Priorities

NASA shelves climate satellites
Environmental science may suffer

By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | June 9, 2006

NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth's changing climate and environment.

The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture -- a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.

And in its 2007 budget, NASA proposes significant delays in a global precipitation measuring mission to help with weather predictions, as well as the launch of a satellite designed to increase the timeliness and accuracy of severe weather forecasts and improve climate models.

The changes come as NASA prioritizes its budget to pay for completion of the International Space Station and the return of astronauts to the moon by 2020 -- a goal set by President Bush that promises a more distant and arguably less practical scientific payoff. Ultimately, scientists say, the delays and cancellations could make hurricane predictions less accurate, create gaps in long-term monitoring of weather, and result in less clarity about the earth's hydrological systems, which play an integral part in climate change...

They have money to look for black holes in our solar system (of course, if there were black holes nearby we wouldn't have our solar system), but not enough to monitor what the Company's doing to the planet.

Science and the Company clearly don't mix. Take for example the recent push to throw money at Gulf War Syndrome. For those of you that can't get past the wall at Science:

Scientists usually bristle when U.S. legislators mandate a project that benefits their constituents. But Gulf War illness researchers are especially troubled by such a funding provision inserted by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) in this year's budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The $15 million earmark to the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas not only avoids the traditional peer-review process, but it also marks the rare--and possibly first ever--VA funding of a program outside its research network, and to a researcher whose theory of the debilitating illness hasn't won much scientific support.

"The particular avenue of research being pursued is not one that has found much favor with the scientific community," says Simon Wessely, director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London. Adds John Feussner, a former head of VA research now at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, "This takes money directly out of the VA research portfolio. … I can't think of any advantage" from the new Gulf War research program...

...epidemiologist Robert Haley, who for years has reported a strong link between exposure to neurotoxins, such as nerve gas and pesticides, and the puzzling cluster of symptoms that struck thousands of veterans after the 1990-'91 Gulf War.

Haley was initially funded by former presidential candidate and businessman Ross Perot and later by the Department of Defense. He believes that Gulf War illness is "an encephalopathy" marked by abnormalities in brain structures and in the nervous system. Many troops, he believes, were exposed to low levels of nerve gas during the first Gulf War.

Now, Haley expects to pin down how these toxins affect the brain, and how to ease their effects, once and for all. Certainly, there's no shortage of funds: Hutchison expects the center--which Haley says will be called the Gulf War Illness and Chemical Exposure Research Center--will receive $75 million from VA over 5 years. Haley says it will initially focus on brain imaging, a survey of veterans from the first Gulf War, animal studies, and a Gulf War illness research and treatment clinic at the Dallas VA Medical Center...

Haley's Gulf War theories, however, put him in the minority. Animal studies disagree on whether low-dose neurotoxin exposure is deleterious in the long term, and the neurotoxin theory has come up short in expert reviews. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in Washington, D.C., concluded that "there is inadequate/insufficient evidence" to forge a link between exposure to low levels of sarin gas and the memory loss, muscle and joint pain, and other symptoms that characterize Gulf War illness. Wessely argues that British troops, which have the same rates of Gulf War illness as seen in Americans, were nowhere near the Khamisayah weapons depot in Iraq, the most cited example of suspected nerve gas exposure during the war. The IOM report notes that an attempt to replicate Haley's findings of genetic susceptibility to nerve gas proved unsuccessful.

A VA committee that included Haley came to a different conclusion. It reported in 2004 that neurotoxin exposure was a "probable" explanation for Gulf War illness and recommended that VA spend at least $60 million over 4 years on Gulf War illness research...

Facts have no bearing on the issue as usual. Facts are messy things to be avoided in all aspects of the war on Terra. Blame everything except the toxic compound the troops are routinely exposed to in this war. And if the world's warming due to human activity, do everything except address the issue responsible, and make it more difficult to actually measure or deal with.