9 Ways NASA Can Tackle Climate Change

NASA could be one of the nation’s most potent weapons in battling climate change. The space agency has conducted decades of research into weather, life-support systems and the atmospheres of other planets providing it with unique skills to address this problem.

It would be easy for policymakers to overlook NASA as they map out a strategy for solving Earth’s biggest environmental woes. But here are some important reasons why they shouldn’t.

NASA has 21 Earth-observing spacecraft in orbit today, five more missions in development, and has been studying Earth’s climate for the past three decades. This includes, for example, ICEsat, which monitors polar ice cap shrinkage. Scientists from across the globe use the data from these missions to refine their understanding of Earth’s changing atmosphere. Some of their number crunching is done on NASA supercomputers (including the largest civilian one in the world). In turn, these models provide us with a basic understanding of the status of our climate and the means to make predictions of future changes.

NASA has a proved ability to accomplish major engineering feats. Climate change is an immense challenge that involves an extremely complex system