Climate Feedback
The Great Plains of the United States, late twenty-first century: breadbasket or dust bowl?
It may depend on groundwater storage, finds a study published in Nature Geoscience this week (subscription required). The results are based on an unusually sophisticated watershed model that connects the below-ground water sources, surface water and the land surface itself.
The next US president should merge two huge government research agencies to bring forth a new independent and comprehensive Earth science body - that’s the idea put forth in a commentary by former agency heads in Science yesterday (subscription required). They call for NOAA and the USGS become a single Earth Systems Science Agency, ESSA.
That merger would ring a few nostalgic bells, since NOAA was once also called ESSA (for Environmental Science Services Administration). And it would bureaucratically marry the atmospheric and ocean research at NOAA to the terrestrial, freshwater and biological studies at the USGS. To face the daunting agenda of “climate change, sea-level rise, altered weather patterns, declines in freshwater availability and quality, and loss of biodiversity,” the authors say, the US needs massive scientific support from an integrated, streamlined institution - one as seamless as the Earth system itself.
But would ESSA really produce better science? The proposal’s authors have tempting suggestions for changes under a new agency, not least upping the amount of money that would leave the building: grants to outside researchers total a few percent of current NOAA and USGS budgets, they told me, but they want the sum to be at least 25% at ESSA. They also call for Big Science modelling and monitoring programs, and even for research into breakthrough green tech, a la DARPA.
Such plans would have to be hashed out over and above the decision to put ESSA together, however. Meanwhile, trying to mesh the USGS and NOAA missions could have interesting effects. What would happen, for example, to NOAA's marine fisheries programs? NOAA is housed in the Department of Commerce, where commercial fishing interests are sometimes seen to clash with conservation. Mark Schaefer, former USGS director and the ESSA proposal’s lead author, said creating the hoped-for independent, nonregulatory agency might mean moving fisheries regulation to the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Department of the Interior, where protecting natural resources is key.
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