ELPExcept that the justification and fear-mongering Defence is using is well over the top. And the long range procurement plans everyone spent time working on are for the most part,… being ignored.
F-111 can keep going till 2020. The idea that they are going to fall out of the sky by catastrophic failure is… given the support infrastructure in place… wrong. Setting them up with JASSM and JDAM equals a huge contempt of engagement ability…. all by themselves.
What is the threat again that is so dire to make a decision now? By ignoring a sensible procurement procedure that satisfies most of the political stakeholders, this is 6 billion that simply is being wasted. I looked at the specs of all of the Indonesian airfields east of Jakarta. I have seen a lot of hardcore NATO quality ops and aircraft generation. The layout of most of those fields up north from Jakarta to Timor suck to do fighter ops out of. Lots and lots of airfields with limited or no complete parallel taxi-way and garbage infrastructure. Really…really not the facilities you would want to bet your life on to quickly generate/recover fighter sorties out of. High risk. Like trying to do ops with your pants around your ankles. Aircraft on those fields would be vulnerable and easy to inhibit the whole airfield with F-111 strikes. And absolutely no offense to Indonesia. I just brought that up as that is local. Add to that they don’t have the operational maturity of the RAAF. There is time to procure the right aircraft the right way. Putting $6 billion into Super Hornet in a non-sensical rush is the same as taking the money out back and burning it.
There is time to look at all the options for fighter jet procurement. There is no rush to have jets delivered by 2010. None. The taxpayer is getting gang raped. Nelson has about as much knowledge of defence systems as my left toe. The only thing getting the Super Hornet by 2010 does, is allow Australia to go off and help the U.S. on some ill advised fishing expedition and be more plug and play with their ops…. more than likely on some OPERATION: Useless Dirt scenario in the sand box. I wonder if the average Aussie taxpayer thinks it is worth all that money?
ELPVery funny. :p
ELPVery funny. :p
ELPHere is something to consider… good reading. What is amusing is that crap like Kyoto is sold to us and we are expected to accept it hook line and sinker, and it isn’t even especially good science.
==============
Rebels of the Sun
The science of how global warming occurs has become crucial to our economy. So why are dissenting explanations of the sun’s influence on our fate being pushed aside, asks environment writer Matthew Warren
——————————————————————————–
March 17, 2007
IT says a lot about the complexity of climate science that we can put a man on the moon but we still can’t predict the weather beyond the next few days. The warming of the planet, and man’s contribution to this phenomenon, has become the top scientific issue of this generation.
Science by its very nature is an argument. But apparently not this one any more. Yet a minority of scientists are still lining up to challenge the accepted wisdom with their claim that global warming is being principally driven by the sun, not by human activity.
The mainstream view is that an accumulation of greenhouse gases, mostly due to human activity, is trapping too much of the sun’s heat within our atmosphere. But the rebels against this dominant view suggest massive variations in the sun’s heat radiation are far more influential in warming than accumulating greenhouse gases.
The UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the executive summary of the science of its fourth assessment report in February. It reported “90 per cent” certainty among consulted scientists that the 0.6C average temperature increase measured during the 20th century was largely caused by the release of greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels by industrialised economies. In other words, by humans.
Although the scale of warming predictions had altered little during the preceding six years of research, politicians and mainstream climate-change scientists queued up to declare the argument about human-caused climate change was officially over.
Despite such confidence, hundreds of blogs across the world continue to run charged claims and counterclaims on the internet about the various positions adopted by climate scientists. The scale of the argument is unprecedented and reflects considerable uncertainty. By comparison, there are no blogs debating the validity of the periodic table of elements, for example.
Despite these claims, the minority of scientists who disagree with the mainstream view are still at large and remain unmoved by the latest IPCC report. Their views have recently been exhumed by two equally contentious, polar opposite documentaries profiling them on British and Canadian television.
Last month, the ABC’s Four Corners screened the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program The Denial Machine, which claimed the campaign for caution about human-caused climate change was conceived by spin doctors and driven and funded by oil and coal companies. Produced last November, the program compared scientific scepticism on climate change to the tobacco industry’s much publicised one-time campaign to discredit links between smoking and lung cancer.
Then last week Channel 4 in Britain screened a program called The Great Global Warming Swindle, in which many of the same scientists from the CBC program were interviewed to put the dissenting sceptics’ sun-driven case on human-caused climate change. Yet to be screened in Australia, and unlikely to make its way on to Four Corners, the program argued the warming measured during the 20th century was the result of changes in solar activity, not increases in carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. It also took issue with what it described as a multibillion-dollar global warming industry that continued to play up the threat to support research, funding and relevance.
The debate over climate change has become increasingly stifling and intolerant to dissenting voices as the mainstream position has become more secure. Some argue it is appropriate, indeed necessary, to censor such dissent for fear it will delay action on the increasingly urgent policy response needed to make deep cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.
Unsurprisingly, the program sparked considerable controversy. One of the scientists interviewed claims he was misrepresented not so much by what he said on air, but by being associated with the thesis of such a one-sided polemic. Main British media outlets subsequently committed considerable space to attack what they claimed were the half-truths and discredited facts, as well as the credibility of the dissenting scientists who made them. While not interviewed for Channel 4, hydro-climatologist Stewart Franks at Newcastle University in NSW is one such scientist. Like all other scientists quoted in this article, he says he has never received any funding from any industry, but is increasingly uneasy about the dangerous path the debate is taking, where alternative views are discouraged and reputations attacked and discredited.
Franks says our understanding of the physics of climate is still so limited, we cannot explain natural variability or predict when droughts will break, or the when and why clouds form, which makes him wary of mainstream claims projecting temperature changes over the next century.
He argues that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere account for only about 2 per cent to 3 per cent of the overall warming effect, meaning even major increases in gases lead to only slight shifts in temperature: between 0.5C and 1C. He is less certain than other dissenting scientists that variation in solar activity is the cause, but doubts that greenhouse gases are the main driver of temperature changes. “It’s clear that we don’t understand enough of the physics of climate to understand natural variability but I don’t expect climate change from CO2 to be particularly significant at any point in the future,” he says.
Franks points to new modelling which has measured changes in the Earth’s albedo or reflectance, driven mainly by cloud formation. The paper by a team of geophysicists reported an unexplained decline in cloud cover until 1998, which caused the Earth to absorb more heat from the atmosphere.
This resulted in increases in incoming solar radiation more than 10 times bigger than the same effect attributed to greenhouse gases. Franks says the current IPCC models assume albedo is constant but such research should be added to the body of knowledge, not excluded or rejected. “It’s reached the point that anyone who offers an open mind publicly is basically criticised and put down,” he says.
New Zealand climatologist Associate Professor Chris de Freitas says it is generally agreed greenhouse gases are having a warming effect on the radiation balance of the Earth, but there is disagreement on the extent of positive feedbacks. The IPCC models claim the warming caused by the release of carbon dioxide encourages accelerated warming, with the system spiralling slowly but insiduously upwards. The IPCC models predict a range of temperature increases from 1.1C to 6.4C by 2100. So much for certainty.
De Freitas, unlike the IPCC, thinks the warming effect of carbon dioxide decreases over time as it becomes more saturated in the atmosphere.
“There is so much scope for disagreement because there is so much uncertainty. This was one of the most outrageous implications of the first IPCC report – claiming that the science was settled,” he says. “The big problem is the feedbacks warming accelerates itself . We don’t still understand the very complex climate system. None of the models have proved to be accurate at all. So using the outputs of models is fallacious because they’re not evidence of anything, they’re just hypotheses.
“The IPCC started it in their first report by calling it a ‘consensus view’ to shut down debate. By calling their critics deniers, they are saying, ‘look these guys are arguing against the impossible’.”
The IPCC is the scientific and political engine room of the climate-change debate. It’s “consensus view” is based on 19 different computer models to project temperature changes based on known increases in greenhouse gases.
At least one of the 1500 “leading scientists” it quotes as its underpinning authority is also one of its staunchest critics, Richard Lindzen, who is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a contributing author to this year’s fourth IPCC assessment report but remains highly critical of how the panel operates, claiming it is largely a political process underpinned by science, which carefully stage-manages the release of its reports to maximise political impact.
The IPCC made headlines across the world in February with the release of the executive summary of its assessment report, which Lindzen says was severely modified by the political session that writes it and which is now modifying the full scientific report to fit for release in May. “That’s a very funny procedure by most standards,” he said. “You don’t appeal to consensus if you have a scientific argument.
“Very few of the models are independent and they all share certain profound difficulties. They all get clouds hugely wrong and a small change in clouds has a much bigger effect than doubling CO2.”
Bob Carter, who is a research professor in marine geology at James Cook University, says there are some excellent scientists involved in the IPCC process and the actual report is likely to be both sound and useful science. But he is even more scathing of the process.
“I think it is probably without precedent in any Western democratic process, the idea that you would publish an executive summary before the report and then openly say that ‘we need a few more weeks to work on the report to make sure it is consistent with the executive summary’,” he says.
“I don’t know how anybody can take them seriously. It’s become a religion. I have no doubt that a number of the IPCC supporters genuinely believe. Others know very well that the evidence isn’t there, but it suits them to believe.
“I’m agnostic. And when the evidence is there I shall be perfectly happy to believe the hypothesis. But the evidence is not there.”
In his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former US vice-president Al Gore’s central claim in his description of the science was his correlation of 650,000 years of temperature changes with atmospheric carbon concentrations using polar ice-core samples. Gore described the relationship as complex, but made the most of the theatre, climbing up on a crane to accentuate the scale of the increases in greenhouse gas. But the sceptics point to a paper published in Nature and Science magazines showing the historical relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature has the gas lagging, not leading.
That is, greenhouse gas rises occurred about 800 years later than allegedly matching temperature change, as the warming seas released more gas into the atmosphere and trapped it when cooling.
This doesn’t discredit the mainstream theory that present levels of greenhouse gases are still well above historical levels, but it is one of several areas where even mainstream scientists believe Gore appears loose with the science to make his film more dramatic.
The CBC documentary referred to predictions of sea-level rises of up to 24m as a result of climate change. The IPCC predicts rises at worst of about 50cm by 2100. If it’s not OK to mislead the public in criticising climate-change science, why is it OK to mislead people in selling it?
Recently Prime Minister John Howard was effectively forced to recant a comment made in parliament that the science was uncertain. Clean Up Australia boss Ian Kiernan recently accused federal Finance Minister Nick Minchin of being an “unscientific looney” because he expressed some doubts about the validity of the climate-change science. Suddenly it’s not just unfashionable to hold some doubts or keep an open mind on the science of climate change.
Having accepted the risk flagged by the mainstream science that the planet is warming, by developing an appropriate policy response, the debate in Australia has effectively decoupled the science from the policy response. We have agreed the issue is too important to wait for more conclusive answers, that we are prepared to act comprehensively on climate change, possibly at considerable cost, on the trust that most respected, credible scientists are deeply concerned about the seriousness of this threat.
Greenpeace played an important role in its formative years by challenging companies, and governments developed economies. Why was that OK then, but this is not now?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21395368-30417,00.html
ELPHere is something to consider… good reading. What is amusing is that crap like Kyoto is sold to us and we are expected to accept it hook line and sinker, and it isn’t even especially good science.
==============
Rebels of the Sun
The science of how global warming occurs has become crucial to our economy. So why are dissenting explanations of the sun’s influence on our fate being pushed aside, asks environment writer Matthew Warren
——————————————————————————–
March 17, 2007
IT says a lot about the complexity of climate science that we can put a man on the moon but we still can’t predict the weather beyond the next few days. The warming of the planet, and man’s contribution to this phenomenon, has become the top scientific issue of this generation.
Science by its very nature is an argument. But apparently not this one any more. Yet a minority of scientists are still lining up to challenge the accepted wisdom with their claim that global warming is being principally driven by the sun, not by human activity.
The mainstream view is that an accumulation of greenhouse gases, mostly due to human activity, is trapping too much of the sun’s heat within our atmosphere. But the rebels against this dominant view suggest massive variations in the sun’s heat radiation are far more influential in warming than accumulating greenhouse gases.
The UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the executive summary of the science of its fourth assessment report in February. It reported “90 per cent” certainty among consulted scientists that the 0.6C average temperature increase measured during the 20th century was largely caused by the release of greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels by industrialised economies. In other words, by humans.
Although the scale of warming predictions had altered little during the preceding six years of research, politicians and mainstream climate-change scientists queued up to declare the argument about human-caused climate change was officially over.
Despite such confidence, hundreds of blogs across the world continue to run charged claims and counterclaims on the internet about the various positions adopted by climate scientists. The scale of the argument is unprecedented and reflects considerable uncertainty. By comparison, there are no blogs debating the validity of the periodic table of elements, for example.
Despite these claims, the minority of scientists who disagree with the mainstream view are still at large and remain unmoved by the latest IPCC report. Their views have recently been exhumed by two equally contentious, polar opposite documentaries profiling them on British and Canadian television.
Last month, the ABC’s Four Corners screened the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program The Denial Machine, which claimed the campaign for caution about human-caused climate change was conceived by spin doctors and driven and funded by oil and coal companies. Produced last November, the program compared scientific scepticism on climate change to the tobacco industry’s much publicised one-time campaign to discredit links between smoking and lung cancer.
Then last week Channel 4 in Britain screened a program called The Great Global Warming Swindle, in which many of the same scientists from the CBC program were interviewed to put the dissenting sceptics’ sun-driven case on human-caused climate change. Yet to be screened in Australia, and unlikely to make its way on to Four Corners, the program argued the warming measured during the 20th century was the result of changes in solar activity, not increases in carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. It also took issue with what it described as a multibillion-dollar global warming industry that continued to play up the threat to support research, funding and relevance.
The debate over climate change has become increasingly stifling and intolerant to dissenting voices as the mainstream position has become more secure. Some argue it is appropriate, indeed necessary, to censor such dissent for fear it will delay action on the increasingly urgent policy response needed to make deep cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.
Unsurprisingly, the program sparked considerable controversy. One of the scientists interviewed claims he was misrepresented not so much by what he said on air, but by being associated with the thesis of such a one-sided polemic. Main British media outlets subsequently committed considerable space to attack what they claimed were the half-truths and discredited facts, as well as the credibility of the dissenting scientists who made them. While not interviewed for Channel 4, hydro-climatologist Stewart Franks at Newcastle University in NSW is one such scientist. Like all other scientists quoted in this article, he says he has never received any funding from any industry, but is increasingly uneasy about the dangerous path the debate is taking, where alternative views are discouraged and reputations attacked and discredited.
Franks says our understanding of the physics of climate is still so limited, we cannot explain natural variability or predict when droughts will break, or the when and why clouds form, which makes him wary of mainstream claims projecting temperature changes over the next century.
He argues that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere account for only about 2 per cent to 3 per cent of the overall warming effect, meaning even major increases in gases lead to only slight shifts in temperature: between 0.5C and 1C. He is less certain than other dissenting scientists that variation in solar activity is the cause, but doubts that greenhouse gases are the main driver of temperature changes. “It’s clear that we don’t understand enough of the physics of climate to understand natural variability but I don’t expect climate change from CO2 to be particularly significant at any point in the future,” he says.
Franks points to new modelling which has measured changes in the Earth’s albedo or reflectance, driven mainly by cloud formation. The paper by a team of geophysicists reported an unexplained decline in cloud cover until 1998, which caused the Earth to absorb more heat from the atmosphere.
This resulted in increases in incoming solar radiation more than 10 times bigger than the same effect attributed to greenhouse gases. Franks says the current IPCC models assume albedo is constant but such research should be added to the body of knowledge, not excluded or rejected. “It’s reached the point that anyone who offers an open mind publicly is basically criticised and put down,” he says.
New Zealand climatologist Associate Professor Chris de Freitas says it is generally agreed greenhouse gases are having a warming effect on the radiation balance of the Earth, but there is disagreement on the extent of positive feedbacks. The IPCC models claim the warming caused by the release of carbon dioxide encourages accelerated warming, with the system spiralling slowly but insiduously upwards. The IPCC models predict a range of temperature increases from 1.1C to 6.4C by 2100. So much for certainty.
De Freitas, unlike the IPCC, thinks the warming effect of carbon dioxide decreases over time as it becomes more saturated in the atmosphere.
“There is so much scope for disagreement because there is so much uncertainty. This was one of the most outrageous implications of the first IPCC report – claiming that the science was settled,” he says. “The big problem is the feedbacks warming accelerates itself . We don’t still understand the very complex climate system. None of the models have proved to be accurate at all. So using the outputs of models is fallacious because they’re not evidence of anything, they’re just hypotheses.
“The IPCC started it in their first report by calling it a ‘consensus view’ to shut down debate. By calling their critics deniers, they are saying, ‘look these guys are arguing against the impossible’.”
The IPCC is the scientific and political engine room of the climate-change debate. It’s “consensus view” is based on 19 different computer models to project temperature changes based on known increases in greenhouse gases.
At least one of the 1500 “leading scientists” it quotes as its underpinning authority is also one of its staunchest critics, Richard Lindzen, who is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a contributing author to this year’s fourth IPCC assessment report but remains highly critical of how the panel operates, claiming it is largely a political process underpinned by science, which carefully stage-manages the release of its reports to maximise political impact.
The IPCC made headlines across the world in February with the release of the executive summary of its assessment report, which Lindzen says was severely modified by the political session that writes it and which is now modifying the full scientific report to fit for release in May. “That’s a very funny procedure by most standards,” he said. “You don’t appeal to consensus if you have a scientific argument.
“Very few of the models are independent and they all share certain profound difficulties. They all get clouds hugely wrong and a small change in clouds has a much bigger effect than doubling CO2.”
Bob Carter, who is a research professor in marine geology at James Cook University, says there are some excellent scientists involved in the IPCC process and the actual report is likely to be both sound and useful science. But he is even more scathing of the process.
“I think it is probably without precedent in any Western democratic process, the idea that you would publish an executive summary before the report and then openly say that ‘we need a few more weeks to work on the report to make sure it is consistent with the executive summary’,” he says.
“I don’t know how anybody can take them seriously. It’s become a religion. I have no doubt that a number of the IPCC supporters genuinely believe. Others know very well that the evidence isn’t there, but it suits them to believe.
“I’m agnostic. And when the evidence is there I shall be perfectly happy to believe the hypothesis. But the evidence is not there.”
In his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former US vice-president Al Gore’s central claim in his description of the science was his correlation of 650,000 years of temperature changes with atmospheric carbon concentrations using polar ice-core samples. Gore described the relationship as complex, but made the most of the theatre, climbing up on a crane to accentuate the scale of the increases in greenhouse gas. But the sceptics point to a paper published in Nature and Science magazines showing the historical relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature has the gas lagging, not leading.
That is, greenhouse gas rises occurred about 800 years later than allegedly matching temperature change, as the warming seas released more gas into the atmosphere and trapped it when cooling.
This doesn’t discredit the mainstream theory that present levels of greenhouse gases are still well above historical levels, but it is one of several areas where even mainstream scientists believe Gore appears loose with the science to make his film more dramatic.
The CBC documentary referred to predictions of sea-level rises of up to 24m as a result of climate change. The IPCC predicts rises at worst of about 50cm by 2100. If it’s not OK to mislead the public in criticising climate-change science, why is it OK to mislead people in selling it?
Recently Prime Minister John Howard was effectively forced to recant a comment made in parliament that the science was uncertain. Clean Up Australia boss Ian Kiernan recently accused federal Finance Minister Nick Minchin of being an “unscientific looney” because he expressed some doubts about the validity of the climate-change science. Suddenly it’s not just unfashionable to hold some doubts or keep an open mind on the science of climate change.
Having accepted the risk flagged by the mainstream science that the planet is warming, by developing an appropriate policy response, the debate in Australia has effectively decoupled the science from the policy response. We have agreed the issue is too important to wait for more conclusive answers, that we are prepared to act comprehensively on climate change, possibly at considerable cost, on the trust that most respected, credible scientists are deeply concerned about the seriousness of this threat.
Greenpeace played an important role in its formative years by challenging companies, and governments developed economies. Why was that OK then, but this is not now?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21395368-30417,00.html
ELPActually ATFS_CRASH, the bulk of what you say is totally irrelevant to this debate, since we are not discussing mass extinction events (fascinating as they are), but the impact of human CO2 emissions upon global climate. Super erruptions and large meteor strikes are rare events over which humanity has no control, where as the burning of fossil fuels is something that mankind is directly responsible for.
If we consider that we have been burning fossil fuels in increasing bulk since about 1700, I hope you can see that the time frame under discussion is substantially less that geological and in this period there have been no super erruptions – indeed the last one was 70,000 years ago, long enough ago, to be totally irrelevant, and if Yellowstone went of tomorrow human CO2 emissions would be the least of our worries.
What we are concerned with here are the effects of human v natural CO2 emissions over the time frame since roughly 1700 and during this period volcanic output has been roughly inline with the USGS’s figures. ie. Volcanoes have produced far less CO2 than man.
Anybody involved with proffessional modelling and prediction knows all about ‘wild cards’ as you put it, so whilst your comments are correct at one level; the real trick is to ask the correct questions (ie. what happens to the price of copper? if demand follows current trends, there are no stockmarket crashes and no wars breaking out in producing countries etc etc.) – I think your reply shows that you have little or no experience of modelling and predicting trends
Moving on your suggestion that ‘The movement to stop CO2 production is not practical and it may actually increase the odds of a global extinction release of greenhouse gases.’ Is almost laughable, huge quantities of methane are locked up in the worlds permafrost and this is already starting to thaw, burning more fossil fuels will only exasperate this trend. And as I am sure you are aware methane is ten times as potent a green house gas as methane…….
Finally your closing remarks show an unwarranted arrogance; ‘By the way this information is much more deeper than you’ll find on most online resources,’ is a fatuous claim because it isn’t. Also what makes you think that ‘most will find it hard to understand or believe?’ Most people on here are well educated, and there is nothing complex in your ramblings indeed if people don’t understand it is probably more down to poor english than anything intrinsicley difficult in your ideas.
Steve.
Who here saw the link to the TV show that was posted?
Funny that I have to be abused for years by an alarmist crowd that says man made C02 is contributing significantly to global warming and that if we were to lower that it would be a big help… where as the TV show that has real scientists on it shows another completely different theory which is:
-Global warming is happening but that its cause is more natural than anything else.
-That the crowd that hangs their hat on man made CO2 being a major problem point to ice core samples ( Like what is shown in Al Gores Movie “An Inconvenient Truth”.
-Where the scientists in the TV show link I posted say if anything, those ice core samples only do the following: “The evidence of what is in the ice core samples, if anything, disproves the theory of CO2 contributing to global warming.” That those samples show that CO2 follows global warming trends, where CO2 increases hundreds of years after a warming trend. The two lines of data never match up.
-The long trends of global warming and cooling don’t prove anything about man made CO2 having any effect on global warming.
-What is interesting is the two lines of data that go hand in hand over the ages are: Global temperature and sunspot activity. The affects of emissions from the sun during higher solar activity go in long trends.
-Where kind of solar activity influences how much cloud cover is present. Lower solar activity means a higher percentage of clouds and starts a slow cooling trend. Higher solar activity over time means less cloud cover and starts warming trends.
-It takes the ocean a very long long time to react to a warming or cooling event. At the minimum, hundreds of years. If ocean activity is warm today, it is in reaction to an event hundreds of years ago. The reverse is true.
Those are just some of the things. Of course you are allowed your opinion. But striking out one science theory just because you don’t like it, is bad science practice. What is happening today is similar to the Spanish Inquisition. Heretics will be demonized at every turn. Anyone that doesn’t believe man made CO2 contributes significantly to global warming is a heretic and needs to be silenced. That, not believing man made CO2 contributes significantly to global warming, is the same as being a Holocaust denier. Not really the scientific way is it?
ELPActually ATFS_CRASH, the bulk of what you say is totally irrelevant to this debate, since we are not discussing mass extinction events (fascinating as they are), but the impact of human CO2 emissions upon global climate. Super erruptions and large meteor strikes are rare events over which humanity has no control, where as the burning of fossil fuels is something that mankind is directly responsible for.
If we consider that we have been burning fossil fuels in increasing bulk since about 1700, I hope you can see that the time frame under discussion is substantially less that geological and in this period there have been no super erruptions – indeed the last one was 70,000 years ago, long enough ago, to be totally irrelevant, and if Yellowstone went of tomorrow human CO2 emissions would be the least of our worries.
What we are concerned with here are the effects of human v natural CO2 emissions over the time frame since roughly 1700 and during this period volcanic output has been roughly inline with the USGS’s figures. ie. Volcanoes have produced far less CO2 than man.
Anybody involved with proffessional modelling and prediction knows all about ‘wild cards’ as you put it, so whilst your comments are correct at one level; the real trick is to ask the correct questions (ie. what happens to the price of copper? if demand follows current trends, there are no stockmarket crashes and no wars breaking out in producing countries etc etc.) – I think your reply shows that you have little or no experience of modelling and predicting trends
Moving on your suggestion that ‘The movement to stop CO2 production is not practical and it may actually increase the odds of a global extinction release of greenhouse gases.’ Is almost laughable, huge quantities of methane are locked up in the worlds permafrost and this is already starting to thaw, burning more fossil fuels will only exasperate this trend. And as I am sure you are aware methane is ten times as potent a green house gas as methane…….
Finally your closing remarks show an unwarranted arrogance; ‘By the way this information is much more deeper than you’ll find on most online resources,’ is a fatuous claim because it isn’t. Also what makes you think that ‘most will find it hard to understand or believe?’ Most people on here are well educated, and there is nothing complex in your ramblings indeed if people don’t understand it is probably more down to poor english than anything intrinsicley difficult in your ideas.
Steve.
Who here saw the link to the TV show that was posted?
Funny that I have to be abused for years by an alarmist crowd that says man made C02 is contributing significantly to global warming and that if we were to lower that it would be a big help… where as the TV show that has real scientists on it shows another completely different theory which is:
-Global warming is happening but that its cause is more natural than anything else.
-That the crowd that hangs their hat on man made CO2 being a major problem point to ice core samples ( Like what is shown in Al Gores Movie “An Inconvenient Truth”.
-Where the scientists in the TV show link I posted say if anything, those ice core samples only do the following: “The evidence of what is in the ice core samples, if anything, disproves the theory of CO2 contributing to global warming.” That those samples show that CO2 follows global warming trends, where CO2 increases hundreds of years after a warming trend. The two lines of data never match up.
-The long trends of global warming and cooling don’t prove anything about man made CO2 having any effect on global warming.
-What is interesting is the two lines of data that go hand in hand over the ages are: Global temperature and sunspot activity. The affects of emissions from the sun during higher solar activity go in long trends.
-Where kind of solar activity influences how much cloud cover is present. Lower solar activity means a higher percentage of clouds and starts a slow cooling trend. Higher solar activity over time means less cloud cover and starts warming trends.
-It takes the ocean a very long long time to react to a warming or cooling event. At the minimum, hundreds of years. If ocean activity is warm today, it is in reaction to an event hundreds of years ago. The reverse is true.
Those are just some of the things. Of course you are allowed your opinion. But striking out one science theory just because you don’t like it, is bad science practice. What is happening today is similar to the Spanish Inquisition. Heretics will be demonized at every turn. Anyone that doesn’t believe man made CO2 contributes significantly to global warming is a heretic and needs to be silenced. That, not believing man made CO2 contributes significantly to global warming, is the same as being a Holocaust denier. Not really the scientific way is it?
ELPThanks T,
There might be some other forums but I don’t know them all, that’s for sure.
ELPHere is an interesting opinion piece from Canberra…
ELPRemember…. um…… remember that we dump half a dozen or more F-16s a year as a cost of doing business. :diablo:
ELPProbably a “goodwill” visit to Havana.:D
I get it now…. You see this is how TR put on the illegal war with Spain! Yellow journalism at it’s finest…. “Remember the Maine”….. … and Spain’s alleged human rights violations against the Cubans…. I see where this is going ……:diablo: 😀
ELPSo the Rhino isnt a real combat jet? And it cant defend itself from a big SU? Obviously you have changed your mind from our discussions on another forum. Once again you have decided to take the “spin” from someone qho doesnt like the Rhino. I think we have had this conversation already. Why dont you ask the Raptor pilot who got his **** handed to him in a BFM set (pictures on the web) “bad” the Rhino os in BFM. The Rhino didnt shoot him with a 9X and JHMCS or AMRAAM, het got a guns kill on the raptor. So, what does that say about it’s wheezing performance? And also like I said before, would it be nice to have more thrust in the Rhino? Sure, who wouldnt want more power (maybe a Raptor guy)? There is a new motor in the works and it would be great to have. That being said, the Rhino is an excellent A/A machine. With it long range sensors and weapons for targets at range or its excellent mnvring in a tigh WVR fight. How long do you think a typical Neutral merge (butterfly set) lasts. Not a trainingism BFM hop, but a going into the merge and first valid shot wins. Before JHMCS it was less than a minute. The nose authority of the Rhino is bar none. Now with JHMCS and the 9X its a heck of a lot less than that.
I wonder how much time Peter Criss has in a Rhino? And what does he do for a living now? Who does he work for? People can say a whole lot (see “spin”) for a number of reasons. Sounds like he has a huge like of the F-111. I know a Raptor guy (pilot) and a Mud Hen (WSO) that just rode (in the trunk) of Rhino and his comments are a tad different. When a Raptor guy tells you that he is totally impressed with the Rhino then obviously its not all bad. When the F-15E guy dittos those remarks, now what that about?
What really impresses me are the number of people that haven’t flown in the Rhino yet make all sorts of “facts” about the aircraft. Does the Rhino have some problems. Sure. What airplane doesn’t. Do these problem areas make the Rhino a pile? Not at all. Is it the best A/A platform around? Nope, but it sure can hold its own. Is it the best A/G platform. I’d say yes but I am a little biased. The Rhino is an A/G stud. CAS, Night CAS, SES, SOF support and the number and type of A/G weapons that it carries is unreal. 11 MK-83’s in one stick. ATFLIR, LMAV, JDAM, JSOW, LGB’s, SLAM-ER, HARM, etc…. etc….
Also the Rhino that are rolling out of the factory today arent the same as the old non ACS lots. Todays Rhino’s are all right.INO
Oh yeah, before you ask. I don’t work for Boeing or any other lobbying group.
I also am throwing the BS flag on an F-111 being able to take twice the load twice the distance twice as fast comment.
Ah… yes… trott out the one SH gun cam photo. An event that only shows that the SH pilot in question is unsafe. As the full story on that is that the shot was out of engagement rules (close). If anything a nice setup for a mid-air. WVR…. and a Super Hornet in WVR with JHMCS is dangerous. But so are a lot of other aircraft. Again… where… the Super Hornet has problems is:
-Speed. The kind of speed that will allow you to escape or chase. It just is not in the class of any peer group jet ( name any 4th gen ) to do that kind of task. This would be the last jet I would want sitting ground alert to go out and intercept something. If the object of intercept is coming toward it, fine. If it is off some, SH is going to have it’s work cut out for it. For that price I don’t see why I should have to pay for something like that. F-15E guy likes it? Well the strike avionics are only about a full generation ahead of an E, not hard to do. The 10% of the aircraft I have a problem with is the lack of brute performance. Block III engines… I’ll believe that when I see it. They have to fund Block II all the way and get Block II+ settled ( yes?). I mean given that JSF funding just went in the dumper, one could even say we are going to have to spend some money to populate more Navy squadrons with Super Hornet as JSF is getting scary on funding with todays announcement of the funding raid to pay for ground stuff for the war doesn’t seem so good. That looks like an event that will be repeated and repeated as long as we are in Iraq. The silver lining in that is thrashed legacy Hornets might get out of service sooner. My confidence in JSF arriving as planned is pretty low. And we can’t just hope it will arrive and keep hard-used legacy Hornets around. And what of the Marines? If JSF gets fund raided anymore we might as well fund USMC for Super Hornet. I don’t give one damn about STOVL. If the Marines need support they need a good existing strike platform par excel-lance and that is Super Hornet in Marine colors running off of an aircraft carrier. ( hey we have space on the deck now for them if needed. :p ).
– Yes SH has some great carrier traits ( safe flying qualities, incredible bringback etc etc ) Great. Australia isn’t going to run a cat-carrier anytime soon. So why pay for the extra weight in landing gear and structure that contributes to it’s already over-weight condition. The common supply chain to legacy Hornet is an advantage but given SH is so different, only to a point.
I totally understand the downsizing of the ’90s. I was there. For the Navy that was hard times. A-12 getting goofed. F-14 running out of airframe life and a shrinking budget that demanded that the ship building lobby still get their fief no matter what. I love our Navy and carrier ops and believe in a strong carrier community. But I’m not going to stand by and let someone put the word “super” on a mediocre airframe that has great supply chain management traits, awesome avionics, and is neutered from the word go on common fighter-like traits. If anything the F-18E/F fits the need of the A-6, A-7 well. Carrier ops are expensive. I don’t give one damn how much it costs to put a squadron of 12 F-22-like no_peer performance jets on every carrier deck. There is no price too big for that kind of real killing power off of the carrier deck. After that you can populate the rest of the carrier wing with as many SH’s as you want. However, hyping the air to air ability of Super Hornet is getting old. Give it a rest.
Of course I should probably mind my manners. Given the current production slow down of JSF and given that we will now be using upgraded F-15s and F-16s well to 2030… and given that if the F-16s thrash out too much and by that time the F-16 line is dead closed….. USAF will be buying the only airframe left in production to gap fill….. The Super Hornet. There simply won’t be enough airframes to fill the USAF mission where we run it to a lack-of-available airframe come to Jesus time around 2018 or so. Might as well project some F-18Es into a few USAF squadrons by 2014. You think I’m joking. At the current lowered production rate, USAF would have to buy JSF all the way to 2040 just to fill current airframe needs. 2040. If JSF gets fund-raided anymore… and with a long closed F-15 and F-16 line around 2012 or so, USAF if it doesn’t make a move to put something with a new car smell into place will be screwed by 2018-2020. Especially if GWOT ( WWIII ) gets worse and we are tasked even more. I’ll have to shut my GD mouth and like the Super Hornet in USAF colors.
In the case of Australia where a medical doctor with about zero aviation knowledge says that the F-18F is somehow going to replace the capability of the F-111, I’m a little puzzled. The following guy, while over the top sometimes, has it about right on this topic: Consider this:
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Media-Release-050207-1.html
From what I am seeing, the defence establishment just sees the taxpayer as something to be fleeced. Considering how this aircraft selection came out of the blue, it’s hard to doubt that.
I forgot to add: INO, thanks for posting. We do need more USN influence around here.
ELPHmmmm some of you must be contributing to global warming by wearing your chicken little suits. 😀 :diablo:
ELPHmmmm some of you must be contributing to global warming by wearing your chicken little suits. 😀 :diablo:
ELPpor lo que reitera que definitivamente no será con aviones interceptores Sukhoi-27.
This means they clarify they won`t buy the Su-27 i mean i did not check this sorry they are indeed saying definetively they won`t buy them and theya re studing other options it seems the pro-US government will not buy fighter aircraft since the SU-27 is the cheapest aircraft they can buy however it is possible they still could buy MiGs, but they do not mention other biders
I only took Spanish in high school for 2 years. Unfortunately, now I just have a bunch of words in my head that I don’t know the meaning.:D
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