« Climate Change And The Future Of The West | Main | Today's Bush Joke »
February 19, 2007
| Starving Climate Science | Environment Politics Science/Technology |
From an interview with NASA climatologist Drew Shindell in yesterday's NYT:
Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone's interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.
By NASA? Well, it's a NASA decision following the directives from their political leaders. The money has been redirected into the manned space program, primarily.
Are you referring to President Bush and his plan to send Americans to Mars? The moon and Mars, yes. It's fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet.
Why is NASA involved in climate research in the first place? There is no federal agency whose primary mission is the climate, and that's a problem, because climate doesn’t command the clout that it should in Washington. Since NASA is the primary agency for launching new scientific satellites, it has ended up collecting some of the most important data on climate change. [...]
Why do you think the federal government has been so phobic about adopting energy-efficiency regulations? "Phobic" is the right word, because it's irrational not to conserve when you think of all the advantages, such as keeping money in consumers' pockets instead of sending it to Middle Eastern countries that hate us. [Emphasis added]
It always seemed a little odd that the Bush White House took an interest in promoting manned spaceflight to Mars and the moon. It seemed out of character.
Pardon my cynicism, but could it just be their way of diverting funding away from research into the inconvenient truth of global climate change? Seems like just the sort of move that Bush, Cheney, and Rove might think was oh so very clever.
Posted by Jonathan at February 19, 2007 03:41 PM
