Geohazards have a high public profile and can be costly. One political party thought volcano reseach was just political pork but shortly after that Anchorage airspace was threatened by ash falls and European airspace was shutdown because of the volcano in Iceland.

We had the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and Japan but our warning system is still inadequate (can we use cable news channels to get the warnings out?). We're overdue for The Big One in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest. Rogue waves are hazardous to shipping. Coastal erosion and hurricanes wipe out communities that shouldn't have been built there in the first place causing an enormous cost to the economy and society. The threat of meteors and asteroids impacting Earth are real but hard to calculate. Tornados are getting more dangerous because of suburban sprawl and lack of shelters. Sealevel rising will have a tremendous cost. Floods, landslides, blizzards, ice, and forest fires disrupt everything.

When a voter asks you what is the benefit of
billions of dollars being spent to find the Higgs boson,
what would you say?
What can we do about islands of plastic in three oceans?
What about national leaders and business executives
who can not be convinced that global warming is as important as the
profit bottom line?
Something is very wrong when supersonic airplanes are less
important that cruise missiles.
When it takes more 40 years for archaeologists to admit that
men have been in the new world since before the last ice age era
was over while persecuting their own who claimed otherwise.
Science was the hope of the 20th century,
but appears to be the backward child of the 21st?
Chemistry has so many failures from plastics and explosives to insecticides
that I'm sometimes embarrassed to say that I studied it.
Physics can't claim to have been successful in 50 years
of experiments with fusion
and the most successful fusion machine was invented by the
relatively self-taught inventor of television.
Just what have modern humans been successful at?
They have produced too large a population to be sustained
well on the world's resources.
They have successfully raise CO2 levels above anything known before in
nature.
They have generated a new sedimentation level for future history:
the plastic level.

Just what can we do to make thing better for the future?
Can science and technology save us from our own use of science and
technology?
The fascists of the last world war said we should
sterilize genetic defectives and those of low IQ's.
Their final plan be was the elimination of the most
intelligent branch of the human race... the Jews.
The Indians and Chinese have both tried to get some control
on their population increase and failed.
We have a major world religion that still
refuses to allow the members to practice birth control.
With George Bush lying about "Weapons of Mass destruction"
to finish his father unfinished war
and the current president carrying on the war
against the Islamic fundamentalists/ terrorists
and even widening it to Libya, politics as usual
seems unusually ignorant alternative?
We can't let a Republican back as president
because they have driven us back past the 30's in
terms of social progress.
We can see 4 more years of a sell out president
who hasn't done enough to stop the economic
black hole we seem to be falling into?
Business as usual, science as usual,
politics as usual...
This all seems like a bad future in the making:
the failure of science in the modern age.

Many scientific programs collect tons of data and samples, then the scientists write their preliminary reports, publish their reports in some journals, and then move onto the next project because they don't have the funding to store and analyze all that data. Archiving collections for future research doesn't have the glamour of collecting new data but it is important for analyzing changes over time. This is true for sediment and ice cores, moon rocks, animal and plant collections, etc. It would be much cheaper to analyze the rest of the moon rocks than going to get more. The archives would be good for synthesizing data from various disciplines, regions, and expeditions so it is great for completing the Big Picture. Should we use more resources to analyze old data?