Watts is very shortsighted

In a new post on Watts Up with That, the esteemed dunce running the site advocated steep cuts to NASA climate studies, cuts that are being floated by the anti-science, head-in-the-sand GOP numbskulls now trying to run things in the House chamber of horrors.

NASA climate programs being eyed for the budget axe

In reply to that, I write:
Before you go calling for massive cuts to NASA climate studies, you ought to look a bit more into what they constitute. NASA is a research organization, so they have continually pushed the envelope in terms of improving remote sensing of the Earth, which feeds back to remote sensing of other planets. We wouldn't know nearly as much about Titan (Saturn's moon with an atmosphere) were it not for the pioneering efforts of NASA engineers. NOAA satellites are just duplicates launching copies of the same instrument over and over, useful for basic monitoring, but not for research.

The Nimbus program was groundbreaking. The now-we-take-it-for-granted Landsat program was NASA's originally. Roy Spencer is now using data from AMSU, a NASA instrument better than its MSU predecessors -- by a lot. The lamentably lost Quikscat improved hurricane forecasting. The TOMS series of instruments confirmed stratospheric ozone depletion, and also turned out to be pretty adept at following volcanic eruption plumes. That's just a few examples.

The NPOESS fiasco showed that it's pretty hard to duplicate the innovative capabilities of NASA with regard to remote sensing. NASA earth observations are a lot more than the GISS modelers.


So before you toss the baby with the bathwater, it might be a good idea to recognize what NASA does pretty well.