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.”
…
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 Pournelle and 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.
“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.”
Politicised branches in NOAA and NASA tend to ignore the satellite era and prefer their biased frequently adjusted limited data sets. Prefer made up data and interpolation instead of satellite SST’s. They have been trying to cling on to their dark ages and have been short sighted all this time.
The claims of more warming in the surface data sets because of this Arctic interpolation is nonsense based on less than 5% of the planets surface would literally mean have been extremely high.
For each 0.1c rise in global temperatures only due to more Arctic warming, means this region needs to have found at least 2.0c higher temperatures. They have instead found multiples of 0.1c higher temperatures because of this apparently, so where are the 8.0c to 10.0c warmer temperatures that the satellites with better coverage some how manage to miss?
I wonder if this means the end of RSS and UAH.
No way.
In Canada, green monger Trudeau is panicking… GOOD!
Trump should invade Canada and have Trudeau and most of the premiers arrested and thrown in jail.
Contemplated early 1815. War weary sons and daughters of the Revolution fathers. The debate was around ‘the never ending story- war conflict commerce disputes with British subjects. Coincidentally a similar never ending threat debate – shorter time frame in 1848 at the southern border, with a conclusion ‘this will not go away’ by us (war) alone.
No, we need to let the Canadians take care of their own political problems, but we can give them our moral support.
Oooo! Bad mojo here. This has been contemplated and attempted more than once during the 1711-1920 time period.
Generally speaking, the attempts were made by various groups of yahoos who quickly ended losing in less-than-savage battles like “The Windmill”, or simply being incarcerated in Canadian jails.
If your comment’s intent was to request help draining the Canadian swamp, Trump’s going to be busy draining the one(s) in the USA.
If Trump is reasonably successful (draining swamps means lots of blood-thirsty disenfranchised elites), it should make it easier for others to follow.
Sorry, but you need to assign Sen. Bill Proxmire to Wisconsin
By “essential for our way of life”, I’m sure he just meant he and his true believer cohorts feeding from the gov’t trough for the last 8 years.
@ur momisugly FredericE
November 23, 2016 at 6:24 pm: No, invasion attempted 1815, stopped by Canadians and thrown back as part of The Duke of Wellington’s Army joined in, having beaten Napoleon. Washington DC sacked, President’s dinner eaten by British Officers. Army went home and finished Napoleon off at Waterloo. In time, sense prevailed and Alliance begun…….
The USA election coverage proves most in the media now treat their followers with an arrogant, preachy distain . In Britain it is the same thing . The Guardian and others seem to think their view is the only one.
That is why their businesses are in free fall . They can’t or won’t up their game but have shareholders seemingly happy watching their equity getting peed away .
It will be very disappointing if Trump chooses to back off on the fraud called global warming .
Oohh YYEESS!!!!!(prickly animal fondling automatic weapon) These anti-human a$$wsipes will never go away until we strip them of all the tax money they are and have been stealing from us. Drain the swamp, indeed. Time to reclaim that land and make it productive!
Judith Curry
Trump’s great climate-change ‘hoax’ is that he talks like a pretty green president, after all
One puzzling statement in that article
“Climate activists would do well to find common ground with the Trump administration on topics that he supports: clean water and air; stewardship of federal lands…2
I thought he was going to support digging up federal lands for coal, gas, oil, etc.
Is massive fossil fuel exploration the same as stewardship now?
Stewardship is an ethic that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources. “Is massive fossil fuel exploration the same as stewardship now?”, so, no it isn’t “the same as”, but it is part of the responsibility.
You seem to labor under the misconception that “stewardship” is synonymous with “protection” as in locking up the lands as “wilderness” and throwing away the key. Go search “Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976” and in particular familiarize yourself with the concept “multiple use” – “Managing public land resources for a variety of uses, such as energy development, livestock grazing, recreation and timber harvesting, while protecting a wide array of natural, cultural and historical resources.”
They might have survived if they’d stayed more true to their space science mission. But studying solar-space plasma physics is tedious, boring, nerdy, and always struggles for funding. No element of alarmism unless you operate a billion dollar GEOSAT, and then you already know 99% of the space risks.
But the lure of fame as Dr James Hansen discovered led them to politicize their science Earth’s climate. After Dr Hansen sold his first baby for fame, speaking engagements, and more money, selling the following babies (i.e., his integrity as a scientist) became progressively easier.
Here is what GIS was supposed to be:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/about/gfx/19600128_nytimes_244_900.png
Surely I’m not the only one with that uncomfortable feeling in my stomach driven by “I’ll believe it when I see it”.
The person responsible for the politicalization of NASA as well as all other U.S. scientific organizations is Obama.
He has all but destroyed quality science in this country based on his demands that scientific organizations must manipulate all information in support of his climate alarmist ideology based on his monumental ignorance and arrogance.
President elect Trump needs to clean house on this scientific mess that this colossal idiot Obama has created.
“The person responsible for the politicalization of NASA as well as all other U.S. scientific organizations is Obama.”
Al Gore beat him to it. Back during the Reagan and first Bush administration, Hansen was making crazy noise about CAGW and both administrations considered him a lunatic for his proclamations that ‘the sky is falling’. He got his revenge when Clinton/Gore came to power and he found an ally in Gore. Climate science just hasn’t been the same since. It hasn’t even been science since …
Obama certainly piled on and spread the political infection to other agencies that were supposed to be apolitical, for example, the Justice Department.
I agree with that historical assessment. Hansen was regarded as a kook in the 80’s. Found his savior in Al Gore, a man looking for the next big idea to politicize and ride to riches.
Funny how Al Gore got most of his current riches from Qatari shieks for selling his bankrupt network to AlJezeera.
Joel,
And before that his family prospered because of Occidental Petroleum shares, given his dad for services rendered in congress and from being on the take from Armand Hammer, Lenin’s stooge in the US.
Larry Hamlin commented: “…The person responsible for the politicalization of NASA as well as all other U.S. scientific organizations is Obama…..based on his monumental ignorance and arrogance….
Please, he is nothing more than a useful idiot. From his first inauguration speech where he deftly entered “wealth redistribution” into the American lexicon with no push back to his “the science is settled” proclamation it’s all been choreographed by the Marxist/Socialist cabal. People aren’t aware of how close we came to losing our Democratic and Capitalistic way of life. It’s a never ending struggle that we lose sight of in times of plenty. We’ve been given a chance to revive it and I hope we don’t fail.
Two LGBTQ voters planning on leaving for Africa, because the future belongs to Trump and his blond family:
Fascism is the goal of Socialists. The NAZI acronym stood for the National Socialist Party…
Facism believes in limited property rights with a large centralized government controlling its citizens and the economy through high taxes and a gigantic bureaucracy that usurps control through the tax code, cronyism and oppressive rules, regulations and mandates.
Trump is not a Fascist, he’s a Populist that wishes to: lower taxes, decentralize government, curtail cronyism, reduce government rules, regulations and mandates, and protect our borders as all civilized countries do…
All of Trump’s goals are the complete antithesis of fascism… Find a new meme..
I can’t tell if that is satire or an insult of Trump, but Hitler and the NAZIs were a direct result of the left wing progress politicized science of the day called “Eugenics.” The title of Darwin’s book is shortened today to “Origin of Species.” The real title is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species
Rewriting history doesn’t change history, it simply robs future generations of the lessons that could be learned.
Two LGBTQ voters planning on leaving for Africa
==================
Could it be that all heterosexual males are secretly transgender lesbian’s?
heterosexual males are secretly transgender lesbians
=======================
would it be discrimination for female lesbians to exclude transgender lesbians?
Send the fake scientists at NASA to the unemployment line. If you can’t fire them, send them to Nome, Alaska for thermometer weather measure and winter swimming in the warming Arctic.
Polar bear meat
Surely the greatest achievement of NASA was not placing a man on the moon put helping to place a non-stick frying pan in every home?
And Tang in every glass! 🙂
Got the email from Ms. Cris McEntee the Emperor of AGU about a “Petition”.
I replied back that I would be advocating the abolition of the White House Science Advisor, Office of Science and Technology and the NSF, with the incarceration of all employees and the “Executives” of the AGU, AMS and APS.
I guess my 25+ years as AGU member is on “thin ice”.
True story
Ha ha
Asteroids as a threat to life on earth should be a high priority. A greater area of potential funding for NASA than for resource opportunity. Ask any dinosaur you see , it will tell you.
This is some great news:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L. Mencken
On 17 January, 1961 President, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell speech to the people of the United States. In the first half of the speech he warned of the danger of the influence of a powerful group of elite experts he called the military-industrial complex. He feared they would use their connections and expertise to raid the US treasury by proclaiming a never ending list of potential enemies who could only be vanquished by purchasing their machines of war (Technology).
In the second but much more important part of the speech, he warned that soon, virtually all US research would be paid for by the government. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
That forecast had come true before the end of the 60s. Since then virtually ALL non-commercial research has been and is paid for by the US government. Scientists will gladly do research for and find proof for ANYTHING their paymaster requires; not the least of which is research into “climate disruption, global warming, climate change, etc.”
Fortunately, President-elect, Donald J. Trump will have none of it and will defund those programs so those resources can be invested into space exploration, NASA’s raison d’être:
Hallelujah! The Salem Witch Trials Are Soon Over.
HTC
Here it is. That speech was featured in this documentary that was way way way ahead of its time. Everyone should send a link of this documentary to Donald Trump and his supporters.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=1h2m8s
That’s a little bit rich, coming from the leader of a cabal who treat global temperature satellite measurements as if they might have been touched by someone with leprosy.
mods, why does mentioning the full name of the man with the initials K T mean my post doesn’t appear?
Viva Trump!
Walker apparently claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”
So I’m puzzled he wants to make a political decision to remove collection of that evidence.
If its a fraud, it needs to be proved a fraud… or the fraud will become politically inspired removal of inconvenient evidence…
I’m sympathetic with this. It would be good to put together a neutral panel of experts in statistics and data collection to review (audit?) major climate records and assure that we have reliable data. That would not resolve the entire debate but it would enable us to be confident that we are not debating about fiction.
Why not keep them in place for a while, give them hard public scientific scruitiny (forensic audit) to expose their lies and bias and then shut them down.
““It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.”
You mean the satellites that you generally ignore if they don’t match with your models?
The Climate Research Unit’s money should be redirected towards funding Nuclear Fusion research. Nuclear fusion is both a clean alternative energy and applicable to space travel. Liberals waste taxpayer funding promoting junk science and junk solutions. This would be a real productive use of all those resources and reduce CO2 production as well.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/23/iter-nuclear-fusion-project-first-burn-delayed-until-2035/
Thorium and fast breeder fission are a lot more feasible and have already been demonstrated.
Should James Hansen be investigated for fraud? Oh yeah. If he did not INTEND to commit fraud, I guess he shouldn’t be held accountable.
The climate “scientists” had plenty of warning. They know of the Climategate Emails, they now the “tricks” to “hide declines,” they know the questionable “adjustments,” they know the falsifying results of the IPCC models. They know the truth behind the fraud. Those that remained silent are as guilty as those that committed the fraud. The entire “scientific” community turned a blind eye. Federal funding has to be cut to any University involved is this fraud.