NASA and climate change

I chose to examine the section of NASA’s website on what they label as global climate change. As with others that have been posted so far, the URL provides an immediate opportunity for reaction: climate.nasa.gov. Whether or not one has preconceived ideas about whether or not government entities would be a reliable source of information on climate change will certainly impact perceptions of the information presented. Either way, they certainly do their best to establish themselves as a legitimate source and authority. The angle they choose to take in doing so is to present a large volume of facts and data—sometimes in the form of graphs and diagrams, other times as statistics accompanied by numerous citations. There are videos, pictures, maps—certainly no shortage of evidence to support their side of the argument, carefully presented in short clips and statements that are accessible to a casual website viewer. There is, however, a sense of focused urgency about the site: the home page, for example, has a banner tracking earth’s “vital signs,” such as sea level, global temperature, and CO2 levels, as if the earth were a hospital patient whose heartbeat was being monitored. In this way the site anthropomorphizes the earth, putting it in a state of emergency, and is better able to engage our fears and emotions as well.

The goal overall seems to be to establish NASA as a rational, unbiased presenter of straight facts. They even state under their “Solutions” page that: “It is not NASA's role to develop solutions or public policies related to global climate change. Instead, the agency's mission is to provide the scientific data needed to understand climate change and to evaluate the impact of efforts to control it.” Their stake in the issue, however, becomes clearer as they discuss their role in climate science. They have a huge amount of government backing and funding and, and it seems that they must maintain themselves as the most reliable and up-to-date source of climate change information in order to justify the amount of money they receive. According to a chart on their own website, NASA receives almost 60% of federal investments in climate change science. This alone is revealing as to how much influence politics is going to have on their information since the government is putting a huge stock into their research.