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 gonna be a huge, huge problem for the mission...

Tur chimed in: “I mean they’re doing it because they’re trying to figure out what sort of risk the world is gonna be in if the temperatures across the globe keep rising.”

Soboroff decried the fact that the scientific mission may be ruined: “The whole point is to have continuous data to understand without interruption what happens as the sea ice melts and connect it to the data points down here. And literally, it’s blowing the point of the entire mission, the seamless collection of data.”

Unable to hide her disdain, Tur remarked: “The President, I think it was yesterday, or maybe it was today, talking about cold temperatures and sarcastically saying he wanted some global warning.”

Soboroff revealed that the mission scientists “didn’t want to talk about President Trump at that time” when he initially reported the story, but that he talked to them again:

John Sonntag, who was the mission scientist who’s in charge of this project, today didn’t mince any words about how horrible this truly is, potentially if they can’t get those airplanes up, for the future of this mission. I don’t they’re making any secret about how frustrated they are with how things are going in Washington today.

MSNBC and NBC have long been invested in the climate change agenda. On December 30, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd opened a special edition of the program by proclaiming: “We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter, and human activity is a major cause. Period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers.”

On Tuesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute announced a new campaign to take on NBC for “silencing dissent” the issue.

It’s no wonder why MSNBC’s biggest fear about the shutdown is the possibility that they might not be provided with latest climate change talking points.

Here are excerpts of the January 21 segment: