Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

Okay, sure. I can give you a serious answer if you'd like.

First of all, you're attempting to take down some strawman. _Who_ is applauding this discovery, and simultaneously calling NASA's climate change research "all a big con"? It's disingenuous when you just present a (IMHO) off-topic opinion that the majority of the other commenters here have, in the form of an innocent question. If you would like to discuss the view of a public figure or other commenter, that's fine. If you want to discuss how you think that people should accept NASA-related research as a whole or not at all, that's fine.

But don't ask a false question to take down a strawman.

Second, your statement "either you think NASA is good at science or you don't" is a massive trivialization. NASA is a 19 billion dollar organization, with over 17,000 employees (not counting contractors). Beyond the problems of the phrase "good at science" (What does it _mean_ to be "good at science"? That's an incredibly complex topic.), NASA is huge, with many, many different people and departments, opinions and beliefs, cultures, etc. Thinking of NASA as a fixed, singular, cohesive entity is a flawed assumption.

And I guess finally, to get back to your original question, it's quite straightforward. The (economic, political) implications of habitable planets 40 light years away is quite different from the (economic, political) implications of American industrial and economic activity needing to be massively changed, very quickly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon. But I don't feel that your original question was presented in the best possible way.

> The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky.

this reminds me of one my favorite films ever. it is just four minutes long

http://www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers/

> either you think NASA is good at science or you don't

That's a false dichotomy.

Its quite possible to think (I am not endorsing this belief, only saying that it is not self-contradictory) that a large organization like NASA has people doing good and non-politicized science in certain areas in certain areas and bad and politicized science in others.

In fact, one could quite internally consistently believe that NASA does good, non-politicized science in some domains deliberately as a means of generating credibility so that people accept the bad, politicized science it does in other domains.

Your posts here have been pretty disparaging toward the scientific community. The scientific community does have problems with groupthink and cognitive biases, but it also has to contend with a flood of people who passionately defend idiosyncratic ideas without appearing to appreciate what counts as a scientific theory or scientific evidence. Every scientist and other technical domain expert has encountered dozens or hundreds of people offering the secret of why science is totally on the wrong track. (I don't work in physics or climate science, but I've experienced this in cryptography and number theory, which do relate to my job.)

In order to be taken seriously, I'd suggest that novel physical theories should accurately use existing technical vocabulary and notation (and define and explain the motivation for any new vocabulary), be expressed in quantitative terms, not pick a fight with the scientific community or impugn its good faith or intelligence, and hopefully make empirical, testable predictions (including better-explaining observations compared to existing theories).