Living on the Real World

Jerry Ravetz is an extraordinary scholar whose work and thought defy easy characterization. Fortunately, he’s done the job for us! On his website, he self-identifies as a “philosopher-at-large.” He’s  been a refreshing and insightful presence at the intersection of science, philosophy, history, and policy for decades. If you don’t know Jerry and want to get a feel for him and for his work, click on and read the professional biography on his web site.

A few days ago he commented on a post I’d written in 2010 describing the fumbling but improving efforts of the private- and public sectors to collaborate in the arena of Earth observations, science, and services. Here is what he said, verbatim:

Fascinating! Over here in the UK there is a sharp polarisation. Roughly half the country believes that when the private sector moves into a public-sector operation, they’re only in it for the profit, and they will cherry-pick the profitable business and reduce quality on the rest. The huge and damaging debate over the reform of the National Health Service is an example. Also, it was private-sector ICT firms that produced one disaster after another in large-scale integrated projects. The railways took years to recover from privatisation in the 1990s. Yet you describe an example of real enrichment and collaboration. How did it happen?

It seemed a shame to let either the comment or the subject languish…this issue of collaboration is often mentioned as a distinguishing hallmark of our field. And speaking of shame, the question and the man who raised it make me wish I had some real scholarship to offer. With apologies, I’m going to give a poor substitute…a personal narrative. Perhaps this will motivate other readers to provide some real facts…maybe we can get a little discussion going.

But let me begin with an (unproven) assertion: if seven billion of us are to cope successfully with our threefold challenge of (1) extracting resources from the Earth (food, water, energy, etc.), (2) protecting the environment and ecosystems, and (3) building resilience to natural hazards, we will have to nurture a more-capable, more-nuanced, less-stereotyped social contract between the public- and private sectors. [If interested, you can find several other posts touching on this subject listed here.]

Back to the narrative. The narrative has a clear public-private-sector piece, but we have to postpone that a bit. For today, we’ll begin with the subject of scientific collaboration more generally. Here goes…

When I was in ninth grade my science book on one of the opening pages asserted that “scientists are a community of scholars engaged in a common search for knowledge.”

Please stop for a second to reflect on how naïve and Pollyannaish that statement sounds to 21^st-century ears…or even to adult scientists of the year 1957. Nevertheless…back in ninth grade I failed to lift the veil and realize that this just might be a tiny over-simplification.

It also never occurred to me as the son of a mathematician and the nephew of a plasma physicist that I would become anything but a scientist. When I attended Swarthmore, from 1960-1964 (some years after Ravetz was a student there…we referred to the students of his generation and the 1950’s as “a time when giants roamed the Earth”), I saw nothing to dispel this idea of community. Just the opposite. It seemed to me physics at Swarthmore embodied these ideals at their best.

Graduate school was a different story. At the University of Chicago, at the Institute for the Study of Metals, life seemed at the time to fit the Hobbesian description…nasty, brutish, and short. The junior faculty were competing for tenure, sometimes even when conducting joint research. We were enjoined to keep ideas within our small group. I had one faculty member tell me it had taken him eighteen months to grow a metallic crystal to the degree of perfection we needed for our experiments, and he was “damned if I’ll show anybody how I did it until I’ve milked it for all it’s worth.”

Some community.

After a year, I was sufficiently frustrated by this to look for something else. I transferred to the University’s Department of Geophysical Sciences…

…and entered a far more cooperative world. Collaboration was taken for granted. Comity was in the air. There was a divide between faculty and students, but far less of one than in Physics.

Back then and since, I’ve tried to collect and/or formulate explanations for the difference. Here are a few: (1) The geophysical ground was less picked-over; by contrast, with the invention of the transistor, solid-state (condensed-matter today) physics had become a hot topic. And understanding of geophysics was primitive. The results of the International Geophysical Year were only just settling in. Planetary physics was in its infancy. Unsolved problems were everywhere.  (2) In geophysics, oil exploration aside, chances of getting rich were negligible. (3) So were the chances of winning a Nobel Prize. Remember, this was years before Crutzen, Molina, and Rowland would win the 1995 Nobel Chemistry Prize for their explanation of the ozone hole.

The biggest reason most often given, however, is quite different…and over my career I’ve heard it from all sides. It’s the idea that geophysics is inherently cooperative, whereas physics, chemistry, etc., aren’t. It goes like this. Your colleagues don’t share your interest in rotating liquid helium at temperatures near absolute zero? Or the DeHaas-van Alfven effect? Fine. You’ll go it alone. And you can go it alone anywhere. By contrast, suppose you want to study the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. Or glacial rebound on Baffin Island? You have to go to these places. And do you want to make a several-day weather forecast for Seattle, Washington? What if the Russians don’t want to share information on current weather conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.) over Siberia? [Hark back to the 1950’s and earlier, before weather satellites.] Then you’re outta luck! In the United States, this reality obtained during the Civil War. During the 1850’s Joseph Henry’s Smithsonian put out a daily weather forecast, based on telegraph reports of weather conditions to the south and west of Washington DC. But once hostilities broke out, the Confederacy denied the Union the data, forcing the Smithsonian out of the forecasting business.

So…from the time that meteorology was born, the field has emphasized international sharing of data. The International Meteorological Organization (the antecedent of today’s World Meteorological Organization) dates back to 1873. It was formed for that specific purpose.

With this as the background…in the next post we’ll turn our attention to private-public-sector collaboration in weather and the Earth sciences more specifically.

Appropriately enough, we’ll find that the relationship has sometimes been tempestuous…and the road a little rocky.

As I start to write this, in the evening of May 6, it is 75 years to the day that the 61 crew and the 36 passengers of the airship Hindenburg were attempting what was called a “high landing” or “flying moor,” in which the airship would drop lines from altitude and then be winched onto the mooring mast. For several hours they had been slowly cruising along the New Jersey shoreline, waiting for thunderstorms over the Lakehurst area to clear the Naval Air Station so they could land. Everyone on board was impatient. The Hindenburg was late. Headwinds over the Atlantic had put the airship behind schedule. Absent those delays, the landing might have occurred substantially earlier in the day.

In any event, as airship and ground crews struggled in the winds and drizzle, the Hindenburg caught fire. Some seven million cubic feet of hydrogen (coincidentally, the Hindenburg at 840 feet in length and 135 feet in diameter was approaching the same size as the Titanic) burst into flame.

The entire airship was completely destroyed in less than a minute.

Because of the high profile of these German airships and their operations, press coverage had been extraordinary and this event was captured on film. Grim viewing, even to today’s jaded eyes. It’s hard to imagine how anyone escaped, but only 35 people died, including one member of the ground crew.  

The post-accident investigation was extensive for the time. The Wikipedia links give much of the detail. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts of where the fire started. The possible triggers and contributing causes of the disaster have been the subject of much conjecture. Lightning or electrical activity from the nearby storms? Sabotage…maybe a camera’s flashbulb linked to a timer? In the shadowy alternative what-if, if-only, coulda-woulda world-that-might-have-been that closely tracks the real world we live in, perhaps the disaster might have been averted?

Or not.

Certainly the single major contributing factor was the use of hydrogen instead of helium gas to provide buoyancy. Hydrogen provided an extra 8% lift, but that wasn’t the reason for its use in this case. Technology had only recently made it possible to collect helium, an inert gas, in the quantities needed. That technology was in American hands. The Germans had requested helium, but that request had been denied. By this time Hitler’s Germany was already considered a rogue nation, and helium was recognized as a strategic material. The swastikas emblazoned on the tail of the Hindenburg were a grim reminder that Hitler and the Nazi party had not only taken over the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company but also Germany itself…ironically wresting it from the leadership of Paul von Hindenburg, the German former military leader and statesman after whom the airship was named.

The Germans were comfortable handling the hydrogen. They’d been using it all along…were confident they knew how to control the risk (just as they thought they could handle Hitler).

As I read these background materials to prepare this post, a name caught my notice. Mark Heald, a Princeton professor of history who’d been an eye-witness, along with his wife and son, was quoted to the effect he’d seen St. Elmo’s fire on the airship moments before the airship became ablaze.

Mark Heald? While at Swarthmore, I’d had a physics professor by the same name. I googled Mark Heald the history professor and found a biography. He’d obviously had a distinguished career. And he had a son Mark Heald who had been living in Swarthmore at the time of his death.  

Hmm.

Time to draw onthe Internet one more time…a little research yielded a phone number that got me in touch with my former professor, now retired.

What a great privilege to hear from this gentle, insightful scientist once again! Brought back a rush of gratitude and great college memories. And sure enough! He had witnessed the Hindenburg tragedy…

 Mark told me he had been eight years old. His dad had gotten a new car, and asked the family if they wanted to go for a drive. They’d heard the Hindenburg was landing that day at Lakehurst, just about 40-50 miles away. So they set out.

Mark said at that time airships from Lakehurst – the Macon and the Akron – would often fly from Lakehurst to Princeton on training runs and then loop around. [The story of the Akron, including its loss at sea in a storm, makes particularly compelling reading.] The Princeton schoolkids could hear the distinctive sound of the airship engines in the schoolroom; they’d sometimes be allowed to go outside and watch.

Mark said he’d remembered that a squall had delayed the airship’s landing, so his family went for a bite to eat and then drove over to the naval air station. He said it had been quite rural then, and they were able to park the car in a lot outside the main entrance to the base. From there they enjoyed a close-hand side view of the landing, while shielded from the wind and drizzle. He said their vantage point was distinct from most of the camera perspectives which were essentially underneath the vessel. He remembers his father saying “oh my goodness the Hindenburg’s on fire.”

Mark said they left almost immediately afterward; his father had realized the two-lane roads would be clogged with emergency vehicles and they’d only be in the way. He said they were very surprised to read the next day that so many people had survived.

Airships had been making the trans-Atlantic run in three days or a bit less. The Hindenburg had made something like 17 round trips in 1936. Many saw these vessels as the people movers of the future. But their weather vulnerabilities, immense bulk, high operating costs, and dangers soon made their dangers and limitations all too apparent.

History went a different way.

It is early morning as I write this. And we all know – or realize with a moment’s reflection – that dawn’s onset can never be defined or known precisely. Just when did that darkness give way to light?

Dawn is always a special time. It is that point when the coming day offers its fullest promise. When it is bursting with potential, overflowing with opportunity. A night’s sleep, whether sound or fitful, has freed us from the bondage of yesterday’s mistakes. A fresh start seems possible. Hope rules, in the spirit of that wonderful Christmas hymn, “A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”

What’s going on, Bill? What’s triggered this rhapsody?

An editorial in this morning’s Washington Post…complete with satellite image. The tone? Not particularly cheery. The piece cites a recently released National Academy of Science NRC report Earth Science and Applications from Space: A Midterm Assessment of NASA’s Implementation of the Decadal Survey developed under the auspices of the Space Studies Board and the leadership of Dennis Hartman. The editorial supports the report’s findings and recommendations that NASA budgets for Earth observing satellites should be restored to earlier, higher levels.

Readers coming to the editorial from various perspectives might see room for improvement. The editors refer to problems besetting both the operational Earth observing satellites and the research satellites, but address the funding challenge primarily for the latter. Some might wish the editorial had spoken to the need for increased funding more broadly… to cover ground-based Earth observing networks of weather radars, ocean sensors, and more; Earth science; and science-based services. Some might not be happy that the editorial pitted satellite funding against cheap student loans. After all, surely we need to invest in our young people – tomorrow’s human infrastructure – as well.

But the fact remains…in looking across the gamut of problems facing the world today and tomorrow, The Post editors chose to highlight this one. And leadership is less about doing things right, and more about doing the right things. To focus on this topic at this point in the 21^st century is surely right.

So, is this really the dawn of human concern for the Earth observations, science, and services, on which hangs so much of our national agenda – the resource extraction; the food, water, and energy production; the environmental protection; the resilience to hazards? Or will the interest and concern and support lapse? Will our attentions be diverted? Might this be no more than a so-called false dawn[1]?

Of course.

But the point is…when future historians look back on this time, they’ll see this period of history as an age of emerging self-awareness of our changing impacts on the planet we live on…and its changing impact on us. They’ll see these years as a time of great awakening.

The dawn of a new day.

Chances are, you’ve heard of the first, but not the second. Both were vessels. Both sank, disastrously. Both tragedies occurred in April. The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912…100 years ago this month. The Sultana sank in the early morning hours of April 27, 1865…147 years ago today. The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, in icy waters 300 miles south of Newfoundland. The Sultana sank on the Mississippi River.

The sinking of the Titanic took 1514 lives. The sinking of the Sultana killed between 1300-1900, with the official toll listed at 1547.

Sad. But also puzzling.

Why is the former event an icon for disaster, while the latter is almost unknown today? Where’s the media commemoration of the greatest maritime disaster in America’s history?

Don’t know the reasons, but here’s a little more background on the Sultana (the Wikipedia article provides a fuller description, and even a photograph)[1]. At the close of the Civil War, Union soldiers couldn’t get home fast enough. They crowded every means of transport. Mississippi waterfronts were clogged with young men trying to get north. Riverboats were enjoying what promised to be a short-lived boom. The Sultana was one such. The day before, coming north carrying only 100 passengers and a crew of 80, it developed a leak in the boiler. The boat’s captain, eager to avoid any revenue loss, had a quick patch done in Memphis (avoiding the three-day delay that would have been required to change out the bad boiler).  When the ship set off from Memphis in the evening hours of April 26^th, it was groaning under the load of 2400 men on a ship rated for 376. To add to the tragedy, many of the 2000+ soldiers who had crowded on board had been only recently released from the notorious Confederate POW camps of Cahawba and Andersonville. Most were in the most fragile health. They’d barely survived one horror. Soon they’d find themselves in another. Sometime around 2:00 a.m., when the Sultana was no more than ten miles north of Memphis, perhaps as many as three of her four boilers blew. Hundreds were killed outright in the explosion, or subsequently died from burns. Others were drowned or died from hypothermia. [The spring runoff of the Mississippi was no warmer than that iceberg-infested northern Atlantic would be in 1912.] Survivors made their way home with varying degrees of difficulty. In many cases, once they’d arrived, their troubles were just beginning. Getting the medical help and pensions they had coming would engage some in years of struggle. The stories are all-too-reminiscent of stories for present-day veterans coping with the after-effects of agent orange, or brain damage from the concussive impacts of IEDs, etc.

The last bit to the story? There was an official inquiry. The investigators found that the ship’s boilers exploded due to the faulty repair to the leaky boiler, as well as careening caused by overloading, with contributions from other causes. In present-day eyes, it would seem there was plenty of malfeasance to go around. The captain had taken shortcuts with the repairs. Union officers charged with signing off on the repairs did so without qualm. But in the event, everyone was exonerated.

Which brings us back to the question…why has this disaster gone largely unremarked and unremembered? Was it because the victims were nameless, while those on the Titanic included many of the rich and famous? Was it because the Titanic was notoriously seen as “unsinkable,” so that the disaster has come to be linked with hubris? My wife suggested this morning that the Sultana casualties occurred against a backdrop of Civil War battlefield losses (600,000 over the four-year span… as many as 10,000 in individual battles) …is that the reason?

Your thoughts are welcome.

In the meantime, let’s all take time to honor the memory of those poor souls who fought to preserve the Union we enjoy today…and gave their lives at the very moment they thought the worst was over.

How serious are those rising weather satellite costs?

Here’s a comparison. If you’re reading this, chances are good you have a smartphone. That bling and a few apps might have set you back something like $100. And as the technology improves, you buy a new one or trade in or up every couple of years. Let’s say your income is $50-$100,000 per year. The cellphone is .1-.2% of that – about 3 times the fraction those NOAA satellites represent of the federal budget. [Of course your 3G or 4G service contract costs a good deal more over the same period.]

Read the print media or go online and you’ll learn that year-on-year the phones you’re buying are chewing up more and more bandwidth – and you’re footing the growing bill, both for the phones themselves and for that service. Again, something like what’s happening to those satellite costs.

This could frustrate you. You could complain that this growth in bandwidth the newer phones require and the associated costs are spiraling completely out of control. [The Siri feature to iPhones has in fact prompted some such comment.] Some people might go looking for a cheaper vendor or a dumber phone. A few maybe cancel their service entirely. Or recoup the extra cost by cutting back on the rest of their IT. Perhaps buy a cheaper, less capable desktop or laptop. Or forget buying a Wii.

[Not a perfect analogy to the NOAA satellites. But you get the idea.]

But that’s not what most of us do. At that price point, most of us focus not on the costs of the smartphone or the individual contributions to that cost but rather what that phone connectivity and information access buy us. They provide greater awareness and quicker response to workplace developments. Increased job productivity. Closer contact with family and loved ones. Handheld geo-positioning. Locating the nearby Starbucks. And much more (even weather warnings!).

We don’t compartmentalize. Instead we look at the bigger picture of our lives as a whole.

In the case of the NOAA satellite procurement and the overruns, who’s looking at this bigger picture – the satellites as the instruments that let us observe what’s going on with our weather and climate and oceans and landscape? That keep us from flying blind into a problematic future where our agribusiness must feed billions, our water resources must slake our thirst and run our industry, where our energy demands seem insatiable; where environmental protection is a must; where flood, drought, and storms threaten our health and safety?

Not the Senate CJS appropriations subcommittee alone. It has jurisdiction only for a compartment. The Commerce, Justice and Science budget. Not the dollars available to those behemoths like DoD, USDA, Energy, and others that depend day to day and hour to hour, year in and out, on those Earth observations. The subcommittee is using the only tools available to it: the budget and a draconian but unimaginative reorganization. The piece of the budget they control is some $60B/year…far larger than the $1B problem…but far smaller than the $2-3T that the federal government spends on all government services – mostly entitlements.

Where is the process and the dialog that has us all looking at the bigger picture? Asking what we throw away if we skimp on the satellite budgets and compromise both the NOAA observations we need for today and the next few years and the NASA innovation we need for decades to come? It’s not really happening. Everyone in both the legislative and executive branches is too beleaguered by the pace of today’s workplace and too pressed to get back to the business of micromanaging within their respective compartments. What political debate there is, when it’s not focusing on the candidates’ personal qualities – who’s cool, whose dog gets the most respectful treatment – is concentrated on the immediate issues such as the month-to-month upticks and falls of the unemployment figures. Our continued dependence on the planet we live on and basic goods and services such as food and water and energy? Only rarely and briefly up for serious, sustained discussion. And this isn’t the only consequential subject begging for a sustained and respectful national attention and debate. There’s health care and national defense and education and immigration. Our future and role in a globalized, resource-constrained world. Discussion on these matters has been reduced to sound bites and invective.

No blame here…that’s just the reality.

What are the likely effects of this compartmentalization? What risks might we face if we fail to step back, and look across government and the national agenda at the larger picture? Comprehensively? Urgently? Strategically?

Want an example that’s been on everyone’s mind these last few weeks? How about this one?

The Titanic.

We all know the story…in fact we’re tired of it. The ship struck an iceberg and was sinking rapidly. No worries. Simply close those watertight compartments and confine the damage. But that wasn’t what happened, was it? The ocean liner took on so much water that the bow went under, and then the entire vessel plunged like a knife into the deeps. From start to finish? Less than three hours.

In all the ink accompanying the 100^th anniversary of this disaster, did you notice some of the discussion to the effect that many of the 1500 who died might have been saved? No, it wasn’t that hundreds more could have been put on those unused or less-than-full lifeboats. Rather it was this. Some engineers have suggested that if the captain and crew had used the fire extinguishing system to flood the ship’s aft compartments, that the vessel might have maintained balance, perhaps buying the few extra hours needed for the first rescue ships to arrive – maybe stabilizing to the point where it didn’t sink at all in the relatively calm seas.

The Titanic was the victim of compartmentalized thinking.

When it comes to the Earth observations, science, and services, on which we all depend…

…let’s think outside the box.

So all of us have slept on the idea…sort of…for six days.

Even with the added reflection, it still looks to be a bad move. And here’s why.

But first, let’s step back for a moment. It’s easy to see why Senator Mikulski (D-MD) and her fellow appropriations subcommittee members are frustrated. Who wouldn’t be? We’ve seen a decade of rosy initial cost-projections, followed by overruns and delays, followed by de-scoping, followed by new overruns and delays…maybe 2-3 cycles of this all-too-dreary spiral to the bottom.

And in the background? A well-intended attempt to “rationalize” federal programs and save a few dollars in the process has instead created managerial dysfunction. In the 1990’s, OMB decided that separate DoD and civilian weather satellite missions represented unnecessary duplication of effort, even though the different agency players and stakeholder communities had distinct objectives. A forced marriage of the Department of Defense and NOAA polar satellite programs resulted unsurprisingly in a collaboration that was desultory at best. Moreover, it contained a poison pill; a requirement that if either partner reduced its weather satellite program budget for any reason, the other would have to follow suit. This inherently unstable budget approach inevitably led to a crisis and triggered a program split brokered at the White House. Replication of the civilian-program woes on the military side then followed. In normal times both programs might have survived these setbacks, but the financial-sector collapse in 2008 sapped government’s willingness to soldier on (not just here, but on a number of essential fronts…but that’s another story).

Which brings us back to 2012 and to the Senate appropriations subcommittee. Everyone’s looking to them for an answer. And what are their options? Swallow hard, make cuts around the margins, hope that things will sort themselves out and look a little better next year…or at least grow no worse? Simply refuse to appropriate the funds needed? Or accompany the appropriation with a disruptive organizational change, to signal their displeasure? Maybe not surprisingly, they’ve chosen the latter.

But it’s still a suboptimal choice. To see this, ask yourself questions such as the following…

The move will pit NOAA operational satellite programs against NASA’s research satellite programs. We’ll see competition for funding, facilities and people. How will a research agency make such calls? Favor operations, and you compromise U.S. leadership in space science and technology. Favor science, and you increase the risk to the U.S. public from weather hazards, and costs to weather-sensitive sectors of the U.S. economy. And the fact is, NOAA’s service satellite programs begin and end with attention to customer needs. These user requirements are not just incidental, they are paramount. And they are different from purely scientific requirements. NOAA has understood and worked with these realities for decades. But it’s terra incognita for NASA management or organizational structure. And these are skills that can’t be mastered overnight.

Speaking of overnight, GOES-R and JPSS programs are concentrated every day, laser-like, on maintaining continuity of observations and avoiding the disruption in service that looms just a few years out if we fail to maintain full focus and momentum for any reason. Is now the time to create a huge distraction for these programs, their leadership, and their scientists and engineers? Do we really want them thinking about whether they’ll have a job tomorrow, and where, and fretting about organization charts, instead of on their program execution?

To be useful, the NOAA satellites must be plug-compatible with the NOAA’s ground-based communication and computing infrastructure responsible for turning the raw data into accurate weather forecasts. This is difficult enough when all aspects of the project are under one roof. How smoothly, and more importantly, how quickly and effectively, will that coordination be accomplished if the work lies in separate agencies?

That question brings us naturally to the Golden Rule…He who has the gold rules. If NOAA doesn’t control the program resources (funds, people, facilities, etc. – all of it) how much ability will it have to set requirements/priorities? How can it make its voice heard?

And finally, if NOAA loses its key systems development expertise in this arena, how does it prevent further erosion of such needed capability across the agency more broadly? Traditionally, satellite systems support has provided people, and culture, and capabilities that have contributed to systems development across the whole of NOAA. The contemplated transfer of satellite acquisition from NOAA to NASA doesn’t staunch such erosion; it feeds/accelerates it.

The tone so far seems a little somber. Maybe it’ll help to inject a little situational awareness. Here goes…

Early on in my professional career, an older hand asked me… “Hey Hooke! Have you ever heard of the six phases of a project?”

“No. What are they?”

My colleague went on…

“Phase 1. Enthusiasm.

Phase 2. Disillusionment.

Phase 3. Panic.

Phase 4. Search for the guilty.

Phase 5. Punishment of the innocent.

Phase 6. Awards and honors for the non-participants.”

Is it just me, or are you judging we’re somewhere near Phase 5?

Folks, if we persevere and stay the course we might find we are closer that it might seem to the successful end of this chapter of the story. The goal is not fixing the blame. It’s not even fixing the problem. It’s not just building and launching a series of satellites. The goal is nothing less than providing the Earth observations with the global coverage, the spatial detail, and the rapid updates needed  to save lives in the face of weather hazards; keep food on the table, potable, plentiful water in the tap, and energy in the pipeline; protect the environment and ecosystems; and project this U.S. capability across the globe to enhance geopolitical stability and national security.  Weather satellites – in NOAA and DoD – are not “nice-to-have.” They’re  an imperative. For the United States. For the world.

Transfer of parts of this job from NOAA to NASA will not make either agency stronger or more capable, will not help meet their mission requirements, will not save taxpayer money, will not speed up needed satellite development and deployment, will not reduce the risk of service disruption – will not even make us feel better, however vexed we might be.

Oh…and speaking of vexed? Both the challenge and the opportunities here go far beyond the purview of the Senate CJS appropriations subcommittee. Why should the country put all the responsibility for finding a solution and a way forward all on their shoulders? Why aren’t we rallying around a larger circle of folks to help out?

More on that in the next post.

Maybe not CJS’ best idea.

Looking for bi-partisanship in the Congress? Of course we are. America faces big problems. We’ve elected and sent members of Congress to Washington to wrestle with them on our behalf. We hope and pray that our leaders of whatever political stripe are wrestling with the problems…not each other.

Something like that bi-partisanship surfaced in Congress just the other day. On a 17-1 vote the Senate’s Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations subcommittee (CJS) approved legislation that would move NOAA’s funding and building weather and climate satellites to NASA.

17-1? That doesn’t sound like a split along party lines, does it? Sure enough, the subcommittee’s chair, Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and the ranking minority member, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), seem to have been of like mind.

And that shared mindset is frustration. Senator Mikulski was quoted by E&E Publishing’s ClimateWire as saying “We have said time and time and time and again to NOAA, ‘Get your act together’”… “Continual cost overruns are eating up NOAA’s budget, and quite frankly, eating up the budget and goodwill of this committee.”

The last straw? She noted that the cost of NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) rose by $1B to $12.9B even as the allocation available for her spending bill shrank by $1B to $51.9B. Again according to E&E, Mikulski advocated letting each agency do what it’s best at: “NASA does know how to buy and build satellites… NOAA knows how to operate those satellites and get the most value.”

Vexation? Wholly understandable. And the response? Sounds good…on the surface. Congress working on a major challenge – taming the federal budget deficit. Congress working bilaterally. Congress taking action.

But ask yourself two questions. Does this action fix the problem it’s trying to solve? And is that action solving the real problem?

There’s room for improvement on both counts.

Does this action fix the problem it’s trying to solve? Not really. Mostly it just shifts it. Costs of weather and climate satellites are going up. They’ll continue to rise whether they’re in NASA or in NOAA.

[Here’s an analogy, an imperfect one (they all are) but bear with me. The sinking of the Titanic is fresh in our minds. The crew below decks reports to the bridge that the ship is taking on water. The captain orders the crew to confine the leak. Twenty minutes later the crew is still losing the battle. The captain has had enough, and orders the men to stand down. He turns to the crew in the aft part of the ship and asks them to take over.]

So what’s likely to happen, if we take no further action? The costs of the weather and climate satellites will continue to rise, unabated. However, now instead of cannibalizing the rest of NOAA’s budget, they’ll start eroding the budgets of all the Earth-satellite missions of NASA. There may be a bigger pot of money here to draw from, and what’s happening may be less-visible to the American public for a while, but one day we’ll look up and find that the United States is no longer at the cutting edge of Earth observation by satellite, because we will have redirected our innovation in Earth observing from space to cover operational costs of existing, aging technology.

What’s worse is that the NASA culture is a research culture. NASA is not now, nor has it been, in the business of maintaining and providing continuing, uninterruptible data streams for indefinite periods. It’s a science agency. Its task is to develop and try new ideas, demonstrate feasibility, and move on. And the hard part of service provision is not the technical part. It’s the strategic working with customers to identify future needs and meet those. The CJS idea is that NOAA will continue to do this bit. But this will require a new level of coordination between NOAA and NASA that has been missing for decades, ever since the termination of the Operational Service Improvement Program (OSIP), which was designed to facilitate this coordination.

In fact, it was the termination of OSIP that has contributed to today’s problem in a fundamental way. Failure to maintain the relatively small resources needed to ensure that NOAA remained a smart customer able and ready to take over a continuing stream of technological innovations from NASA has led to much of the current shortfall and the prospects for more.

So if you think that the rising costs of satellites was a problem for NOAA, if you think satellites represent only cost, and not also opportunity, then (another analogy), by this action you’ve transplanted not a healthy organ from one patient to another…you’ve transplanted a tumor.

Does the action address the real problem? No. The real problem is society’s need for satellites (and many other tools) to (1) guide our extraction of resources (food, water, energy) from the Earth; (2) help protect the environment, and (3) warn against natural hazards. This threefold problem is the defining challenge of the 21^st century. And here it is time – not just funding to cover satellite budgets – that is of the essence. The good news is that satellite costs, even rapidly growing satellite costs, will remain miniscule relative to the large and growing rewards here for wiser real-world decisions and actions. This problem is doable – and worth the doing.

Other nations recognize this. China is ramping up its satellite Earth observation programs even as the US flirts with winding down. China accurately sees such observations not as sunk costs but as essential, high-payoff investments to foster its global aspirations over the coming century.  It will use the knowledge it gains from such satellites not just domestically but to project its power and influence over a world that hungers for more information on resources, the environment, and extremes of weather and climate.

In the last century the people and leaders of the United States demonstrated similar wisdom. When Nazi Germany overran Europe and the Japanese attacked, the United States didn’t just heave a collective sigh and say, “It’s too bad these challenges didn’t surface when we were rich, back in the 1920’s. Now, because of the Great Depression we’re too poor to wage war.” And when the war was done, the United States didn’t say, “Because of the costs of the war, we’re too poor to fund the Marshall Plan and rebuild Europe.”

So, back to the present day…

As a signal? An attempt to draw the world’s attention? Maybe the CJS vote makes sense. In the actual implementation? The CJS action would be a bad idea. Bad for NASA. Bad for NOAA. Bad for the country.

Just saying.

100 years ago last night, the passenger liner Titanic struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank two hours later. She carried over 2200 people – some of the world’s richest, and maybe 1000 of the poorest, the latter seeking a new start in the America of 1912. Some 1500 of those on board died, most within minutes of exposure to the frigid Arctic waters when the ship sank. There were lifeboats on board for only 1100-1200 of the passengers; in the event, only some seven hundred successfully made their way aboard these.

The tragedy has developed an iconic stature over the century since, entering the realm of metaphor and story. The sinking inspired hundreds of books, major movies, and re-releases of those movies. It has also motivated research. The oceanographer Robert Ballard achieved a measure of fame for finding the submerged and deteriorating wreckage of the Titanic in 1985, using the research submersible Argo, and later returning with the Alvin and Jason Junior. The studies not only established his reputation but gave the entire field of oceanography great media exposure and a welcome boost.

Could it be that after hundreds of millions of words over past weeks and the countless media retrospectives, what’s standing between most people and fulfillment is another few hundred words on the topic?

Just in case…here they are.

In the world of hazards and catastrophe, the goal is to learn from experience, and the failure to do so results in repetitive loss. The model for the former? The world of aviation and the National Transportation Safety Board. For the latter? Flood loss.

Remarkably, the Titanic embodies both.

Learning from Experience. The sinking of the Titanic prompted thought and new ways of doing business with respect to every aspect of the threat. Improved hull design for ships. More lifeboats – even for “unsinkable” vessels. Lifeboat drills for passengers and crew. Improved surveillance of icebergs (and eventually, with the invention of shipboard radar, the capacity for doing this on ship). Improved regulations for ship-to-ship communication. It triggered the establishment in 1914 of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). The science, technology, and attention (the NTSB provides oversight in marine navigation as well as aviation) have paid off. Ship safety may have been helped by the advent of air travel. Speed of passage – and the accompanying recklessness – is no longer an issue. Passengers in a hurry have better options.

Bottom line? Travel by ship is much safer today.

Repetitive loss. But the sinking of the Titanic has also come to be a metaphor for misplaced pride, for blind-sightedness. It was deemed unsinkable, by its builders, its captain, and its crew, and its passengers. The White Star Line and the others involved saw no need for any lifeboats…the few that they allowed were merely a bow to what they saw as an old and outdated tradition. Those who boarded the Titanic anticipated an exciting trip…but only because they’d break those speed records for the crossing.

In these respects, it wasn’t the first such tragedy, nor has it proved to be the last. This pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Proverbs 16:18 (NIV) says “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Think Goliath. Think the Tower of Babel. The Maginot Line. Lehmann brothers and for that matter the entire global financial establishment in 2008.

Do you and I want to reduce repetitive catastrophe in our world? Then let’s continue to learn from experience and advance our science and technology. But let’s start from within, at the spiritual level. Let’s admit to our lack of vision…and our universal, unjustified… smug… complacency.

Yesterday afternoon a tornado ripped through Norman, Oklahoma, doing what tornadoes do best; hopscotching along and ripping up the place everywhere it touched down. It uprooted trees and knocked down their power-pole counterparts, cutting off electrical power to thousands, tore the roofs off buildings and did other structural damage. Unsurprisingly, it also caused human injury – fortunately none reported as major this time around.

Today may be even more dangerous across a large area of the central United States. National Weather Service local forecasts speak to the threat; you can check your local forecasts here or on your favorite private-sector site.  

The weather community – NWS forecasters, researchers, and broadcast meteorologists – started recognizing the menace posed to this region days ago. Social media and the blogosphere have stepped up the chatter. For a sample, check out Mike Smith’s Meteorological Musings. It’s not like the old days, when these storms would develop with little or no warning.

The reason for what might seem to be such dramatic forecast improvement? More than sixty years of focused thunderstorm research, closely linked to structured and sustained action to move advanced observing capabilities, new understanding, numerical weather prediction, and more recently, new understanding of risk communication from the research desk into day-to-day public- and private weather services. The origins go back to the so-called Thunderstorm Project. You can find the narrative in Horace R. Byers and R. R. Braham, Jr., The Thunderstorm: Final Report of the Thunderstorm Project (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949, or in a more recent and accessible history put together by Charles Doswell.

Where has this work been done? Well, much of the energy and progress has centered in Norman itself. Yesterday’s tornado path went within just a few miles of the National Weather Center, a complex on the University of Oklahoma research campus housing National Weather Service, OU, and even private-sector elements. The world’s largest concentration of tornado experts can be found here.

Such concentrations bring both benefits and risks.

First the upside. What is striking and alluring about the study of the Earth in general and natural hazards in particular is that it is inherently, inescapably place-based. The weather in the Arctic is different from the tropics. It varies from continent to continent. Want to study monsoons? You have to go to where the monsoons are. Want to study ocean western boundary currents such as the Kuroshio – or more familiarly to Americans and Europeans, the Gulf Stream? You’ll want to be on the nearby coast.

This is not so for the laboratory sciences like physics and chemistry, or medical research. Here the history and the focus of the work is merely shaped by human decisions and preferences. Look at the location of the Department of Energy National Laboratories. Brookhaven, NY. Argonne Labs in Illinois. Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. Los Alamos…and so on. You can split the atom or map the human genome anywhere.

By contrast, if you want to study earthquakes, you might find yourself at the USGS facilities at Menlo Park California, deliberately sited near the San Andreas fault. Want to study volcanoes? You have a choice between USGS sites near the flanks of Mount Rainier or in Hawaii Volcano Observatory at Kilauea. Marine weather? You’ll find yourself at an oceanfront laboratory. NOAA’s hurricane research and services are sited at Miami. It’s tsunami warning centers are in Hawaii and Alaska.

And its tornado research is in Norman.

The place-based nature of the research and services, and living in a community vulnerable to the hazard under study, fosters a sense of urgency, of mission, and a wonderful passion that are hallmarks of our community, perhaps even unique. For those in our field, our life’s work and our family-, neighborhood-, and broader community interests and values are linked in a wonderful way.

For many geophysicists and meteorologists, this awareness came early. They’ll tell you about a winter storm or tornado that hit their town when they were ten years old. Or an earthquake or volcanic eruption that made an impression. They can’t remember a moment when they weren’t obsessed, energized with their life’s work. Mike Smith? He’ll tell you about his experiences as a kid. Joel Myers, who founded and still leads AccuWeather? He was issuing daily forecasts and selling them to his grandmother for a penny a day before he was ten years old. Louis Uccellini, director of the NOAA/NWS Centers for Environmental Prediction? He’s been transfixed and preoccupied with northeast snowstorms and their prediction since growing up in New York. And Mike and Joel and Louis are the rule, not the exception. The urgency and immediacy of the work fosters resolve and focus on the part of the experts. They make more rapid progress. [Note that these realities apply to other countries around the world as well, not just the United States. Go to Japan, or China, or Russia, or Egypt, you’ll find the same thing, concentrations of experts, strategically located atop the hazard, at Ground Zero.]

So much for the upside. What about the downside?

The risk is that one day – and it’s not a matter of if but when – the tornado, or the earthquake, or the hurricane – the hazard under study will hit each of the communities and facilities that have been developed and concentrated for such study and service. And when that happens, it’ll be a setback for the larger society depending on these people and their work for providing public safety in the face of hazards.

This is a reality, not a conjecture. The USGS honor roll includes vulcanologists who have lost their lives at the volcano’s rim. David Johnston at Mount St. Helens. Katia and Maurice Krafft at Japan’s Mount Unzen in 1991. U.S. research and forecasting of hurricanes – both the NOAA research facilities and the National Hurricane Center, as well as the families and homes of many of the staff – took a real hit from Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

So, today, to our Norman friends and colleagues, as well as all those living and working throughout the region…as you do your jobs, issuing those watches and warnings…you and your families are in our thoughts and prayers.

Be safe.

“Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.” – Catherine M. Wallace

My daughter always tells me big stuff.

[Want some examples? Check out these posts – here, and again here.]

Here’s the latest big thing. She suggested tonight that I might find the following link interesting: How to talk to a climate-change denier, by George Marshall. The video is quite engaging, and the text itself is interesting. All of it appears on a website called Talking Climate: The Gateway to Research on Climate Change Communication.

Maybe the rest of you have known of this website all along. And followed it. I confess to having done neither. Never heard of it until my daughter put me onto it. Haven’t had a chance to check out the other links, to gain any idea of how much I might like or find fault with the website as a whole.

But I do know that I liked this video. A lot.

For three reasons.

First, this suggested route doesn’t require that we command the whole of the climate change argument and have all the details at our fingertips. For some who are expert in the big picture and the detailed intricacies of the climate change arguments, the George Marshall approach might not be that appealing. But for the other 99.999% of the human race, the rest of us, even those of us who know a little of the science, this looks like a pretty good way to go. It looks doable. It’s couched in terms of a few simple notions.

Second, the five principles George Marshall suggests are principles that you and I could well apply to any discussion, on any subject that matters. Faith. Politics. Fact is, you can use these same rules if you’re among the unconvinced, and you’re talking to a rabid proponent of climate change. The rules cut both ways.

Marshall simply suggests that we:

-          Show respect

-          Hold our views

-          Put them (our views) in the context of our personal journey

-          Frame them in terms of our worldview

-          Show how they offer rewards.

(Want more details? You should. Best to watch the video. In 21^st-century perspective, it’s rather long…20 minutes. So wait until you have a bit of time.)

Third, my daughter doesn’t just mouth these rules; she lives by these rules. For me to watch this video was to understand how she works, how she relates to the world. Her kids. Her husband.

Her dad.

Thanks, honey!