Amid all the celebration of the new image of the whole earth that have been coming out today, something has been lost in the shuffle. This delivery is sixteen years late. The DSCOVR satellite that was launched February and which went into operational mode today was ready for launch in 1999. And therein hangs a tale.

You see, the original germ of the idea was Al Gore’s. And we live in an age when if your opponent suggests something, it must automatically be treated as a bad idea.

Space Science vs Ostrich Science

In the present case, it’s a particularly ironic turn of events, though, because at the time Al Gore proposed this mission, it offered an objective test of whether the climate concerns he was voicing were realistic. The instruments on board directly measure the energy coming into and out of the earth, and could detect the energy imbalance that those who think climatology is somehow a disreputable pursuit find so hard to believe. Or, if the imbalance weren’t there, could show its absence.

You’d think people who think we have the earth’s energy balance wrong would be eager to go ahead and fund a science mission that could prove it.

But you’d be wrong.

Observing the energy balance of the sunlit side of the planet turns out to be possible because of a peculiar consequence of orbital dynamics. And it turns out that, although a clever idea for “an expensive screen-saver”, and arguably worth it for that purpose alone, such a satellite, properly instrumented, could offer important constraints on the earth’s energy budget.

In short, if the consensus understanding of climate change really were badly wrong, this instrument would almost surely provide enough information to prove it.

If you think the people who find climatology unconvincing should support this mission because it could prove their point, you don’t understand how know-nothingism works. The climate denial position is not that we don’t know enough — their position is that we can’t know anything and therefore we can do whatever we want.

If you don’t follow the syllogism, if you think a lack of knowledge should imply prudence, you still don’t understand know-nothingism.

The slowest launch in the history of space science?

The instrumentation and platform was proposed in 1998 in conversations initiated by then Vice-President Gore and quickly constructed; it was ready for launch in 1999. But Republican pressure in the 1999 budget negotiations mothballed the project, disparagingly called “Gore-Sat” by its opponents. (In some circles, any mention of Mr. Gore is considered disparaging. He’s sort of like Mike “global warming hockey stick” Mann in that way, a serious, moderate, thoughtful and highly effective person who has somehow been painted as a demon. Witness modern discourse at its best.)

And in mothballs it sat. Because Al Gore. Because conspiracy. Surely not because the data would utterly fail to upend the existing consensus and would help refine it.

The Triumph of an Outdated Platform

DSCOVR sat more or less neglected until this year. It was launched on a Space-X rocket in February. Today, its first image of the whole earth was released, to much calloo-ing and callay-ing.

Here’s Neil de Grasse Tyson’s celebration of the image, which was released as a memo by the White House.

Here’s astronaut Scott Kelly right here at Medium.

Here’s Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic.

All the happy talk today seems to be trying to bury the very interesting back story of Republicans practically sabotaging the launch by delaying it for an absurd amount of time. Wikipedia has links on that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/01/science/politics-keeps-a-satellite-earthbound.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15park.html

Going back to what I myself said a few years back, there is likely to be a deeper and more interesting story here than has been told to date:

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/09/earth-observation-covr-up.html

Would it have been more sensible to redesign the platform rather than launch an almost 2 decade old gizmo? Is this the best instrumentation for the mission to launch today? I don’t propose to have answers for those questions; I would not be surprised if the contemporary purpose of the launch is almost as political as the purposes of the absurd delay.

These are also things worth talking about.

In Defense of a Purely Photographic Mission

That all admitted, I would defend the “screen-saver” (as opponents have it) aspect of it that was Mr. Gore’s original inspiration. Actual photos of the whole earth available on a daily basis are worth the few cents per capita that we actually spent on this thing. Providing collectively funded information of collective utility is a legitimate function of government. Seeing where you are sitting (on a rock hurtling through space, that remarkably but contingently is suitable for life) is a good thing.

High views are in demand for a reason. We can easily afford to see ourselves from space if we all pitch in. Why should that be a problem?

Science has never been the sole purpose of NASA, or we wouldn’t have sent astronauts to the moon.

Apparently taking pictures of Pluto is less controversial than taking pictures of the Earth, though.

Well, Pluto is cool too. Perhaps a bit too cool, but that’s another tale, isn’t it?

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Title image: SpaceX launch of the DSCOVR instrument, February 11, 2015.

All images in this article are from NASA and in the public domain.