Historically, he repeatedly urged cancellation of the ISS and the Shuttle until President Bush named him administrator -- although since then he has dutifully backed it, in accord with White House orders, entirely on the transparent grounds that we would let our international space partners down if we cancelled it at this point.

It would be more, much more, accurate to say that canceling Shuttle and Station at this point would let down a very large number of Congressmen and Senators, in both parties, who had spent most of their careers mistakenly voting for the thing -- and who, in many cases, relay upon these two big programs as a source of pork for their constituents.

He has also been the most technologically knowledgeable administrator NASA has had in a long time -- more so than Dan Goldin who strained to be innovative, but made a whole series of questionable technology decisions that have had a variety of negative and positive outcomes - and certainly more so than Sean O'Keefe, who was hired solely as an emergency-basis accountant to try and get NASA's grotesquely snarled and corrupted financial records back into order.

In that capacity O'Keefe arguably did well; but his own alarming technological ignorance allowed him to be suckered by his underlings into backing such ridiculous red herrings as the gigantic, super-costly Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter and the Hubble Telescope Repair Robot.

Unfortunately, last week Griffin made a misstep that was not only serious, but monumental -- concerning what is by any rational standard the single most important task NASA is currently assigned to fill. Specifically, he announced -- during an interview broadcast on National Public Radio on May 31 -- that he regards the entire global warming problem as being fundamentally flawed issue.

Stating the Bleeding Obvious
The relevant passage of his interview with Steve Inskeep follows:

"STEVE INSKEEP: One thing that's been mentioned that NASA is perhaps not spending as much money as it could on is studying climate change, global warming, from space. Are you concerned about global warming?

"MICHAEL GRIFFIN: I am aware that global warming -- I'm aware that global warming exists. I understand that the bulk of scientific evidence accumulated supports the claim that we've had about a one degree centigrade rise in temperature over the last century to within an accuracy of 20 percent. I'm also aware of recent findings that appear to have nailed down -- pretty well nailed down the conclusion that much of that is manmade. Whether that is a long-term concern or not, I can't say.

"INSKEEP : And I just wanted to make sure that I'm clear. Do you have any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with?

"GRIFFIN: I have no doubt that global -- that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change.

"First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings -- where and when -- are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

Meanwhile On Planet Earth...
The result was an instant furor, since the Bush Administration has only recently changed its own official tune about man-made global warming from questioning its importance to agreeing (after almost every other government on Earth) that it is a serious problem, regardless of what measures are best to take against it.

White House science advisor John H. Marburger had only recently stated: "Climate science initiatives are critically important for the kind of long-range planning that must be done region by region around the world to rise to the challenge of climate change.

Even modest advances in our understanding of weather and climate can have a positive impact. The United States is spending nearly $2 billion per year on climate science within a well-defined strategic plan, developed and reviewed in consultation with the international scientific community and the National Academy of Sciences."

And -- on the very day of Griffin's remarks -- President Bush himself announced his new official plan for the problem:

"The United States will work with other nations to establish a new framework for greenhouse gas emissions for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. So my proposal is this: By the end of next year, America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases. To develop this goal, the United States will convene a series of meetings of nations that produce the most greenhouse gasses, including nations with rapidly growing economies like India and China.

"Each country would establish midterm management targets and programs that reflect their own mix of energy sources and future energy needs. In the course of the next 18 months, our nations will bring together industry leaders from different sectors of our economies, such as power generation, and alternative fuels and transportation."

(This proposal has come under immediate fire itself by many observers for supposedly being a meaningless fake pose of action -- since it consists entirely of suggestions for toothless "voluntary" standards that would be set by each country for itself -- but at a minimum, Bush is now at least paying lip service to the problem.)

Sure enough, the Administration hastily distanced itself from Griffin's remarks. Marburger said, "It's pretty obvious that the NASA administrator was speaking about his own personal views and by no means representing or attempting to represent the administration's views or broader policy. He's got a very wry sense of humor and is very outspoken." White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairman James Connaughton delivered a clear spanking to Griffin: "We're dedicated to action. And, in fact, I think the conversation's really moved beyond a statement of the problem."

The scientific community was a great deal more acid. James Hansen -- NASA's top climate scientist, currently at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies -- snarled, "I almost fell off my chair. It's an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement. It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change....It's unbelievable.

I thought he had been misquoted. It's so unbelievable....The devastation with sea level rise of several meters, with hundreds of millions of refugees, would dwarf that of New Orleans. Is it arrogant to say that such would be a problem?"

(The Goddard Space Flight Center itself, on the same day as Griffin's interview, had issued a press release: "NASA Research Finds That Earth's Climate is Approaching 'Dangerous" Point -- NASA and Columbia University Earth Institute research finds that human-made greenhouse gases have brought the Earth's climate close to critical tipping points, with potentially dangerous consequences for the planet.")

ABC News reported: "Several other NASA climate scientists contacted by ABC News echoed Hansen's comments, saying an overwhelming majority of their colleagues believe global warming is an urgent issue that society should be addressing. The scientists asked that their names not be used because they did not want to jeopardize their careers."

Dr. Michael Oppenheimer -- the lead author of some of the major reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- said: "I was shocked by the statement, and I think the administrator ought to resign. I don't see how he can be the effective leader of a science agency if he doesn't understand the threat of global warming," Jerry Mahlman, a former top scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who is now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the remarks showed Griffin was either "totally clueless" or "a deep anti-global-warming ideologue." (More predictably, the Democrats currently running the relevant Congressional committees hit the ceiling unanimously.)

Griffin himself responded by diving immediately for cover, issuing an "official statement" that carefully failed to make any mention whatsoever of the part of his NPR interview that had stirred up the fuss: "NASA is the world's preeminent organization in the study of Earth and the conditions that contribute to climate change and global warming. The agency is responsible for collecting data that is used by the science community and policy makers as part of an ongoing discussion regarding our planet's evolving systems. It is NASA's responsibility to collect, analyze and release information. It is not NASA's mission to make policy regarding possible climate change mitigation strategies. As I stated in the NPR interview, we are proud of our role and I believe we do it well."

Mission To Planet Earth: The Only Profitable Space Program

Was he right after all, and could it be his massive worldwide swarm of critics who are wrong? The answer is definitely "no". Griffin really did make not one, but two alarmingly fundamental scientific errors -- his "objections" have been routinely raised, and routinely explained, by climate scientists for at least the last two decades, and it's downright shocking that he could commit such fundamental errors.

First, consider his statement that "I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown." What millions of years of history have shown -- obviously -- is that other types of natural phenomena can also cause major climate changes.

There are the biggest factors of all: the natural "Milankovitch cycles" in which the "obliquity" (degree of tilt) of the Earth's axis, the slight degree of eccentricity of its orbit, and its precise distance from the Sun at the particular points in its orbit when one of its poles is mid-summer and the other in mid-winter all slowly oscillate over time in accord with the gentle gravitational tugs of the other planets. But these operate in a very slow way: the three overlapping main Milankovich cycles have periods ranging from 26,000 to 100,000 years -- and the climate changes which they produce are usually just as very slow.

Other natural events can -- at very rare intervals -- produce much more dramatic and fast changes. The total amount of light-colored volcanic ash and sulfate aerosols thrown into the air by Earth's volcanoes influences the amount of sunlight that's reflected back out into space before it has a chance to enter the lower atmosphere and stimulate the greenhouse effect.

Indeed, it's now generally assumed that the otherwise puzzling failure of Earth to heat up during the third quarter of the last century -- despite the fact that humanity considerably increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during that period -- was due to the fact that, by pure chance, Earth's total level of volcanic activity was above average during that period. Half the time, of course, it will instead be below average.

Changes in the energy output of the Sun itself may produce similar long-term changes -- but such changes seem to be always very slight (otherwise, complex life would have had much more trouble evolving on this planet in the first place).

And once in a (fortunately) very long while, a large asteroid or comet crashes into Earth and hurls enough dust into the atmosphere to produce a brief but really major episode of global cooling. (Indeed, a paper about to be delivered at the next meeting of the American Geophysical Society proposes evidence that the "Lesser Dryas event" -- a sudden, hitherto inexplicable episode of major cooling 13,000 years ago, lasting about a thousand years -- was due to a major comet impact that also set fire to much of the Northern Hemisphere, exterminating most of the Stone Age tribes and large mammals that lived in that region.)

But the key here is that these events are either very slow, or very, very rare -- fortunately for us. Griffin himself referred to "millions of years" of climate records, without mentioning that most of the climate changes he was referring to have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of years to occur.

By contrast, the amount of carbon dioxide that we are dumping into the atmosphere by rapidly burning buried fossil fuels that took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate has been unmatched by any natural level of CO2 in millions of years -- and the greenhouse-warming effect of even small quantities of CO2 is a very simple physical phenomenon, understood for over a century.

Virtually no scientist doubts that we have the power to dump enough CO2 into the air to change our own climate significantly -- the few remaining skeptics have been forced to fall back on the possibility (which seems increasingly unlikely) that there may be some natural negative-feedback effect that acts as a similarly fast-acting "thermostat" to cancel out the effects of that CO2 increase.

One suggestion that's been made is that Earth may respond to a temperature increase by increasing its ratio of cumulus clouds -- which cool the planet -- to cirrus clouds, which actually further warm it by trapping infrared radiation. But the evidence that any such deus ex machina (or deus ex natura) might actually exist is at this point very small.

And the additional natural changes that may occur in Earth's climate over the coming centuries could tilt either way -- they might rescue us by providing, through luck, some countervening cooling effect; or they could make the problem even worse. So Griffin's statement that "millions of years" of climate change -- virtually all of it before human technology existed at all -- somehow proves that humans cannot change the climate does display scientific ignorance on a grade-school level.

Incidentally, if we can change Earth's climate -- by increasing or decreasing the amount of CO2 in the air -- we also actually have considerable power to cancel out dangerous natural climate changes in the future. Unfortunately, it's far easier for us to artificially warm the planet against a future Ice Age than it is for us to cool it against a natural increase in temperature.

It's very easy for us to dump more CO2 temporarily into the air any time we want -- we simply set fire to a lot of Earth's vegetation, and then deliberately keep it from regrowing, and thus pulling the resultant additional CO2 out of the air, until the time of our own choosing.

But it's much harder for us to pull CO2 from either natural or artificial sources back out of the air once it arrives there.

The average CO2 molecule entering the air seems to spend about a century there before being removed again by natural processes, and the possible techniques we've worked out for chemically pulling CO2 back out of the air and imprisoning it in buried oilfields, or in artificial carbonate minerals, are sufficiently complex and difficult that it remains to be seen whether they'll be economically practical for us at all.

Nor will it be easy for us to do so by encouraging natural plant growth -- plants need not only a greater supply of CO2 but an increased supply of groundwater and soil nutrients to grow more.

What about his second claim: that the problem is unimportant because we don't know whether the climate we live in at the moment is really the long-term optimum one for humanity? The answer to this one -- again routinely pointed out by climate scientists over the last few decades -- is that the danger we're dealing with comes mostly from the very high rate at which our artificial climate change is about to occur -- a rate to which humanity will have great difficulty adapting. As one biologist put it succinctly in the political blog "Balloon Juice":

"You don't have to know each individual who will win and lose from changing climate to know that human civilization, in the aggregate, grew in and depends on a several-thousand-year period of historic climate stability. Our global population has surged towards seven billion because food growers can plan their harvest five, ten and twenty years in the future. Water rights in marginal lands use regional averages that have held true for hundreds of years. Humans living near water (somewhere near 50% of the global population) count on the coastlines staying where they are next year and the year after that. The word civilization keeps growing in meaning as technology advances and far-flung regions grow entirely interdependent on one another for survival.
"Hardly an exception from global interdependence, Americans may be worse off than anybody. Think of how many products you have used that came entirely from inside America. Do you know where the raw materials were produced? Do you know where your shoes were assembled?
"The simple fact is that Americans could not possibly afford shoes, cars or coke for blast furnaces produced entirely in America. Our raw manufacturing sector is dead. We outsource both labor costs and environmental degradation to poorer countries that make our stuff for us and then sell it back to us on the cheap. Coincidentally, many of these same countries stand on the front lines with respect to climate. When components of the global system break down, everything will start to crawl.
"We need to find a solution for global change because every element of our current system is heavily mortgaged on stability."

To this, one can add that -- even apart from the disruptive suddenness of the major changes that global warming will produce -- it may have genuine, permanent destructive effects. It is quite possible that global warming cause the total agricultural productivity of the world to drop.

Areas of the near-polar regions in Canada and Russia may become more arable for farming, but these gains may be more than compensated for by the reduction in usable farmland across the rest of the Earth, replaced by growing deserts and swamps as well as simply being covered up by the slowly rising ocean level. (Most of Bangladesh -- one of the most densely populated regions on Earth -- is a flat plain at near sea-level; and that's only one example.)

By then we may be able to deal with this problem by genetically engineering radically new kinds of crops that can grow in such unfriendly local climates -- or even by growing new crops in the ocean itself -- but this would be just one expression of our overall urgent need to deal with the crisis either by reducing the extent of man-made global warming, or by adapting ourselves to it, or by a mixture of both.

Any of these choices will take a huge effort, both technological and economic -- our task is to decide which combination of courses of action is the least painful. And the longer we wait in making those choices, the harder they will be, because -- as I mentioned -- it will be much harder for us to pull extra CO2 out of the air than it is for us not to put it into the air in the first place.

On top of that, as the oceans finally begin to absorb much of the heat energy of the newly greenhouse-heated atmosphere -- as they are apparently beginning to do -- they will serve as an enormous "heat battery" which will keep the atmosphere warmer long after its own greenhouse-gas levels have returned to their previous lower levels, although the temperature of the ocean water itself will rise by only a tiny fraction of a degree.

And there is also a very real danger that, if the tundra of Siberia and Canada are only mildly warmed, they may belch a massive additional supply of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, greatly worsening the problem. Studies over the last three years suggest that this may occur much more easily than had been previously thought.

A new study ("Mitigation of Climate Change") released by the IPCC on May 4 estimates that the cost of dealing with the problem quickly enough to keep global temperature from rising more than 2 deg C. -- the figure described as "dangerous" by the European Union -- will be less than 3 percent of humanity's global Gross Domestic Product per year, and probably closer to only 1%, if we act fast enough to stabilize the temperature at that level by 2030. But if we delay such stabilization until 2050, the total cost will be twice as high.

But Griffin has chosen precisely this moment to question whether we need to do anything about the problem. And he has done so using arguments which -- although specious -- are just convincing-sounding enough to convince a large number of lay people who have already been conditioned by the long-time propaganda of the political and economic groups which, for their own reasons, have opposed any action against the problem and therefore have exaggerated the evidence that the problem doesn't really exist.

More and more of those previous resisters have recently given up that argument -- ranging from the Bush White House to Exxon -- but the legacy of their past propaganda remains. A May 6 CNN poll found that, while 54% of Americans do believe that man-made global warming is occurring, 22% are skeptical that global warming is occurring at all and another 20% believe that it has purely natural causes about which nothing can or should be done. And many of the remaining skeptics (including that professional purveyor of misinformation Rush Limbaugh) are already starting to leap eagerly at Griffin's new pronouncement.

Moreover, Griffin made his announcement at precisely the time when NASA is scheduled to start launching a new series of sensitive climate- and atmospheric-observation satellites that are supposed to give us a far better idea of just how big, and how fast-moving, the problem actually is.

It's even possible -- although the likelihood at this point is small -- that they may reveal the marvelous news that the problem really is a red herring, in which case we will need to know that as soon as possible before we have taken too many of those costly and unnecessary countermeasures.

And this is also the time at which NASA has begun cutting its planned funding for those research satellites and delaying their launches by up to several years -- partly under the past pressure from the Bush Administration, and partly because NASA itself is straining to maintain funding for the gigantic and still-growing fund-eating machines of the manned space program, both the current Shuttle/Station program and Bush's projected follow-up Vision for Space Exploration with its expensive planned return to the Moon and establishment of a permanent manned lunar base by the early 2020s.

A committee of scientists selected by the national Academies of Science was assigned by NASA to write a "Decadal Survey" recommending the best set of Earth science space missions and scientific analysis programs throughout the year 2015. It had already issued an interim report in 2005 that described the national system of environmental satellites as "at risk of collapse."

In its final report this January, it adds "That judgment was based on the observed precipitous decline in funding for Earth-observation missions and the consequent cancellation, descoping, and delay of a number of critical missions and instruments. A particular concern expressed in the interim report was the vitality of the field, which depends on a robust Explorer-class program and a vigorous research and analysis (R and D) program to attract and train scientists and engineers and to provide opportunities to exploit new technology and apply new theoretical understanding in the pursuit of discovery and high-priority societal applications. Those concerns have greatly increased in the period since the interim report was issued, because NASA has canceled additional missions and NOAA's polar and geo-stationary satellite programs have suffered major declines in planned capability...

"The world faces significant environmental challenges: shortages of clean and accessible freshwater, degradation of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, increases in soil erosion, changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, declines in fisheries, and the likelihood of substantial changes in climate.

"These changes are not isolated; they interact with each other and with natural variability in complex ways that cascade through the environment across local, regional, and global scales. Addressing these societal challenges requires that we confront key scientific questions related to ice sheets and sea level change, large-scale and persistent shifts in precipitation and water availability, transcontinental air pollution, shifts in ecosystem structure and function in response to climate change, impacts of climate change on human health, and occurrence of extreme events, such as severe storms, heat waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. The key questions include:

+ "Will there be catastrophic collapse of the major ice sheets, including Greenland and West Antarctic and, if so, how rapidly will this occur? What will be the time patterns of sea level rise as a result?

+ "Will droughts become more widespread in the western U.S., Australia, and Sub-Saharan Africa? How will this affect the patterns of wildfires? How will reduced amounts of snowfall change the needs for water storage?...

+ "How will coastal and ocean ecosystems respond to changes in physical forcing, particularly those subject to intense human harvesting? How will the boreal forest shift as temperature and precipitation change at high latitudes? What will be the impacts on animal migration patterns and invasive species?

+ "Will previously-rare diseases become common? How will mosquito-borne viruses spread with changes in rainfall and drought?...What are the health impacts of an expanded 'Ozone Hole' that could result from a cooling of the stratosphere, which would be associated with climate change?

+ "Will tropical cyclones and heat waves become more frequent and more intense?"

At precisely this moment, Griffin has questioned, on totally specious grounds, whether we need to carry out these important studies at all -- even to let us know whether there is actually no problem after all. Bart Gordon, the Democratic chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, says: "Based on NASA's own five-year budget plan, the agency will be unable to start any of the new Earth observations initiatives recommended by the National Academies [in that Decadal Survey] for the foreseeable future. That's not going to get us where we need to be in our understanding of climate change."

Where actual practical benefit for the human race is concerned, an excellent case can be made that Earth science missions -- and particularly climate-observation missions -- are by a huge margin the single most important thing NASA does (with aeronautics research probably running a distant second). At precisely this moment, the new Administrator of NASA has suddenly questioned -- on totally specious grounds -- whether we need to carry out these important studies at all -- even to let us know whether there is actually no problem after all.

This is a serious enough mistake -- potentially a deadly mistake, conceivably even a near-genocidal one -- to outweigh all the good that Griffin has previously done in his tenure as head of NASA. It's hard for this writer not agree with Michael Oppenheimer that it is a disastrous enough mistake to warrant Griffin's firing. It will be very interesting to see what kind of reception he gets at his next Congressional hearing.

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Opening The Hatch On The Mars Underground
Cameron Park CA (SPX) Jun 13, 2007
As I mentioned in my last chapter, we have now definitely found the first caves on another world -- cave openings on the slopes of Arsia Mons ("Mt. Arsia", the southermost of the four great Tharsis shield volcanoes). These are volcanically-produced caves, rather than caves produced by water erosion or by the chemical erosion of minerals that can be produced by acidic water. They must be one of two things.