Ever hear of the name Triana? Neither had I until I found about NASA's climate observation project. Triana was the name of a NASA satellite that that would have sat in the neutral gravity point between the Earth and the Sun known as the Langrange 1 or L1. At L1, Triana would have had a view of the full disk of the sun in one direction and a full sunlit Earth in the other. Triana's purpose would have been to monitor Earth's climate balance, and would have beamed a real time image of our planet back to us. Triana's data would have helped nail down some of the real causes of Global warming - and could have narrowed the scope of research on climate change by eliminating suspected causes other than green house gases.

Development on Triana was started in 1998, and was ready for launch in 2001 with a total cost of $100 Million. So what happened to this project? It was ready for launch and paid for, but one minor thing got in the way - a presidential election. To the victors go the spoils as they say, and the industries that lobbied heavily with the new Bush White House were not big fans of any kind of research that even acknowledged the existence of Global Warming, and the scheduled launch of Triana was postponed.

The White House had other reasons for stopping this project. It was a pet project of Vice-President Al Gore. He did not invent Triana, but his vision and influence helped make Triana a reality, and he was hoping the results of the mission would inspire environmentalists and schoolchildren by giving them access to Triana's real-time data. The project was riduculed as "Gore's screen saver" - but what would Bush's screen saver look like - a photo montage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

In the wake of Katrina and the worst Hurricane season ever in the United States, having a climate observatory out at L1 doesn't seem like a bad idea, even if you had to give Al Gore the credit!