Sps supplement Rough Draft-endi2011 Alpharetta 2011 / Boyce, Doshi, Hermansen, Ma, Pirani
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NSSO IndictTheir NSSO evidence is a failure. Day, “American space historian and policy analyst and served as an investigator for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board”, 8 [Dwayne A. Day; “Knights in shining armor”, The Space Review; 6/9/2008t; http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1147/1] The NSSO study is remarkably sensible and even-handed and states that we are nowhere near developing practical SSP and that it is not a viable solution for even the military’s limited requirements. It states that the technology to implement space solar power does not currently exist… and is unlikely to exist for the next forty years. Substantial technology development must occur before it is even feasible. Furthermore, the report makes clear that the key technology requirement is cheap access to space, which no longer seems as achievable as it did three decades ago (perhaps why SSP advocates tend to skip this part of the discussion and hope others solve it for them). The activists have ignored the message and fallen in love with the messenger. But in this case, the activists touting the NSSO study do not understand where the NSSO fits into the larger military space bureaucracy. The National Security Space Office was created in 2004 and “facilitates the integration and coordination of defense, intelligence, civil, and commercial space activities.” But any office that “facilitates” the activities of other organizations has limited influence, especially when those other organizations are much bigger and have their own interests and connections to the senior leadership. The NSSO has a minimal staff and budget and does not command any assets—it does not fly any satellites, launch any rockets, or procure any hardware, all of which are measures of power within the military space realm. Simply put, the NSSO exists essentially as a policy shop that is readily ignored by the major military space actors such as Strategic Command, Air Force Space Command, and the National Reconnaissance Office whenever it suits them. As one former NSSO staffer explained, the office consists of many smart, hardworking people who have no discernible influence on military space at all. In fact, for several years there have been persistent rumors that the NSSO was about to be abolished as unnecessary, irrelevant, and toothless. Add to this the way in which the NSSO’s solar power satellite study was pursued—the study itself had no budget. In Washington, studies cost money. If the Department of Defense wants advice on, say, options for space launch, they hire an organization to conduct the study such as the RAND Corporation, or they employ one of their existing advisory groups such as the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. All of this requires money to pay for the experts to perform the work. Even if the study is performed by a committee of volunteers, there are still travel, printing, staff support, overhead, and other expenses. Costs can vary widely, but at a minimum will start in the many tens of thousands of dollars and could run to a few million dollars. In contrast, the NSSO study of space solar power had no actual funding and relied entirely upon voluntary input and labor. This reflects the seriousness by which the study was viewed by the Pentagon leadership. If all this is true, why is the space activist community so excited about the NSSO study? That is not hard to understand. They all know that the economic case for space solar power is abysmal. The best estimates are that SSP will cost at least three times the cost per kilowatt hour of even relatively expensive nuclear power. But the military wants to dramatically lower the cost of delivering fuel to distant locations, which could possibly change the cost-benefit ratio. The military savior also theoretically solves some other problems for SSP advocates. One is the need for deep pockets to foot the immense development costs. The other is an institutional avatar—one of the persistent policy challenges for SSP has been the fact that responsibility for it supposedly “falls through the cracks” because neither NASA nor the Department of Energy wants responsibility. If the military takes on the SSP challenge, the mission will finally have a home. But there’s also another factor at work: naïveté. Space activists tend to have little understanding of military space, coupled with an idealistic impression of its management compared to NASA, whom many space activists have come to despise. For instance, they fail to realize that the military space program is currently in no better shape, and in many cases worse shape, than NASA. The majority of large military space acquisition programs have experienced major problems, in many cases cost growth in excess of 100%. Although NASA has a bad public record for cost overruns, the DoD’s less-public record is far worse, and military space has a bad reputation in Congress, which would never allow such a big, expensive new program to be started. Again, this is not to insult the fine work conducted by those who produced the NSSO space solar power study. They accomplished an impressive amount of work without any actual resources. But it is nonsensical for members of the space activist community to claim that “the military supports space solar power” based solely on a study that had no money, produced by an organization that has no clout. Warming DefenseWarming isn’t anthropogenic- IPCC is false Kemm, nuclear physicist and is the CEO of Stratek Business Strategy Consultants, 7/1/2011 [Kelvin, “ IPCC not an authority on climate change”, July 1st, 2011, http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/ipcc-far-from-an-authority-on-climate-change-2011-07-01 MA] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of the United Nations, is often projected as the world authority on climate change. This is far from the truth. The IPCC has always projected a very scary image of the world being plunged into disaster as a result of the actions of mankind. The IPCC supports the theory that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) is the cause of global warming. Despite significant evidence that any global warming observed is probably due to the incidence of cosmic rays from the stars, the IPCC refuses to be scientifically honest and to take this scientific evidence into account. In one of its reports, the IPCC relied heavily on the now infamous Hockey Stick graph, which purported to show a great increase in temperature rise during the twentieth century. This graph has now been totally discredited, and the IPCC has withdrawn it. In 2009, the Climategate affair was made public. In Climategate, a group of scientists led by Phil Jones, of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, in the UK, manipulated results to falsely show that the earth was warming more than was the truth. This affair gave rise to the phrase ‘Hide the decline’, when many emails were discovered that had been passed between this group of people in which they plotted their deception. They were writers of a chapter of the IPCC report known as AR4. Last year, the IPCC was forced to apologise that it had grossly overstated the threat to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. Well, the IPCC is in hot water again. It has just been revealed that an IPCC report released in May, stating that the whole world could be running on 77% renewable energy by 2050, was largely written by a prominent member of Greenpeace. The man who led the campaign to expose Climategate was Steve McIntyre, a Canadian engineer. McIntyre is playing a role in exposing the latest scandal. On 17 June, Mark Lynas, a journalist, refer- ring to the Greenpeace person’s major role in the current IPCC report, wrote on his blog, http://www.marklynas.org/2011/06/questions-the-ipcc-must-now-urgently-answer/: “Here’s the scenario. An Exxon-Mobil employee – admittedly an energy specialist with an engineering background – serves as a lead author on an important IPCC report looking into the future of fossil fuels. The Exxon guy and his fellow lead authors assess a whole variety of literature, but select for special treatment four particular papers – one produced by Exxon-Mobil. This paper heralds great things for the future of fossil fuels, suggesting they can supply 80% of the world’s energy in 2050, and this headline is the first sentence of the ensuing IPCC press release, which is picked up and repeated uncritically by the world’s media. “Pleased, the Exxon employee issues a self-congratulatory press release, boasting that his paper had been central to the IPCC effort and urging the world’s governments to get on with opening up new areas to oil drilling for the benefit of us all. “Well, you can imagine the furore this would cause at Greenpeace. The IPCC would be discredited forever as an independent voice. There would be pious banner-drops by Greenpeace activists abseiling down Exxon HQ and harshly criticising the terrible stranglehold that fossil fuel interests had achieved over supposedly independent science. Campaigners everywhere would be up in arms. Greenpeace would feel doubly justified in taking direct action against new oil wells being opened up in the Arctic, and its activists could demonstrate new feats of gallantry and bravery as they took on the might of the world’s oil industry with some ropes and a rubber dinghy somewhere near Greenland. “How is the Exxon scenario different from what has just happened with the IPCC’s renew- ables report? And why – when confronted with this egregious conflict of interest and abuse of scientific independence – has the response of the world’s green campaigners been to circle the wagons and cry foul against the whistle-blowers themselves? That this was spotted at all is a tribute to the eagle eyes of McIntyre. Yet I am told that he is a ‘denier’, that all his deeds are evil, and that I have been naively led astray by him. Well, if the ‘deniers’ are the only ones standing up for the integrity of the scientific process, and the independence of the IPCC, then I too am a ‘denier’. Indeed, McIntyre and I have formed an unlikely double act, posing a series of questions – together with the New York Times’ Andy Revkin – to the IPCC report’s lead author, rofessor Ottmar Edenhofer, to which he has yet to respond. “Here’s some classic closing of ranks by Stefan Singer, of the WWF, riding to the rescue of his embattled Green-peace colleagues in a comment on my original blog post: ‘Yes, I am biased as well, I am director for energy policy at the WWF – we scandalously dared to publish a global energy scenario a few months ago, showing how the world can go to even 95% renewables by 2050 and, even more shocking, we also showed in that scenario how global energy consumption can indeed be reduced globally with substantive energy conservation and efficiency policies without curtailing growth and economic activities. Moreover, if we want to combat climate change effectively (which, I rea- lise, not everyone supports on this exchange), what is wrong with showing that renewables can contribute 80% or even more to global energy supply? Mark Lynas, in case you take that serious (sic), you should thank Greenpeace and the NGOs to drive that debate.’” What the IPCC always does, and did in this case, is that it issues a ‘summary’ of the report a month before the actual report is made public. So the press get the summary and report on it. It is then a whole month later when the actual substance of the report can be examined. The current report, in its depths, assumes that there will be huge world reduction in electricity consumption. They are talking of real consumption, not efficiency improvements, or reduction in growth rates. This effectively means that, in the whole of Africa, no substantive extra electricity can be used. So South Africa’s plans to double electricity production would be a no-no, according to the WWF and Greenpeace. Warming is false- Earth is cooling Kemm, nuclear physicist and is the CEO of Stratek Business Strategy Consultants, 7/1/2011 [Kelvin, “ IPCC not an authority on climate change”, July 1st, 2011, http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/ipcc-far-from-an-authority-on-climate-change-2011-07-01 MA] In the meantime, another piece of news has just emerged. The current cooling trend of the earth, which gave rise to the two years of severe winters in Europe and the US, may continue. Journalist Lewis Page, of The Register, wrote on June 14: “What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age. “The announcement made on June 14 comes from scientists at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the US Air Force Research Laboratory. Three different analyses of the sun’s recent behaviour all indicate that a period of unusually low solar activity may be about to begin. The sun normally follows an 11-year cycle of activity. The current cycle, Cycle 24, is now supposed to be ramping up towards maximum strength. Increased numbers of sunspots and other indications ought to be happening, but . . . results so far are most disappointing. Scientists at the NSO now suspect, based on data showing decades-long trends leading to this point, that Cycle 25 may not happen at all. “This could have major implications for the earth’s climate. A statement issued by the NSO, announcing the research, stated: ‘An immediate question is whether this slowdown presages a second Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots [which occurred] during 1645–1715.’ “As Nasa notes: ‘Early records of sunspots indicate that the sun went through a period of inactivity in the late seventeenth century. Very few sunspots were seen on the sun from about 1645 to 1715. Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the sun was, in fact, well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the Little Ice Age, when rivers that are normally ice free froze and snow fields remained year round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past.’ “During the Maunder Minimum and for periods either side of it, many European rivers which are ice free today – including the Thames – routinely froze over, allowing ice skating and even for armies to march across them in some cases. “‘This is highly unusual and unexpected,’ says Dr Frank Hill, of the NSO. ‘But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.’ Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.84 Mb. Share with your friends:
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