Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

In regard to our ecological crisis, the Bush administration is running headlong in the wrong direction.  We have posted previously about the attempts to silence NASA’s preeminent climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen.  But if you can’t get the experts to shut up, you can do something worse — cut the budgets for the science programs that help us understand what global warming is doing to our atmosphere.

This story merited a front page article in today’s Washington Post, so somebody inside the DC Beltway thinks it’s important.

A two-year study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences shows that NASA’s earth science budget ‘has declined 30 percent since 2000.’  In fact, what they say is that half of our environmental satellites will stop working by 2010, if funding is not restored. 

Meanwhile, over at the NOAA, a major project to study and monitor weather and climate change is 3 years behind schedule, a product of bureacratic bungling, technological delays and, yes, budget cuts.  One member of the study group said NOAA’s Earth science budget ‘has fallen off the rails.’

One reason this is happening is because of Bush’s much-hyped boondoggle of a project to send human beings to the moon and then on to Mars.   The Mars mission alone would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.   Talk about misplaced priorities, and misappropriated funds!

I suppose he imagines some astronaut landing on Mars someday, unfurling a “Mission Accomplished” banner and publicly thanking the then-former president for his commitment, a la John Kennedy when he commissioned the Apollo project.  Kind of like the way he will bask in the glow of history someday for single-handledly bringing democracy to Iraq.

Sorry, George.  Human beings won’t be landing on Mars in our lifetimes, but things will certainly be getting much hotter down here on Earth in the meantime.

Not to have the science to understand what is happening to our planet for these clearly political, even megalomaniacal, reasons — this is not just irresponsible; it’s immoral.

Said Richard Anthes of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, and a member of the panel (as quoted in the Post):

If things aren’t reversed, we will have passed the high-water mark for our Earth observations.  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.

Ya’ think?  Ya’ think we need to know these things?  Would it matter to understand why we had two years of record hurricanes (before this year’s El Nino calmed things in the Atlantic — temporarily), to know what to predict about these storms in the future and make decisions accordingly?  Would it matter to understand why these El Nino’s come more frequently and more intensely, resulting in the crazed weather of this winter — record warmth, record snow and ice storms, record rains in the northwest, etc.?

Does it matter to know these things?  Would knowing it perhaps contribute to a movement in this country to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions by drastically cutting down on our fossil fuel consumption which might impact the profits of the corporations represented in Dick Cheney’s energy task force back in 2001?

If you visit the NOAA’s El Nino page, you will find this self-description of the agency’s mission:

NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has primary responsibilities for providing forecasts to the Nation, and a leadership role in sponsoring El Nino observations and research.

Now, do you think this is a program that, perhaps, ought to be adequately funded, given what is at stake?  The article linked above explains how warmer ocean waters are likely to intensify the El Nino effect, building more moisture in the atmosphere to create the rains and enormous snowstorms that have dumped on the US Northwest and Great Plains this year, and the springlike weather across the midwest and east and northeast in December and early January.

Said Daniel Schrag, associate professor of geochemistry at Harvard back in 1999:

…it would be surprising to me if El Niño wasn’t affected in some way by the rise in temperatures globally. Specifically, it seems likely that the unusual pattern of El Niño we have seen for the past 22 years is related to global warming. We cannot prove that, but if I owned an insurance company, I’d be very concerned.

Folks, we need to press the new Democratic-led Congress, both houses, to reverse course at NASA.  They can legislate an abrupt about-face in spending priorities, making climate change, global warming and its impacts, a top priority at the agency, thereby quashing the megalomania of Mr. Bush and restoring sanity to government-funded Earth science programs.