Top Ten Reasons to Shut Down NASA’s Climate Change Shop Known as GISS
3 days ago Anthony Watts
For decades, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has projected itself as a sentinel of Earth’s climate future. But its transformation from a space science institute into a climate policy echo chamber represents a textbook example of mission drift. Founded for planetary studies, GISS has long since abandoned its original purpose and embraced speculative climate modeling and media-driven narratives—often built on data more adjusted than measured.
It’s time to be honest: GISS should be closed.
Here are ten good reasons why.
1. GISS Abandoned Its Original Mission
GISS was established in 1961 to support NASA’s planetary science efforts—specifically analyzing satellite data and studying planetary atmospheres. This made sense during the era of Apollo and planetary exploration. But today, GISS has become a climate modeling hub pushing speculative scenarios about Earth’s future, often far removed from observational reality. The pivot from space to climate was not a logical expansion—it was bureaucratic repurposing to fit political trends, and perhaps to save the organization from lack of relevancy and funding cuts once the Apollo missions were over..
2. Duplication of Effort and Bureaucratic Bloat
The U.S. and the world already have multiple agencies—NOAA, NCEI, HadCRUT, Berkeley Earth, UAH—dedicated to tracking Earth’s climate. GISS’s primary offering, the GISTEMP dataset, merely reprocesses NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) data. This is redundancy masquerading as innovation. There’s no compelling justification for maintaining a separate NASA-funded entity to do what other agencies already do—except perhaps to keep a particular narrative alive.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/06/12/top-ten-reasons-to-shut-down-nasas-climate-change-shop-known-as-giss/
