The Deniers always talk about the need for more climate research before we can act. But much of that turns out to be just empty rhetoric — as DeSmogBlog reveals:
Somewhere in Maryland is a metal box containing a fully completed climate spacecraft that could save the world.
NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) cost over $100 million and was designed to measure the energy budget of our warming planet. Yet the spacecraft has remained in its box for the last five years and it looks like it is not going anywhere anytime soon.
NASA quietly cancelled the project altogether in January 2006 citing “competing priorities”.
Why? DeSmogBlog is going to spend the next few months “digging into the history of DSCOVR, the reasons why it was cancelled, and why NASA refuses to release any internal documents on the decision to kill the mission.”
This is precisely the kind of online climate journalism need to see more. Kudos to DeSmogBlog!
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After all these years, I find it hard to believe that the people at the top do things like this. Don’t they care about their legacy?
It would be interesting to know if the shelving of DSCOVR is nefarious or standard bureaucratic snafu. Good luck to DeSmogBlog. Nasa in the past has proven to be extremely uncooperative about FOI requests.
Wouldn’t it depend on their “competing priorities”?
$100m is a huge amount of money and I bet it would cost quite a few more millions to keep it going once it was launched. Could a “competing priority” be feeding a few hundred thousand people? (No, I don’t think NASA would actually consider doing that….but what a nice thought!)
I think the comment by Ianvs “Don’t they care about their legacy?” is very short sighted. What “legacy” are you refering to? Do we as a human race deserve any sort of “legacy”? We are animals and compete for survival every single day. The world around us changes every single day and always has. It has always been survival of the fittest.
One day the human race could come to an end either via global warming, global cooling, nuclear war, starvation, a meteorite pulverising the planet or numerous other ways. Odds are something will survive and thrive and there will be no-one around to give a rats @@s about anyones “legacy”.
My kids are going to grow up in a warmer climate with rising sea levels etc etc but their greatest challenge is going to be surviving the harsh realities of day to day life. They will adapt to climate change, as we have all done in our life times, but they will never adapt to the sudden stupid spontaneity of various human beings.
Very revealing that a Dr (of what?) considers caring about one’s legacy shortsighted.
Canceling a climate spacecraft project that has already been built at the cost of $100 million, especially one designed to measure the energy budget of our warming planet, during a time when the scientific community is very concerned about the effects of AGW is not only shortsighted but a great travesty. Those responsible should be held accountable, as should those who blocked the issuance of climate change reports that are required by law, and prosecuted. Speaking of shortsightedness!
And you can bet the taxpayer’s money that that competing priority was all about feeding fossil fuel interests.
I have read, but do not know if it is true that both the Chinese and French offered to launch it.
But because former VP Gore was involved in the original concept, they will never do so.