Say Nothing About the Failing Satellite 193
The QuikScat satellite used for predicting the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any time (it's already past its designed lifetime). Without this satellite, the accuracy of US forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% — and there are no plans for any replacement. Bill Proenza, director of the National Hurricane Center, has been outspokenly critical of his superiors on this situation, but he has been warned to stop commenting on it.
Step right up! Bargains galore! (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't a satellite named "QuickScat" be properly used for improvising jazz lyrics?
or (Score:2, Funny)
What it means (Score:5, Informative)
Scatterometer [wikipedia.org]:
"A radar scatterometer is designed to determine the normalized radar cross section (sigma-0) of the surface. Scatterometers operate by transmitting a pulse of microwave energy towards the Earth's surface and measuring the reflected energy. A separate measurement of the noise-only power is made and subtracted from the signal+noise measurement to determine the backscatter signal power. Sigma-0 is computed from the signal power measurement using the distributed target radar equation.
"The primary application of spaceborne scatterometry has been measurements near-surface winds over the ocean. By combining sigma-0 measurements from different azimuth angles, the near-surface wind vector over the ocean's surface can be determined using a geophysical model function (GMF) which relates wind and backscatter. Scatterometer wind measurements are partiularly useful for monitoring hurricanes. Scatterometer data is being applied to the study of tropical vegetation, soil moisture, polar ice, and global change."
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And here I was thinking it was zoological term for turds.
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Wouldn't a satellite named "QuickScat" be properly used for improvising jazz lyrics?
You're close. It does both. That way the weather forecast is more entertaining. Who doesn't like it when a middle-aged white guy starts belting out "skeep-beep de bop-bop beep bop bo-dope skeetle-at-de-op-de-day! "
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Burt Rutan Called. (Score:2, Funny)
Is it any wonder? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:5, Funny)
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Egypt considers the war on an Arab despot a direct threat to it's own totalitarian regime, and in keeping with it's nationalist rhetoric the local media were all instructed to demonize anything American in this war, and support any force, terrorist or otherwise, against it. The US state department knows and understands this, as the Egyptians need this to heat up the people against a common enemy/"devil" or else lose power.
Saudi is not happy because now they have to protect themse
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I agree that Egypt,Saudi and Kuwait would feel threatened if Iraq and Afghanistan had become democratic countries, the current mess is therefore their win-1. The ousting of Saddam Hussein improved their position in the Arab world, that is win-2.
In other words:
All three countries (and probably many more in the region) are, covertly or openly, very happy to see the neighbourhood bully Saddam Hussein killed, especially when done by a bunch of infidels.
All three cou
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No, it's part of the new policy on global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
And so funding was cut on climate monitoring satelites. Even though we need more monitoring on ocean temperatures and the like to refine computer models. I imagine this was just caught up in it, since ocean temperatures are sorta coorelated with strong hurricanes...
No science is good science!
Opps --- warm waters DO relate to storm intensity (Score:2, Informative)
Now here's the interesting part: the warmer waters given to us by climate change so far haven't actually been also giving us stronger storms. Instead they've been giving us more frequent storms. And so hurricane season actually started several weeks early this year, wherea
Re:Opps --- warm waters DO relate to storm intensi (Score:3, Interesting)
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"is currently not great enough to be measured with the data set we have to measure it against"
We need more data (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.gfdl.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.html [gfdl.gov]
A quick first search turned this one up, and it seems to list all the papers along with dissents.
If you look at section #4, those are the papers I'm thinking of. Dissenters seem to say that our instrumentation isn't accurate(*) and that the data set isn't long enough. Too bad we won't actually put up more and better instrumentation.
(*) There's six hurricane basins to look at. Some sateli
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the claim of the reprimand "taking valuable time away from your public role" indicates,
in my view, that Mary Glackin, who presumably wrote or approved the document, is
corrupted and can no longer function as a useful civil servant. We, the people, need to
find a better person to take over that position. Clearly, warning of failure to maintain the
information gathering apparatus that supports hurricane warning is VERY
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Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:5, Interesting)
The satellites had nothing to do with embarrassing anyone over Katrina. What's embarrassing is that my damn governor refused Federal help and let people die in their homes. Which (combined with the hugely incompetent recovery effort) is why she isn't running for re-election.
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That's not what Heckofajob Brownie says. [foxnews.com]
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Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:5, Informative)
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I actually worked in the government during Katrina and I watched everything happen from the inside. Not only was Federal help not requested, but people showing up to offer help were turned away, including a Flotilla of ~150 boats from my hometown who tried to volunteer to help rescue people off their roofs. They were turned away by the DWF (which makes no sense) and told "
Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry -- Blanco was right, and the Feds were wrong here.
Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks, Ron Obvious!
With NASA's already anemic budget being mostly eaten up by the money pit of the ISS to keep the Russians afloat and NOAA having huge commitments all over the place (Do you know how many programs and areas of responsibility NOAA has? It's staggering.) I imagine Congress just thinks it's cheaper to pay the cost of evacuating more people over the next ten years than pay the large upfront cost for getting a new satellite out NOW. Congress decided it wasn't worth billions of dollars to prepare for a "once in 200 years" event. If it'll only happen once in 200 years, then you can stretch out the monetary damages over that time period as well (in theory). Preparing for a category 5 storm just isn't worth the cost.
They used to feel the same way about terrorist attacks. Then 3000 people got killed, and we've more than doubled the defense budget since then, to $739 billion [slate.com] if you count the yearly emergency funding bills. The comparable figure in 2003 was $480 billion. [msn.com] Meanwhile Katrina killed 1000 people, about 1/3 as long ago. Somehow we didn't react to that one. For FY 2007, NASA's budget was $16.8 billion, and NOAA's was $3.6 billion.
Even according to your own logic (which in principle, I agree with) this is ridiculous. We can afford to replace a weather satellite.
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Even with the warnings and pictures, I was not impressed with the general outlook on the part of the public.
They really had no idea of what was to happen.
Then when Katrina showed up on my doorstep, and the trees came crashing down, cutting off power, all I had left was a scanner, which I hooked up to a car battery. The scanne
Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:5, Insightful)
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SNAFU.
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"The Treasury Department reported Monday that the deficit for the budget year that began Oct. 1 totals $42.2 billion, down 57.2% from the same period a year ago." - Federal deficit shrinks due to record tax collections [usatoday.com]
2/12/2007
"The Treasury Department said that the deficit t
Re:Is it any wonder? (Score:4, Interesting)
No. The fact that there is a deficit at all fits perfectly well with the argument that tax cuts should be rescinded.
If the national debt was zero then that would fit with the argument that taxes overall could be kept at the same level (although it might still be good to shift the tax burden to the very wealthy to deal with the increasing wealth inequality) but you're talking about the deficit here not even the national debt.
If we were talking about the national debt then I would agree that the national debt is so large that it is impossible to pay off the national debt in a single budget year. In that case, it would make sense to talk about the rate at which the national debt was growing or shrinking. On the other hand, when it comes to the deficit, there should be very little inertia. In fact, the average deficit should be negative (i.e. running a surplus on average) with some years running a slight surplus and other years running a slight deficit - we need the surplus to pay off the national debt.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. The fact that the government is running a deficit means that the government is going further into debt. Going further into debt hardly seems like "making money". You may mean that the raw revenues have increased but the raw expenditures have increased even more (or there wouldn't be a deficit).
Anyway, under Clinton the deficit was (depending on your accounting) actually eliminated so, over the long term, the fact that there's a deficit at all makes it hard to claim that the deficit is less now than it was under Clinton. If the deficit had been decreasing ever since Clinton left office then we'd be running a sizable yearly surplus - which would be a good thing because then we'd actually be paying down the national debt.
Trying to create their own reality again, I see... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'''
But, as Ronald Reagan said—quoting John Adams, consciously or unconsciously, without attribution—"facts are stubborn things."
full quote (Score:5, Insightful)
The full John Adams quote (from "Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials"):
The Founding Fathers wisdom FTW!
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Hogwash! What are facts nowadays?
Information on most media is produced by a generation of journalists which learned early in their careers that they may be out of job quickly if they violate an unwritten "code of conduct".
"Facts" are often not brought up for that reason and stay hidden. Actually, pseudo "facts" are created to hide the real one's,
Global Warming (Score:5, Funny)
This is all part of a ploy by the global warming alarmists to show how "crazy" hurricanes are behaving and how meteorologists can no longer predict their path with the accuracy they could in the past. To ensure another Katrina doesn't happy, the Imperial Federal Government will establish behavior guidelines to make sure the citizens are acting in a way that is friendly to our environment.
Shortly after that, Freedom and Liberty are brought out back and shot.
</tin foil hat off>
Boy it's a lovely day outside.
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And, of course. behavior guidelines for citizens will be augmented by behavior guidelines for tropical storms and hurricanes. They will behave or they will be dealt with most harshly. America will not tolerate terrorist behavior by meteorological entities.
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Can someone who knows about hurricane prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
Can someone who knows about hurricane prediction please answer a quick question for me? I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
Where were the media's predictions coming from? Did the hurricane forcasters in the scientific community screw up (i.e. were the scientists really predicting a large hurricane season)? Or did the media just present a one-sided view when really many hurricane forcasters were not predicting anything unusual?
Because if the hurricane forcasting is so off as to generate such predictions as we were heard about 2006, then a decrease in accuracy of 16% probably isn't that serious, is it (they're so far off anyways)?
I'm writing as a layman here.
Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:2, Interesting)
its not there this year, so there is nothing to stop the 2007 being as bad as predicted.
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http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnig ht.6.14.2007.gif [noaa.gov]
Notice the cool (blue anomaly) waters off of the coast of Peru. The water was warmer than normal last year (El Nino) and has now switched to a weak La Nina, which is supposedly favorable for Atlantic hurricane formation. However, current
Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:5, Informative)
AFAICT, that this satellite helps to predict the behavior and path of an individual active hurricane, which would be useful for deciding where and when to post warnings and evacuation orders. That task would have almost nothing in common with forecasting the statistical nature of an overall hurricane season.
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http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/quikscat/ [noaa.gov]
I would agree that the data from the satellite is used to predict the path of individual hurricanes. The season prediction probably wouldn't include real time wind speed data.
Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:5, Interesting)
Firstly, I believe that when it is referring to hurricane forecasts, it is actually referring to hurricane tracking, not predicting the number of hurricanes in the upcoming season. A 16% decrease in the accuracy of hurricane forecasting therefore would result in meteorologists being less sure of the path that a hurricane would take. It's possible it's also referring to the prediction of a storm system being elevated to 'hurricane' status after forming a tropical storm/depression.
Even assuming I am completely wrong (that wouldn't be surprising) and the satellite will be use to help predict hurricane seasons, hopefully the replacement satellite will offer forecasters some new information to help in the future (Not every year's predictions are as off as the 2006 predictions, but if they were, I'd agree with you, a accurcy decreasing by 16% really won't make much of a difference.)
Secondly, while the 2006 hurricane season was grossly overstated [noaa.gov] and scientists really were predicting a record number of hurricanes, you can blame the media for creating a frenzy regarding the results. In any other year, the prediction might have gotten a mention on page 20 of a newspaper, or the science section of CNN.com, but after hurricane Katrina, media outlets jumped at the opportunity for more scaremongering. So I'd say, both are to blame.
One of the important things to realize is that he's not saying the acgency is necessarily underfunded, but that it has the money to easily replace the satellite but it is being used for PR instead.
It looks like they're predicting a record [noaa.gov] number of storms this year too..
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No, The Press is not responsible for bad predictions on the
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Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:5, Informative)
Predicting the number of storms in a season is tricky business. Last year El Nino fired up, which created a situation that suppressed hurricanes. Otherwise the conditions were very good for hurricane development. That hasn't really changed, so this year could see many storms since the El Nino has weakened. But it is possible it will just be an average year.
NOAA's and NASA's earth observing satellite fleets are aging, and replacements are either not in the queue or 8+ years away. Our radar satellites like QuikSCAT and microwave-sensing satellites, both of which are critical for tropical weather monitoring, are past their useful lifetimes with no replacements on deck. This is a problem. One could argue that the problem is funding, and to some degree it is, but another part of the problem is management and a lack of useful oversight by Congress. We are going to lose some of our weather and climate monitoring abilities because we launched a number of research satellites that we came to rely on and then did not make any plans to replace them.
Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:5, Interesting)
The predictions were based on the computer models. In hindsight, they went back and analyzed the atmospheric data and found that there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere, being carried by the prevailing winds. The dust was coming from the sahara. It appears that the dust had the affect of reducing storm intensity. That's the kind of thing that's hard to account for in a model. Especially when it the variables can change significantly from year to year.
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The predictions were based on the computer models. In hindsight, they went back and analyzed the atmospheric data and found that there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere, being carried by the prevailing winds. The dust was coming from the sahara. It appears that the dust had the affect of reducing storm intensity. That's the kind of thing that's hard to account for in a model. Especially when it the variables can change significantly from year to year.
Wait... others here say it was El Nino that kept the hurricanes away. Which is it then? Both? If so, why have I never seen anyone mention both in the same explanation?
Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:4, Interesting)
In short: this is how science works. Multiple hypotheses for the same event simply mean that we don't have a full understanding of what happened. You need more data, which in an experimental science means more experiments. In an observational science that means sitting back and hoping that mother nature will give you something that will validate/invalidate your hypothesis.
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Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:2)
I don't know a hell of a lot about hurricane prediction, but I did hear one expert say that el-nino had a moderating influence on the 2006 hurricane season, and el-nino is wearing off for 2007.
As far as the media is concerned, I wouldn't trust them a lick to report anything regarding science. Global warming has an effect on the long term o
Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:2)
I don't watch the news channels but every time a weather scientist, geologist, biologist or glaciologist is on Science F
Re:Can someone who knows about hurricane predictio (Score:3, Insightful)
It is my opinion, lots of people have played fast and loose, blaming a multitude of things on global warming. GW has become as much a political statement as a scientific one... in fact, it's probably more political right now. If it were pure science you'd have heard more about the positive points of the global warming scenario - whatever they are.
The best info I have seen shows hig
Bush to NASA Admin Michael D. Griffin: (Score:2)
Just before the next hurricane wipes out Miami, probably.
Rob
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What the letter REALLY said (Score:2)
How dare you point out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes!
Now, instead of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on PR, we're going to have to actually keep our mission-critical technology going?
You sir, do NOT know how to properly game the system, and if that isn't bad enough, you're trying to stop us from doing it too?
You shall be punished.
Signed,
Your Boss."
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How dare you point out the fact that the Emperor has no case! You sir, do NOT know how to properly game the system, and if that isn't bad enough, you're trying to stop us from doing it too? You shall be punished.
Signed,
Alberto Gonzales
Funny how little simular those situations look. By funny, I mean sad.
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Also, it is REQUIRED by international law that you have enough fuel onboard to de-orbit your satellite before you run out (basically to clean up after yourself). If they are on borrowed time, it may be that they are betting they can get it out of orbit
Needed Expense? (Score:3, Insightful)
Integrity (Score:5, Insightful)
He'll be fired within a year.
Welcome to Dilbertville (Score:4, Insightful)
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I deal with finance people on a daily basis and it's a nightmare. The last things on their mind is allowing is allowing the money to be used for useful purposes. Indeed, the system is set up t
It is NOT a failing satellite (Score:2, Funny)
16% ???? (Score:2)
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Shame it's not a sleeping satellite (Score:2)
Not the only soon to fall satellite (Score:5, Informative)
The US government regularly under-funds satellites & space systems. You can see this with the huge cost overruns on NPOESS http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive05/NPOESS_1
I am off on a tangent though - Quickscat is a different story. Quickscat was a NASA R&D bird . See http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index
NASA does R&D type of satellites - proof of concepts, risk reduction, etc. We in NESDIS-NOAA often take over running them, or we run their sensors on our satellites. Well, these proof of concept satellites were never intended to be part of a series providing a continual new functionality.
NESDIS/NOAA has two major satellite series that will always (in the future) have spares for:
GOES series http://osd.goes.noaa.gov/ [noaa.gov]
POES series http://www.oso.noaa.gov/poes/ [noaa.gov] (although the newest will be NPOESS via a joint program with DoD replacing our POES and DoD's DMSP)
There is another satellite that is likely to fall soon too - Windsat/Coriolis http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Projects/windsat.html [noaa.gov] While Windsat is technically a Navy satellite, we run that one too, and it has no replacement either. Fortunately, Windsat is more about Navy stuff than it is about Hurricane tracking...
Bill Proenza, as a consumer of NESDIS' satellite data, sees NOAA efforts on the publicity side as being detrimental to the funding of the NOAA-NWS-National Hurricane center funding. Well, for the sake of accuracy, a few million dollars isn't going to fix our funding shortfalls...
Until Congress starts funding new satellite development properly (not like NPOESS) this problem won't go away.
Re:Not the only soon to fall satellite (Score:5, Interesting)
As one of those toilers at JPL who worked on QuikSCAT: The instrument is a copy of one that was being built for a Japanese satellite. It was built in 13 months (hence the Quik) from spares from the one already in process, modified to fit on a commercially available satellite bus (Ball BCP2000) and launched on a surplus obsolete TitanII the AirForce had sitting around. The rush (normal spacecraft development is a 4-5 year process) was because the existing instrument, NSCAT, was on a satellite that failed after 6 months, leaving a big hole in the data, so QuikSCAT would fill in until the Japanese satellite launched and came on line (it launched late, and later failed)
The instrument was designed as part of an effort to collect 10 years or more of continuous data as part of an overall "understand the interactions of air and sea" program. So JPL developed a ground data system oriented towards that need (hosted at PODAAC). As it happens, we also had a real time feed of the data to NOAA (think of a "tee" early in the data pipeline), which, it turns out, has been very useful in the forecast business (back in 1999 and earlier, when this was all being done, people weren't sure it would be useful.. certainly not to the point of kicking in large sums of money to that end..). It took several years for the forecast community to start heavily using QS data (they were justifiably nervous about depending on an experimental satellite that was never intended to run this long...)
QS is actually operated by LASP in Colorado.
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WindSat (Score:2)
No point. (Score:5, Funny)
</snark>
well, here's a solution! (Score:2)
Rack Up Another Win For The Bush Administration (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this administration is letting everything essential rot on the vine while they push war, war, war.
BushCo just does not understand that when the decision is made to "go", it will be years before another satellite can be put in place. They are compromising safety, lives, and disaster response.
It's sad. Very sad.
Tough PR problem with an easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
Now the real problem is ... you can't really address the problem by shooting at something. So that makes it a downright un-American issue.
Now here's what to do about it.
First of all the NOAA has to be brought under the Department of Home Security because that's where the money is nowadays. Secondly, submit a {sizeable} donation to to e.g. the Cato institute or an equivalent, and have them bring together a posse of "intelligence experts", who go on record as being "worried" that hurricanes may be caused by Al-Quaeda, or that Al-Quaeda is somehow taking advantage of them. PR campaigns in the media are optional, but be sure to work the lobby circuit.
Then introduce the number of tracked hurricanes as a DOH success metric. That's important because it's a measurable and *achievable* goal.
Now you've created a win-win situation! The DOH gets a clearly visible and achievable success metric [they haven't got all that many of those], and the NOAA gets the funding to track hurricanes in every part of the globe. Problem solved.
Congressmen Support "Kick Back Retirement" (Score:3, Insightful)
1. 50 years of discussion of the insolvency of Social Security from an actuarial point were and are valid.
2. 50 years of illegal migrants after the bracero program in California, and it & border security is still not solved
3. 35 years of oil supply crisis issues, and still there is not a single interim or long term program from congress
4. 20 years of pulling down the military in various ways has to be looked at from the perspective of the bad guys who change and hide and subvert and move from country to country: The U.S. must remain vigilant and up to date in peace time.
5. The constitution basically said the Federal Government should protect borders, commerce and currency and leave other issue to the states, and Congress is arguably not doing so good on a lot of these accounts (Mexico, foreign spying, China for a start resp.).
QuikScat is valuable (Score:2)
Don't bother us now! (Score:3, Funny)
-NASA
Bush bashing at any cost.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand that Bush-bashing rates +1, cool! rating on Slashdot, let's back up a little.
While I realize it's easier just to assume there is a "darkly-hooded cabal of evil men"(tm) running our government, let's - for a moment - suppose that they are men and women just like you or me, basically rational, basically GOOD people trying to do the best that they can.
Rewind to Katrina: there were PLENTY of warnings, there was an extraordinarily good degree of accuracy in the predictions, and what happened? People blew it off. The human tragedy - no matter what you have to say about Ray Nagin, the city of New Orleans, the governor, etc - was that PEOPLE didn't get out of the hurricane's way *despite* being warned. And what is that? PUBLIC RELATIONS. Clearly, the agency believes, it has a credibility problem (I'd say it's a human-stupidity problem, but that's just me). So THAT'S their priority.
In a land of shortening budgets (and, for the Constitutionally-impaired out there, it's CONGRESS that sets budgets, not the President) everyone has preferences - this guy wants the new satellite, I'm sure other administrators want more staff, others want more ground observation, and all have very good reasons. BUT NOT EVERYONE CAN GET WHAT THEY WANT. And while I very much abhor much of the Republicans' spending priorities in the last 8 years, I don't see the Democrats RACING to correct them, aside from earmarks for their own districts, ie. business as usual.
So this guy, probably with the best of motives, decides he's not got enough traction internally, and takes his story to the sympathetic press who are slavering for any story that shows the "evil cabal at the top is clearly incompetent".
Yeah, I'd reprimand him too.
OK, just go back to your anti-Bush circle jerk, it's probably more fun than thinking.
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AP: "An aging weather satellite crucial to accurate predictions on the intensity and path of hurricanes reportedly could fail at any moment, but plans to launch a replacement have been pushed back seven years to 2016. If the satellite faltered, experts estimate that the accuracy of two-day forecasts could suffe
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They've obviously also expanded the "Cone of Silence"... on their own employees.
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First, just think of a hurricane as a honking big horseshoe holding a handgrenade...
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You mean they updated their forecast - of the future - which they can only predict based on the present - to say it was going to be rainy when it changed, instead of sunny?
Ah, so you mean it made the predictions
Did you actually check and see if they were correct when that day fell as of their last forecast or did you just decide that they must be wrong because they kept changing their mind?
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Lets put aside the obvious question as to how worse hurricane predictions would lead to suppressed climate change knowledge for now...
Many prominent meteorologists (as opposed to climatologists) are critics of global warming alarmists, primarily concerning their claims that recent hurricane seasons are evidence of global warming (and not just a natural cycle of strong hurricane seasons that has come and gone since we first had the technology to monitor the storms). Wouldn't that mean that this vast right
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Please?
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We have eternity to put men in space, so we should first perfect the processes we need to explore and exploit space with robots and supporting systems. We shouldn't NEED people to do anything but be passengers whe we get it right.