According to a study by a panel of experts at the National Academy of Sciences, the earth science budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has declined 30 percent since 2000. The earth science programs at NASA provide satellite images of the Earth that are extremely helpful in understanding and predicting weather patterns.
The earth science budget will decrease even more as the agency moves to fund a manned mission to the moon and
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In addition, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is also experiencing delays and financing problems with weather and climate programs. Cutbacks in weather and climate research affect scientists’ ability understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes due to global warming.
“NASA’s budget has taken a major hit at the same time that NOAA’s program has fallen off the rails,” said panel co-chairman Berrien Moore III of the University of New Hampshire. “This combination is very, very disturbing, and it’s coming at the very time that we need the information most.”
NOAA officials announced last week that 2006 was the warmest year on record in the United States—part of the warming trend over several decades that many scientists attribute to greenhouse gases emitted by the energy and transportation industries. There is a general consensus in the scientific community that atmospheric warming is bringing more extreme weather—longer droughts, reduced snowfall and more intense hurricanes such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
The budget for earth science programs for NASA and NOAA grew in the 1990s, which led to more weather- and climate-monitoring missions in the past five years. But the report found that, as the current satellites deteriorate, the number of space-based Earth-observation missions will decline steadily through 2010, as will the number of instruments in space to gather weather, climate and environmental data.
“If things aren’t reversed, we will have passed the high-water mark for our Earth observations,” said co-chairman Richard Anthes of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “This country should not be headed in this direction. … We need to know more, not less, about long-term aspects of climate change, about trends in droughts and hurricanes, about what’s happening in terms of fish stocks and deforestation.”
Global warming is a major crisis facing the entire planet, a crisis caused by untrammeled capitalist development placing short-term profit ahead of environmental protection. Scientists and scientific institutions should prioritize their efforts towards understanding the problem and working to solve it.
The U.S. government, in allowing earth observation research satellites to deteriorate without replacement, is in effect hiding the evidence of the impact of global warming.
It is critically important that carbon emissions be reduced, so as to prevent further damage to the ozone layer. While emissions reduction is technically very feasible, it requires the political will to impose meaningful regulations on industry, something the U.S. government—in the nation with the highest rate of emissions—has refused to do so far.
By silencing the scientific evidence of the impact of global warming, the United States appears to be trying to alter the public discourse on climate change. Since the U.S. government has made it clear that it does not intend to reduce carbon emissions, it will take a mass struggle to force it to take action.
