By Jeffrey Mervis, Science News, May . 17, 2018

A U.S. House of Representatives spending panel voted today to restore a small NASA climate research program that President Donald Trump’s administration had quietly axed. (Click here to read our earlier coverage.)

The House appropriations panel that oversees NASA unanimously approved an amendment to a 2019 spending bill that orders the space agency to set aside $10 million within its earth science budget for a “climate monitoring system” that studies “biogeochemical processes to better understand the major factors driving short and long term climate change.”

That sounds almost identical to the work that NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) was doing before the Trump administration targeted the program, which was getting about $10 million annually, for elimination this year. Critics of the move said it jeopardized numerous research projects and plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris climate accords.

Assuming the money is intended to restore the CMS, researchers familiar with the program were hailing the vote. “That’s great news!” earth scientist Pontus Olofsson of Boston University wrote in an email. “[W]e need a research program that investigates the use of all the data and tools we now have at our disposal for the how to study, understand and mitigate carbon emissions. NASA CMS is such a research program and it’s essential that the program will be allowed to continue its work.”

“Effective climate policies require the ability to accurately and independently measure greenhouse gas emissions,” Philip Duffy, president and executive director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts wrote in an email. “I applaud today’s bipartisan action.”

The amendment is now part of a $62 billion spending bill covering the departments of commerce, justice, and several science agencies including NASA. It was offered by Representative John Culberson (R–TX), chairman of the spending panel that oversees NASA. Culberson cited the climate program’s importance as part of the agency’s efforts to track all sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Culberson also thanked Representative Matt Cartwright (D–PA) for urging him to restore funding for the monitoring system.

The bill now goes to the full House, and ultimately will need to be reconciled with a parallel bill in the Senate. It will likely be several months before Congress completes action on the 2019 budget.

Here is the text of the amendment:

Under NASA, science, after the paragraph titled Earth Science Decadal, insert the following: Climate Monitoring System: Within the funds provided for Earth Science. Not less than $10 million shall be for a Climate Monitoring program, including competitive grants to help develop the capabilities necessary for monitoring, reporting, and verification of biogeochemical processes to better understand the major factors driving short and long term climate change.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/nasa-climate-science-program-trump-axed-house-lawmakers-just-moved-restore-it/

From the Columbia Law School, New York City

Date: May 2018, Explanation: Budget Cuts (? – DGN)

On May 9, 2018, Science reported that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had cancelled a $10 million-a-year research program aimed at improving carbon monitoring. The program, known as NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), was established in 2010. Since that time, it has provided funding for 65 projects, aimed at measuring carbon stocks and fluxes. According to the report in Science:

“Many of the 65 projects supported by the CMS since 2010 focused on understanding the carbon locked up in forests . . .

The CMS improved other carbon monitoring as well. It supported efforts by the city of Providence to combine multiple data sources into a picture of its greenhouse gas emissions, and identify ways to reduce them. It has tracked the dissolved carbon in the Mississippi River as it flows out into the ocean. And it has paid for researchers . . . to refine their satellite-based observations of methane.”

According to a spokesperson for NASA, existing grants issued through the CMS will be allowed to finish up, but no new research will be funded. This is reportedly due to “budget constraints and higher priorities within the science budget.”

Update: On May 11, 2018, Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) wrote to the Senate Appropriations Committee expressing “deep concern” about the cancellation of NASA’s CMS and urging the committee to restore funding thereto in the FY2019 appropriations bill.

NASA cancels carbon monitoring research program

Paul Voosen, AAAS, Science Magazine
Science 11 May 2018:
Vol. 360, Issue 6389, pp. 586-587
DOI: 10.1126/science.360.6389.586

Summary

The administration of President Donald Trump has waged a broad attack on climate science conducted by NASA, including proposals to cut the budget of earth science research and kill off the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 mission.

Congress has fended these attacks off—with one exception. NASA has moved ahead with plans to end the Carbon Monitoring System, a $10-million-a-year research line that has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks of methane and carbon dioxide into high-resolution models of the planet’s flows of carbon, the agency confirmed to Science.

The program, begun in 2010, has developed tools to improve estimates of carbon stocks in forests, especially, from Alaska to Indonesia. Ending it, researchers say, will complicate future efforts to monitor and verify national emission cuts stemming from the Paris climate deal.

“Any other president would have fired him,” the New York Times editorialized last week in reference to EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s brazen rollbacks of bedrock environmental protections and entanglement in an ever-growing list of scandals. “Mr. Pruitt’s self-aggrandizing and borderline thuggish behavior has disgraced his office and demoralized his employees.”

The following day, the Sierra Club joined a coalition of 40 civic, environmental, and labor groups in taking out full-page ads in the Times, The New York Post, and the Oklahoman calling for Pruitt’s resignation or dismissal.