporated. A program dedicated to knowledge and scientific discovery wasn't nearly as compelling as a bulwark against the Enemy.