Yet another Trump promise unfulfilled. Hopefully voters won't be fooled a second time...
I stipulate that there are naysayers out there. We have the internet and Google, and we can find supporters of both sides of any question. With regard to technical disputes in which it takes years of training to really fully grasp what is being explained, we mere mortals are left to decide who is right based on who we trust. Do you trust NASA and the world community of experts in this field? Or isolated individuals, who rarely turn out to be actual climate scientists, who are claiming to support a position your preexisting ideology wants to believe?
I try to think of examples where I believe in something that is ideologically compatible but is not widely accepted by the experts. I actually can't think of any. Does that mean I'm not a "free-thinker?" Maybe. Or maybe it means I'm on my guard not to bend the facts to fit my ideology.
What accounts for the former NASA experts saying this is not done to Earth by man? When the experts solved it mathematically, clearly man is not at fault for all of the warming.
This former NASA scientist wants this mess studied. And has been working hard for the funding and people who are willing to work on the mess.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201904/wielicki.cfm
Make the case for us. What is this observatory you want to build, and why do we need it?
We don’t have a climate observing system rigorously designed for collecting data over long time scales. Everybody’s been doing their own individual missions. Maybe one satellite’s spectrometer is optimized for quantifying chlorophyll in the oceans, and another is optimized for studying aerosol properties. Each satellite’s instruments are designed to measure reflected solar radiation in a range of different wavelengths, and you end up with this mess where it’s hard to compare data collected by different satellites.
So I’m proposing this: what if the countries of the world agreed to design, build, and maintain a dedicated climate observatory system? We did this with weather forecasting back in the 50’s and 60’s. For example, the UN established the World Meteorological Organization, which coordinates international infrastructure to produce and disseminate weather forecasts.
Where do things stand now?
The CLARREO Pathfinder mission that I’m leading is a small step toward standardizing climate data. It’s a spectrometer that will go on the ISS for calibrating instruments on satellites. It’ll cross the orbits of various satellites 1,300 times. During these orbit crossings, it’ll take data that correct for calibration drifts. The most common cause of these drifts is from contaminants in the instruments that get fixed on optical components by direct solar UV exposure. The effects can be larger than 10 percent over a decade or less. CLARREO will calibrate these drifts and make for a more accurate climate record in the long term.
I’ve also collaborated with Roger Cooke, an economist, to publish several papers on the long-term economic benefits of building an international observatory. We calculated a metric called value of information (VOI). VOI is essentially an estimate of the economic value of accurate climate data, assuming that the government uses it to prevent climate-related disasters. We’ve estimated that for each dollar we invest in the observatory, it will return around 50 dollars in avoided damages. The economic models we use add around a factor of 5 of uncertainty, so the return on investment ranges from about 10 dollars per dollar to 250 dollars per dollar. Working with other climate scientists, I’ve put together a whitepaper making the case for this idea for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is the head group of all the scientific agencies. We’ve also published several academic papers on this.
So we have all sorts of documentation that we need to build this observing system. But no one has said, dang it, it’s worth it, let’s go ahead and do it. I’ve been giving talks about building it for about five years now. It doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
