LAUSR

Privately run Earth-monitoring satellites are promising, but research must continue. I t's more than two decades since a team of US scientists proved that signals from the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites could be used to gather atmospheric temperature data. The technique, known as radio occultation, depends on precise measurements of delays in the radio signals as they pass through the atmosphere. The first mission, GPS Meteorology, paved the way for the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC-1) in 2006. Radio-occultation data from COSMIC-1 and a handful of follow-on missions have been integrated into government forecasting systems around the globe, and now a trio of private companies is vying to get into the game. after the 2001 attacks triggered a strong and effective series of protests about the impact on science. The International Council for Science called on the dozens of national academies and scientific societies among its members to hold their conferences outside the United States. The US National Academy of Sciences and others issued warnings about the dependency of the US research system on migrant minds, and how promised visas — and the careers that depended on them — were being cancelled for young scientists from Pakistan and elsewhere. It took years for the promised fixes to the system to be introduced. Trump has made a bad situation much worse. The acute problems and distress his order has caused to researchers and others could yet be compounded by the chronic effects of related actions. Changes to the Department of State and reports of the United States possibly withdrawing from international organizations and treaties — many of which are scientific — have raised new fears about the role and status of scientific diplomacy in the Trump administration. As noted, we have been here before. Here is this journal's opinion on " science and political responsibility " from an editorial published in November 1935 (Nature 136, 733–734; 1935): " The outcome, as is familiar to all, through the repercussion of economic and political factors , has been the intensive cultivation of the national spirit, to which concessions were made at the close of the War in the interests of justice and peace, but which has now become a source of irritation and danger greater than the injustices which it was fostered to remove. " The contrast with 2017 is not as sharp as we might like. ■ …