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Trump To Scrap NASA Climate Research In Crackdown On 'Politicized Science' (theguardian.com)
dryriver quotes a report from The Guardian: Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by NASA as part of a crackdown on "politicized science," his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said. Nasa's Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century. This would mean the elimination of NASA's world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. [NASA's network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division's budget set to grow to $2 billion (PDF) next year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8 billion in 2017.] Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be "a major setback if not devastating." "It could put us back into the 'dark ages' of almost the pre-satellite era," he said. "It would be extremely short sighted."
All space-based instrumentation falls squarely in the realm of NASA's expertise. Who knows more about scanning the atmospheres of planets than NASA?
Just remember Mr. Right Wing dumb ass, you're on the same planet as everyone else. Even if it is another universe.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That anthropogenic climate change is real and caused by humans is undisputed and has been undisputed (by the scientific establishment, crackpot conspiracy bloggers dont count) for decades. Thats not actually whats being researched. What is being researched is how bad it is, what sort of time line we are looking at, what mitigation strategies do we have, are those mitigating strategies we already have working, what are the current effects, and how do we respond to the growing deleuge of problems already starting to occur.
Its *suicidal* to defund the most important agency in the world covering it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
You're too late. Today he announced an evangelical woman who hates public schools as the Secretary of Education.
This is like in Civilization IV where the game tells you, "Your Golden Age has now ended".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, but where will climate change cause flooding, where will it cause draught, how much water can utilities, dams and shippers expect, how tall does this seawall need to be, and where will the best places be to build are all very important questions. Regardless of global warming being caused by man or not, better predictive models help humans plan.
Still no "funny" mods? If I ever saw a mod point to give, I think I'd have been more likely to give "funny" to some of the "insightful" ones.
Minor substantive reply on this comment: The Secretary of Education is much more powerful than most people realize. A LOT of Trump's votes came from people indoctrinated by the public schools, which were largely reoriented by Bennett back in the Reagan days. Yeah, the same hypocrite who wrote books about "virtue" while losing millions of dollars due to his gambling habit. He's still around, he's still a right-wing lunatic, and he supported the Donald, too. Back in the Reagan days he helped divide the public schools into a tiny elite track, basically a new kind of lottery that sustained the hopeful fantasy of parents too poor to afford the good private schools, while most public schools were reoriented as obedience training for future wage slaves, prison inmates, or worst of all, Trump voters. (He also boosted the bad private schools of religious stripes.)
Reminds me of the Trump-era investment advice. Plastics are for losers. You should invest in makers of wife-beater T-shirts, anti-anxiety medications, and the for-profit prisons.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Ahh, the ol' Bugs Bunny rabbit season bit.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/1968m...
Mission I: To Understand and Protect Our Home Planet
Mission II: To Explore the Universe and Search for Life
Mission III: To Inspire the Next Generation of Explorers
That was interesting.
I'll bet it's like George W. Bush saying he wanted NASA to get people to Mars. Turns out you can't do it by just yelling at them and cutting their budget.
No. That's a lie. He never said that.
Right...
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
https://twitter.com/realdonald...
and
"We should be focused on clean and beautiful air-not expensive and business closing GLOBAL WARMING-a total hoax!"
https://twitter.com/realdonald...
It is what it is.
No need to guess - that's already happening. The chairman of the congressional science committee (a rabid anti-science denier from the red side of the aisle) has been hounding NOAA for ages trying to force them to stop publishing results that he doesn't like.
The republicans are getting sick and tired of scientists constantly reporting that the their bullshit climate science denial is... well bullshit. They don't want to stop spreading bullshit (there's lots of sweet campaign donations in the spreading of this particular bullshit) so instead... they are trying to silence the scientists.
It's quite ironic to hear them saying it's about ending "politicised science" ... considering they are politicians trying to interfere with science and force them to lie about the results with budget threats.
It's doubly ironic that the deniers claim the scientists only publish climate change papers to get grant money... considering that the push from congress has been consistently to take money AWAY from scientists who do that. If anything, it would be a LOT easier to get the republican congress to fund your research if you were a denier.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And of course - flagrant self contradiction:
"The fraud is (mostly) not coming from scientists"
Anything you've heard about climate change from a political group (any UN body, for example) is automatically a lie.
These two sentences flat out contradict each other - because the primary UN body that says things about climate change is the IPCC which is just about entirely staffed by scientists.
Of course, it all hinges on his attempt at deceptively claiming the IPCC is actually a political body.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *