The sheer scale of NASA’s 60-year mission to study Earth is why conclusions about climate change caused by human activity are so firmly established. And it’s that scale that makes proposals to move NASA’s earth-science program somewhere else a recipe for taxpayer waste.

Critics make it seem like the program’s $2 billion budget goes to a handful of climate-crazed computer modelers, and that moving earth science from NASA would just be an exercise in pushing desks around. But that money covers a lot: It goes to thousands of technicians building satellites for NASA and its contractors. It goes to people at Cape Canaveral who launch satellites atop of 100-foot pillars of high explosives. It goes to engineers operating those satellites as they wheel some 300 miles overhead.

NASA’s storied success comes in part through its economies of scale. Engineers building instruments for a Mars mission will bring their expertise to developing sensors for an earth-science satellite. Thus the kind of experience NASA has built isn’t fungible. Just as it would be folly to ask the Army to build and operate submarines, asking someone else to do NASA’s job would be an invitation to organizational chaos.

Agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United States Geological Survey also represent monumental accomplishments of American science. But neither has the reach or experience to take on what America asks of NASA. NOAA, an agency of the Department of Commerce, has a budget of just $6 billion, a fraction of which is spent on earth science. Asking it to absorb part or all of NASA’s earth science effort would be like watching a snake try to swallow an elephant.

Proposals to get NASA “back to” some other kind of science not only ring false but their wasteful price tag would also fly in the face of fiscal conservative values. And worse, NASA’s climate critics miss an essential point in their effort to politicize the science. The planet is changing, and that change will pose challenges and opportunities. NASA brings the capacity to know something about what tomorrow will bring. We would be foolish to mess with that kind of competence.