President John F. Kennedy in his historic message to a joint session of the Congress, on May 25, 1961 declared, “…I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” By NASA (Great Images in NASA Description) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Bob Walker, senior campaign adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, has re-affirmed Trump’s commitment to NASA focussing on space exploration, by stating that NASA’s Earth Science Division would be stripped of funding as part of a Trump crackdown on “Politicized Science”.
Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding as the president-elect seeks to shift focus away from home in favor of deep space exploration.
…
Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.
“We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.
“My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing Nasa programs but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies. I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing. Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”
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Climate scientists at other organizations expressed dismay at the potential gutting of Earth-based research.
Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be “a major setback if not devastating”.
“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.
“We live on planet Earth and there is much to discover, and it is essential to track and monitor many things from space. Information on planet Earth and its atmosphere and oceans is essential for our way of life. Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.”
…
I remember growing up, reading science fiction authors like Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelleand Michael Flynn, about the great battles for funding, about how Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) did everything in his power to kill American space research.
His reason for doing so? Like Climate Scientist Kevin Trenberth, Senator Proxmire believed Space exploration was an unnecessary luxury, a waste of taxpayer’s funds. Proxmire wanted to strip the NASA budget to fund welfare programmes.
I never imagined back then that the true enemy of NASA’s original deep space mission would strike from within, slowly eating away an ever increasing share of NASA’s internal space budget like a raging parasitic infection, leaving the original shell intact, but quietly transforming NASA from a space exploration agency into a glorified weather programme.
Perhaps Trump will make NASA great again.
Correction (EW): h/t South River Independent, Jon von Briesen – Senator Proxmire was D-Wisconsin, not D-Illinois, he was born in Illinois.
Related
Lame Duck EPA Chief : “Trump can’t halt U.S. shift to clean energy”… While the Swamp Draining Gets Underway
At first glance, I thought she was flipping the bird at the camera.
Energy and Environment
EPA chief: Trump can’t halt U.S. shift to clean energy
By Brady Dennis November 21
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday gave an impassioned defense of the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policies and insisted the nation’s shift from fossil fuels will continue no matter who occupies the White House.
“The inevitability of our clean energy future is bigger than any one person or one nation,” Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a speech at the National Press Club that was twice interrupted by protesters.
[…]
“Science tells us that there is no bigger threat to American progress and prosperity than the threat of global climate change,” she said. “And if you take nothing else from my speech today, take this: The train to a global, clean-energy future has already left the station. We have a choice. We can choose to get on board, to lead. Or we can choose to be left behind.”
[…]
“Science tells us that there is no bigger threat to American progress and prosperity than the threat of global climate change”… Good fracking grief!!!
Can you say delusional?
The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale University, which has the highest climate costs of the Obama administration’s three models, estimates that global GDP in 2100 without climate change would be $510 trillion. That’s 575 percent higher than in 2015. The cost of climate change, the model estimates, will amount to almost 4 percent of GDP in that year. But the remaining GDP of $490 trillion is still 550 percent larger than today. Without climate change, DICE assumes average annual growth of 2.27 percent. With climate change, that rate falls to 2.22 percent; at no point does climate change shave even one-tenth of one point off growth. Indeed, by 2103, the climate-change-afflicted world surpasses the prosperity of the not-warming 2100.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442383/donald-trump-climate-change
Setting aside the facts that the Social Cost of Carbon is 100% mythical and that neither 2.27% nor 2.22% growth are paths to prosperity (2% growth is basically treading water). We’re supposed to gleefully spend $44 trillion over the next couple of decades based on a statistically insignificant difference between two rolls of the DICE?
Even with U.S. “leadership,” the commitments made by other countries under the Paris agreement look almost identical to the paths those countries were on already. Thus the agreement’s impact is at best a few tenths of a degree Celsius. MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, for instance, projected 3.9°C of warming by 2100 without the Paris agreement and 3.7°C with it.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442383/donald-trump-climate-change
If Ms. McCarthy defines “prosperity” as the difference between 2.27% and 2.22% GDP growth, she is fracking delusional.
If Ms. McCarthy thinks that our salvation from the “threat of global climate change” rests on the difference between 3.7°C and 3.9°C from 1850-2100, she is delusional… Particularly since almost all of the actual observation-based data indicate that the total warming in a “business as usual” scenario will be no more than 2°C from 1850-2100.
This bit is priceless…
“The train to a global, clean-energy future has already left the station. We have a choice. We can choose to get on board, to lead. Or we can choose to be left behind.”
“The train to a global, clean-energy future” is the tiny green “hockey stick” at the bottom of the graph. It runs mostly on corporate welfare and the “train” literally “can’t get there from here”…
Despite the investment of over $1 trillion of private capital and billions in corporate welfare since 2008, wind and solar have actually grown at a slower pace than natural gas and are projected to have a slower growth rate through 2040. Renewables, including hydroelectric, have barely gotten back to where they were in 1930.
Draining the Swamp
The swamp draining can’t begin soon enough. This will be a good start:
Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.
This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bn next year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.
Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.
“We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.
[…]
Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be “a major setback if not devastating”.
“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.
[…]
“Without the support of Nasa, not only the US but the entire world would be taking a hard hit when it comes to understanding the behavior of our climate and the threats posed by human-caused climate change,” he said.
[…]
Hopefully President Trump’s first budget will zero out some of this…
Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. As shown in figure 1, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has reported federal climate change funding in three main categories since 1993:
- technology to reduce emissions,
- science to better understand climate change, and
- international assistance for developing countries.
