The future of climate science

The instrument labs at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, have been staffed with some of the world’s best climate scientists and aeronautical engineers. State-of-theart equipment stands tuned and ready for testing. Everyone is eager to get going on a scientifically critical endeavor: to measure, via satellite, the earth’s radiation budget — the balance of incoming radiation from the sun and outgoing radiation from reflected sunlight and infrared heat.

This undertaking is known as the Clarreo mission. Its aim is to better understand the nature and dynamics of climate change. The mission’s preliminary stage is set for 2020, with a payload of earth-observing instruments to be placed aboard the International Space Station. The next stage will probably be a separate Clarreo satellite.

Unless Clarreo is scuttled. In the Trump administration’s proposed budget, it gets the ax, along with three other climate missions.

This might appear to be a loss that, however lamentable, could easily be reversed in a few years if a more science-friendly administration comes along. But science cannot stop and start on a dime. Research projects take years or even decades to prepare. Cutting off funding for a branch of science has a series of cascading effects — including harming other branches of science — that can require many years to undo.

Any productive field of research needs to pursue multiple promising avenues at once, continuously, over long periods. Graduate students who are training today become the researchers who complete a project a decade from now. Work in one field (like climate science) ends up driving and benefiting from work in others (like computer science and engineering and public health). If you pull the plug on one field of research, getting it back up and running is not a simple matter of plugging it back in.

Consider the legacy of “Lysenkoism” in the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, the agronomist Tofim Lysenko rose to power within the Russian scientific establishment. Rejecting Mendel’s theory of genetic inheritance, Lysenko claimed plants could be “taught” to have new characteristics, which could be passed down to future generations. Though his theories flew in the face of scientific evidence, with Soviet state backing Lysenko was able to implement his ideas, with disastrous results for crop yields.

The Soviet Union rejected Lysenkoism by the 1970s, but Russian biology, having missed the revolution in genetics that swept the world during the intervening decades, has still not fully recovered. Since 1958, the United States has had 39 Nobel laureates in fields associated with molecular biology; the Soviet Union and Russia have had none.

It’s a lesson we ignore today at our peril. The canceling of Clarreo and other climate missions would damage our ability to study global warming for decades, hobbling our capacity to prepare for its dire challenges — and infecting the whole of America’s scientific enterprise.

Adam Frank is an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a co-founder of NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog and the author of About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.