Imagine a looming disaster heading for the US, a hurricane or blizzard is on the way and as things are, we're not quite sure what may happen but scientists can take an educated guess as to how the storm will act and give proper warning to those in its path.
But what if, due to cuts to NOAA funding, we just weren't able to do that anymore?
It's not an if, it's a reality. And as the East Coast is taking a battering from Irene's storm surge and winds, it is hard to believe that "austerity measures" means cutting things that actually saves lives. Not just one or two lives, but potentially hundreds and thousands of lives.
NASA and NOAA satellites have been tracking Hurricane Irene as it barrels up the coast. But one type of NOAA satellite, which orbits the poles and helps predict severe weather like tornadoes and blizzards, may soon be out of commission—with no scheduled replacement—leaving NOAA with a blind eye.
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It's a startling headline to read, NOAA Warns Of Gap In Future Forecasting Abilities, but it's even more appalling to read why. It's not that forecasting is going to become more difficult as our weather changes or becomes more erratic, which is what I was thinking. This is just pure stupidity on the part of those who think cutting budgets is good political showmanship for a certain minority of voters who don't actually seem to care about the things Government does.
I am sure they would argue that the private sector would love to send such satellites up into space, but why? Where's the profit to be made? Lets charge the Government for these services now? Which would probably be more expensive? Wait, lets not give them any ideas.
Joining me to talk about this is David Biello. He is an associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American here in New York. And he is in our New York studios.
Welcome.
DAVID BIELLO: Thank you.
FLATOW: What kind of budget cutting are we talking about here?
BIELLO: Well, we're talking about the same kind of general austerity that we've seen throughout the U.S. government. As you may have noticed, there's been a standoff across the board, and this is budget cutting not just for NOAA but also for NASA. And this is an across-the-board cut in all of our Earth monitoring systems, and this is actually something that's been going on for about a decade now.
FLATOW: So, NASA has satellites that look down on Earth, and they help us watch these different events, tornadoes and hurricanes and things?
BIELLO: Correct. We have two kinds of weather satellites. There are the ones that sit in what's called geostationary orbit - that means that they kind of sit there and take a picture of one hemisphere at a time. That gives you some information. And then we have these polar-orbiting satellites. They go the opposite way, so they're kind of passing over the Earth while it's rotating past them underneath. And they give you a much more precise and detailed look at kind of rainfall and the other things we might like to know. Like, for example, it's how we know that Irene is probably going to dump about eight inches of rainfall across the entire East Coast.
...
FLATOW: Well, we had an earthquake and a hurricane, the same - in the same sort of week here. Do you think people might wake up a little bit on Capitol Hill?
BIELLO: I would hope so. I mean, I'm assuming that they're using these satellite forecasts to kind of plan their own travel, perhaps plan their own evacuation, perhaps batten down the hatches on their summer home. And I would think they would come to appreciate what could be lost. Now, this isn't something that's going to happen tomorrow. This is something that's going to happen over, say, the course of the next decade.
NASA is launching, in October, one of these satellites that would do this polar orbit that's so critical to kind of weather prediction. The problem is in more like 2016, 2018, the satellites that would be the successor to that program and continue - and make sure that we continue our kind of eyes in the sky on that stuff, would be the ones that were lost.
FLATOW: And that - so there's no money for that now?
BIELLO: There's no money for that, and so they're going to have to delay those by up to two years, the launch, in the hopes that some money would come later.
FLATOW: So we'll have a satellite gap?
BIELLO: Exactly. And we already have a satellite gap for certain things. There's - there was a satellite called ICESat. As its name applies, it was keeping tabs on kind of the meltdown in Antarctica. And, unfortunately, it reached the end of its design life and shut down and there was no replacement. Because, like I said, during the Bush administration, we cut the money, we stopped putting these kinds of satellites up. And they've now replaced that with a plane for weather observation...
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A plane. Seriously. I suggest you go read the whole interview and let that sink in. And then go back and rewatch this clip with Jon Stewart and think about the little bit of money that we refuse to raise taxes on the rich, you know, it's just 700 billion dollars.
And think about how we're willing to cut in the most ridiculous places and put hundreds of thousands of people at risk, for what?
