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Story of the month ...

September 2011: Spaceship Earth won't get a cockpit: The intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is supposed to build the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS). GEOSS could be illustrated as the cockpit of planet Earth with many dashboards informing our leaders, the stewards of Earth, about the current trajectory of our unique spaceship, so that they could keep it on a sustainable path. However, GEO is not doing the job. Instead of building the cockpit as fast as possible, we in GEO spend (or waist) time on reorganizing ourselves, and endless discussions are aiming to highlight the pros and cons of various organizational alternatives. We prepare proposals for activities the GEO Plenary has asked us to address, only to hear from the Executive Committee that these activities should not be done by GEO or should be postponed until after 2015, when a new GEO is initiated. Considering that the names 'Plenary' and 'Executive Committee' were meant to indicate the classical mandate for the respective bodies, would it be so wrong to speak of clowns in the Excom who do (a) not know, or respect, what the Pleanry thought GEO should do, and (b) not read what they get from lower layers in GEO?

And in these lower layers, we have a few more clowns who do nothing else than block any activities that might lead to GEO developing some kind of authority in Earth observations. What we don't have, unfortunately, are people with backbone, who would speak up for GEO and focus discussions on the needs of GEOSS in order to become our planet's cockpit.

After the recent Committee meetings in Salzburg, Austria, I have very little hope that GEO will ever build the cockpit so urgently needed. On Earth, we are on a spaceship that has no cockpit where the pilots could gather and find out how well they are keeping our mothership on track. I sometimes wonder why I still sleep well almost every night and nightmares are rather infrequent.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.