what we won't know can't hurt us......thanks Susan
Tight Budgets Imperil the Nation's Environmental Satellites - Vital Forecasting Tools
By MATT CRENSON
The Associated Press
Budget cuts and poor management may be jeopardizing the future of our eyes in orbit, America's fleet of environmental satellites, vital tools for forecasting hurricanes, protecting water supplies and predicting global warming.
Amazing, thought I, upon first read. And convenient too, for an administration that has consistently downplayed the dangers (and reality) of global warming. This is a predictable pattern with this gang: Don't adequately fund or legally acknowledge an issue and you can pretend a problem doesn't exist, i.e., if you don't teach sex education, teens will stop having sex; if you don't let gays marry, people will stop being gay; if you don't let women have abortions, they will stop luring men into sex with their wicked, wicked ways, etc. I think of it as the "If You Don't Buy an Umbrella, It Will Never, Ever Rain!" school of SimpleLand Leadership.
Everything in this administration comes down to three political positioning maneuvers (and note that #2 and #3 really are subsets merely designed to serve #1):
1. Corporations should operate absolutely unfettered in order to line the pockets of the oligarchical elite (See: empire building, environmental and safety deregulation, using the armed forces to pry open new markets/ resources/cheap labor, tax cuts, union busting, privatization of anything and everything, etc.)
2. Pandering to the Religious Right (in order to get the votes to further #1).
3. Escape any and all responsibility for the obscenely awful consequences of #1 upon the 90% of Americans who fund the stupidity - and pay the personal price in their daily lives - for these policies.
So on a second read of this defunding the satellites story, we can catch a glimpse of future Monty Python "No one could have foreseen .... [fill in the blank: the Iraqi insurgency, planes flying into buildings, levees breaching, etc.]" moments.
Scientists warn that the consequences of neglecting Earth-observing satellites could have more than academic consequences. It is possible that when a big volcano starts rumbling in the Pacific Northwest, a swarm of tornadoes sweeps through Oklahoma or a massive hurricane bears down on New Orleans, the people in harm's way and those responsible for their safety will have a lot less information than they'd like about the impending threat.
Oh, goody! A twofer! Bush can now claim that global warming doesn't exist because it hasn't been observed or measured AND with a few years of defunding, he (or his Rove-ordained successor) won't be bothered with pesky, alarmist NOAA reports predicting unimaginable devastation. No more silly questions about why he ignored evidence, because there won't be any evidence to ignore. The U.S. simply won't fund it.
Carry this trend out long enough, and we'll all be thrown back into the 14th century, at the mercy of forces we can neither measure nor understand, a nation of praying sheep huddled in the courtyard of our feudal masters, praying to an angry and bewildering God for deliverance from mysterious phenomena visited upon us for sins we never knew we committed in the first place.