Trump To Scrap NASA Climate Research

New president-elect Donald Trump is set on stripping off funding of NASA's Earth Science division for the agency to concentrate more on deep space exploration.

The Guardian noted that Trump is considering eliminating all climate change research conducted by NASA to crack down "politicized science," stripping the division of funding, focusing instead on deep space. The president-elect is setting a goal to explore all of our solar system by the end of the century.

With this move, NASA's world-renowned research on temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena will be at a standstill as its network of satellites will have to pause its work in digging up information on climate change. This is especially devastating to the division that was supposed to grow its budget to $2 billion next year.

Trump's senior campaign adviser, Bob Walker, said that there is no longer a need for the agency to do what was described by the Trump camp as a "politically correct environmental monitoring." He said, "We see NASA in an exploration role, in deep space research. Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission."

He also added that while it is not easy to stop all ongoing programs, future programs other than deep space exploration should be placed with other agencies, believing climate research to be necessary, albeit heavily politicized, in turn undermining a lot of work from researchers.

Still, despite Donald Trump's belief that climate change is a hoax, Walker claimed that the role of human activity is shared by half the climatologists around the globe -- and science would do better in telling us what reality is without the interference of politicians.

This move from the new president-elect is surprising, considering that only a few days ago, as reported by Engineering & Technology, Donald Trump seems to have eased on the Paris Treaty -- although he did note to slash climate science budget.

As the report noted, Donald Trump's space policy may likely be heading to the opposite direction pursued by the Obama administration. President Barack Obama increased the Earth science division budget by 50 percent to $1.92 billion in 2016, limiting deep space exploration spending in the process, including the cancelation of the Constellation program that would have put another human to the Moon by 2020.