A Matter of Priorities

This is an old news item, but I wanted to chew on its implications for a while before I said anything about it. When he unveiled the proposed 2010 DoD budget, the line item that drew the most attention was his announcement that he would end F-22 Raptor production at 187 aircraft. I am somewhat ambivalent about this. On the one hand, our current doctrine relies upon air superiority. Staying ahead is easier than catching up, after all, and we never really want our guys to find themselves in a fair fight. On the other hand, there's a conversation we really need to have about missions and force structure.

Let's roll back the clock about 20 years. Back in the late 1980s, the mission and force structure was fairly plain. We were built up and deployed to receive a Warsaw Pact assault in Western Europe. Some days that looked more likely than others. There was a time when I fully expected to cash in my chips fighting Russians somewhere in Germany. At a minimum, we had good reason to hedge our bets. After World War II, Stalin's policies were expansionist and aggressive. We saw that in both Berlin and Korea. Stalin's successor Khruschchev wasn't as blatantly expansionist, but his rhetoric wasn't what you'd call friendly, either. If you took their founding documents seriously, if you believed that they meant what they appeared to say, there were few conclusions you could reach other than they really believed that the world wasn't big enough for both Communism and Capitalism. They would carry by the bayonet what they couldn't carry by persuasion.

Under that threat, we had to be prepared to defend our allies against aggression. We maintained a large peacetime standing army, something unheard of in American history. We continued to spend at an almost wartime level on national defense. The weapons we developed during those years were designed around that threat.

Then, something totally unexpected happened. The Warsaw Pact fell apart. In the aftermath of that collapse, we never really took a hard look at our force structure, never really figured out exactly what it is we're trying to do with this new world we find ourselves in. We continued to build a Navy designed to take on the Red Banner Northern Fleet, an Army intended to turn back the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, and an Air Force meant to chew up Soviet Frontal Aviation. I've long thought we needed to re-think things. But that never quite happened.

Maybe, just maybe, that conversation will happen now. We need to establish new priorities. We need to structure our defense establishment around what our needs really are today, not around what they were twenty years ago. The question on the table -- and I don't pretend to have a complete answer, much less the right one -- is this: What is America's role in the world? Knowing that, what kind of military can best fill that role?

Breaking it down yet further: Are we the world's policeman? Or are we the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own?

Like I said, I don't yet have an answer. I just have the question. The conversation is way, way past due; and we can't really know what our military should look like until we have it.

That said, I have a few observations about military policy:

1) My esteemed colleague, the anonymous Chair Force Engineer, makes a very good point about the drawbacks of our somewhat ADD approach to military planning. We tend to go through cycles of "Ooh! That looks neat!" followed by "Damn! That's expensive!" This idiocy tends to drive up acquisition prices. Once we know what we need, we should then buy what we need. Just that.

2) As a related point, there's something goofy about the way airplane costs are accounted for. When a news article reports the cost of an F-22 Raptor fighter, for example, that per-airplane cost amortizes the RDT&E cost over the entire buy. This makes each individual airplane look much more expensive than it actually is, based on the marginal cost of building the damn thing. If I had my 'druthers, we'd do it differently. You'd pay up front for the factory, tools, dies, and everything you have to have to build the first example. You'd eat that in the program start-up cost. You have to build that infrastructure anyway, whether you build one or ten thousand. After that, the unit cost would be the marginal cost of actually building each additional airframe that rolls off the assembly line: mostly time and materials. If you build enough, process improvements make each successive lot cheaper, not more expensive. However, I doubt that'll ever happen.

3) I'm not all that upset about the F-22 ending production. She's a lovely bird. And the Raptor rules the skies -- today. But all the same, I know an incipient dinosaur when I see it. Two technologies are coming to maturity that spell doom for the manned tactical fighter. One is the airborne laser, the other is the unmanned combat aircraft. Within fifteen years, we'll see a laser-armed unmanned fighter that is smaller, cheaper, and far more maneuverable than any fighter in the world today. Its main weapon fires line-straight at the speed of light, and cannot be jammed or evaded. If the gunner lays cross-hairs on you, you're done for. I'd rather we started making the down payments on this next turn of the technological wheel than putting another coat of polish on last year's model.

4) In the current budget climate, it really comes down to a matter of priorities. One way of setting priorities amongst services and programs is this: if you can only fully fund one, which one should it be? If you put that question to me, I'd look you straight in the eye and say without flinching -- it's the Navy. Understand that it's a former Air Force man saying that. My father was a career USAF NCO, and I was an AFROTC cadet myself, but I've read enough military history to know what's important. We are safe from invasion not because we have a powerful Army, nor because we have the world's best-equipped Air Force. Those are nice things to have, but they're not defensive arms for us. Those are the things we use to strut our funky stuff on someone else's real estate. No, the service that keeps them from returning the favor is the Navy. We sleep soundly without worry that rude foreigners will interrupt our rest mainly because the United States Navy is bigger than the next seventeen put together. The USN may not rule the waves, but no one else swings the heavy iron to seriously contest the matter. I'll trade Raptors for more Littoral Combat Ships every day and twice on Sundays. I'm a flyboy born and bred, but still, that's a thief's bargain. As long as we have a nice, strong Navy, I will sleep soundly and contentedly.

5) One last thing about force structure: back before WWII, the general arrangement was that the President did what he wanted with the Navy, but the Congress owned the Army. I'd kind of like to get back to something like that. If I had my way, I'd draw down the regular Army somewhat, and transfer assets to the National Guard in the various States. Then, I'd change the law such that the National Guard could only be mobilized by the President pursuant to a Declaration of War passed by Congress. Not an "authorization of force." Not a "state of emergency." An honest-to-God Declaration of War. Congress needs to step up and do its damn job. The last President ran amok, true enough, but he was aided and abetted by a supine, servile Congress. If we force them to "own" the Army again, maybe that'll change.

In summary: there are both winners and losers in the 2010 DoD budget. But on the whole, things look pretty good.

Who Watches The Watchmen?

Dunno, but it's obvious that someone does.

Video Del Fuego, Part XX

Today on Video Del Fuego, the launch and recovery of STS-119, the most recent Space Shuttle mission.

It's rather interesting for me to listen to the radio chatter during the Shuttle's ascent. The commander and pilot are busy managing the vehicle as they ride a controlled explosion into orbit, so the only thing Mission Control bothers them with are updates to their abort modes. They start out with basically no abort mode at all. If something comes unglued while the SRBs are still burning, they're screwed. But after the SRBs burn out, there's the theoretical possibility of a Return To Launch Site abort, or RTLS. Nobody really likes that option. You're basically doing a bootlegger's reverse with a 100-ton glider. They're pretty sure the vehicle would hold together during the maneuver, but not 100% certain. They like the Trans-Atlantic Abort (TAL) option better. Once they have enough energy to clear the Atlantic, they can make an emergency landing downrange at one of several designated sites. This doesn't require any risky mid-air turns, so they're confident they can pull this off if they have to. Their favorite abort option of all, and the only one that's actually been done so far, is Abort To Orbit (ATO). Getting into space is their safest option. Space is mostly harmless. It's going and coming that can kill you.



The landings also fascinate me, from an aviator's point of view. This is probably the riskiest thing they do. Dead-sticking any glider can be challenging. Dead-sticking a 100-ton glider that isn't even all that great a glider to begin with is one of the hardest jobs in aviation. The Shuttle's glide slope angle is insane. No other vehicle approaches the runway so steeply. Then, right before landing, the commander has to "flare" -- pull the nose up to arrest the sink rate -- at just the right moment. Too high and you overshoot the runway, too low and you hit too hard. And with no engines, you have one chance to get it right. These guys are champs. They float it in and kiss the runway, as gentle as you please.



They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one. They also say a great landing is one after which they get to use the airplane again. This was a great landing.

A Taxing Experience

As a general principle, I have nothing against paying my taxes. I don't get the hard-core libertarians who scream that taxes are tantamount to theft. Although I tend towards libertarian views most of the time, I accept the need for a government, and accept the need for said government to be funded. I see taxes as club dues. I accept the benefits of American society, and so the honorable thing to do is pay my dues. Welshing is for losers.

I'd be a lot happier if I had some way of knowing a priori what those dues are.

I know, I know, the Devil's in the details. Flat taxes, while simple, are regressive. But still: you know that your tax code is hideously broken when it's far simpler to explain how to plot a course to Mars by way of Venus than it is to explain how the hell you figure out how much you owe the taxman. I can do the former in about a page of mathematics. The latter ... well, I haven't done my taxes in the better part of a decade. It's a fringe benefit of having married a financial professional. But the computation is about five times more involved, easily.

I know it won't happen. There are too many people with their fingers in the pie. But please, for the love of God, can we have a simplified tax system? Something that's actually manageable by someone with a 12th-grade education? A system where you can plan ahead? I mean, I'm not asking for a tax cut. I'd gladly take a modest increase if it meant that I'd know on January 1st what I'd owe on December 31st. Most years, we're guessing.

We're guessing. I'm a few hundred pages short of a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering, my wife's a Controller at a major firm, and we're guessing. We guessed right this year, and didn't owe any extra money. But dammit, it ought to be possible, at least in principle, to figure out how much you need to withhold such that you cover your bill. But two educated professionals with more numerical acumen than any ten common citizens can't plan ahead with certainty. Honest, I'm not trying to brag, but if we're guessing, most people are hopelessly screwed.

If some kind soul would do a complete strip-down re-write of the tax code, it would be a public service. But like I said earlier, that won't happen. Not only are there too many vested interests, it's damn hard work. At the end of the day, you need a tax code that funds the Government's operations. The current one does, more or less, after a fashion. It's a damn nuisance for us for about a week out of the year, though.

It's not that I mind paying my share. I just want to know what that share is, ahead of time, that's all.

There's Nothing New Under The Sun

I just saw this item on CNN.com, about a new solar-powered oven.

Except that it's not all that new. My Dad had one he took on campouts 35 years ago. He called it a Dutch oven. No, wait, the Dutch oven had to have been the big iron pot. Funny ... all these years, I thought the solar heat-box thing was called a Dutch oven. Still, he did have this insulated, silvered box with a clear plastic lid. It got damn hot on the inside if you left it in direct sunlight. I distinctly remember that he used to make cherry cobbler with it. I have no idea where he got the notion. He was an air conditioning technician back in the day, and few mortals understand solar heating as intimately as men who work in attics during a Texas summer.

Still, this new design is remarkably cheap to build. He's earned a hearty thumbs-up for that, if for nothing else.

Video Del Fuego, Part XIX

Important mechanical tip: just because your engine can provide the torque, and just because your tires are rated for it, does not mean that the mounting bolts won't shear off under the strain.

Respect the manual! It will save you time, money, and public humiliation all at once.

Actually, It IS Rocket Science

Editor's Note: This news item would be hilarious, were it not for the fact that so many in North Korea are starving while their leaders pull these shenanigans. But while I have a great deal of sympathy for the people of North Korea, I have none at all for their leaders, who deserve all the scorn we can muster. It is our right -- no, it is our duty -- to serve those clowns with as much vicious mockery as we can bring to bear.

On Sunday, April 5, the same protean genius that brought the world nuclear explosives that don't unveiled his latest innovation: a communication satellite based somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific. So, while the unfortunate aquatic wildlife endure North Korean revolutionary ditties in the fond hope that a fishing trawler might come to put them out of their misery, the rest of the world scratches its collective head and wonders.

What are those morons trying to prove?

You have to admit, as international menaces go, North Korea is distinctly third-rate. They threaten their neighbors with atomic weapons (that don't work) mounted on missiles (that don't work either). They menace their neighbors with tanks (that might or might not have gas), fighter-bombers (that have to share gas, if any, with the tanks), and fiercely-attired troops (who might have pawned their ammo for a burger). They have all the destructive potential of a group of slightly cranky Cub Scouts. And we're worried about Li'l Kim's latest spasm ... why? The record shows that the safest place to stand during a North Korean missile attack is the rocket's intended aim-point. Firing off an interceptor is simply a waste of ammunition, as the North Korean engineers have apparently seen fit to design their missiles to be self-intercepting.

Granted, the damn thing actually made it off the pad this time. So the first stage might actually work as advertised. But the second stage either didn't work, or just as likely, it performed an ocean-insertion burn instead of an orbit-insertion burn. It's easy to mix those two up, especially since they're both five-letter words that begin with an "O". And now that we've elected a President whose name is also a five-letter word that begins with an "O", well, they're hopelessly confused.

And let's not forget the payload of this aerospace marvel: a communications satellite whose sole function appears to be playing two songs on endless loop. Now, that's just sad. For comparison, let's look at Russia's first satellite. True, Sputnik I was basically just a transmitter, but they were in a hurry. The missile was ready before the payload, and that almost never happens. And America's first satellite, Explorer I, carried a load of scientific instruments into space. Li'l Kim decided that for his first outing, he'd regale the world with songs bragging about how great he is. It's embarrassing to see a grown man's neuroses on parade like that. That re-defines sad. That's world-championship, Olympic-caliber sad. If there was a Sadness Trophy, we'd have to retire it.

And what's it all in aid of? Developing an ICBM? "Yes! I will threaten those Yankee pigs with a nuclear missile that I have to prepare for a week in broad daylight before firing! Muahahahahaha!" Dear God, can he really believe that might actually work?

There's more, but I can't go on. On top of it all, the failed missile test is a monument to human misery. The resources wasted on this folly could have gone to feeding God knows how many of his people. He will have to give an account one day, to a far sterner judge than any human court could provide. I wonder what he'll say?

In closing, in the microscopically small chance that he's reading this, I'll repeat something I said a few years ago in similar circumstances:

Before your ego starts writing checks your army can't cash, take note of a few key facts. Before you start threatening your neighbors with atomic weapons, you must have:

1) A working atomic weapon,

2) A working atomic weapon that's small enough to put on a missile,

3) A working atomic weapon that's small enough to put on a missile capable of reaching its intended target.

You're still 0-fer on all the important points. But do try again. It enrages your friends, and amuses your enemies.

Oh, and you'd better make your first shot a damn good one. You won't get a second.

Going Cold Turkey Ain't Easy

It's one thing to say we should get off of fossil fuels. It's another thing entirely to do it. Mind you, I think we should for any of three or four perfectly good reasons. The brown haze that hangs over Dallas in the morning is one. Impoverishing chumps like Chavez and the al-Saud gang is another. Saving the oil that's left for industrial feed-stock is still another. But we cannot delude ourselves. This is a simply gargantuan undertaking, and it won't happen overnight.

Throughout this post, I'll be referring back to this diagram, which is a detailed breakdown of energy consumption in the United States from 2002:



It's an eyeful, all right. But if you're patient, you can tease some really useful information out of this picture.

First: There's a fairly neat split between the usage of coal, and the usage of oil. When you're talking about coal, you're talking electrical power generation for the most part. And when you're talking about oil, you're talking about transportation for the most part. There's some crossover, but not much. Natural gas is more complicated, being split not quite evenly over electrical, residential, and industrial uses.

Second: Most of the wasted power comes from power losses in electrical distribution, followed closely by energy lost in the transportation sector. Energy wastage in the residential and industrial sectors are small potatoes by comparison.

Now here's the main thing. Let's say that our plan is to eliminate fossil fuels entirely from our energy picture. We'll still use some of them in a nonfuel capacity, as feed stock for making plastics, medicines, and other useful things. But we won't set a match to them and burn them for energy. What this means is that for the residential/commercial sector, the industrial sector, and the transportation sector, we have to supplant the inflow of fossil fuel energy with an equivalent amount of electrical energy.

By the numbers, we delivered 11.9 quads of usable energy to consumers in 2002. The residential/commercial sector consumed 10.7 quads from non-renewable sources. The industrial sector consumed 13.86 quads from non-renewable sources. And the transportation sector consumed 26.5 quads from non-renewable sources. Adding all that up, we will need to deliver 62.96 quads of usable electricity to take up the slack. Note that this is after transmission losses. This means that we have to generate 202.1(!) quads of energy ... all without using fossil fuels. That's 5.29 times more energy than we actually did generate that year. Or more to the point, that's 17.42 times more energy than we realized from non-fossil sources.

That, friends, is a staggering shortfall.

The good news is that this isn't a political problem, or a social problem, but a technical problem. And technical problems almost always have answers. Difficult sometimes, and expensive, but still doable if we want to undertake it. The question is: how?

The obvious first place to look is to see about ways to reduce the amount of "lost" energy. And from the diagram, while there are certainly economies to be found in the residential and industrial sectors, there's not enough to be found to make a huge dent. That's not to say we shouldn't try. But the far larger losses in the electrical and transportation sectors cry out for first attention. Effort spent here will pay far greater dividends.

First, transportation. This, we can actually do something about. Firstly, internal combustion engines are inherently inefficient. This is immediately obvious from the thermal efficiency equation. In your ideal heat engine, you suck energy out of a high-temperature source (Th) and reject it to a low-temperature sink (Tc). You extract work from the flow of energy from source to sink. The maximum efficiency N(th) can be found from:

N(th) = 1 - Tc/Th

where the temperatures are measured in absolute units, either Kelvin or degrees Rankine will do. Internal combustion engines rarely score higher than 0.2 or so. That means only 20% of the energy extracted from the source actually does useful work. The rest is wasted. Electric motors are typically much more efficient, and what's more, we will be using more thermally efficient processes to generate the power in the first place. (Hint: nuclear reactors and fusion reactors have astoundingly high values for Th...) So, at a stroke, by going electric we reduce the energy wasted in the transportation sector. By how much, I don't know for sure. I suspect it's by a fairly substantial amount, though. The other thing to keep in mind about cars is that they spend a lot of their energy simply shoving the air aside. Consider the Aptera for a moment. New, streamlined electric cars designed to slide cleanly through the air instead of batting it aside by brute force don't need to expend as much energy going from place to place. That is quite likely the look of the future.

Second, electrical distribution. This is a more intractable problem. We're pretty much guaranteed to eat a certain amount of loss to Joule heating, which scales as the square of the current I times the resistance R of the power line. This is why power line voltage is so high: that reduces the current, and therefore the power loss. We still lose a lot in transmission. The way around this is a lot more speculative. If we can ever fabricate a superconductor in quantity that will work at ambient temperatures approaching 200 degrees Fahrenheit, this problem goes away. That's a long way off, if indeed we ever get there. My mind keeps coming back to this one, though, because if we pull that off we triple our deliverable energy at a stroke. High cost, but a very high payoff if it works. [Addendum: There's also been some new work on conductive carbon nanotubes, which have a very low resistance compared to conventional wiring, even at ambient temperatures. There's a fair bit of work to be done to make it practical, but that's probably going to happen long before 200-deg-F superconductors come along. An 80% reduction in resistance is certainly nothing to sneeze at.]

For the time being, though, we need to get to work on generating power input. I will take these concepts more or less in order of when I expect them to become major players.

(1) Nuclear power. For all its problems, this is the one we can get started on right now. It already supplies more of our electrical power than natural gas does. It can generate large quantities of base-load power as soon as the plants come on-line. While it entails a degree of risk, those risks can be mitigated. For example, we can task the Navy with producing a common reactor design to use going forward. This design will be sufficiently robust that it can handle any set of reasonable conditions without containment failure. And before you start worrying about terrorists flying planes into them, check this out. Those walls are pretty sturdy. The real bottleneck, though, will be finding enough qualified personnel to run the plants. A massive training program will have to go hand-in-hand with construction. But this option does not require us to do anything we don't already know how to do.

(2) Distributed solar power. I keep reading from several sources about how there's a coming breakthrough in tough, flexible solar panels. Furthermore, they'll be much cheaper. The real breakthrough will be when they're tough enough, flexible enough, and cheap enough to be used routinely as a roofing material. Such things are available now, but they're expensive. As the price comes down, this option will become more popular. There comes a price point when it becomes stupid not to generate your own power. I don't know where that point is, or when it will come, but I'm reasonably confident it's no more than ten years down the road.

(3) Wind farms. Wind power is highly regional, and won't make sense for everyone. But if you get a lot of wind, why not use it? The real question here is reliability: is the source steady enough to rely upon hour-by-hour, day in, day out? In the long run I expect this to be like hydro-power: the regions that have it will use it, and others won't.

(4) Space-Based Solar Power. Much has been written about this elsewhere, and I won't repeat that here. The long pole in this tent is cheap and reliable access to space, which we don't have yet. This is doable if we really want it. For less than we've poured into Iraq, or into the banks, we could probably have built Unit #1, put it in operation, and be well into building Unit #2.

(5) Mr. Fusion! This is the transformational game-changer. Solar power, after all, is fusion power by proxy, given that the Sun is a naturally-occurring gravitational confinement fusion reactor. It's also damn tricky. The joke has been that fusion is the power of the future, and always will be. But there are advances underway on all fronts. The National Ignition Facility just came online. And there's Robert Bussard's outfit, working on the Polywell experiment. Not to mention ITER over in Europe, or the Z-Machine. Magnetic confinement, inertial confinement, inertial electrostatic confinement ... one of them's bound to work, probably more than one. I wouldn't be surprised that it depends on scale. Some methods will lend themselves more naturally to different power scales. This is the holy grail of energy, though, because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the entire Universe, and therefore something we're very unlikely to be short of anytime real soon. There's also less radioactivity to mess with. If fusion tech was available, no one in their right mind would build a fission power plant. (Which is why the Navy is funding the Polywell effort, I expect...)

In summary, getting off of fossil fuels is going to take us a long time, and is going to cost an appreciable amount in R&D. It won't happen quickly. But, hard as it may be, there is no fundamental reason why we can't do it.

We simply have to make the deliberate decision to start moving in that direction.

You're Getting Warmer (?)

This quote from Michael Steele came to my attention by way of Andrew Sullivan:

"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right?"

OK ... Steele would do well to stay away from microphones for a while, but he's got a tiny, minuscule point buried in there. But it's probably not the one he thinks it is. There's come chicanery going on in the climate change debate, but that doesn't really change the fundamental conclusions.

Here's the graph that started it all:



This graph, based on data analyzed by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, appeared in the 2001 IPCC report. What this data set appears to indicate is a dramatic increase in temperatures during the 20th Century, a change that was entirely imputed to human causes.

I have had a problem taking this interpretation of the data seriously. The reason for that is that, for a long time, Mann refused to divulge the analytical techniques he used to derive the graph in the first place. As this Wikipedia page shows, he eventually came clean on how he got the data, but still ... in science, repeatability is key. As I said earlier, if you can't describe your procedure well enough for another researcher to duplicate it, you probably don't understand what's going on as well as you think you do, and if you won't, you've probably got something to hide. Now, it's possible (even likely) that Mann had nothing to hide. I tend to assume that most professional scientists have a sufficiency of professional integrity. But for a while there, he acted like someone who was hiding something. And you can't really trust diddled data.

But even discounting that graph, this one was the clincher for me:



This isn't junk processed through some super-secret filter. This is pure hard-core, read-it-and-weep data. The one incontrovertible, undeniable fact revealed by the ice core data is that current CO2 concentrations are at simply absurd levels.

Now, knowing that, what can we reasonably expect? What kind of warming will this result in?

The thing you must realize straight away is that the climate is a Sun-powered machine. Virtually all of the energy within the world's weather systems comes from the Sun. Further, daytime high temperatures are governed by solar heating of the surface, while night-time low temperatures are governed by how much heat can escape into space overnight. Atmospheric composition, then, will have its major effect not on daytime highs, but on overnight lows.

Now, let's look at the heat retention capacity of various gases within the atmosphere. From the Wikipedia article on the greenhouse effect, we see:

* water vapor, which contributes 36–70%
* carbon dioxide, which contributes 9–26%
* methane, which contributes 4–9%
* ozone, which contributes 3–7%

In a damp climate, water vapor dominates. In such climates, water vapor contributes 70% of the greenhouse effect, with CO2 only contributing about 9%. In dry climates, it's a more even split, 36% versus 26%. So, the most prominent effect is going to be in cold, dry climates, such as we see around the North Pole, and in Antarctica. The least prominent effects are going to be in warm, humid climates. I wouldn't expect a huge swing in temperature there due to atmospheric composition.

Now, how does this square with what we see happening? The reduction in Arctic sea ice seems to be bearing this out. There has also been a reduction in Antarctic sea ice. Both cases point to an elevation of low temperatures to the point that the sea ice has begun to melt.

Melting sea ice won't change the overall ocean levels. You can try this for yourself with a plastic cup, some water, an ice cube, and a Sharpie. Put some water in the cup, drop in an ice cube, and mark the water level. When you come back after the ice cube has melted, the level will not have changed. This is because ice contracts as it melts. Glacial ice is another matter entirely, as is Antarctic pack ice, since that melt-off adds new water into the system.

In any case, we're currently running an open-ended experiment on elevated CO2 levels, which is probably unwise. We don't really know with iron-clad certainty what the effects are going to be, but the effects probably aren't going to be especially pleasant. Sooner or later, we're going to have to get a grip on this problem. Besides reducing emissions now, we probably ought to be looking at ways we can reduce the amount of CO2 that's already in the atmosphere. One idea I've heard about is promotion of algae growth in the oceans ... which may be a good idea, up to a point. Done excessively, it can deplete the ocean of oxygen, which isn't very helpful, either.

To make a long story short, I haven't always trusted global warming proponents, but I haven't complained much because we already have a sufficiency of good reasons to get off of fossil fuels posthaste. They fill our air with crud, they enrich people who hate us, and aren't those two reasons good enough by themselves?

You Got Questions? They Got Answers...

This new service, coming in May 2009, is going to be so great...

Google works pretty well for most things. It's a decent research tool. But sometimes, that's not what you really need. Sometimes, you just need the answer to a (possibly) obscure question. You don't care to sift through various web pages for it, you just need to know. Like, say, "What was the world's population in 1950?" Or, "How long is Manhattan Island?"

When it goes live, you'll be able to type the question directly into WA's box, and out pops the answer.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm really stoked about this one. It's easily the best thing to come down the pipe since, well, Google.