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Trump White House Quietly Cancels NASA Research Verifying Greenhouse Gas Cuts (sciencemag.org)
Paul Voosen, reporting for Science magazine: You can't manage what you don't measure. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage -- and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line, has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into high-resolution models of the planet's flows of carbon. Now, President Donald Trump's administration has quietly killed the CMS, Science has learned.
The move jeopardizes plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris climate accords, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of Tufts University's Center for International Environment and Resource Policy in Medford, Massachusetts. "If you cannot measure emissions reductions, you cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement," she says. Canceling the CMS "is a grave mistake," she adds.
The move jeopardizes plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris climate accords, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of Tufts University's Center for International Environment and Resource Policy in Medford, Massachusetts. "If you cannot measure emissions reductions, you cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement," she says. Canceling the CMS "is a grave mistake," she adds.
Why? To increase the number of people employed by the government and to tie up as many of the America's resources seeking solutions for non-existent problems as possible, so that America's adversaries and enemies have some breathing room to catch up on the stuff that actually matters... Like space programs...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I get your point, but I think the President's point is that: we're not the world CO2 police.
It's a bullshit, political issue allowing massive numbers of white-guilt liberals to expiate themselves by "doing something"...
NOTHING we say is going to change the public's gullibility on this, nor the Left's insistence that everything is the West's (and mainly America's) fault. Nothing. You could have reams of data showing the cheating, how the Tokyo, then Copenhagen, then Paris accords are nothing more than fancy posturing and vapid promises, whose only real intent is a massive justificatory wealth-transfer and nobody will change their mind. CERTAINLY not a few pages of numbers from US satellites.
Look at the new rounds of the Paris accords: essentially, the poor countries are complaining that the free handouts aren't coming fast enough, while simultaneously insisting that Developed nations' requirement for things like documentation and transparency are 'unreasonable'.
-Styopa