Budget cut puts US satellites that monitor global warming in jeopardy

4 May, 2007: The United States’ satellites that monitor global warming are in jeopardy as military and human spaceflight programmes get the lion’s share of the US budget, an expert on science policy has said.

Kei Koizumi, an expert on science budget policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says that environmental research and development in the United States has been hit particularly hard over the last few years. The satellite capability that has been projected over the next few years looks very bleak, he adds.

Budget cuts are hitting some of the existing environmental satellites – some will not be replaced when they reach the end of their lifespan and some other planned satellite launches have been canceled.

Earth-observing satellites watch for oncoming storms and forecast daily weather as well as look for signs of global warming and other phenomena. Weather forecasters, who rely on their data on these satellites, also would be adversely affected by any gaps in service.

In the beginning of May 2007, scientists using NASA’s Aura satellite reported that the Arctic ice cap is melting about three times faster than computer models suggested.

According to Kei Koizumi, the squeeze on environmental-observation programmes, including those that watch from earth’s surface as well as those in space, is a part of an overall reduction in money for domestic programmes in the proposed 2008 budget.

In the overall budget, Koizumi says, US Congress and the President have so far cut domestic spending as the primary way of reducing the deficit. For the US Climate Change Science Program, funding dropped from $2 billion in 2004 to $1.5 billion in the proposed 2008 budget. But military spending, instead of getting reduced, keeps growing, Koizumi complains.

The United States National Research Council had come to a similar conclusion in an earlier analysis which found that the US global observations of the environment are at great risk and that the next generation of earth-observing satellites would be generally less capable than the current ones.

The subject was debated at a hearing of the House of Representatives on NASA’s space science programmes and the Bush Administration’s proposed 2008 budget.

Witnesses at the hearing acknowledged that the major share of NASA’s budget is meant to pay to develop spacecraft to replace the shuttle fleet, slated for retirement in 2010, and to finish construction of the International Space Station.