Monday, February 1, 2010

Will NASA Dare to Go Where Japan Has Been Before?

 
In a memorable exchange featuring two Mercury 7 astronauts in the film, The Right Stuff, Astronaut Gordon Cooper points out, "You boys know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up." Astronaut Gus Grissom backs him up with, "He's right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

If Congress backs up Barack Obama in his proposed 2011 budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA's old vision of pioneering manned space flight will be "reset" to Obama's new vision of tracking "climate change." From the Associated Press:
Obama's budget would kill former President George W. Bush's $100 billion mission to return to the moon, on the seventh anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia disaster.
[snip]
The budget is much more about spending closer to Earth. It promises a speeding up of launching new Earth's observing satellites, especially to monitor climate change. It includes money to fly a replacement for a carbon dioxide monitoring satellite that fell into the ocean last year instead of going into orbit.
Despite deepening scandals that make the "science" of global warming look like a house of cards about to make contact with an occluded mesocyclone tornado, Obama is determined to put NASA in charge of demonstrating that we really really really do need Cap and Trade, in whatever form he can push it through.

It is a little advertised but uncomfortable fact (for global warming alarmists, at least) that, although the U.S. carbon dioxide monitoring satellite hit the drink, Japan's carbon dioxide monitoring satellite, named IBUKI, made it into orbit (see image above) and recovered very interesting data. According to that data, the United States, rather than being the expected major producer of widely dreaded CO2, actually lags behind most of the world in CO2 production.

Yes, the U.S. has one of the world's smallest CO2 footprints!

Below is the Japanese chart of worldwide CO2 production. The little dots show various concentrations of CO2 in the air, with the blue dots representing lower concentrations, green dots representing higher concentrations, and orange and red dots representing the highest concentrations.
 
 

Notice who the CO2 culprits really are? India, China, Northern Africa, Southern Africa, Australia, and Eastern Europe. See who's lagging behind, primarily because of the efficiency and environmental consciousness of our operations?

Evidence like this isn't going to make it any easier for NASA to fulfill Obama's dreams of a (purportedly) rapidly overheating Earth being saved by carbon credits bought and paid for by guilty Americans.

Read more about it at The Strata-Sphere
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