Newsbusters
January 23, 2019
Amid the ongoing partial government shutdown, on Monday, MSNBC anchor Katy Tur and correspondent Jacob Soboroff warned that the most devastating impact may be a temporary delay in a NASA climate change study. Soboroff feared that “life on planet Earth” itself may be in jeopardy if the budget impasse was not resolved soon.
“And several scientific projects have been slowed or stopped completely by the government shutdown,” Tur fretted on her 2:00 p.m. ET hour show. Reciting a list of impacts from The Washington Post, she noted in part: “NOAA has yet to release the average U.S. temperature data for 2018.” She then added: “According to government officials who talked to The New York Times, ‘The impasse will eventually show in shutdown-size gaps in data that scientists often collect across generations.’”
The host specifically highlighted how “NASA’s 10-year-old IceBridge campaign will suffer from one of those gaps.” She worried: “The program, that was set to begin on March 4th to measure ice loss near the North Pole, just had to cut half of its scheduled work and it could be – potentially get cancelled all together.”
Soboroff recalled joining the expedition last year for a report featured on the Today show in which he claimed there was “no debate at all” about climate change. On Monday, he sounded the alarm:
But, this is actually critically serious to the future – I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say – the future of human beings’ life on planet Earth. Because for 10 years, this flight and these satellites have been up there seamlessly measuring polar ice, both at the North Pole and at the South Pole. I got to go with them last year and take a look at it and it was an extraordinary thing….And the shutdown now is gonna basically stop one of these flights from going and seamlessly collecting this data, which is…