Friday, January 16, 2009

Obama's Science Team

(Happy New Year everyone! Let me clear out the cobwebs on this blog once again.)

I'm pretty happy with the appointments Obama has made to the the various science agencies. It will be very interesting to see how climate science is changed over the next few months and few years.

One agency with no official appointment yet is NASA. Here's was Robert Park has to say about that and the other appointments:
OBAMA’S SCIENCE TEAM: AIR FORCE GENERAL TO HEAD NASA.
After eight years of continental drift in science policy the science community urged president-elect Barack Obama to act swiftly to fill science positions. But who expected a much admired professor of physics to be nominated as science advisor before Christmas? Or a Nobel laureate to be Secretary of Energy? No scientist could refuse the President’s call to serve their country and the world. Do we only now have a leader who understands this? The members of the Obama team are linked by their commitment to the environment. Only the position of NASA Administrator remains to be filled. It was no secret that Michael Griffin wanted to keep the job, but as NASA head he consistently ignored environmental concerns to push a hopelessly outdated space-cadet program of manned rockets and islands in space. The great environmental observatory DSCOVR was left locked in solitary confinement. Obama will name USAF Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, Ret. to head NASA, possibly today. We know virtually nothing about Gration’s position on the issues, but Obama presumably knows; he spent a lot of time with Gration on a trip to Africa, where Gration was born to missionary parents. This is the sort of person you put in charge when you want to sever the shackles of outdated tradition and totally reexamine its reason for existing.

Emphasis added on that last sentence. We live in interesting times....