White House Deletes Nasa Program on Greenhouse Gases
According to Science magazine, the White House has ended the Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a NASA program designed to monitor carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere as a contributor to global warming. Unofficially, the reasons given are of a budgetary nature.
Climate science is once again undermined by Donald Trump. According to a spokesman for NASA, the White House " quietly killed " a space agency program whose mission was to monitor emissions of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere; two gases that contribute to global warming. The Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) program, worth $ 10 million a year, is looking for emission sources and carbon dioxide sinks, and has created high-resolution modeling of these flows. greenhouse gas on the Earth.
Collaboration between parliamentarians and the executive
In any case, according to the journal Science , there is no mention of this program anywhere in the budget adopted in March by the US Congress, which " allowed the initiative of the administration to enter into force ".
Thursday night, the spokesman for the space agency said that the US president had already proposed last year to remove the CMS program and four other scientific missions NASA. According to him, after long deliberation, the Congress decided to preserve the financing of the four missions but as the CMS was not mentioned, it was removed. He described this process as a collaboration between parliamentarians and the executive. However, the subsidies already allocated will be honored.
For the time being, NASA " has refused to provide a reason for this cancellation other than 'budget constraints and more pressing priorities within the scientific budget,' " she says.
One more blow to the Paris Agreement
The US president has always been skeptical about climate change, even talking about his election as an "invention" of China. It has already canceled another scientific mission to monitor the Earth, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3), and announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement signed in late 2015.
According to Kelly Sims Gallagher, Director of the Tufts University of the United States Center for InternationalEnvironmental Policy and Resources, the removal of the CMS is threatening efforts to verify the national level of greenhouse gas reduction in the United States. framework of this agreement.
" If we can not measure the emission reductions, we can not trust the fact that the countries are complying with the agreement, " she told Science. Deleting the CMS is " a serious mistake ".
Research focused on forest carbon stocks
With funding from CMS (65 projects since 2010), NASA scientists, for example, have successfully modeled the dynamics of forest carbon stocks , particularly in Alaska, from aircraft. In addition, the program also supported research to improve carbon inventories in tropical forests.The carbon monitoring system has assessed deforestation, for example by burning tropical forest to clear land for grazing.
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