NASA's Goddard Institute For Space Studies Closing; Scientists Will Work From Home, At Least For Now

[hatrack]

Perched above the New York City diner made famous by the TV show Seinfeld, Tom’s Restaurant, a small research laboratory became, improbably, crucial to humanity’s understanding of our changing climate and of the universe itself. Now, it is being shut down by Donald Trump’s administration.

Nasa’s top climate and space monitoring lab, called the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), has been housed in six floors of a leased building owned by Columbia University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side since 1966. Since then, it has launched the career of a Nobel prize winner, aided missions to Venus and Jupiter, mapped the Milky Way and alerted the world to global heating by creating one of the first climate models. The climate model ran on an IBM computer, the fastest in the world in the 1970s and so gargantuan it took up the entire second floor.

But this storied history has meant little to the Trump administration, which is ending the lab’s lease on 31 May, releasing 130 staff to work from home with an uncertain future ahead. Donald Trump, who has called climate science “bullshit” and a “giant hoax” in the past, wants to slash Nasa’s Earth science budget in half. “They are trying to kill the messenger with the bad news, it’s crazy,” said Dr James Hansen, known as the godfather of climate science and previously director of Giss for more than 30 years.

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Ironically for a place that has produced world-leading climate science for a tiny fraction of Nasa’s budget, however, it will be closed down ostensibly for efficiency reasons. Last month, the US president signed an executive order calling for a review of all leased federal office space, particularly in cities, to slash costs. “Over the next several months, employees will be placed on temporary remote work agreements while Nasa seeks and evaluates options for a new space for the Giss team,” a Nasa spokesperson said. It’s unclear where, or if, such a space will eventuate. The move will likely not even save the federal government any money – the $3m a year lease is between Columbia and a different federal agency and cannot be broken early. Researchers, their books and equipment are being packed up and removed so that the US taxpayer can fund an empty building in New York City’s moneyed Upper West Side.

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https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1127

[Brenda]

1. SOMEONE HAS TO STOP THIS DAILY DESTRUCTION!

Thanks for the awful news but your link is a link to this post!

Maybe more coffee...quick buy some before the tariffs kick in.