That’s the thing about flying to the moon. It gives you an untrammelled perspective and respect for the real world, facts and hard data. In a blast worthy of a rocket launch, 49 former NASA scientists, astronauts and engineers have finally had enough of NASA’s climate advocacy role.
Going public with a letter to Chief NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, the group pulled no punches in asserting the lack of empirical evidence in support of the agency’s “extreme position” as a bastion of climate change alarmism.
The letter’s co-signatories “respectfully request” that both NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) – the latter run by the high priest of climate alarmism James Hansen – refrain from making “unproven remarks in public releases and websites”. Claims that man-made CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are “not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.” And, alluding indirectly to the high-profile headline grabbing alarmism of James Hansen and his GISS team, the letter emphatically states “the science is NOT settled”.
The eminent group of co-signatories, including respected astronaut Walter Cunningham, flight designer Michael Collins and chief flights dynamics division engineer for 40 years, Dr Kenneth Cox, and a host of senior former eminent NASA ‘glitterati’, have clearly lost patience. They plainly want to bring NASA’s end-is-nigh speculative science back down to earth. The letter cites the “unbridled advocacy of CO2” as the major cause of climate change as nothing less than “unbecoming to NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data”.
The signatories call for an end to “unproven and unsupported remarks” sanctioned by NASA and GISS, “prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate”. The letter amounts to a stark and very public rebuke to both NASA and the GISS headed by its alarmist-in-chief, James Hansen.
