So this is interesting. Four Senators have written a letter to President Bush asking him to provide funding for NCAR’s Center for Capacity Building (CCB). The letter can be seen here in PDF and the Senators are Menedez, Sanders, Casey, and Kerry.

The letter is off target for several reasons, not least because the Bush Administration had nothing to do with the termination of the CCB. In fact, no one in government appears to have any role in the cutting of the CCB, although the relevant NSF program officer approved of the decision. Furthermore, each of these Senators could easily keep the CCB going with an earmark, so they are asking the President to do something that he really can’t do (tell a NSF grantee how to spend their funds) but that they could do much easier. (But to be clear, this would be a bad idea, because no one wants Congress meddling in the spending of NSF grants at the $500k level! Been there, done that.) Given these facts, it is clear that the letter really isn’t about the CCB, rather it is just another opportunity to play partisan politics in the area of climate science.

More broadly however, the letter does indicate that policy makers do pay attention when scientists justify their work as being relevant to policy. NCAR will continue to have a hard time selling the idea that climate science is settled sufficiently for aggressive mitigation action to occur, yet maintain that they need to shore up that science with the itty bitty amount of funds for adaptation that NCAR previously had. If the science is settled, then now is the time to scale back that research. Who studies settled science?

I have no doubt that NCAR will try to sell policy makers on the idea that effective adaptation policies will require the predictive knowledge that comes only from the output of sophisticated global climate models (see, e.g., this paper). Having a program in place with a 34-year track record that shows that adaptive successes have absolutely no need for such predictions would probably be inconvenient.

Mickey Glantz says more along these lines in a letter at Dot Earth.