That's irrelevant to the extent of Arctic sea ice. It only has to do with water at intermediate depths, not the surface temperature, nor sea ice extent. The Arctic surface was indeed colder than today during the glacial period, and there was more sea ice (to the extent that we can reconstruct from paleo proxies).

Not completely surprising. Cooling at the surface induces ocean circulation changes that can warm at depth. For example, the warmer Atlantic water could be forced deeper and warm the Arctic depths. The paper discusses a number of hypotheses for how this may happen.

They're not handouts. They have to pay market price.

See the grant proposal.

Maybe so. I favor NASA's science mission over manned exploration. Both would be nice, but if it has to be one, I vote for science.

Clearly you see no value in geoscience. I think that point of view is ridiculous.

Yeah, probably there have been individual transmission line bans for reasons like that. Which are entirely legitimate, by the way. But it's not the main thing holding wind power back.

Companies have been able to build new nuclear plants for years, permits have been issued, and some construction has taken place. TFA is about a recent freeze which isn't expected to last long. The reason you don't see more nuclear plants is economics.

The DOE does not regulate power plant construction; that's the NRC. The DOE does not provide ethanol subsidies; that's a Congressional handout to the farm industry. (Incidentially, those subsidies expired this year, although the Renewable Fuel Standard that Congress passed is still here.)

The DOE does subsidize solar power and electric vehicle companies. I don't agree that none of them produce real benefit, but that aside, that's not the only thing the DOE does. Most of its budget is actually nuclear national security, it does R&D, etc.

Good.

Most of the long-term growth potential of natural gas in this country will come from fracking, which isn't banned by the federal government.

Wind power isn't expensive because of the government banning transmission line installation. Take Texas, for example. It probably has the largest "bottleneck" of wind supply due to lack of transmission lines. But they've received permission to install plenty new capacity. The main problem is lack of regional demand for renewables, which are still more expensive.

What are you talking about? The federal government hasn't tried to ban natural gas or tracking. They've very recently (April) started putting in environmental regulations to govern fracking. Are you arguing that these are unnecessary and companies should be free to operate using whatever process they want with no oversight? Heck, even the American Petroleum Institute welcomed the move, as an improvement over a patchwork of organizations that have been looking at regulations.

Incorrect. Carter instated a ban on nuclear reprocessing (due to proliferation concerns). Reagan rescinded it.

The DOE awarded a contract for a MOX reprocessing plant in 1999. The contractors went way over budget and still haven't finished the project. For that matter, no customers stepped up even with government subsidies.

Yeah, like nuclear reprocessing is the only thing the DOE does. Let's wipe out the whole department. What's your beef with them anyway? Note that the DOE doesn't regulate power transmission, fracking, or nuclear power plant licenses; those are FERC, a new interagency working group (maybe eventually to be transferred to the EPA), and the NRC, respectively. And the nuclear reprocessing example I gave above is really an issue with the private sector, not the federal government.

As the AC pointed out, by your criterion nothing occurs in "real time" (unless it's on your own worldline), thus rendering the term effectively meaningless. Your post is just silly overeducated nitpicking (and I say this as someone who went to grad school for GR). You probably scream "there's no sound in space" at the movie screen, too.

Alan Kay also came up with the Dynabook concept in 1968, although I don't know if at that time it was a tablet concept, or a laptop.

Who said the manned space program is NASA's main purpose? Have you read either the Space Act or their mission statement? Earth observation and science has always been a major part of their purpose.

Furthermore, you have no idea how NASA is funded, do you? It's not like if all of NASA's Earth observation activities were shifted to NOAA, Congress would suddenly give NASA more money for the manned space program.

Finally, it's kind of comical that you seem to consider Earth observation satellites "only vaguely space-related at best".

Iran got an advanced centrifuge design from A.Q. Khan that is extremely difficult to operate in practice. (We also interdicted the supply of some of the advanced machine components it requires.) For some reason, they stuck with it, and eventually got it to work. That's why it's taken them so long to get significant enrichment.

Now, if they were on a crash program to build a bomb, they could have abandoned it and pursued a simpler earlier Soviet design. So I agree it's not their first priority. Indeed, the fact that they stuck with the expensive but efficient technology suggests that they want more than to just "build a bomb".

However, that doesn't preclude a dual program, to pursue civilian uses, but retain the option of building a bomb as well. I suspect that's their real intention, and there is evidence that they've done some preliminary weapons work (such as implosion devices and delivery systems, IIRC). Iraq actually used (chemical) WMDs against them in the 1980s, and with all the U.S. activity in the region, they may eventually want a deterrent.

It doesn't further exploration of space. My point is that exploration of space is not the only thing NASA does, nor the only thing that it is tasked to do.

I'm sympathetic to cuts in both exploration and science, but my point is that NASA is supposed to, does, and should, do both.

Furthermore, my reading of this year's NASA budget indicates that Earth Science got a 0.2% cut over the previous year, while Exploration got a 6.5% increase. ("Science" as a whole got a 0.2% increase, due entirely to a 3.7% boost to Planetary Science, which IMHO also counts as space exploration.)

Oh good grief. Talk about tortured logic.

Let me explain this to you simply: the scientific purpose of GRACE is not to "discover gravity". It is directly to measure the Earth's gravitational field. Indirectly, it is to discover a lot of things about geoscience (ice dynamics, hydrology, etc.).

I may also point out to you that (as has been noted elsewhere in the comments) the Space Act which chartered NASA explicitly states that part of its mission is to expand human knowledge of the Earth (using spaceborne technology).

Evidently. Read NASA's mission statement. "Scientific discovery" features prominently. GRACE is a space mission, you know. NASA does tons of scientific space missions, both for Earth observing and other observation.

That's why I said it looks like you need both LAGEOS and GRACE.

The GRACE gravity field data product has monthly time resolution.