I think Parks is right on this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15park.html?_r=1
http://tinyurl.com/5kuqkz
Here's more:
On Dec 5, 2008, at 2:40 PM, What's New wrote:
WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 5 Dec 08 Washington, DC
1. TRIANA: WHY DOES THIS ADMINISTRATION HATE IT SO MUCH?
Could it be because Al Gore’s initials areon it? They changed the
name,
but the initials wouldn’t rub off. Three years ago while Congress
was out
of town for the Christmas break, I heard NASA was quietly terminating
Triana, a.k.a. DSCOVR, http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN06/
wn010606 . How
could this happen? The $100 million observatory was already
built. It
was meant to answer the most fundamental question of climate
science: what
is the energy balance between solar radiation falling on Earth and
reflected or reradiated energy? Global warming deniers all claim
solar
variation is the major factor in global climate change. Is it?
Well,
Triana is the only experiment that can unequivocally answer that
question. But I couldn’t find a single global warming denier who
wanted
it tested. So I wrote an op-ed for the NY Times; but maybe nobody
read
it, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15park.html . It’s
still
timely; the NY Times should feel free to reprint it without change.
2. DSCOVR: A DICK CHENEY SHOTGUN BLAST BLINDS THE WORLD.
The Nov 19, 2008 online Nature news, reported that the NASA
reauthorization bill ordered the agency to come up with a plan for
DSCOVR. The article quoted Francisco Valero of Scripps, the
mission’s
principle investigator, who estimated that it would take $117
million to
refurbish and launch DSCOVR. The Air Force offered to launch it, but
incredibly, only if all Earth observation equipment is removed.
This led
me to wonder if there could be a national security reason. No, Dick
Cheney just doesn’t want to hear about global warming.
DeSmogBlog, the
best of the environmental blogs, quotes an unnamed source within
NASA who
spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying Cheney was the hatchet
man,
intent from the beginning on killing DSCOVR, and keeping Bush’s
fingerprints off the axe. And why did I have to learn about this
from a
UK science magazine and a Canadian blog? The only major U.S.
paper that
mentioned it was the Houston Chronicle.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
