Climate research is not a political act

I know Donald Trump won’t read this, but I feel it still needs to be said, on the day we hear that NASA’s Earth Observation funding is in jeopardy, that no matter how political a subject is, the gathering of information itself is never a political act.

Climate change is regrettably, a very hot political potato, the science is very clear cut, the physics describing how molecules interact with different wavelengths of photon is highly detailed, and people who state global warming is fake because it’s snowing have failed to grasp the obvious difference between the words climate and weather.

The accusation in question is that by studying the effect of climate change on the planet, NASA is shutting down conversation on the causes, and forcing policy makers to enact unnecessary regulation and prohibitions; that the act of studying the Earth’s climatic systems is a politically motivated act.

Amongst the hundreds of ongoing projects that form the highly respected and world renown Earth Observation program, NASA has been flying radar equipped planes over Antarctica for decades, and they have constructed a highly detailed 4D map of the ice cap; its shape and structure, and how it moves and flows over time.  They have found geological features buried under millions of years of ice, and lakes and rivers hidden forever from view.  They have found an entire sub-Antarctic hydrological cycle.  This is data, it’s not policy; it doesn’t say you can’t have a car with a large V8 engine, it just tells us something about the world we didn’t know beforehand.

Discovering how energy enters and exits our atmosphere and oceans is not policy.  Measuring the changes in gas and particle levels across the Earth’s surface, seeing how they move and rise and fall and mix is not policy.  Establishing climatic norms across large time spans and geographical areas, and then identifying deviations from the norm is not policy.

Political decisions have to be made in the light of this and all other relevant data, but they are made by political institutions.  Just because research produces data that forces political institutions to make decisions they would rather avoid does not mean that the research is flawed.

There is a device at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque called the Z machine.  It was built in order to verify that America’s thermonuclear arsenal would remain effective years after the warheads were manufactured, now that test detonations had been outlawed by treaty.  To do this it can produce, for an instant, the temperatures and pressures that initiate thermonuclear detonation in the deuterium tritium fuel.  There is possibly no greater political act that working on potentially world ending super weapons, and yet even here the actual data been gathered is not political.

The Z machine produces the Z effect, in which a target is surrounded by a nest of thin wires that are then explosively vaporised by a massive electrical pulse.  The wires transform in to a cloud of intensely magnetic plasma, which then collapses and generates an immense x-ray pulse, this hits the target from all directions, and blasts the surface outwards at relativistic velocities.  In obedience to Newton’s second law, this outward force must be countered by an inward force, and the target is crushed.  The energies involved are pure hyperbola, billions of atmospheres and billions of kelvin.

The periodic table as we know it is a grouping of elements by the characteristic which they possess in environments that humans would be comfortable with.  Crank the pressure up to one million atmospheres and the table would bear no resemblance to the one we all saw in class, or shower curtain in my case.  At high temperatures or pressures, the unique properties of the elements change.  Our physics was built on the surface of the Earth, but in reality most atoms in the universe exist in a very different environment.  They are crushed within planets and stars, or drift in giant intergalactic clouds, which surprisingly are enormously hot, so hot in fact we didn’t spot them for decades as we were looking in the wrong part of the spectrum.  Most of the universe inhabits a region our physics in only beginning to understand.

Our particle accelerators and massive lasers, and z-pinches allow us to establish fundamental physics at high energies, where most of the universe’s physics actually happens.  True, as a consequence it does teach us how to blow up one very small part of the universe very effectively, but that is not the fault of knowledge.

I am a massive fan of space exploration.  The fact that we may soon inhabit a world where no living person has been anywhere except the Earth is a failure of our civilisation.  We should be doing much much more, we should be on the surface of Mars, we should be drilling through the icy moons to the oceans beneath, we should be using nuclear propulsion to get round our system in a reasonable time frame.  Yes, it would take massive resources, and trillions of dollars, but we spent trillions on weapon systems that prevented their own use, so perhaps an opportunity has already been missed.

But if we could only do one thing in space, learn about our world, or learn about the others, then it would have to be this home of ours every time.  We cling to our small rock with only the slightest sliver of atmosphere to cosset us, and to deliberately fail to understand the workings of that, the effects of that, the consequences of that, seems incomprehensible. 

There is no such thing as political and apolitical science.  It is an artificial delineation that is only created by politicians at times for expediency.  We don’t mind what you say on the news, and how you pander to the crowd on the hustings, just leave the very clever men and women to get on and find real answers.