FINALLY!
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Trump White House quietly cancels NASA research verifying greenhouse gas
cuts
By Paul Voosen
May. 9, 2018
You can't manage what you don't measure. The adage is especially relevant
for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and
challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft
instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and
NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line,
has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into
high-resolution models of the planet's flows of carbon. Now, President
Donald Trump's administration has quietly killed the CMS, Science has
learned.
The move jeopardizes plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in
the Paris climate accords, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of Tufts
University's Center for International Environment and Resource Policy in
Medford, Massachusetts. "If you cannot measure emissions reductions, you
cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement," she says.
Canceling the CMS "is a grave mistake," she adds.
The White House has mounted a broad attack on climate science, repeatedly
proposing cuts to NASA's earth science budget, including the CMS, and
cancellations of climate missions such as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3
(OCO-3). Although Congress fended off the budget and mission cuts, a
spending deal signed in March made no mention of the CMS. That allowed the
administration's move to take effect, says Steve Cole, a NASA spokesperson
in Washington, D.C. Cole says existing grants will be allowed to finish up,
but no new research will be supported.
The agency declined to provide a reason for the cancellation beyond "budget
constraints and higher priorities within the science budget." But the CMS is
an obvious target for the Trump administration because of its association
with climate treaties and its work to help foreign nations understand their
emissions, says Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in
Falmouth, Massachusetts. And, unlike the satellites that provide the data,
the research line had no private contractor to lobby for it.
Many of the 65 projects supported by the CMS since 2010 focused on
understanding the carbon locked up in forests. For example, the U.S. Forest
Service has long operated the premier land-based global assessment of forest
carbon, but the labor-intensive inventories of soil and timber did not
extend to the remote interior of Alaska. With CMS financing, NASA scientists
worked with the Forest Service to develop an aircraft-based laser imager to
tally up forest carbon stocks. "They've now completed an inventory of forest
carbon in Alaska at a fraction of the cost," says George Hurtt, a carbon
cycle researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park, who leads
the CMS science team.
The program has also supported research to improve tropical forest carbon
inventories. Many developing nations have been paid to prevent deforestation
through mechanisms like the United Nations's REDD+ program, which is focused
on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation . But the
limited data and tools for monitoring tropical forest change often meant
that claimed reductions were difficult to trust. Stephen Hagen, a senior
scientist at Applied GeoSolutions in Newmarket, New Hampshire, was part of a
team that with the Indonesian National Institute of Aeronautics and Space
developed laser-mapping tools to automatically detect new roads and gaps in
tropical forests, monitoring that helped the Indonesian government apply for
REDD+ funding. The end of the CMS is disappointing and "means we're going to
be less capable of tracking changes in carbon," Hagen says.
The CMS improved other carbon monitoring as well. It supported efforts by
the city of Providence to combine multiple data sources into a picture of
its greenhouse gas emissions, and identify ways to reduce them. It has
tracked the dissolved carbon in the Mississippi River as it flows out into
the ocean. And it has paid for researchers led by Daniel Jacob, an
atmospheric chemist at Harvard University, to refine their satellite-based
observations of methane.
It's an ironic time to kill the program, Jacob says. NASA is planning
several space-based carbon observatories, including the OCO-3, which is set
to be mounted on the International Space Station later this year, and the
Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory, due for launch early next decade.
The CMS would help knit all these observations together. "It would be a
total shame to wind [it] down," Jacob says.
This type of research is likely to continue, Duffy adds, but leadership will
pass to Europe, which already operates one carbon-monitoring satellite, with
more on the way. "We really shoot ourselves in the foot if we let other
people develop the technology," he says, given how important the techniques
will be in managing low-carbon economies in the future. Hurtt, meanwhile,
holds out hope that NASA will restore the program. After all, he says, the
problem isn't going away. "The topic of climate mitigation and carbon
monitoring is maybe not the highest priority now in the United States," he
says. "But it is almost everywhere else."
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trump-white-house-quietly-cancels-nasa-research-verifying-greenhouse-gas-cuts