Will Trump Scrap NASA’s Climate Research Mission?
Credit: NASA
NASA does more than explore other planets; it studies our own.
Agency scientists worry Donald Trump will abort the work.
by Andrew Revkin
ProPublica, Dec. 12, 2016, 8 a.m.
The wonders of NASA 2014 Mars rovers, astronaut Instagram feeds, audacious missions probing distant galactic mysteries 2014 have long enthralled the American public. And, it turns out, the accomplishments have won the agency the public’s trust: Polls have consistently shown NASA to be the second-most trusted government institution, behind only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The public, however, probably has less appreciation for the work NASA has done on its home planet. NASA’s $2-billion-a-year earth-science program has long tracked global-scale environmental conditions on Earth, including climate change.
But with the election of Donald Trump, there was immediate concern 2014 inside NASA and among the fans of its valued work on global warming 2014 about the future of the agency’s earth-science program. Within hours of Trump’s acceptance speech on Nov. 9, an internal email from a senior official in the Earth Sciences division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center circulated within NASA acknowledging worry that “funding may now be exposed to severe reductions.”
The last month is not apt to have eased that alarm.
Trump’s most visible advisor on space policy has been Bob Walker, a former House Science committee chairman who is now a space-policy lobbyist pressing to move “Earth-centric” and “heavily politicized” climate science out of NASA altogether. And Christopher Shank, who was chosen by Trump to lead the transition at NASA, is a seasoned strategist who has expressed strong skepticism about the severity of global warming.
Should Trump come to take a dim view of NASA’s research on climate change, he’s likely to have no shortage of support in Congress. The last few years have seen intensifying moves against the Obama administration’s investments in climate science in hearings led by the Texas Republicans Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Lamar S. Smith, whose views on NASA and climate parallel those of Walker 2014 built around the notion that NASA needs to focus on outer space, not back on Earth.
As Smith put it in 2015, “There are 13 other agencies involved in climate-change research, but only one that is responsible for space exploration.”
NASA’s Earth Science Division, if less well known to the public, has regularly seen its budget fluctuate with turnover in the White House. Under Ronald Reagan, there were substantial investments in what was then called the Earth Observing System. George H.W. Bush, building on a 1987 report by astronaut Sally Ride, funded a program that came to be known as the “Mission to Planet Earth.”
George W. Bush reversed course, and reduced resources for the program (his administration was eventually exposed for trying to suppress NASA research on global warming). Most recently, though, the division’s budget was greatly restored by Barack Obama. A core argument of Walker and congressional critics of NASA earth science, that budgets have ballooned and reduced resources for other NASA science programs, has no basis, said Arthur Charo, who has tracked NASA science budgets for the Standing Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space of the nongovernmental National Academy of Sciences.
He said a careful look at programs, adjusting for inflation, shows no evidence of such a pattern. “There is a mythology that earth science has undergone dramatic growth and that this growth has occurred at the expense of other divisions in the Science Mission Directorate,” he said. “Both assertions are false.”
The Trump transition office declined requests for interviews and Walker did not reply to email messages.
Piers J. Sellers is the director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the former astronaut is a climate scientist himself. ProPublica spoke with him recently. Sellers declined to discuss the politics surrounding NASA during a presidential transition, but said the agency has a unique position in the world in clarifying global environmental risks and that part of its mission deserves support.
“We’re doing our best to provide the least dangerous options to getting from here to a safe future,” he said. “That’s our job as U.S. government scientists. NASA has the greatest capability to see what’s going on and has a pretty strong capability to model what’s going on into the future, as well.”
Some of NASA’s most vital earth-science work has been done at a tiny climate research hub, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The center occupies the upper floors of a century-old building in upper Manhattan best known for Tom’s Restaurant, the cash-only corner diner famed because its façade was featured in the sitcom “Seinfeld.”
The institute was led for decades by James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who stepped ahead of most peers in the hot summer of 1988, famously telling a Senate panel it was “99 percent certain” that human-generated greenhouse gases were driving global warming. A decade ago, Hansen defied muzzling efforts during the George W. Bush administration and irked defenders of fossil fuels with his warnings of calamitous warming. He retired in 2013 to focus on activism aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases linked to warming.
The institute has produced one of the four most important records of global temperature trends and, under Hansen’s successor as director, the TED-talking, Twitter-savvy climatologist Gavin A. Schmidt, has continued to refine climate simulations and communicate warnings about unabated warming.
Schmidt declined to be interviewed for this story, citing what he described as selective quoting in recent coverage of possible threats to earth science under the Trump administration. But he’s shown no signs of dread in his personal Twitter flow, on Thursday night posting this provocative two-parter:
It’s as if they really believe that the science is ordered up by politicians & changes as often as their principles.Newsflash: It doesn’t
2014 Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) December 9, 2016
On Wednesday, in an appearance at a space law conference in Washington, D.C., Walker, Trump’s advisor, stuck with his vision of stripping “Earth-centric” science out of NASA and “transferring the programs, lock, stock and barrel, to another agency,” according to an article by Jeff Foust in Space News.
It could be argued that the core work done at Goddard 2014 particularly its climate modeling 2014 is redundant, for the United States has two other major climate modeling centers, and there are more than 30 worldwide. But Richard Betts, the head of the climate impacts division at Britain’s Met Office, said in an interview that the Goddard Institute’s modeling stands out because of NASA scientists’ longstanding familiarity with the information coming from NASA-built satellites.
Decades ago, John R. Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, co-developed with NASA a method for tracking the temperature of the lower atmosphere from satellites, cutting out some of the uncertainties that come with surface measurements. He has long held skeptical views on the severity of global warming, and has been a featured witness of Republicans resisting steps to cut greenhouse gases. But in an interview Thursday, Christy expressed concern about plans to move Earth-focused science out of NASA.
“NASA has a very good track record of putting things in space that work, and that provide data,” he said. “NASA does that soup to nuts kind of work.” He added, “Undoing that would be disruptive to the mission we have of trying to characterize the planet with as much accuracy as we can.”
He also noted that, with or without human-caused global warming, from California to sub-Saharan Africa, the forces driving megadroughts and other climate-system threats are still poorly understood. “There’s so much that needs to be known and the perspective from space is just absolutely essential,” he said.
What happens to NASA next?
In his victory speech on Nov. 9, Trump pledged to listen to people with differing views, so perhaps he’ll reach out beyond Walker in weighing next steps for NASA to people like David Titley, a retired Navy rear admiral and former Oceanographer of the Navy, who has written a comprehensive overview of the value NASA earth science provides to society, including to national security.
Or perhaps he could turn to former President George W. Bush. While funding for NASA earth science dropped on his watch, his administration’s 2006 NASA Strategic Plan made clear that NASA was an appropriate venue for such research: “Earth science is science in the national interest. While scientific discovery from space is inherent in the Agency’s mission, NASA’s programs in earth science also are central.”
Sellers, in the email to his Earth Sciences Division team a month ago, managed to summon some confidence, even defiance.
“We have an excellent record of achievements and can make a solid case for stable support,” wrote Sellers (his email was provided to ProPublica by someone else at NASA).
“We will never give up on this.”
Correction, Dec. 12, 2016: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Piers Sellers as the director of NASA’s Earth Science division. He is the director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
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14 responses to “Will Trump Scrap NASA’s Climate Research Mission?”
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if so, then he would be a real idiot, WRT OCO-3.
The big issue with CO2 numbers is that they come from different sources depending on the nation.
For example, for America, it is almost 100% measured here.
Europe is a mixture of measurements combined with gov. giving up data.
China is almost 100% based on what their gov says. The reason is that they prohibit nearly all measurements and for the few outsiders that were allowed in, they were required to sign all sorts of documents saying that they would NOT release the information outside of China. And how many of these work with IPCC? NONE.
Not a ONE. So, nobody on the ‘official’ numbers knows what is really going on inside of CHina.
That is why we need sat measurements esp. OCO3.
OCO-2 PROVES that CHina emits more than 6x as much CO2 as America does. However, its weakness is that it only shows RELATIVE amounts. Worse, we really can not see the flow of CO2 with it.
OCO-3, unlike OCO-2, is capable of showing ABSOLUTE amounts of CO2 emissions. In addition, with it and Japan’s coming new CO2 sat, we can see flows of CO2 in/out of regions.
Basically, OCO-3 will be refuted by IPCC (esp. since it will be refuting their numbers), HOWEVER, it, like OCO-2, which IPCC also has issues with, measures all nation’s in the same WAY. IOW, fairly.
None of the others have the sats capabilities of NASA. In addition, work that NASA does on sat measurement is then able to be applied to other planets so that we understand what is going on.
This is highly misleading.
Walker and others are proposing to cut NASA’s Earth Science program. There is no intention whatsoever to move it.
Move is precisely what Walker said at COMSTAC,
http://spacenews.com/nasa-e…
“In general, what I’d say is a lot of these missions that NASA is now doing are probably more appropriately done by NOAA,” Walker said at the COMSTAC meeting last month. “There would have to be some budget adjustments in order for NOAA to assume those kinds of responsibilities.”
They use the term, they pretend that it’s about “efficiency” or “focus” or similar garbage, but people have followed up with the advocates and none of them are actually proposing moving the actual NASA programs to NOAA. Even Walker’s careful phrasing doesn’t actually commit to moving the existing programs, only that these are the kinds of “responsibilities” that NOAA should be doing.
And those actually in Congress have stated explicitly that they don’t intend to increase NOAA’s funding. (The opposite is likely.) Even though they still use the same kinds of phrasing for the media, when pressed their offices have stated that they intend no new funding for NOAA and no transfer of funding.
They are eyeing the $2b/yr Earth-Science budget at NASA to throw at missions for SLS/Orion. That wouldn’t be the case if they were planning to simply move the directorate.
There’s a synergy in having the people who study and model the atmosphere’s of other planets in the same agency as ones who study this planet.
(Also, again, no-one is actually proposing to move NASA’s Earth Science Directorate to another agency, they want to cut it. Talking about “focus” and “other agencies” is simple misdirection. Those other agencies will be under similar attack by the people making this proposal.)
No matter what Mr T and his cabinet say or believe, Earth is a planet, ignoring it while focusing on others is silly at best. Sending sensors to and operating experiments on Earth is as cheap as it gets. You need to study all the planets at the same time. Taking Earth out of the loop is as silly as the catholic church officials who refused to look thru telescopes.
A couple of questions for Mr. Revkin:
1) If the NASA groups and their budget were simply transferred to NOAA, would he object? If so, why? Is there some magic property that makes the Earth sciences programs work only under NASA administration, or is the issue that the budget will receive a lot more scrutiny under NOAA than it would under NASA?
2) “NASA does that soup to nuts kind of work.” Wouldn’t the programs benefit from a lot less “soup to nuts”? The rest of the commercial space industry seems to be able to develop and operate satellites just fine. And at the end of the day, that’s all we’re talking about here, right? It’s not as if the data analysis has to occur in NASA, nor does the requirements generation for future missions. So doesn’t this really boil down to an assertion that the only entity capable of developing an innovative Earth-observing satellite is NASA, and isn’t that assertion demonstrably false?
I’m in favor of a pretty robust Earth observation program, but I’m even more in favor of NASA being an organization that develops manned and unmanned spaceflight architecture, coordinates the development of the components to those architectures by outside parties when possible and, as a last resort, develops some of those components itself. I don’t see the Earth observing program having anything to do with that mission.
actually, being a civilian program, NASA’s core is about science.
“
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1958[7] with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.[8][9]
“
While NASA’s mission is also about what you describe, it is also about science. And yes, we need BOTH.
Is there anything in what I said that would lead you to believe that NASA should be excluded from doing science? All I’m saying is that, if the motivation for manned space is only science, or even purely exploration, then any goals related to the development of the capabilities for large-scale, routine, deep spacefaring are unlikely to be developed.
That doesn’t rule out sending robotic probes to the outer planets, or even to develop a robust agenda for manned science. But it does require that the goals be capability-based.
yeah, your last sentence.
Part of planet science is also studying our own.
To rule that out, is to rule out science.
And science should also be part of NASA, but not the only.
Yes, there are plenty around who hate man-launches because they claim that it cuts into their science.
Yet, at the same time, I see those that hate science, such as yourself, by declaring that earth should NOT be studied, even though this is the cheapest one to study (and probably most important).
So all science should be part of NASA? How about we get the CDC to report to NASA? Maybe NASA and ESA should jointly take over CERN? “NASA does science” does not imply “if it’s science, then NASA does it”.
Your reading comprehension skills (to say nothing of your logic) seem to be a little weak, so let me spell this out:
I support doing climate science. Climate science is important. I have no problem launching Earth-observing satellites to further our scientific understanding of the climate.
But doing that work under the auspices of NASA is, at the very least, organizationally odd. Traditionally, NASA’s chief concern with Earth’s atmosphere has been how to get things to fly through it. We bolted on the Earth Sciences stuff to NASA because, at the time, they were better at constructing, launching, and operating Earth-observing satellites than anybody else. Whether that’s still true is highly debatable, given that the US satellite industry is now a more than $90B/year business.
If you were to transfer the NASA Earth Sciences Division to NOAA along with its budget, you’d still have just as robust an Earth science program. But you’d allow NASA to focus on what it was intended to focus on, i.e., space research and technology.
Please, please, please understand that what we’re debating here is an organizational question. Frankly, I don’t know why you wouldn’t be in favor of this. Putting all the climate scientists in one place would create efficiencies that would allow more climate science to get done for the same budget. It would have more climate scientists consolidated in one organization, which ought to improve communication and project management, which in turn ought to allow more science to be done.
Shouldn’t you want that?
LOL.
Its funny that the first satellite that was launched was explorer 1, and its primary missions was to explore the cosmic rays that was in various levels of our atmosphere.
IOW, our first sat was a sat devoted to earth science.
The idea that NASA does earth science to compare against other planets actually makes sense. The idea that NASA would do 100% of the earth science would make zero sense.
Likewise, having NASA take over 100% of disease control does NOT make sense. However, NASA DOES have ppl on board that work on disease control for dealing with ISS, shuttle, etc. After all, we have to know what will happen in space and on the moon/mars.
Transferring 100% of all climate science to say NOAA would be a NIGHTMARE to science. The reason is that ppl higher up make choices about who to hire/fire/etc. and at some point, they become politicians. And these ppl will push THEIR AGENDA rather than being concerned about science.
BTW, I have worked at CDC, NASA (MGS), multiple DARPA grants (developing counteractions to bio/chem agents, and it turns out, weapons as well), and plenty of other science arenas. I fully support NASA doing manned launches and getting us to the moon/mars. BUT, it also makes sense for them to continue the science that Eisenhower and then Kennedy pushed as well as the engineering.
Having science in NASA is NOT a bad thing. They have a different way of looking at things, than what you will see at NOAA.
So your argument is that we have to sprinkle climate science around and make it inefficient so that the politicians can’t find it all? Do you think that they don’t have a copy of the budget sitting in front of them?
You’re basically arguing for inefficiency as a way to protect bureaucratic fiefdoms. I can’t think of a strategy that is less about science and more about politics than that.