UPDATE: 11:30AM 4/12/12 Predictably, Andrew Revkin from the New York Times joins in with the poo-pooing consensus saying it is “utterly unremarkable ” (yet he writes a article about it – go figure). From Revkin’s shuttered in world of living in the woods (he didn’t even know what the TV show Seinfeld was until I brought it to his attention in Climategate2), that’s probably true, but Andy, here is one of your favorite consensus buzzphrases that can be applied: it is an unprecedented letter. There’s no denying that. – Anthony
==========
From the Daily Caller, in my opinion, a load of “hooey” from NASA’s chief scientist, particularly since James Hansen doesn’t bother with peer review much anymore, he just publishes opinions and protopapers to his Columbia University website and a compliant MSM repeats them as if they were in fact peer reviewed. Further, Hansen has never accepted an offer to debate, and he probably won’t. Clearly NASA’s chief scientist is clueless about what is going on.
NASA swipes back at former astronauts over climate change
NASA is swiping back at a group of nearly 50 of its former scientists and astronauts who wrote to accuse the space agency of advocating the “extreme” position that global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide.
In a March 28 letter addressed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, 49 former employees said the “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”
But NASA responded on Wednesday by saying they don’t “draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’ about research findings.”
“We support open scientific inquiry and discussion,” NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said in a statement provided to The Daily Caller.
“If the authors of this letter disagree with specific scientific conclusions made public by NASA scientists, we encourage them to join the debate in the scientific literature or public forums rather than restrict any discourse,” Abdalati said.
He added: “NASA sponsors research into many areas of cutting-edge scientific inquiry, including the relationship between carbon dioxide and climate.”
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Bob Gaddrod says:
April 12, 2012 at 2:51 pm
Any citizen can verify that the NASA letter’s first-named contact person, Harrison Schmitt, presently serves on the board of directors of the Heartland Institute, and is chair emeritus of the Exxon-funded Annapolis Center For Science-Based Public Policy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
AND any citizen can verify that The Climate Research Center (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (Phil Jones) was funded by Shell Oil, British Petroleum and the Sultanate of Oman. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
Manned spaceflight science was (past tense) testable. Even with errors (Apollo 13), the science tested positive and far exceeded expectations. The dividends to the national economy exceeded the expenditure. It was one of the few examples of a great public investment.
Today NASA has no (Zero) manned spaceflight capability. It’s shamefully unproductive.
theduke on April 12, 2012 at 11:00 am said:
I thought that is what they were doing–”disagreeing with scientific conclusions . . .in a public forum.”
———–
Nup. They were insisting that NASA not tell anybody about NASA’s scientific conclusions.
So NASA told them: you don’t like the scientific conclusions? Tough!!!!! If you disagree come up with your own research. As long as you sit on the sidelines relying on your authority to naysay things you have only superficial knowledge of, you will be ignored.
NASA is completely lost. They are no longer the leaders on science and engineering that gave us the moon landing. They have become just a bunch of political hacks. No science statement is made without political filtering. Where are Chris Craft and the rest of the people with the right stuff? James Hansen is a perfect example of non-scientific figure head using the past good name of NASA lead credence to his ramblings.
NASA is not interested in science or scientific discussion. Recently, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center gave some lectures to a local college campus on climate change and the CO2’s impact on climate change. My students tried to ask questions, but the speakers would not take questions from the audience directly, but asked to write the questions and the speakers would select from them. My students were very disgrutled over the bias of the speakers who also included a speaker from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
So it doesn’t really surprise me that NASA is really interested in good scientific discussions.
LazyTeenager says:
April 12, 2012 at 4:54 pm
You used to throw “lawn darts” straight up in the air as a youngster, didn’t you LT?
Waleed Abdalati. I will say no more.
When is the debate with Dr. Waleed Abdalati? I think my wife could debate him and render him clueless. And she’s just a Physician Assistant.
Speaking of clueless, Algore gets his comeuppance from Spidey:
http://dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/algore_vs_spidey.jpg
See, I’m so confused – I thought that the North American Space Agency was about space and final frontiers and stuff. I suppose now that they don’t do space anymore cos they don’t have a launch vehicle they don’t really care about all those old Astronaut blokies and launch director’s. Perhaps they should have a new name more fitting with their current activities?
Any suggestions? (tee hee)
THIS is what’s driving the Federal government’s enviro-whacko war on carbon dioxide:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/FY12-climate-fs.pdf
$2.5 billion! About half to NASA, the rest to Commerce, Energy, NSF, etc.
The Hoax will continue as long as this gigantic money spigot remains open. Can we get Mitt and a Republican Congress to turn it off?
/Mr Lynn
D.M. says:
April 12, 2012 at 2:06 pm
“… I fear for future astronauts.”
How about the current astronauts who have to ride into space and return in 1960s technology while our Shuttle program is being scavenged for parts? That’s scary, I don’t care who you are!
I have no clue what wordpress is doing, but somehow it is inactivating spell check in Firefox. In this tab and this Leave a Reply window it lets me spell brokan like this with no underline to indicate it is misspelled and should be spelled broken. In another tab in this same session of Firefox, on a different forum that mispelled word if flagged by firefox’s spell check. I suspect a new “feature” has been added to Wierd Press that is breaking FireFox spell check.
Larry
[In the “Reply” box, as you type (or edit) in Firefox-Mozilla, right-click within the text, then turn Spellcheck, “off”, then “on” again. The internal spellcheck function within FireFox-Mozzila usually re-starts. Robt]
@ur momisugly Larry Ledwick (hotrod ) on April 12, 2012 at 8:57 pm:
Well you’re doing better than I am. I’m on Lenny Debian GNU/Linux with the included Firefox variant, Iceweasel 3.0.6 (Mozilla 5.0), and they just upgraded Debian to Squeeze, I’m on dial-up thus not upgrading anytime soon, so I’m currently stuck with this browser version for now.
I had gotten used to the previous “upgraded” wordpress comment box having quirks like variable height w/wo scroll bar. Past couple of days, more quirks. The comment box loads collapsed, I have to click on a small “box” space to expand it and have the info show up. Height got set to just three lines, tweet length and impossible to click the page up/down scroll bar parts, which doesn’t work with my normal long comments. If I type something and go look at another tab, on return the cursor has disappeared. I have CA Assistant, I found if I hit the Preview, come back, and click twice in the box, the cursor returns. And I have to scroll back to where I was. But I also use CA Assistant for blockquotes, highlight text and hit the toolbar button. Which now results in both the start and end blockquote commands popping up at the end of the text.
So I’m adapting to using gedit, the built-in Notepad-like text editor for the GNOME desktop, and write everything on a “scratch pad” sheet, and copy over for a final “Preview” check. Still got spellcheck, but have to do HTML tags manually. On the plus side, I can do highlighting for HTML which helps simple errors stand out.
Do you have spellcheck with your Notepad-like simple editor? If so, try using it as I said.
And now that I mentioned it, maybe wordpress is trying to encourage quick brief Twitter-style comments. For which correct spelling and spellcheck is apparently neither used, useful, nor desired, therefore…
R.I.P NASA.
Well, that’s all nice an dandy. but what do these scientists at NASA actually say in their letter ? Let’s take the first sentence :
OK. And where do NASA and GISS claim that “carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change” ?
Or did these guys just make that up as a strawman argument ?
Who are these former NASA employees anyhow ?
Ah. That explains a lot. Maybe Abdalati has a point that they should have this debate in scientific literature instead of using their “high-profile” connections to make their point.
I’d like to point out what several seem to have missed:
This is not anywhere an official NASA press release or statement. The source is spaceref.com a ‘mediaorganisation’ by group of ‘reporters’ who also run the critical NASAwatch.com -site. Further, their claimed source is NASA HQ (linking to site NASA.gov) but no related statement or information can be found there. Nothing at all.
But we are led to believe (through the headline) that this is an official NASA statement, which peculiarly enough neither starts nor ends even or looks like one. All we are shown are snippets of quotes(?). These could be from a phone-interview, and be taken from memory, edited, cut, doctored etc, we don’t know. And We don’t know to what questions or claims they were responses to.
Abdalati seems to be an AGW-leaning type (on leave from Univ. Colorado, Boulder, there: Director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) and may very well have expressed his opinions like that.
But I suggest that, before there is an official NASA statement, this should not be viewed as one. Rather as a typically slanted ‘journalistic’ effort …
The comment above (reclaimreality) was by me, Jonas N
(Not quite accustomed to wordpress, sorry)
I didn’t comment because this just confirms my opion that NASA is a bit of a laughing stock.
The only reason it funds people like Hansen is to try to justify firing rockets into space. In other words, Hansen is just an excuse to spend taxpayer money and keep the rocket firing gravy train going.
OK, undoubtedly NASA has done a few good things in its time … I wouldn’t count the moon landings as they were pure PR, but GPS e.g. wouldn’t have happened without that massive gravy train.
But there comes a point when you have filled every point in geostationary orbit with yet another satellite when you have to question whether this agency isn’t just “toys for the boys” … only partly justified by need … and reliant on playing up the “dire” consequences of things like global warming to create a problem that needs more satellites and hence more rockets to solve.
In the land of free enterprise … why is there any need for government spending on a space agency?
Come on … at least we in the UK put our money into something useful like universal health care. Whereas what do you run as a public-money crunching scam … NASA!!!
Haven’t you heard of privatisation? Maybe with so few state run institutions, you haven’t got the hang. It’s pretty simple. Just print a lot of “shares” and then sell them to people and hand over ownership to these people we in the UK call “shareholders”.
Does SpaceX have a Muslim outreach program? No, but they have manned space flight capability with Dragon 9. What does NASA have? A sniveling idiot who doesn’t have the good sense to listen when the folks who put man on the moon say that he is trashing the brand. NASA is finished.
From Judith Curry’s website – the 50th NASA signatory !
Herman Alexander Pope | April 12, 2012 at 11:30 pm | Reply
The 49 should have been 50. I signed an early version of the letter and the final version of the letter. My name was left off. That was a mistake.
We are 50.
Herman A (Alex) Pope Aerospace Engineer 44 years.
Intense Climate Theory Study, 4 years.
Earth temperature is not doing what the alarmists forecast.
Ocean levels are not doing what the alarmists forecast.
The Ultimate Climate Model, Earth, produces data and that is all on our side. It may take one year, five years or more, but as Earth data continues to not match the alarmist Theory and Model output, at some point they are done. There is no actual real data that supports the alarmist position. They do, from time to time, cheat and make it look like there is data on their side, but climate gates keep happening to bust their cheating.
Our letter was intended to stop some parts of NASA from taking part in the cheating. It is still our NASA and we do care.
Yeah, maybe it’s time to start a serious conversation about going ‘Galt’? NASA used a 12 bit address computer to get us to the moon and back in the 60’s but now they’re using supercomputers measured in PFLOPS to ‘prove’ that I have to pay 1/3 higher electric rates for bird killing wind mills off of Cape Cod or we’re all gonna fry.
When NASA was made up of men such as the 49 letter signers, NASA was a successful entity putting men and woman in space, travelling to the moon and back and sending space probes into deep space which after decades are still, methinks, sending images. The number of successful missions was astounding and beyond belief. Fast forward a few decades and we see a NASA begging the Russians to help them transport food for their astronaut on the space station. Today, NASA is grounded. It’s satellites are faulty, they don’t have a space work-horse and all they do is spout climate pseudo science telling us that the world is gonna end in a woosh due to the increase of 0.01 percentage point in atmospheric CO2. Meanwhile China is planning space missions which would make the USA run away in shame. Thank God there’s North Korea with whom NASA can compare itself with.
There are a number of contradictions in the reply from NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, some have already been mentioned.
‘We support open scientific inquiry and discussion’ and ‘we encourage them to join the debate in
the scientific literature or public forums rather than restrict any discourse’.
Has the fact that these hero scientists and astronauts of the right stuff have had to wait until they retire before expressing their views passed him by. If there was open scientific inquiry, discussion and debate on climate change within NASA why wait to retire, even now their letter of concern is ‘restricting discourse’? Oh and what happened to the CAGW claim that ‘the science is settled’ and ‘the debate is over’
Can anyone imagine what it would say about their organisation if so many ex employees felt so strongly about an issue that they signed such a letter let alone these ex employees. The reply has merely attempted to fob them off. The reply is so discourteous with its terminology ‘if the authors of this letter disagree’ they may as well have said ‘shut up your view means squat’.
Now we see the true picture at NASA your view only counts if you agree with the official CAGW line. NASA are surrounding themselves with ‘yes men’ and ‘the authors’ are whistleblowers.