A threat by the incoming Trump administration to the climate research of US space agency NASA would be disastrous for global efforts to monitor and counter global warming, Australian researchers said.
NASA's earth science division would be stripped of funds, with the money diverted to deep space exploration, the Guardian reported on Tuesday, citing comments by Bob Walker, a senior advisor to president-elect Donald Trump.
Greenhouse gases: not just a bunch of hot air
From tracing the exact source of CO2 in our atmosphere to measuring the earth's "carbon budget," the scientists studying climate change know a lot more about the greenhouse effect than you might think.
From tracing the exact source of CO2 in our atmosphere to measuring the earth's "carbon budget," the scientists studying climate change know a lot more about the greenhouse effect than you might think.
"I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicised, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing," Mr Walker was quoted as saying. "Mr Trump's decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicised science."
The election two weeks ago of the Republican candidate to replace Democrat Barack Obama next January for a four-year term sent shockwaves through the global climate research community. Mr Trump has said climate change was a hoax "created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive".
As Fairfax Media reported, Australian scientists are keenly aware that much of the climate monitoring and models they rely on are sourced from US agencies including NASA.
Matthew England, a professor of oceanography and climate dynamics at the University of NSW, said NASA was "one of the iconic climate science centres in the US".
"Cutting NASA out of earth observation would be disastrous," Professor England said. "We need the observations that this lab underpins."
Professor England, though, said Mr Trump was sending mixed signals on his intentions. During a meeting with New York Times journalists on Monday, the President-Elect declined to repeat his campaign promise to abandon the international climate accord reached last year in Paris, saying, "I'm looking at it very closely."
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| NASA supplies key data for Australia's climate research - and many other countries' efforts. Photo: BOM |
While those comments were welcomed, Professor England noted many of Mr Trump's appointments so far bore "almost a hatred of our field of research".
"They are people who don't have an open-mind," he said, adding that many of them had close ties to the fossil-fuel industry – one that Mr Trump had pledged to help.
'Whole world'
Roger Jones, a former CSIRO scientist now at Victoria University, said "the whole world" uses processes developed by NASA such as the satellite observation system MODIS.
"In Australia [the data] is used to monitor floods and drought on an on-going basis," Dr Jones said. "It's used to ground-truth our understanding of soil moisture and production systems."
"This is an area where global-scale earth system science is seen as an aspect of 'globalisation' and thus suspect," he said. "The UN agenda is to use science funded by the people of America against the interests of everyday Americans – this is what they see as happening now."
Malte Meinshausen, director of the Climate & Energy College at Melbourne University, said there were few other agencies that could shoulder similarly advanced satellite projects.
"While deep space exploration enables us to have big dreams, understanding planet earth enables us to live better lives and actually save lives," Professor Meinshausen said.
The NASA Aqua satellite "now delivers unprecedented detail about the water cycle, and the patterns of carbon-dioxide concentrations", he said. "Those satellites are what the X-ray instrument is in any hospital - vital to our understanding where the patient planet earth is sick and what the root causes are."
Ceding America's technological edge could see US farmers, among others, lose out. Photo fluorescent measurements, for instance, involve NASA scientists working with a Japanese satellite to offer advanced detection of crop disease and droughts, he said.
'Shockingly stupid'
Mr Walker's comments have added to international anxiety over the future of US climate research.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said end NASA´s Earth observatory mission was "would seriously impair our ability to see the big planetary picture".
"Unfortunately, these plans echo the weakening of climate science capacities at CSIRO by the Australian government," Professor Schellnhuber said, referring to efforts by CSIRO management earlier this year to slash climate modelling and monitoring.
"The scientific community has to stand together now [to avert] the Trump attacks," he said. "Otherwise, not only America would go myopic and risk lagging behind the scientific state of the art, but today´s and future generations would suffer direly from the consequences."
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said stripping NASA of its climate role "would be a shockingly stupid move that would deal a very severe blow to global research on environmental change across the world".
"Stopping all funding would, for instance, mean abandoning satellites that monitor the earth's surface and would be an enormous waste of billions of dollars of scientific research," Mr Ward said. "It would also trigger the departure of many world-class scientists that would have catastrophic consequences for the competitiveness of universities and businesses in the United States."
Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, took aim at Mr Walker's comment that NASA science was "politicised science": "That is preposterous and probably just means that he does not like the results."
"We're in the midst of rapid global warming and many associated changes to Arctic and Antarctic ice cover, sea level, extreme weather events, droughts and wildfires, to name just a few," Professor Rahmstorf said. "NASA's observations of planet Earth from space and NASA's ability to analyse and understand the changes is of critical importance to America and the world."
"Hampering this capability would be like trying to navigate blind-folded into treacherous waters."
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