I'm pretty sure that the article is incorrect and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has very little or nothing to do with this study. The apparent paper[1] describes the funding as:

"This work was partially funded through NASA/GSFC grant NNX12AD03A, known as "Collaborative Earth System Science Research Between NASA/GSFC and UMCP""

I believe the Guardian writer is simply using NASA and Goddard as an appeal to authority to increase the credibility of a highly speculative study written by grad students.

That said I hope you can see that ideology is an important driver of both the reporting and the study.

[1] http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-submi...