Attacks on scientific research, the US military will cut off important satellite sea ice data!
Japan's emergency relief, but ultimately miss critical data for several months.
On July 6th in the US, the US publication "Space News" published an article.
US climate scientists will be cut off from satellite data used to measure sea ice, the US Department of Defense announced plans to cancel processing these data for scientific research.
This is the latest attack by the US government on scientific research, aimed at cutting budgets to allow tax cuts elsewhere.
These attacks have already forced the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Science Foundation out of their offices, climate science references on websites have been removed, and funding for hurricane forecast data has been canceled.
After scientists raised strong protests against this decision, it has been postponed until late July.
Putting politics aside, purely from the perspective of scientific research, this is crazy.
Without the ability to track sea ice, scientists cannot understand the most important indicators of climate change, nor can they determine how close we are to the edge.
Certainly, the United States is not the only country operating climate instruments on satellites.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has a satellite called Shizuku, officially named the Global Change Observation Mission.
Shizuku is equipped with an instrument called the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-2), which works very similarly to SSMIS.
Japanese researchers have been looking for ways to transfer data to AMSR-2, possibly because they heard about the upcoming decision by the US Department of Defense.
However, this transition requires time to calibrate the instruments and the NSIDC system, which will result in a gap in the scientists' data - a blind spot in climate monitoring that we cannot afford.
US netizen Schimig said:
The Trump administration politicizes research and selectively uses science, leading the United States down a dangerous and irresponsible path.
Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/1836937704246282/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author.