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Senate Confirms Climate Denier With No Scientific Credentials To Head NASA (nytimes.com)
On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Trump's NASA nominee Jim Bridenstine, seven and a half months after being nominated to lead the agency. "The Senate confirmed Mr. Bridenstine, an Oklahoma congressman, as the new NASA administrator in a stark partisan vote: 50 Republicans voting for him and 47 Democrats plus two independents against," reports The New York Times. "The vote lasted more than 45 minutes as Republicans waited for Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona to cast his lot." Slashdot reader PeopleAquarium writes about some of Bridenstine's anti-LGBT and non-scientific views: Bridenstine ran a planetarium once, and peddled a debunked argument made by climate change skeptics, claiming that global temperatures "stopped rising 10 years ago." He said "the people of Oklahoma are ready to accept" an apology from then-President Barack Obama for what Bridenstine called a "gross misallocation" of funds for climate change research instead of weather forecasting. In further news, our rockets will now be coal powered, and gay people aren't allowed in space.
Come on, editors. Wtf? How is that relevant or helpful to the conversation? Are the people posting really that partisan? What are the new administrator's goals for the agency? Does he have a vision that includes manned space missions? Is he going to burn the agency to the ground? I can't tell. All I know is the poster liked Obama and doesn't like Trump which probably shouldn't be in the summary at all.
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It's not because he believes in physical genders, it's because he thinks gay people are " sexually immoral," and has been known to allow his religion to trump his reason... publicly.
It's not a great attitude for the head of an organization that has 14,000 employees of all walks of life, and that is primarily science based.
Publicly admitting that he hates some of those 14,000 employees for religious reasons is going to wreck his ability to lead, and get the agency mired in distracting lawsuits.
I agree that this guy is very suboptimal but the summary isn't very fair either especially the unnecessary snark that "In further news, our rockets will now be coal powered, and gay people aren't allowed in space." There's a legitimate criticism about his views on climate change and that should be expanded, especially as a major part of NASA's Earth observing work is precisely to understand the global environment and how it is changing. But the summary doesn't mention the primary criticism of Bridenstine. Prior administrators have almost always had a combination of adminsitrative and scientific skills. For example Griffin had a background in physics and engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin, Lightfoot the current acting administrator is an engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Lightfoot_Jr., Bolden was himself an astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bolden. Etc. Putting in someone whose primary qualifications are political rather than scientific is very suboptimal; NASA has suffered enough the last few years due to congressional politics and politics dictating goals rather than science and engineering. The SLS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System is a really good example of this. Putting in a head of NASA whose qualifications are political with no real experience is very bad, and that would be bad even if he weren't a climate change denier (which does admittedly make it worse but at this point given who is in charge of the EPA should be about expected for this administration).
Putting someone with anti-science beliefs in charge of a science agency is like putting the Klan in charge of your Martin Luther King day barbeque. It's just a shitty idea.
This is not about whether he "knows" science. This is about appointing someone who *doesn't believe in science* because it produces results that don't fit his politics.
If you can't characterise the problem effectively, you'll waste your time sneering at a strawman, which is exactly what you've done.
Looks like Slashdot has gone from "News for Nerds" to yellowpress-style hit pieces.
Yes this. We already have one agency for climate, why do we have to use nasa for it as well. Oh I know, the grand money grab the thing driving all of the climate research.
Yes. What does building satellites have to do with weather and studying the Earth? oh, wait.
I know jack shit about him other than *his own words and deeds*, many of which are in the public domain, and which are enough to come to an informed view of him.
But let's just say you were right and I knew "Jack Shit [sic] about him". What more would you know, then? Nothing more than me, correct? So what makes *your* original post qualify as "thinking for yourself" vs mine? Just the fact that you agree with your own views and felt the urgent need to defend yourself. That reflex reaction to defend -- that's not thinking for yourself. Thinking for yourself would have involved a step back, reflecting on what I wrote, and responding in a positive and constructive way.
I feel no such compunction to do any of that in my first response. I was content to point out the (obvious) flaws in your position. But then, I didn't need to, as I'm not the one lecturing other people on how they ought to argue online, so I wasn't the person at risk of being shown to be a hypocrite.
Watch Nova's Decoding the Weather Machine. The science is settled. Global temperatures are rising. Sea levels are rising. Severe weather is getting worse.
The only uncertainty is whether we Americans will get off our collective ass and help fix the problem we helped to create.
Science isn't a yes / no. Certainly we don't completely understand climate.
If you want a yes / no, you need to ask a very specific question:
Does human activity affect climate? Yes - obviously.
Should we we reduce CO2 emissions? That isn't a "science" question, it is a political question that takes (or should take) as inputs climate models and economic models.
The real questions are things like:
For various CO2 emission scenarios, what are the likely ranges of sea level, and climate changes in different parts of the world. These are being worked on, but there is still a large range in the simulation predictions.
Are we missing any important inputs to climate? (like the cosmic ray / solar wind effect on cloud seeding issue).
If the science were settled there would be no point spending more effort on it. (Newtonian mechanics is "settled", no one does research on Newtonian mechanics).
How is a policy decision a science question?
Science can tell us what will happen in different scenarios, but it can't tell us what we SHOULD do about it because science says nothing about what our goals are. There world will be different under different policies, but its not the job of science to tell us which of those futures are better.
Should we kill or sterilize everyone with genetic defects? Science will say that course of action will very gradually decrease the number of defects in the population, and the Nazis used this as an argument that we SHOULD take that action. Most people today, myself included, think that is a terrible course of action because we are not trying to optimize the genetics of the human race, that isn't the goal.
In the case of climate, I think that science provides input that makes a political decision to reduce CO2 emissions a good choice, but it remains a political, not scientific choice.
The only uncertainty is whether we Americans will get off our collective ass and help fix the problem we helped to create.
I can answer that, we Americans will do nothing about Climate Change, just look an the attempted conversion to metric. Only when not using metric is expensive we will change to it. Defence and most health industries have already converted but the general population ls no clue that happened. So for Climate Change, Americans will need to have a real cost to ignoring it. My first step is for the government to stop subsidising flood insurance and state "due to Climate Change, doing this is too expensive"
We know he doesn't have a PhD in science. That should make him bang out of line right there. But when has the Trump administration ever cared about qualifications other that sucking up to Trump?
What you want at the helm of NASA is someone who is enthusiastic about the agency, who knows how to schmooze the right people (especially Congress – and yes, you can take this as a pun, presently), who can advertise NASA, who respects the input from the scientific community (he said he would do that), who does not get too much in the way of the inner workings but recognises when NASA screws up and helps set the ship right (yes, NASA screws up more than you think).
Being a scientist is most of the time not a good qualification in itself – those guys sit already one level down. Listening to and accepting advice from scientists (internal and external), on the other hand, is vital for that position. You also do not want a bean counter (if that's all they do), or someone who does not care.
Even if I don't agree with Bridenstine, he is definitely enthusiastic about the job and really wanted it. NASA administrator is not the jumping board to become the next president (or senator). Bridenstine is fairly young. Wanting to lead a 20+ billion USD agency that is full of people smarter than you is a bit nuts. But, because of that, it's also the #1 federal agency in terms of employee satisfaction, and it's still "cool".
NASA could have done a lot worse. This will be nothing like the EPA or CDC, for example. I would predict that NASA will mostly continue on its path (which is having to do too much with too little money to do it). Maybe it even helps that he comes from Congress. Congress holds the purse strings, and one of the worst problems of NASA, which needs to engage in long term projects, is the eternal budget uncertainty.
I'd give him a chance. Just imagine it would not be him but Rick Perry ...
Do your own thing. And overdo it!