Earth Climate Satellite Co-Chair: "We Just Want To Get Back To The U.S. Being A Leader" - NYT

[hatrack]

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Several prominent scientists welcomed the report, saying that while the overall tightening of the federal budget played a role in threatening Earth-observing efforts, a significant contributor was also President Bush’s recent call for NASA to focus on manned space missions. “NASA has a mission ordering that starts with the presidential goals — first of manned flight to Mars, and second, establishing a permanent base on the Moon, and then third to examine Earth, which puts Earth rather far down on the totem pole,” said F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who shared a Nobel Prize for identifying threats to the ozone layer.

In an e-mail statement, John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, acknowledged that there were many challenges to maintaining and improving Earth-observing systems, but said the administration was committed to keeping them a “top science priority.”

The report, “Earth Science and Applications From Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond,” proposed spending roughly $7.5 billion in constant 2006 dollars on new instruments and satellite missions through 2020, saying that would satisfy various scientific and societal priorities while holding annual costs around what they were, as a percentage of the economy, in 2000. “We’re trying to present a balanced, affordable program that spans all the earth sciences,” said Richard A. Anthes, the co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report and the new president of the American Meteorological Society.

The report is the latest in a string of findings from such panels pointing to dangers from recent disinvestment in the long-term monitoring of a fast-changing planet. “This is the most critical time in human history, with the population never before so big and with stresses growing on the Earth,” Dr. Anthes said. “We just want to get back to the United States being a leader instead of someone you can’t count on.”

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http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=66930

[BattyDem]

1. So do we, dude ... so do we!

:-(