NASA Slashing Observations of Earth 358
mattnyc99 points us to a new report by the National Research Council warning that, by 2010, the number of NASA's Earth-observing missions will drop dramatically, and the number of operating sensors and instruments on NASA spacecraft will decrease by 40 percent. The report says, "The United States' extraordinary foundation of global observations is at great risk." Popular Mechanics asks an MIT professor what it all means. From these accounts it is clear that the Bush administration's priorities on a Mars mission and a moon base are partly to blame for the de-emphasizing of earth science. Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming.
Prioritites people (Score:0, Insightful)
when a country spends 500 billion a year on the military (more than the rest of the world combined spends) and 8 billion a month on killing^Wliberating people in a foreign land while their own people starve in New Orleans its quite clear where a nations priorities lie and Space and the advancement of the Human race comes way down the list
i wonder how long it will take after this regime has gone to recover from the damage, methinks it will be several decades if ever at this rate
shame, no really a damm shame
nice troll, smitty (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we mark a submission, as -1, Unnecessary Trolling?
Slashdot tipping over (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention troll bait (but just the fact that certain words ARE troll bait should tell you something) but global warming is just one of them. why is this a Michael Crichton (the Harvard-educated scientist who wrote Coma, Jurassic Park and A State Of Fear, among other things) vs Al Gore (inventor of the Internet) battle? If we're scientists, where is our skepticism? For that matter, where are our manners? Are we unwilling to admit that we might be incorrect?
(..Wait, I forgot. Sorry. Please don't revoke my geek card.)
What I really don't understand is why all the surprisingly non-geek-oriented but heavily political stories are appearing on Slashdot.org. Anyway, back to finishing my TPS reports..
Re: nice troll, smitty (Score:2, Insightful)
> Can we mark a submission, as -1, Unnecessary Trolling?
Unfortunately, it's hard for reasonable people to avoid considering the proposition.
This is the administration that forbade the tour guides at the Grand Canyon from mentioning how old is is, lest they offend creationists.
Personally I think the Moon/Mars mission decision was an attempt to construct a legacy. But like I said, I can't very well prevent the other explanation from crossing my mind.
NY Times @ Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Must editorial opinions mark every bit of tech news here on Slashdot? Maybe Andrew Rosenthal should be granted an editorial position here at
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
Clinton was right in refusing to sign Kyoto. It was basically a bill that punishes the first world for pollution, while the worst offenders get a free pass.
Everyone sane realizes that global warming is happening, but the problem is the solution seems to be to cripple the first world, without also holding the poorer countries (who are the ones eating our manufacturing sector lunch due to lax work/environmental laws) to any sort of standard. That is why I am convinced that global warming will not be really addressed without some sort of global govt (which will never happen). No matter what the first world does, there will always be some country offering a free pass on environmental/work laws, and corporations that need to pollute/abuse workers will flock there. And the more countries that try to stop that, the more powerful the financial incentive for a country to break tghe "cartel" of countries bound by environmental law. And if you are expecting the UN to do anything about it....well, im sure you can count on a strongly worded letter.
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to start by saying that these stories, when posted with summaries like the one above, should be moderated flamebait, or perhaps tagged flamewar for those with tagging abilities.
I've noticed a general shift to the right across society as a whole. Political groups that used to be happy to be seen as left wing are now trying to appear centrist and shrug off the "liberal" tag while groups that once were right wing are now openly fascist in character, if not in name. Once upon a time, insisting on the rule of law was seen as right wing, but now it's considered pinko liberal lefty hippy homo crap to suggest that members of the US administration should be tried as war criminals, for example, becuase they are in power and those in power are the winners who should not be questioned. Might is right and all. Go figure.
So I wonder if the apparent left wing bias on /. is because /.ers are still mostly balanced while the surrounding political climate is changing.
Re:no wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to buy an acquisition from DigitalGlobe? Do you have $10,000? If you have more questions, read the NRC report itself:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11820
or read about NASA's current Earth science research:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
I would rather have other countries show us how it's done rather than tell us how it should be done, but it seems rather unlikely. If they try and fail, they can get laughed at, but if they tell us to try and we fail, they can laugh at us.
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot Parents Ends with Flamebait (Score:3, Insightful)
Inappropriate ideological sniping. That is a stated opinion on a highly disputed theory among experts in the field, not science.
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:2, Insightful)
Teenagers have flocked to the Internet because it is assumed that they can mask their immaturity in a seemingly objective arena. Slashdot, being a techy site, and therefore supposedly even more objective, attracts a large amount of adolescents.
Growing up in a family where parents of the sixties refuse to raise their kids properly, the parents selfish wants and needs create a socialistic attitude, where the kids get what they want for free and are screamed at at intervals.
This being their only knowledge, they apply it elsewhere--Leftist/Socialistic leanings--which are prized by other kids like them.
As a result, slashdot has tipped to the left. Not so much because the conservatives have left, but because its popularity has dragged in a young crew, and instead of smacking them until they recognize reality, it caters to their immature attitudes.
When they grow up and get jobs about half of them will become conservatives, unfortunately, more kiddies will take their erstwhile place.
Re:A huge waste of taxpayers money? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think handing that money over to Congress will lead to anything tangible for you or I.
Second, think about the peripheral benefits of everything NASA has done, not just the pretty pictures. Subtract the Voyager probes. The science section at Barnes and Noble is a whole lot thinner ehh? How many books have been published, how many scientists have been educated, how many television shows have been produced based on what those two probes discovered? Suddenly, we know virtually nothing about the moons of Saturn and I don't get to wonder if there is life under the seas of Europa.
Subtract some rocket science that was pioneered by NASA and the Soviets during the space race. Perhaps your cell phone can't call Australia anymore, hurricanes give us less warning and HBO does not have quite as many options. I doubt private industry would be quite so far along in communication satellite technology were it not for the feasibility of such demonstrated by NASA.
Subtract some planetary and atmospheric science regarding Venus. The Global Warming theory suddenly has holes in it's foundation and we couldn't have half the arguments we do on Slashdot.
Subtract Hubble. Suddenly the official stance of the Vatican's is that we are at the center of the universe, we have a few million less interesting web pages and my desire to learn more and educate myself regarding astronomy are greatly diminished.
Despite NASA's budget being slashed and despite their priorities being subject to the whims of politicians, they've done quite well in educating and inspiring all of us who care to pay attention.
Bandwagon posts are just annoying (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead of using the logic of "10 million lemmings must be right", global warming advocates would do well in looking at the underlying scientific knowledge instead. The measurements are scientific and wholly honest for the most part, but the popular interpretations are not scientific at all, and should be ignored by those who value science above advocacy and social posturing.
There is a very wierd popular meme that the fact that a large number of scientists *THINK* that there is a substantive correlation between CO2 levels and the melting ices indicates that there actually *IS* a causal effect. Well, science doesn't work that way. The number of adherents to an interpretation has absolutely no bearing on science, despite the popular feeling that "it must be right".
The simple fact is that the various intrepretations are all within the same error bounds, and manmade CO2 has been demonized for no good scientific reason at all, mainly because of lack of alternatives it seems. Well that's just not good enough. The real demon is our lack of knowledge about what's going on. Blaming CO2 doesn't absolve us.
Anyone who is still wholly convinced by the CO2 agit prop ought to take a look through Earth's history, back to a time when the CO2 levels were hundreds of times what they are now, and yet the Earth was a solid block of ice.
That's one important piece of evidence to the contrary, but when it comes to science, there is a vastly more important issue to consider, and it has nothing to do with observations.
Science is based on mathematical models that are the basis of our theories, and the use of hypotheses derived from those theories by which the theories can be tested. Well, in climatology, those theories are embodied in computational models, our many Global Climate / Circulation Models (GCMs) --- and not a single one of those GCMs predicts the extreme temperature oscillations between glacial and inter-glacial periods that have been occurring with total regularity every 100,000 years over the recent million years of Earth's history.
When the theory doesn't match observations, then the theory is wrong. Yet, people are basing their predictions about the effect of manmade CO2 on those blatantly non-working models.
Well sorry, but that's scientifically invalid.
I have no personal axe to grind either way, being just an observer with a good scientific background. But I take great exception to science being used to underpin political agendas (in either direction) when it is not yet able to model even the most large-scale parameters of climate. That's not science.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
1) Clinton signed Kyoto. [whereistand.com]
2) The worst offendors are first world countries (like US, the worst polluter & Australia, the worst per-capita polluter)
3) India/China are not projected to reach the US's level of greenhouse gas contribution for 20 years. Per Capita equivilance is even further away.
4) Kyoto wasn't supposed to be a solution - it was supposed to be a first step. Anyone thinking otherwise is deluded.
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:4, Insightful)
This should be hilarious. The total sum of Al Gore's formal education consists in getting a Bachelor of Arts degree in government from Harvard (and not completing a law degree at Vanderbilt). Al Gore is even less qualified to talk about climate science than Michael Crichton (who at least has had formal training in experimental analysis while getting a medical degree at Harvard).
Neither of them has a degree in the physical sciences and nothing they say should be taken as knowledge interpreted by a scientist. I don't care how far you want to twist it, a MD and a BA in government do not make you even remotely qualified to discuss climate change. Why the world has focused on these unqualified 'spokesmen' to be cheerleaders for their differing sides of the global warming debate is beyond me.
Its clear? (Score:4, Insightful)
"From these accounts it is clear that the Bush administration's priorities on a Mars mission and a moon base are partly to blame for the de-emphasizing of earth science. Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming."
A quick glance reveals that one article never mentions Bush by name, the other only in that they are calling for more emphasis on global warming research and that real scientists (not /. scientist wannabes) are happy they really are funding the Mars missions.
What is this, really? The New York Times (not exactly known to have a major conservative slant) doesn't bash Bush so instead the /. article has to insert in a completely unsupported accusation?
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is, Kyoto was a *start of a long process, which America has successfully sabotaged, mostly because the US government hasn't got the balls to try and persuade it's country to stop running SUVs and the like. With America, we'd probably have some kind of working process and maybe, like with CFCs, some sort of handle on the problem. Without America, we cannot persuade nations like China or India to start reining it on it's pollution.
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
Once the rest of the world decides to treat the decisions of the US as that of a sovereign state then they can possibly get the US into the debate again. Calling Americans idiots and SUV drivers will do exactly the opposite. The rest of the world complains that the US isn't listening, but they aren't either. It might just be that with a population density of about 30 people per square kilometer, effects like Kyoto on transportation will hurt the US drastically more than European countries which have population densities typically four times higher. Do I expect Europe to listen to this little tidbit? No. Nor do I expect the US to listen to Europeans offering their advice after their taunting and harassment.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bush-bashing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:5, Insightful)
And Michael Crichton's books, though they sell well, are not scientifically valid. That is pretty well-known. Medical Doctors, even Harvard MDs, are not automatic authorities on every scientific subject on the planet. Crichton is not a climatologist, and I'm fairly sure you were aware of that seemingly obvious fact. Would you take your local proctologist's word about quantum mechanics? Is your dermatologist a reliable authority on string theory?
When it comes to climatology, you might want to look at what the climatologists have been saying--and they've been saying for decades that humans are contributing significantly to global warming. Are you saying that all the climatologists are wrong about climatology, but Michael Crichton, Harvard M.D., really set the record straight in his fictional novel?
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:5, Insightful)
How strange. Seems the opposite to me.
Every story that mentions India, for instance, evinces a swarm of racist and jingoistic posts, many modded "insightful". Every article mentioning the word "evolution" gets hundreds of posts advocating creationism. Every article mentioning guns draws a bunch of gun rights advocates.
Perhaps the anonymous poster means there's more criticism of GW Bush. Well, there's more to criticise. Regardless of your political leanings, the one thing that unites most commentators is that GWB has royally fucked up everything he's touched.
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:3, Insightful)
o advocate individual responsibility for individual actions
o support government limited to its Constitutional powers
o take a positive view of legal firearms ownership
o want a strong national defense
o insist on the rule of law
and many other points of view which have generally been considered conservative.
It's the meaning of the word "conservative" that has drifted.
>What I really don't understand is why all the surprisingly non-geek-oriented but heavily political stories are appearing on Slashdot.org.
Either because they create page views or because government is the ultimate machine and we care that it's malfunctioning.
How many sensors DO you need for THAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
So it seems to me that to keep plotting that you don't even need one single space mission. You just need to take the temperatures from all those meteorology stations all over the world, take an average, plot it. How can the big oil stop you from doing that? No, seriously. I'm curious. And even if you need data from meteo satellites, why do you need NASA there? By now there are enough sensors up there to forecast the weather, which starts by telling you exactly what is happening with the weather right now. (Forecasting then just feeds that into a model and tries to predict what will happen tomorrow.) How can the big oil stop you from using data from those?
I'm sure there must be some other science data that we're going to miss, maybe even for modelling the atmospheric phenomena, maybe even something that might help understand better _how_ that global warming is or isn't happening. But stop you from collecting the evidence? How would they possibly do that, anyway? Shoot every single meteorologist on Earth, or what? Bear in mind that that doesn't only include the mouthpieces presenting the weather forecast on TV. The Air Force in every country, for example, is extremely interested in the weather too, because their air missions depend on it. Plus a lot of other commercial and government stuff. Even if you shot all meteorologists, the air force and governments and everyone else will just train more, because they really need that data.
That's what annoys me about conspiracy theories, including the trolling in the submission: they propose that the big bad conspiracy is doing something impossible, pointless and stupid to even try.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most time there is any serious scientific conference on the matter, it seems that the concern is getting larger and larger. Most climatologists believe that anthropogenic global warming is a huge threat to society and which needs to be acted on urgently. All evidence seems to be pointing clearly in one direction.
There have been a few changes in regional climate patterns in the past thousand years, but it seems that CO2 levels are higher than ever, and we already seem to be experiencing some of the effects, which are only the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the numbers and predictions, we are headed for one heck of climate change.
And it is true that the climate changes naturally, although very slowly, and there have been large climate changes in the past. What we also know is that it sucks to be alive when it happens. Mass extinctions and huge land desertification may be comfortable when it happened to dinosaurs millions of years ago, but I would like to prevent it if I can.
Obviously there are a lot of groups who stand to lose out if the government were to enforce controls on emissions, so there is much resistance, and the article you cited is from an unqualified organisation with the specific goal of "debunking" global warming. There is a huge industry based around this denialism, and it would be very dangerous to simply believe anything called a "paper" by an organisation with a name like "global warming research" or similar, that is meant to give people with little knowledge of the academic world a belief of authority or qualification.
Have a quick look at this [guardian.co.uk] and do a text search for "Seitz", the man on the front page of the site you linked to. Read the next few paragraphs after that, it should be a little revealing.
Basically, anybody with a degree, it didn't matter if they had anything to to with climatology, was invited to sign a petition, which he then presented as proof that the scientific community didn't see global warming as a problem.
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want the same answer for all time, stick with religion. Science is a process by which we learn about the world around us. Science's best answer 30+ years ago was different than it is now, because now they have more data, better models, better computers, etc. It's also called "learning," meaning that your knowledge changes. A system that doesn't learn and improve isn't very useful. If you're going to distrust the best answer science has because they might revise it sometime in the future, turn off your computer, turn off all the lights in your house, and never take medicine again. Don't drive a car or use chemically sanitized water or food.
Scientific analysis is always provisional, but that provisional, groping, slow, fallible process gave you all of those things, and you damned sure shouldn't trust them. Only religion gives certitudes. If you don't trust science, then don't trust the fruits of science. By their fruits shall ye know them, and all of that.
From where I'm standing, science seems dependable, and really the only somewhat reliable, if ultimately fallible, system we have for finding out about the world. I know the response is usually "we should do absolutely nothing until we know absolutely everything," but there is a point past which skepticism is just arrogance and bullheadedness. The preponderance of the evidence is too overwhelming to reject, and the price is too high to ignore.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot tipping over (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly, yes, science has been wrong in the past. It will no doubt be wrong again. It's a human endeavor, limited by the nature of our perception, instruments, data, mortality, intelligence, and so on. Good luck living without medication, electricity, airplanes, sanitation, and all those other things that this undependable, ideology-laden worldview has saddled us with. If only they were infallible, we could trust them! Oh, what to do!?!
Oh, screw it. I'm throwing caution to the wind. Science gave me air conditioning and antibiotics, so I'm just siding with them. If global warming is the best that science has come up with today, then I'm going with science. Just as soon as there's another show in town that shows itself even remotely as capable at finding out about the world around us and validating those findings via experiment and, well, lasers and spaceships, then I'll reconsider my alleigance. I'd like to know how you fare without science (you can be the control in our little experiment), but since you won't be using this internet-thingy (electrons are a theory, don't ya know, and they've been wrong before) so I guess you'll just have to send a genie to let me know how you got on.
Gore isn't posing as an expert like Crichton is (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally. (Score:2, Insightful)
You are behind the times. (Score:5, Insightful)
The really critical questions relate to the mechanics of climate change. Questions about the magnitude and nature of human contributions to climate change vs natural factors. Having even marginally better answers to these questions is of immense public value, because they bear on policy questions with massive economic impact. For example, changing our use of fossil fuel even slightly would probably cost far more than the sum total of these missions. It follows that it would be good to know what precise impact of a marginal unit of change in petroleum use would be. It may be the optimal change would be zero (there is no chance of affecting anything), or it may be that we should reduce our use of petroleum considerably, until the net economic impact of slowed climate change equals the net cost of fossil fuel reduction.
In order to address these policy questions, we need climate models. The climate models are useful to the degree they are appropriately calibrated and tested. The most economical way to do that is with your space program.
Derek Bok once said, "If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance." Environmental research is educating ourselves on how the planet works. Thus, if you think monitoring the Earth is expensive, you will find that not monitoring the Earth is much, much more expensive. Suppose the truth is that the Earth is getting dramatically warmer, but there is nothing we can do about it. As sea levels rise, inundating lower lying areas, as breadbasket regions become arid, as Europe starts to become very cold, there will be politically impossible not to do something about it. The conclusion the populace will draw is that the change is purely anthropogenic, and whether or not that is true there will be irresistable pressure to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped. Thus we will compound the tremendous impact of climate change with futile but very costly effort to fix the problem.
No -- more knowledge is better than less. In this case, it is hard to think of a better bargain than a tiny fraction of the GDP spent on remote sensing missions.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it'd be more accurate to say there's no way to convince most countries to do things that are against their own self-interest. That's simply logic at work - why agree to do something you think will be a net harm to your nation? The challenge is in persuading the numerous countries of the world to agree that A) something is indeed a problem for them, and B) a given solution will be effective and fair.
Item A is hard enough. B is even harder. Hence our problems herding cats at the UN.
I am not quite as skeptical about our chances of addressing global warming. If global warming is truly as dire as Al Gore and company claim, nations should start to feel the impact over time and become more motivated to deal with it. They won't deal with it as quickly as they should, and the solutions will be more painful because of the delay, but that lack of long-term vision seems to be the rule in politics.
Just look at the Social Security mess in the United States - we've known the system is heading for ruin if we do nothing, but yet we do nothing because nobody's feeling the pain yet. When taxes start skyrocketing to cover the increased costs, then I think we'll see action. But not until the politicians' jobs are at stake.
Worship Credentials Much? (Score:3, Insightful)
There was a time that people we're allowed to spout out ideas that the Church opposed, and only the Church could approve ideas, and only the Church chose who was in the Church. This period of time is generally considered to have been bad for human advancement and is called the Dark Ages.
We now have the Academy, and only people allowed by the Academy are allowed to question science. The Academy controls who gets the credentials.
As Climatology coalesced around global warming, how willing to fund and approve PhD research that questions it happens. It's wonderful to say that scientists want the truth, which is true in the abstract, but at the individual level, academics want to publish, because publishing gets them tenure. To publish, they do research, which requires funding, which requires grants.
The Academy has become one giant mess of group-think. Also, while current PhD students may enter the program out of a love of science, the previous generation entered out of a love of draft deferments, which is why you have a collection of leftists professors (the few conservative professors out there would be considered liberal Democrats or liberal Republicans, depending on the state) there to collect checks, ride out their time, and be embittered that there school chums outside make more money than them because they didn't waste their time chasing a tenured professor track. Read Philip Greenspun's essay [greenspun.com] on the economics of the university and how it enforces the gender divide.
Those that are doing political incorrect research are outside the Academy, often at industry jobs, and are attacked as being on the payroll of corporations. Never-mind that University professors are on the payroll of government bureaucrats or non-profits, non of which are neutral opinions. Both fields attract a combination of incompetents and do-gooders that love to spend other people's money on themselves... ask anyone good that works in non-profits, they want to pull their hair out.
Stop elevating science to a religion, with challenge-proof dogma. Scientific inquiry MUST stand on the merits of the data and strength of arguments, not the credentials of those giving it.