A couple of years ago a group of engineers and other scientists involved in the Apollo space program took interest in the debates over global warming. They called themselves The Right Climate Stuff, and they set out to make as objective assessments as they could of the arguments pro and con on global warming, human influence on it, and proposals to mitigate it.

Lots of folks wondered why astronautical engineers should have thought they had anything special to contribute to the debate. Over the last few weeks, I’ve gotten to know a few of them—and some have signed onto our Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change—and now I understand much better than I did before.

No, astrospace engineers aren’t climate scientists. But, because they’ve needed to solve a variety of problems related to radiative heat exchange in order to design spacecraft that could withstand the extreme temperatures and stresses involved in blasting out of Earth’s atmosphere and then reentering it, they’re quite accustomed to physical measurements and model calculations of heat exchange, and those measurements and calculations are crucial to our understanding of global warming.

The relevance of that dawned on me in Rome a couple of weeks ago when I listened to retired Apollo engineer Hal Doiron explain that, for all intents and purposes regarding radiative heat transfer, Earth and its atmosphere are like a solid sphere with a very thin membrane, as shown in this picture from space (provided by NASA). (“If you were to compare the Earth to an ordinary apple, the atmosphere would be only as thick as the apple’s skin.”)

In light of that, actual physical measurements of the radiative heat transfer, from the sun to Earth’s surface through the atmosphere and from Earth’s surface back out into space through the atmosphere, are much more informative than climate models that attempt to account for all the hundreds of climate feedbacks one by one.

And those physical measurements lead the NASA engineers to the conclusion that multiplying the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere by two, four, even eight times would make so little difference to the impact of that thin membrane on Earth’s radiative heat transfer as to be inconsequential in terms of Earth’s biosystems. It won’t raise temperature significantly, let alone dangerously, and therefore won’t cause massive melting of glaciers, and therefore won’t cause rapid sea level rise, or any of the other catastrophes global warming alarmists worry about.

This seems a much better mission for NASA than assuring Muslims that they’ve made great contributions to science.