Four Apollo Astronauts are outspoken skeptics. This includes Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmidt (2 of the 12 men who walked on the moon) and Phil Chapman (Apollo 14) and Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7).
Walter Cunningham is a fighter pilot and a physicist and was the Lunar Module pilot on the Apollo 7 mission. In a 263 hour mission in October 1968 the three astronauts covered four and a half million miles.
“Many of NASA’s retirees have grown increasingly concerned that GISS, a NASA organization located in a midtown Manhattan office building, was allowing its science to be politicized, compromising their credibility. Our concern, beyond damage to the NASA’s exemplary reputation, was damage to their current or former scientists and employees, and even compromising the reputation of science itself.
“We developed a letter to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and obtained signatures from seven Apollo astronauts, several former Headquarters managers and Center directors, and 40 former management-level technical specialists. We asked that he restrain NASA from including unproven claims in public releases and on websites. Statements by NASA that man-made carbon dioxide was having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. It is clear that the science is NOT settled.
“Understanding global climate and what, if anything, humans can do to affect it are scientific questions that can be answered only by honest science and scientific data. Yet, global warming alarmists invariably try to make their case through rhetoric, dogma, opinion, and emotion.
“Anytime the “evidence” is debatable, we should push for open and honest public debate in an effort to get to the “truth.” Unfortunately, believers in human caused global warming avoid debate like the plague.
“NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused [anthropogenic] global warming [AGW]. Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy and support for the White House agenda is replacing objective evaluation of data, while scientific data are being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.
“The conflict over AGW has deteriorated into a religious war — a war between true believers in a human-caused global warming problem and nonbelievers…