Will an Anti Science Congress Bind and Gag NASA?

Here’s one reason why the fossil fuel lobby wants to stifle science in US government agencies.  Truth is rarely welcome in the halls of power, and this year less than most. In particular, inconvenient truths about the long term effects of adding carbon to the atmosphere – such as the loss of arctic sea ice, one of the most telling and potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. See above.

NASA:

The most visible change in the Arctic region in recent years has been the rapid decline of the perennial ice cover. The perennial ice is the portion of the sea ice floating on the surface of the ocean that survives the summer (as opposed to seasonal ice, which is the ice around the Arctic basin’s periphery that melts during the summer, resulting in what scientists call the annual “Arctic minimum”). This ice that spans multiple years represents the thickest component of the sea ice cover.

This visualization shows the perennial Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2014. A graph overlay shows the area’s size measured in million square kilometers for each year.

Now there is concern that, with a shift in the balance of power in the Senate, famously anti-science Senator Ted Cruz will be taking control of a key subcommittee that controls NASA funding.

Huffington Post:

“One of the problems with the Obama administration is that it has degraded NASA. It has degraded for space exploration, degraded manned exploration because the Obama administration has undervalued that and shifted to funding other priorities,” Cruz said in a statement. “It shifted the funding to global warming pursuits rather than carry out NASA’s core mission.”

The agency has conducted research on climate change, recently kicking off five projects to study how the earth’s atmosphere affects global warming.

Meanwhile, Cruz has claimed there isn’t enough evidence to prove global warming is occurring, telling CNN he was skeptical of the “so-called scientific theory.”

“Contrary to all the theories that — that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened,” Cruz said in February of 2014.

It’s long been the dream of so called conservative lawmakers to hamstring dedicated scientists studying the life support system of the planet.

It’s always couched in heroic rhetoric about NASA’s “original mission” of space exploration, competing with the Roosskies, etc.NYTimes – 2006:

From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

Houston Chronicle:

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, has been named chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on science and space, which has responsibility for NASA. He spoke on Wednesday with Chronicle science writer Eric Berger about his views on space exploration.

Q. Did you grow up interested in space?

A. Every young boy or girl was amazed by the potential of space. When John F. Kennedy laid down a marker in 1962 that man would go to the moon it inspired a nation and a world. Texas has been at the heart of space exploration from the very beginning. Unfortunately in recent years this (Obama) administration has lost sight of the core mission of NASA. My priority as chairman of the subcommittee is to refocus NASA on its core priority of exploring space. We need to get back to the hard sciences, to manned space exploration and to the innovation that has been integral to the mission of NASA. We should not be allowing NASA to have its resources diverted to extraneous political agendas separate and apart from exploring space.

Phil Plait in Slate:

Space policy expert Marcia Smith, for example, wrote a thoughtful piece for Space Policy Online questioning Cruz’s ability to “derail” NASA. She points out that his ability to change NASA policy is limited. She says,

Cruz … has authority over policy and theoretically could write a NASA authorization bill that restricts what climate science research NASA could do or even abolishes NASA’s entire earth science program. Such a bill, however, would have to get through the full committee, the Senate, the House and be signed into law by the President before becoming law. While one should “never say never,” the chances of that happening are extremely small.

I hope she’s right (and she is very informed on these matters), but I’m not completely convinced. What little legislation the Republicans in Congress haven’t obstructed over the past few years has hardly been a compromise in the dictionary sense; the Democrats and White House have caved on quite a bit. Since the NASA budget is part of the overall federal budget, I’m not 100 percent sure they won’t try to excise what they don’t like.