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E-Letter responses to:

p-forum:
Mark Schaefer, D. James Baker, John H. Gibbons, Charles G. Groat, Donald Kennedy, Charles F. Kennel, and David Rejeski
SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT: An Earth Systems Science Agency
Science 2008; 321: 44-45 [Summary] [Full text] [PDF]
*E-Letters: Submit a response to this article

Published E-Letter responses:

[Read E-Letter] A Good but Limited Idea
Curt Covey   (11 September 2008)

A Good but Limited Idea 11 September 2008
Top
Curt Covey,
physicist
Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Respond to this E-Letter:
Re: A Good but Limited Idea

To respond to the Policy Forum (M. Schaefer et al., 4 July 2008, p. 44) I'd say that merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with the United States Geological Service (USGS) makes sense. The main environmental challenges the world is facing today involve a combination of geology, meteorology, and oceanography. A merged agency could work, for example, to help NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) maintain its status as one of two primary centers for climate modeling in the United States (The other center is the Community Climate System Model consortium, funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation). Despite official blessing from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, GFDL is a small institution that has struggled to keep pace with larger organizations. It could benefit from USGS expertise as climate models evolve into Earth system models.

On the other hand, this plan could do nothing about NASA getting periodically distracted from Earth science by its other concerns: astrophysics, extraterrestrial planetary science, and manned space travel. The authors implicitly acknowledge this limitation by saying that "NASA should be directed both to restore Earth systems science as a prime agency mission and to work collaboratively with" the new NOAA-plus-USGS agency. Exhortations only get you so far in a tangled bureaucracy like the federal government. I'm afraid we will have to live with NASA's competing priorities unless a more extensive (and much more contentious) multi-agency merger happens.

Curt Covey

Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Livermore, CA 94550, USA.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)