Surprisingly, NASA’s technology has recently come under fire from… Turkey’s Forestry and Waterworks Minister Veysel Eroglu, who called it “inadequate,” asserting that Turkish science is “better.”

“Who does NASA think it is? We are better than them,” Eroglu said during a discussion in Turkey’s parliament, as cited by Hurryiet Daily News.

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“They might have satellites but we have our Göktürk,” he said, referring to Turkey’s civil and military observation satellite.

The minister also argued that Turkish technology is ahead of NASA’s, stressing that the weather forecasts of the US agency, which is in charge of aeronautics and aerospace research, had not been accurate over the past year. Eroglu further elaborated, explaining that the scope of NASA’s weather studies are too broad, while 1,450+ of Turkey’s observation systems focus on specific regions.

Eroglu’s rant comes just over a month after NASA, whose most recent achievement was discovering the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein a century ago, released a statement saying that the Levant region (which includes Turkey) experienced the worst drought in 900 years from 1998 to 2012.

“If we look at recent events and we start to see anomalies that are outside this range of natural variability, then we can say with some confidence that it looks like this particular event or this series of events had some kind of human-caused climate change contribution,” Ben Cook, lead author and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said last month.

In their study, NASA scientists reconstructed the Mediterranean’s drought history by studying tree rings – a record dubbed the 'Old World Drought Atlas.' The team discovered patterns in the geographic distribution of droughts, allowing them to identify their causes. The research was part of NASA’s current project to improve computer models that simulate climate.

One of the conclusions of the research was that the entire Mediterranean region might dry out due to human-induced global warming in years to come.

“The Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected [in climate models] as going to dry in the future [due to man-made climate change],” Yochanan Kushnir, a climate scientist at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, explained, adding that the Levant’s recent dry years are a sign that the region may already be suffering from human-induced warming of the planet.