Is your claim that the airframes are reaching their service life and need to be replaced by new builds, or are you claiming that an aircraft design undergoes some sort of senility independent of remaning service life?

Please explain why, for example, a new build F-15 or F-18, with 21st century enhancements, would be in adequate to do its job today if that is your argument.

OK - I'll bite. Why not?

Is there a major war scheduled we don't want to be late for?

Is there an enemy superpower that will outstrip us militarily in a meaningful way if we don't get this plane fielded ASAP?

It was already argued that we could buy other NATO aircraft that are in production. This option is "viable" even if the U.S. Senators prefer to keep the pork at home.

And the system has been more-or-less broken for a very long time. In the mid 1980's I got back from a SSBN patrol to find waiting for me in the mail a notice from Selective Service warning me that having failed to register I was ineligible for all manner of Federal programs. (I hadn't registered because I enlisted in the Navy shortly after my 17th birthday.) Of course being on active duty or a veterans trumps Selective Service registration for eligibility, and it took a letter from my command along with a copy of my (IIRC) Page 2 to finally get them to go away.

For an organization that basically has one job, they aren't very good at it. (Even by the usual low standards applicable to government organizations.)

He said ice sheet. So we're supposed to ignore what he actually said and assume he meant something completely different? Um, no.

"I am not well read in this department" - wait a minute, you can give exact cites for research papers on sea ice, but don't even have a *general* conception of what percentage of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining versus what is losing? Something tells me you're just grabbing cites you've never even read from denier websites.

Let me help you out with ice sheet. Pretty much all of the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining, while pretty much the only area losing is the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding areas in West Antarctica. Now, they're losing *mass* a lot faster per unit area than the east is gaining mass, but in terms of area, the overwhelming majority of Antarctica is gaining ice. Because it almost never gets above freezing there, even in a warming world.

The 2010 paper was evaluating the failed CMIP5 predictions

If you'd actually read the paper, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that they themselves did the CMIP5 runs, it's not CMIP5 runs that had been done earlier. Do you even have a clue what CMIP5 stands for? Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. As in, "there were four freaking phases that came before this one". CMIP5 is comprised of all of the latest models from all over the world. They didn't even start planning CMIP5 unitl September 2008. Your notion that this is some sort of review of old climate predictions just shows how terrible your understanding is of what you're talking about and how you don't actually read the papers that you cite, that you're just simply grabbing them from whatever denialist trash websites you read.

First, that's a paper from 2010. How was a paper from 2010 supposed to be "predicting" anything about what scientists in the past thought?

Secondly, and more importantly, I had been responding to Archangel Michael, who was talking about the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet, not Antarctic sea ice. So your link about pack ice is totally irrelevant.

But hey, let's switch topics totally and talk about sea ice, since you seem to want to. Here's how the IPCC sums up all papers on the modelling of antarctic sea ice, including this one:

Whereas sea ice extent in the Arctic has decreased, sea ice extent in the Antarctic has very likely increased. Sea ice extent across the Southern Hemisphere over the year as a whole increased by 1.3– 1.67% per decade from 1979–2012 with the largest increase in the Ross Sea during the autumn, while sea ice extent decreased in the Amundsen-Bellingshausen Sea. The observed upward trend in Antarctic sea ice extent is found to be inconsistent with internal variability based on the residuals from a linear trend fitted to the observations, though this approach could underestimate multi-decadal variability. The CMIP5 simulations on average simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice extent , though Turner et al. (2013) find that approximately 10% of CMIP5 simulations exhibit an increasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent larger than observed over the 1979-2005 period. However, Antarctic sea ice extent variability appears on average to be too large in the CMIP5 models . Overall, the shortness of the observed record and differences in simulated and observed variability preclude an assessment of whether or not the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent is inconsistent with internal variability. Based on Figure 10.16b and (Meehl et al., 2007b), the trend of Antarctic sea ice loss in simulations due to changes in forcing is weak (relative to the Arctic) and the internal variability is high, and thus the time necessary for detection is longer than in the Arctic.

Weak trend, short observed record, and high internal variability in the simulations. Which shouldn't be surprising, sea ice is a lot harder to model than ice sheet thickness, which really only has three main parameters - snowfall, melt/sublimation, and outflow, and the short observed record is due to how few people historically have navigated antarctic waters vs. arctic.

But again, to reiterate the primary point: the conversation you jumped into was about ice sheet thickness, not sea ice.

I'm sorry, I just read through that paper, and nowhere in it does it say that a decline in Antarctic ice is a forecast of AGW. That's one of the worst examples of "proof by ghost reference" I've ever seen. Not to mention that the paper is mainly focused on the Antarctic Peninsula, the one place that actually gets melt on more than super-rare occasions and juts into a different climate zone.

You need people's emails when you're digging for something (anything really) you can use to discredit someone personally (apart from any scientific merit). Besides which, some of those emails are personal.

The Virginia court ruled that filing a lawsuit just to get those emails constitutes harassment, which in turn is a frivolous use of the court's time. A sensible conclusion in my opinion.

And yes, there do seem to be consequences for filing frivolous lawsuits.

Go right ahead and point me to where a decline in Antarctic ice was a forecast of AGW.

You do know that - below freezing - there's an inverse correlation between temperature and snowfall, don't you? And I really hope you know that it's very rare that temperatures rise above freezing in the vast majority of Antarctica, whether you add a couple degrees to the temperature or not, right? Or did you not know / ever consider that?

Just because you didn't realize something that should have been really bloody obvious to you doesn't mean it was a scientific prediction by your straw-man scientists.

AEI, for one. $10k for any paper that attacks the IPCC reports. There's other public offers out there, too. And I'm sure they're outnumbered 100 times over by not-so-public ones.

Corr: That should read "doesn't lose much IR transmission as a consequence of neutron bombardment like happens in higher frequency bands" - accidentally lost that middle part. Fused silica and fused quartz (especially the latter, but also the former) blacken under neutron exposure, losing transparency; it's even done intentionally to make jewelry. But the papers I ran into when researching the topic showed that this effect isn't very pronounced in the IR band.

Agreed. But that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to embark on big projects. Rather than a "Hey, we're going to walk somewhere new" sort of thing, I'd like to see work on one of any number of space-related megaprojects - for example, a launch loop and/or fallout-free nuclear rockets**. Something that could actually lower the cost of access to space to the point that it doesn't take a vast effort to go walk on another celestial body.

** - There's so many competing designs it's hard to know where to start. My personal concept I've mulled over is a variant of the nuclear lightbulb concept, but instead of the fused-silica bulb containig a gas or plasma core reactor which requires some unknown containment method, the concept calls for a dusty fission core (akin to a dusty fission fragment rocket), which can be electrostatically contained. The energy would be released in the infrared, not visible or ultraviolet (as in a conventional lightbulb concept), but that's fine - fused silica is also transparent to infrared, and moreover doesn't lose much IR transmission as like happens in higher frequency bands; the lower radiation rate of infrared would be compensated for by the huge surface area of the dust radiating it. The simultaneous huge amounts of electric output (from fission fragment deceleration in a grid) could be used in part to run a microwave beam, creating a plasma sheath in ducted atmospheric air surrounding the bulb (airbreathing mode) or injected gas surrounding it (rocket mode) to aid in IR absorption and keep as much of the heat away from the (reflective) walls as possible. A VASIMR-ish mode is possible if you use low gas injection rates and a magnetic nozzle. In space, gas injection could be terminated altogether and the core could be opened up to run in dusty fission fragment mode and get Isp figures in the lower hundreds of thousands. To make up for the problems with using the standard dusty fission fragment rocket proposal's (heavy) moderator in such a high power environment, my thoughts were to have it operate as a subcritical reactor with a spallation neutron source as the driver - after all, there's no shortage of electricity to run an accelerator if you're decelerating a good chunk of the fragments; you don't even have to deal with Carnot losses.

You tell 'em, Ayn! You'll be rich enough to afford your own space program any day now - or at least you would be, if it wasn't for all those Liberal Looters derailing you to get themselves a free ride!

"Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies." -- Scott Westerfeld