Bush spaces out during Sputnik moment
IT IS President Bush's Sputnik moment. He is not like Ike.
Five days after the Soviets put Earth's first satellite into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957, President Eisenhower pooh-poohed it as "one small ball in the air" that "does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota." He said, "the mere fact that this thing orbits involves no new discovery to science." His top military officials downplayed this Cold War humiliation by calling Sputnik a "useless hunk of iron" and a "silly bauble in the sky."
Six days after that press conference, a very different Eisenhower was secretly at work. He assembled some of the nation's top figures in science, including the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, James Killian, and Polaroid founder Edwin Land. According to a now-declassified confidential memorandum of that meeting written by Eisenhower's staff secretary, Army General Andrew Goodpaster, Land spoke "with great eloquence about the great problem that is before us. He said that the country needs a great deal from science. But he felt that science, to provide this, needs the President acutely."
Goodpaster wrote that Land asked "if there is not some way in which the President could inspire the country -- setting out our youth particularly on a whole variety of scientific adventures. If he were able to do that, there would be tremendous returns. At the present time, scientists feel themselves isolated and alone."
Eisenhower, in Goodpaster's narrative, responded that he "would like to create a spirit -- an attitude toward science similar to that held toward various kinds of athletics in his youth -- an attitude which now seemed to him to have palled somewhat." Eisenhower would make Killian the first presidential science adviser. Killian guided Eisenhower to the creation of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and a massive expansion of the National Science Foundation.
The attitude toward science in the current White House has palled into the most appalling state since Eisenhower. Scientists feel so isolated that it barely registered that Bush said he would "confront the serious challenge of global climate change" in his State of the Union address.
One reason is obvious. Bush responded to climate change with chump change for climate science. Eisenhower responded to a Soviet satellite with NASA. Under Bush, NASA satellites are fading into useless hunks of iron.
"Since 2000, this thing has gone off a cliff," said Berrien Moore, cochair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on studying Earth from space and director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire. Moore said the Bush administration has created a "perfect storm" with the "collapse of the earth science budget, down 30 percent at NASA," and the inept development of a polar-orbiting environmental satellite system by NOAA and the Pentagon. The system is three years behind schedule and $3 billion over budget, and many climate-detection instruments have been thrown out to slash costs.
"They just drove the train off the tracks," Moore said. "The effects are about to become very apparent. The assets we have for things like measuring glaciers and ice are getting long in the tooth, with very little in the future to replace them. We're buying data from India and the French."
Moore said the least the Bush administration could do is restore the earth science budget to the levels of the Clinton administration. Just as frustrating to him is that even as the evidence piles up that humans cause global warming -- the Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change releases major new data this week -- there is no White House proposal to cap fossil fuel emissions. Moore said it is "almost irresponsible" that the CEOs of 10 major corporations have called for caps on carbon dioxide emissions but Bush still has not.
"The CEOs gave him a vehicle to change course on Kyoto and global warming," Moore said. "
This is not surprising for a president who has thrown away every report on climate change as a silly bauble. Bush told us he was waiting for "sound science." Eisenhower heard the sound of Soviet science -- the beep of Sputnik -- and prepared America for blastoff. It appears Bush will not understand the need for science until dead satellites rain down on the White House lawn.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
