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> When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and

> When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead. If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things. I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.

gignico 4mo ago
We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.
- deleted 4mo ago
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- IsTom 4mo ago
  I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
  - scrollop 4mo ago
    And these same people likely fund "reports" and "news" with misinformation to make it confusing for the average person.
  - gignico 4mo ago
    Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.
    - foxglacier 4mo ago
      Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
    - mothballed 4mo ago
      So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service. Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
      - Windchaser 4mo ago
        I think this misses the mark. The outrage or sadness is not primarily over "I'm going to lose my job", but the harsh reality that much of your country is not that interested in scientific reality and realizing that your country actually is solidly on the decline. If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo ago
    The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic. Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
    - defrost 4mo ago
      In the US, sure. In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial. TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
      - jordanb 4mo ago
        Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church. The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years. That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US. If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturday_Night_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturd...
        defrost 4mo ago
        The Australian Commission wasn't the first effort in a known problem ongoing since first landing, it was the peak response in Australia after many decades of battle ... has there been a national effort of a similar scope in the US ?
        deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
  - 999900000999 4mo ago
    In theory it can also be beneficial to historical cold countries like Russia and Canada. It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port. Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land. Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects
    - pvaldes 4mo ago
      > It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port. You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake. Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans. > Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land. Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before. Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants. But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream! Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth. The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
      - throw-the-towel 4mo ago
        AFAIK the peat is already releasing gas very quickly.
  - adornKey 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tovej 4mo ago
      It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.
      - t0bia_s 4mo ago
        By your rethoric, do you consider yourself as climate alarmist? Maybe try to be honest to yourslef first and then you'll understand, why it is really just about opinions that vary. No need to labeling opposition.
        tovej 4mo ago
        So you're labelling me a climate alarmist before I have made a single statements about the climate crisis? I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric. Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response? To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
        t0bia_s 4mo ago
        Climate change denialist or alarmist is labeling. You belive in something and other don't. Your arrogance to opposite opinion does not bring anything new to dialogue.
        tovej 4mo ago
        Yes, it's labeling. One of those labels is very accurate, the other is part of a rhetoric that the oil companies are using to drag out the climate response so that they can keep raking in profits. I'm not here to convince you of climate change. If you're actually dumb enough to deny it, then it's most likely a lost cause. The more likely scenario is that you're a bad faith troll, and then this dialogue shows others a positive example: it's ok to be a dick to climate change deniers.
  - QuantumGood 4mo ago
    It's a propaganda talking point. "Controversy" is generally as much a manufactured product as possible, because it assists propaganda goals.
  - drnick1 4mo ago
    > I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money. If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
    - esarbe 4mo ago
      That's a ludicrous proposal. A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'. This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.
    - anigbrowl 4mo ago
      Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
    - xp84 4mo ago
      Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow." It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc. Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are. I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid. They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them. All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
  - yongjik 4mo ago
    Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.
    - Theodores 4mo ago
      Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are. Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'. There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices. Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff. The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story. I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars. But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
      - JohnMakin 4mo ago
        Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all? Most cities aren’t even walkable let alone practical for bike transit due to long distance commutes and lack of infrastructure?“hurrr americans are just addicted to cars” is a really reductive take.
- KolibriFly 4mo ago
  Even if you leave intent aside, the effect is the same: it teaches researchers that funding is conditional on staying within an invisible and shifting political boundary
oersted 4mo ago
Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad. This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry. It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top. And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.
- nextos 4mo ago
  True, also very precarious and unstable. It is now common not to get a long-term contract until your 40s. Given the massive pay gap with industry and scarce funding, it's natural lots of innovation has shifted to industrial labs.
  - oersted 4mo ago
    In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years. Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.
    - jltsiren 4mo ago
      The actual law is more that you need an objective reason for a fixed-term contract in any sector. A genuine project (such as the completion of a PhD) is an acceptable reason. The availability of funding is not. In practice, it has been accepted that postdocs can have fixed-term contracts, because it's a trainee position. Similarly, an assistant professor can have a fixed-term contract before tenure. Both of those are in some sense against the spirit of the law, but the legal system tends to favor consistency and reasonable outcomes over strict adherence to the law. European universities have more postdocs than American universities, because there is more research funding available. But then there are fewer faculty positions for those postdocs, as the universities themselves are not so well funded. That creates a constant stream of researchers looking for other opportunities, which American universities used to take advantage of. Universities tend to operate strictly on a budget, because they only have limited discretionary funds. While a business may choose to buy things it believes it needs, because it expects to make money in the future, a university generally needs to secure the funding first. If you are a researcher, you don't get an office, a laptop, and some lab space simply because you need them to do your job. You may get them if an external funder explicitly chooses to pay for them. I had some visibility into the funding of Finnish universities during the transition to the current system. Under the old system, core funding was more generous. Each university allocated the resources between various units and individual professors, which involved a lot of politics. If someone was particularly successful in obtaining external funding, they might not have enough office/lab space for all the people they could otherwise hire. The funding model gradually changed to address issues like that. Departments had to pay internal rents to the university for the facilities they used. The government started allocating some of the core funds according the success each university had in obtaining external funding. And at some point, they moved most of that money from core funding to grant overheads.
MemoryHoleHQ 4mo ago
Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever. Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart. This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).
- qnpnpmqppnp 4mo ago
  Quoting the article: > Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
  - MemoryHoleHQ 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - brorfred 4mo ago
      Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"? Inclusion Plan Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical: 1 Hiring strategies. The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions. 2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding. Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions. 3. Interactions with stakeholders. Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.
deleted 4mo ago
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timr 4mo ago
> If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will....I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here. As someone who spent far too much of my life pursuing that goal, I have an unpopular opinion: US science needs some cuts. The first project (the space telescope) makes me sad, simply because it's pure science that probably wouldn't get done any other way. And it probably costs nothing, in the grand scheme of things. See also: climate data gathering, oceanology, etc. I don't support cutting things based on politics in any direction. But as you go down the article, you quickly run into projects that are, frankly, a gigantic waste of money -- like "determinants of health inequality" work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing: > Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD)...wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.” It's laughably absurd to claim that "we can start asking these questions", because I'm here to tell you that ineffectual 'scientists' were doing the same research when I was a graduate student, which wasn't yesterday. This kind of stuff has always had ample funding, while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel. It sucked. It's not "censorship" to eliminate it, and the bureaucratic imperative -- along with being accused of "racism" if you cut it, as in this article -- essentially guarantees that it lumbers on for decades. Even in "harder" sciences, it's really a case-by-case basis. You see so much questionable science getting huge funding, simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas. Frankly, there were many days where I felt/feel that the US scientific funding process should just randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold. It would be a much-needed revolution for younger scientists, though of course, it would also lead to endless squealing from beneficiaries of the current system. One of the side-effects of cutting any budgets related to science is that it leads to articles exactly like this one, quoting the people who lost funding. So while I'm saddened that a lot good projects are having a hard time, if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor -- even if "Scientific American" doesn't approve.
inigyou 4mo ago
Such is life in fascism. This is why we used to try to avoid fascism. It sucks. Not only is it destructive, it's randomly destructive, nothing is sacred, there's no stability at all. Why would you invest or take out a mortgage if dear leader could destroy your life for no reason at any moment? It's like living in space where a random piece of debris could puncture any point on your hull at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it.
- wredcoll 4mo ago
  When ever asks about or attempts to defend fascism/strongman style systems with some kind of excuse that they "get things done", THIS IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
dmd 4mo ago
One of the researchers in my department had a study canceled because something they did "engendered a robust hemodynamic response". Whoops, keyword match.
- beej71 4mo ago
  We had one that mentioned "mineral inclusion".
KolibriFly 4mo ago
And scientists are often exactly the kind of people who will try to keep going anyway
- fuzzfactor 4mo ago
  Some individual projects are not worth the money on their own, but maintaining the ability of as many researchers as possible to continue to be at the top of their game, having ever-improving research chops in general is worth more than money can buy. It's still an extremely short-sighted and imbecillic action not to be increasing research opportunities at least as fast as other places like China in particular.
roysting 4mo ago
There is a far deeper problem, a systemic and foundational one; and unfortunately the whole system and all its components are all so vetted to the current rotten and distorted system that no amount of good intentions or personal dedication or will can overcome it. Unfortunately for us all we are at the precipice of a chasm and the forces of nature are upon us.

gignico 4mo ago

We all should feel sad and angry. That said, this was never about saving money. This is about keeping scientists under tight control by the government, in order to suppress research on climate change and other controversial topics. If the government can cut your grant at any time without notice or appeal you will think twice before publishing results that go against their ideology, or even before publishing a criticism on Twitter. This is true especially if you are not tenured, which accounts for the majority of the academic world.

deleted 4mo ago
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IsTom 4mo ago
I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.
- scrollop 4mo ago
  And these same people likely fund "reports" and "news" with misinformation to make it confusing for the average person.
- gignico 4mo ago
  Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.
  - foxglacier 4mo ago
    Yes, the controversy is political because it's about controlling people. There's never a right answer to political problems because they're at the edge of deciding what the objectives should even be and how the good and bad outcomes should be distributed among people. Didn't you ever look at history and think "those silly people 100s or 1000s of years ago made a mistake and ruined everything"? Those people were no different from you - they believed their political beliefs were the right ones. There will be beliefs you hold which future historians will look at as mistakes too.
  - mothballed 4mo ago
    So scientists are getting a reality check. Even scientists have customers, in their case the government. In the private sector a customer can change their mind, even often for a retarded reason, and suddenly decide to stop employing your services. Turns out that happens in government to. We're all employed at the convenience and service of our customers, if they change their mind, ultimately that's their decision that can be made at any moment at which point the most practical next move (assuming the customer is unwilling to change their mind) is to either find another customer or offer a different service. Probably a good opportunity for them to stop and reflect that they're not from a special caste or class, and gravity / global warming / all the rest effect them and the plebs all the same and that includes their exposure to the labor market. Their pleas that it is somehow special when it happens to them falls on deaf ears considering the government funded or employed scientists who have any expertise or position to comment on economics (like Milton Friedman) would preach with their loudest voice from the ivory tower that the plebs duke it out in Darwinistic free-market competition.
    - Windchaser 4mo ago
      I think this misses the mark. The outrage or sadness is not primarily over "I'm going to lose my job", but the harsh reality that much of your country is not that interested in scientific reality and realizing that your country actually is solidly on the decline. If I had to choose, I'd rather I lost my job for some reason, but my country is passionate about science and curiosity and understanding, compared to living in a country where I kept my job but the culture was inimical to science.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo ago
  The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic. Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.
  - defrost 4mo ago
    In the US, sure. In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial. TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrutiny in a very public eye.
    - jordanb 4mo ago
      Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church. The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years. That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US. If you want to see how things were going early on you can look at things like Sinéad O'Connor stuff from 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturday_Night_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O'Connor_on_Saturd...
      - defrost 4mo ago
        The Australian Commission wasn't the first effort in a known problem ongoing since first landing, it was the peak response in Australia after many decades of battle ... has there been a national effort of a similar scope in the US ?
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
- 999900000999 4mo ago
  In theory it can also be beneficial to historical cold countries like Russia and Canada. It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port. Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land. Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects
  - pvaldes 4mo ago
    > It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port. You are 100% right. Yes, some people could believe that huge mistake. Global effects will still catch them. The atmosphere and the oceans are global systems that don't care about frontiers. Warm oceans in Russia means extra hot waters in the equator belt, that means Hurricanes on steroids. This nice Russian port in Putingrade could be destroyed each year by the extreme weather. And nobody could navigate safely in huge stormy areas of the oceans. > Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land. Perhaps we will find that the peat soil starts releasing methane at a level never seen before. And that we enter in an unstoppable cycle of global extinction, just after dismantling science for fun. Weee!. This planet has resorted to that nasty trick a few times before. Once it starts and self-feeds there is not enough money in the planet to bribe the ecosystems. They will fall until the next stable level of energy available. A level that may grant, or may not grant, minimum conditions for plant survival. Humans can't live without plants. But a few rich choosen ones will go to Mars, party all night and it will feel like a Tattoine's adolescent dream! Being rich only works if there are a much bigger amount of people that fix your needs and breeds your food. Money in Mars can't buy you a tuna sandwich when all tunas went extinct. Mars will became a very disappointing place in no time. A place that hates us with passion, with probabilities of survival abysmally lower than the earth. This people will be done the first time that the life-supporting machines will fall. Something that would never happen in the Earth. The earth? will be fine. Go fast-forward several million years in the future and some organism will be seen traveling in machines fueled with petrol made of human corpses.
    - throw-the-towel 4mo ago
      AFAIK the peat is already releasing gas very quickly.
- adornKey 4mo ago
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  - tovej 4mo ago
    It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.
    - t0bia_s 4mo ago
      By your rethoric, do you consider yourself as climate alarmist? Maybe try to be honest to yourslef first and then you'll understand, why it is really just about opinions that vary. No need to labeling opposition.
      - tovej 4mo ago
        So you're labelling me a climate alarmist before I have made a single statements about the climate crisis? I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric. Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response? To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
        t0bia_s 4mo ago
        Climate change denialist or alarmist is labeling. You belive in something and other don't. Your arrogance to opposite opinion does not bring anything new to dialogue.
        tovej 4mo ago
        Yes, it's labeling. One of those labels is very accurate, the other is part of a rhetoric that the oil companies are using to drag out the climate response so that they can keep raking in profits. I'm not here to convince you of climate change. If you're actually dumb enough to deny it, then it's most likely a lost cause. The more likely scenario is that you're a bad faith troll, and then this dialogue shows others a positive example: it's ok to be a dick to climate change deniers.
- QuantumGood 4mo ago
  It's a propaganda talking point. "Controversy" is generally as much a manufactured product as possible, because it assists propaganda goals.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  > I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money. If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.
  - esarbe 4mo ago
    That's a ludicrous proposal. A whole planets' society's structural problems cannot be solved by an individuals action. Your own attitude explains the 'why'. This is a systemic issue that needs systemic fixing.
  - anigbrowl 4mo ago
    Username checks out. I do live that sort of lifestyle and I think your agument is bogus. Different people engage in different amounts of carbon-producing consumerism, but it's notable that different developed countries have quite different carbon outputs, indicating that it's possible to achieve the goal of lowering the collective carbon footprint without immiserating the population.
  - xp84 4mo ago
    Indeed. File under "bitter pills to swallow." It's so easy to sit in an air-conditioned house, with our 2-day delivered Amazon stuff, and just make pronouncements like degrowth, etc. Meanwhile about 99% of the humans who live in places that haven't fully industrialized are either working feverishly to industrialize like us, or are trying to find a way to move to an industrialized country because of how incredibly hard it is to live where they are. I also suspect that our most committed enviro-leftists genuinely believe that their lifestyle is already fully aligned to their values -- they don't even own a car, take transit everywhere! They pay an extra $25 for carbon offsets when they fly, and they "recycle everything"! They live in a blue state that mandates high levels of "clean energy" in the power grid. They do not ask themselves where the factories are built that make the wind turbines or solar panels, what powers their buses and trains and makes the cement that the streets are paved with. What powers the diesel trucks that bring their organic produce and manufactured soy products to Whole Foods for them. All this isn't to even comment on where climate change actually is on the 2 axes of "Non-issue ----> existential threat" and "Completely avoidable if we start now ----> Entirely outside human control." I'm just saying that I suspect nearly every Western climate change activist would be filled with regret if we started making every societal decision to truly optimize for climate concerns to the exclusion of all other priorities.
- yongjik 4mo ago
  Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.
  - Theodores 4mo ago
    Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are. Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'. There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices. Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff. The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story. I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars. But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
    - JohnMakin 4mo ago
      Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all? Most cities aren’t even walkable let alone practical for bike transit due to long distance commutes and lack of infrastructure?“hurrr americans are just addicted to cars” is a really reductive take.
KolibriFly 4mo ago
Even if you leave intent aside, the effect is the same: it teaches researchers that funding is conditional on staying within an invisible and shifting political boundary

oersted 4mo ago

Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad. This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry. It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top. And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.

nextos 4mo ago
True, also very precarious and unstable. It is now common not to get a long-term contract until your 40s. Given the massive pay gap with industry and scarce funding, it's natural lots of innovation has shifted to industrial labs.
- oersted 4mo ago
  In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years. Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.
  - jltsiren 4mo ago
    The actual law is more that you need an objective reason for a fixed-term contract in any sector. A genuine project (such as the completion of a PhD) is an acceptable reason. The availability of funding is not. In practice, it has been accepted that postdocs can have fixed-term contracts, because it's a trainee position. Similarly, an assistant professor can have a fixed-term contract before tenure. Both of those are in some sense against the spirit of the law, but the legal system tends to favor consistency and reasonable outcomes over strict adherence to the law. European universities have more postdocs than American universities, because there is more research funding available. But then there are fewer faculty positions for those postdocs, as the universities themselves are not so well funded. That creates a constant stream of researchers looking for other opportunities, which American universities used to take advantage of. Universities tend to operate strictly on a budget, because they only have limited discretionary funds. While a business may choose to buy things it believes it needs, because it expects to make money in the future, a university generally needs to secure the funding first. If you are a researcher, you don't get an office, a laptop, and some lab space simply because you need them to do your job. You may get them if an external funder explicitly chooses to pay for them. I had some visibility into the funding of Finnish universities during the transition to the current system. Under the old system, core funding was more generous. Each university allocated the resources between various units and individual professors, which involved a lot of politics. If someone was particularly successful in obtaining external funding, they might not have enough office/lab space for all the people they could otherwise hire. The funding model gradually changed to address issues like that. Departments had to pay internal rents to the university for the facilities they used. The government started allocating some of the core funds according the success each university had in obtaining external funding. And at some point, they moved most of that money from core funding to grant overheads.

MemoryHoleHQ 4mo ago

Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever. Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart. This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).

qnpnpmqppnp 4mo ago
Quoting the article: > Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
- MemoryHoleHQ 4mo ago
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  - brorfred 4mo ago
    Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"? Inclusion Plan Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical: 1 Hiring strategies. The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions. 2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding. Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions. 3. Interactions with stakeholders. Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.

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timr 4mo ago

> If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will....I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here. As someone who spent far too much of my life pursuing that goal, I have an unpopular opinion: US science needs some cuts. The first project (the space telescope) makes me sad, simply because it's pure science that probably wouldn't get done any other way. And it probably costs nothing, in the grand scheme of things. See also: climate data gathering, oceanology, etc. I don't support cutting things based on politics in any direction. But as you go down the article, you quickly run into projects that are, frankly, a gigantic waste of money -- like "determinants of health inequality" work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing: > Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD)...wanted to increase research into the social determinants of health—structural racism in home-loan practices meant that nonwhite people got iced out of home ownership and generational wealth, which forced them to live in neighborhoods closer to toxic sites such as factories and highways, without sidewalks and amenities. “It’s a challenging field to quantify, but we’re getting to a place in science where we can start asking these questions,” Norton says. Now the topic is verboten in U.S. grants. “That whole line of research has been shut off and censored because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.” It's laughably absurd to claim that "we can start asking these questions", because I'm here to tell you that ineffectual 'scientists' were doing the same research when I was a graduate student, which wasn't yesterday. This kind of stuff has always had ample funding, while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel. It sucked. It's not "censorship" to eliminate it, and the bureaucratic imperative -- along with being accused of "racism" if you cut it, as in this article -- essentially guarantees that it lumbers on for decades. Even in "harder" sciences, it's really a case-by-case basis. You see so much questionable science getting huge funding, simply because it's done by a consortium of big names, in trendy areas. Frankly, there were many days where I felt/feel that the US scientific funding process should just randomize grants who meet a basic competency threshold. It would be a much-needed revolution for younger scientists, though of course, it would also lead to endless squealing from beneficiaries of the current system. One of the side-effects of cutting any budgets related to science is that it leads to articles exactly like this one, quoting the people who lost funding. So while I'm saddened that a lot good projects are having a hard time, if it leads to a more focused funding of actual, legitimate science, I'm largely in favor -- even if "Scientific American" doesn't approve.

inigyou 4mo ago

Such is life in fascism. This is why we used to try to avoid fascism. It sucks. Not only is it destructive, it's randomly destructive, nothing is sacred, there's no stability at all. Why would you invest or take out a mortgage if dear leader could destroy your life for no reason at any moment? It's like living in space where a random piece of debris could puncture any point on your hull at any moment and there's nothing you can do about it.

wredcoll 4mo ago
When ever asks about or attempts to defend fascism/strongman style systems with some kind of excuse that they "get things done", THIS IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.

dmd 4mo ago

One of the researchers in my department had a study canceled because something they did "engendered a robust hemodynamic response". Whoops, keyword match.

beej71 4mo ago
We had one that mentioned "mineral inclusion".

KolibriFly 4mo ago

And scientists are often exactly the kind of people who will try to keep going anyway

fuzzfactor 4mo ago
Some individual projects are not worth the money on their own, but maintaining the ability of as many researchers as possible to continue to be at the top of their game, having ever-improving research chops in general is worth more than money can buy. It's still an extremely short-sighted and imbecillic action not to be increasing research opportunities at least as fast as other places like China in particular.

roysting 4mo ago

There is a far deeper problem, a systemic and foundational one; and unfortunately the whole system and all its components are all so vetted to the current rotten and distorted system that no amount of good intentions or personal dedication or will can overcome it. Unfortunately for us all we are at the precipice of a chasm and the forces of nature are upon us.