Climate Appropriations Hearing

An oversight hearing on climate change and research was held by the House of Representatives last Tuesday in the Capitol building to discuss the impact of climate change, and how Congress can help.

The Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, an arm of the Committee on Appropriations, brought in a witness from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. By gaining an understanding of the agencies, the subcommittee hoped to inform themselves on how to spend their money.

“When I go through the budget and I have to make cuts, there’s nothing in there that we can do completely without, and so we have to sort of prioritize what is core to our mission,” said Neil Jacobs, a witness at the hearing and assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction at NOAA.

Neil Jacobs stands in front of the bench where members of the House sat and listened as he provided testimony and answered questions on the importance of his organization’s research, NOAA, in order to inform funding. (Photo by Tommy Furlong)

According to Jacobs and Michael Freilich, earth science director for NASA and the other witness, those priorities lie within a mix of observation, modeling, compute resources and communication.

These are the necessary components to continue to understand and improve the ability to forecast future climate changes as well as inform the public.

Already, “we can predict what has happened,” said Anne Giblin, the interim director for the Ecosystems Center at The University of Chicago, by “mimic(ing) the warming trend we’ve seen we can assign a human component to every one of those things” ranging from changes in dust to changes in greenhouse gases.

But it requires decades to get that sort of conclusion, which is NOAA and NASA’s argument for funding. Their agencies provide the public with the models necessary to analyze patterns that underlie everyday occurrences.

While a single weather event, such as a storm, cannot be attributed to climate change, “when you start looking at the overall pattern it accumulates,” said Giblin. That’s when one can start to predict future change.

Therefore, according to Jacobs and Freilich, funding must be allocated to weather and climate models. Weather models “actually allow us to run experiments and learn things that then teach us about how to improve our climate,” said Jacobs.

Once the government has this research, said David Wooley, the executive director of the Center for Environmental Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley, they must find the proper use of tax money to continue it, but also implement regulation.

However, he cautioned that many real regulations will not come into effect until after the 2020 election. With that being said, “it is important we still take the steps to setting up success moving past the November 2020 date,” said Wooley. The government will not reverse its efforts to roll back methane production, nor will it establish fuel standards any time soon as Wooley suggests, but they can continue the steps of research.

Chairman José Serrano, said at the hearing, “if we can’t all agree there’s climate change, we must all agree something's going on.” According to the witnesses, it is the research of NOAA and NASA that allows for such conclusions. But now it will be up to Congress to decide where the money deserves to go.