Three key agencies should join forces to track changes in the Earth’s temperature, according to a federally funded study on climate change released Friday.
NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Geological Survey should implement “a coordinated approach for their space-based environmental observations to further advance Earth science and applications for the next decade,” according to a new study released by the National Academies of Sciences and funded by the three agencies.
The coordinated approach would help answer key scientific questions to reduce climate uncertainty, improve weather and air quality forecasts, predict geological hazards, and understand sea-level rise from global warming, the report said.
“Changes in climate, air quality, water availability, and agricultural soil nutrients are largely being driven by humans,” said Bill Gail, co-chairman of the committee that conducted the study. “Embracing this new paradigm of understanding a changing Earth and building a robust program to address it is a major challenge for the coming decade.”
The report recommends building a “robust, resilient, and balanced” Earth observations satellite program to enable the agencies to strategically advance the science and applications with limited budgets and resources, the study said.
“Information about Earth science now plays a significant role in our daily lives, and we are coming to recognize the complex and continually changing ways by which Earth’s processes occur,” said Waleed Abdalati, the other co-chairman of the study.
“In order to progress as a society, we must focus on understanding and reliably predicting the many ways in which Earth is changing,” he said.
President Trump is focused on shifting the government away from tackling the issue of climate change, including proposing a fiscal 2018 budget that would slash NASA’s Earth observation satellite program and NOAA’s research divisions.
Trump announced in June that he would be pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate change accord while no longer sending money to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund under the deal.
Trump sparked outrage last week by tweeting that the U.S. “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming” amid the recent cold snap that has gripped the eastern part of the country. Climate experts, environmentalists, and meteorologists said the president was confusing weather with climate change.
Trump added in his tweet that the U.S., “but not other countries,” was going to pay trillions of dollars to “protect against” the threat of climate change.
