US Navy Below 250 Warships?

The only thing Navy experts agree upon is our 100% track record of not knowing what the next conflict is going to look like or be fought with.  It's now clear that this and subsequent administrations will continue reducing the Navy's 283 ship fleet while adding three flawed Littoral Combat ships, two insanely expensive Virginia class submarines and a few capable, yet untested, Zumwalt class Destroyers.

In this world of uncertainty it makes sense to once again consider the flexibility and force multiplier of retrofitting fourteen prematurely retired Los Angeles attack submarines and possibly another four underused Ohio class SSBN's (during refueling) with Tomahawk missiles.  If the reduction of strategic missile patrols, 64 in 1999 to 28 in 2012, continues another four Ohio class SSBN's could be converting into missile barges, each capable of delivering 154 surface to surface missiles or roughly the same number as an entire battle group.

At a cost of $2.7 billion, I fear future leaders will not be willing to put the Virginia class submarines in harms way.  Also the only current threat to U.S. submarines are the inherently quiet (batteries don't make noise) modern diesel electric submarines which have been purchased by China and hostile nations for as little as $200 million.

Converted submarines give battle commanders needed stealth, submerged protection, unmatched fire power and the ability to covertly insert Special Forces.  The SSGN's have proven themselves in combat and I would argue having fourteen converted Los Angeles class SSGN's along with an extra four Ohio class SSGN's for the price of two insanely expensive Virginia class SSN's and three flawed Littoral Combat ships is more than a bargain.  Lastly, having more "boats" will continue to develop the #1 weapon in the Navy's arsenal... The men and women who serve.

PS  I was a surface warfare officer for eight years.  I've never served on a submarine but conducted exercises and war games with them and frankly it was never a fair fight which is why, if the Navy continues to shrink, we need more subs.

Jim Hansen - Not the Muppet Guy

Mr. Jim Hansen attended my dad's alma mater, the University of Iowa, and graduated with a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics in 1963. He earned a M.S. in Astronomy in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Physics in 1967.  He was a graduate trainee with NASA and headed NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York City, from 1981 to retirement in 2013.

After graduate school, Hansen continued his work with radiative transfer models, attempting to understand the Venusian atmosphere. Later he applied and refined these models to understand the Earth's atmosphere, in particular, the effects that aerosols and trace gases have on Earth's climate. Hansen's development and use of global climate models has contributed to the further understanding of the Earth's climate and in no doubt our current understanding of global warming.

While working with NASA he was key in formulating the model that explains why Venus is the way it is - a run away green house planet with an atmosphere of 96.5% CO2.  His work on Venus became the template for modeling the Earth's atmosphere, with CO2 as one of the driving mechanisms to global warming.

James Hansen is the father of our understanding of CO2 and how it interacts and serves as a green house gas.

The near freezing of the Great Lakes in 2014 or the 17 years upper atmosphere warming pause notwithstanding, over the last 100 years the Earth has warmed and sea levels have risen.  In part, thanks to James Hansen, nearly all scientists believe man's releasing of sequestered C02, via the burning of fossil fuels, is responsible for this trend.

Two things:

#1  The Earth is NOT Venus!

#2  Does anyone honestly believe that a 1 in 10,000 increase in any atmospheric gas has cause the warming we have seen over the last 100 years?

The model James Hansen developed was for Venus with a 96.5% CO2 atmosphere, not Earth with .039680% CO2 atmosphere.

If you can envision a parcel of air being equal to $10,000, man's total CO2 contribution equals $1 dollar.  That's right, before man, CO2 was three and now with all human activity to date, it has risen to four.  Do you really think a $1 increase in a $10,000 budget is having a measurable impact?

There is little doubt this 33% increase is man made.  The latest IPPC report projects that in the next 100 years CO2 concentrations will double and change the world as we know it.  Meaning we are to believe  scientists can predict 100 years into the future and that CO2 at 8 out of 10,000 beckons a global melt down.  Besides spending trillions to "solve" this, the best thing the world can do is stop using coal (the worst of the worst) to produce electricity.  Hogwash!

N  -  78.084%
O  -  20.946%
Ar  -    .9340%
CO2 - .039680%  as of 2014
CO2 - .080000% as of 2114 (IPPC's 4th Report)

Some how common sense doesn't fit into the equation.  Politicians, scientist, the media, etc... are collectively telling us a $1 increase in the atmospheric budget of $10,000 has caused our recent droughts, warming, sea level rise and super storms.  Furthermore, it's only going to get worse.  This is accepted as settled science only because the vast majority of the worlds population is scientifically uneducated.  Common sense can't be applied because the basic foundation in science is nonexistent among the population.  Scientists who embrace the 33% CO2 increase, ignore the atmospheric budget and use computer models based on Venus to predict the future for 100 years flummox me.

Take a breath and think... 100 years is a long time.  The only thing that doesn't change is change and new discoveries we can't even imagine will occur.  I have a warm feeling that man made climate change isn't going to be what we are talking about in 20 years, let alone the year 2114.  I recommend that we focus on helping developing nations, specifically China, India, Pakistan and most African countries clean up their air, water and land as I'm certain the planet can't handle another 100 years of their collective environmental damage.

There are currently 2,300 coal powered electrical stations in the world with 1200 more currently in the planning stage, of which 75% will be built in China and India.  Let's spend money today helping developing countries build modern coal fired plants with the latest in scrubbing technology while funding basic research in new, sustainable, clean energy technologies.

A lot can happen in 100 years!

1913  The discover of the atom's structure
1920  First radio broadcast
1924  Edwin Hubble discovers the first new galaxy besides our own
1927  Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe
1928  Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
1929  Edwin Hubble puts forward the theory of the expanding universe
1931  Cyclotron invented to study accelerated particles
1932  James Chadwick describes the nucleus of the atom
1942  Enrico Fermi demonstrates the first controlled nuclear reaction
1945  The first electronic computer
1947  William Shockley invents the transistor
1953  The double helix structure of DNA discovered
1957  The Soviet Union launches the Sputnik satellite
1960  Stephen Hawking publishes Grand Unified Theory
1964  Murray Gell-Man predicts the existence of quarks
1969  Man walks on the moon
1975  US university campuses linked by computer network
1971  Intel makes the first commercial computer microprocessor
1990  The World Wide Web is born
1990  Hubble space telescope launched
1996  Dolly the sheep cloned
1997  Scientists accurately predict El Niño
2003  Completion of the Human Genome Project
2004  Facebook founded mainstreaming social media
2005  Predictions of Peak Oil adjusted... again
2010  The Large Hadron Collider's first high power collisions
2012  Physicists statistically demonstrated the Higgs boson
2013  Private companies resupply the International Space Station
2014  United States energy self-sufficient... (not yet but close)