Almost two decades ago, I was a rocket scientist. Not really, but I had a good handle on the space debris problem.
I was asked to participate in a congressionally directed NASA led study on orbital debris. I worked on the staff of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, derisively called "Star Wars" at the time.
The Democrats in Congress and NASA wanted to kill SDI. If you can't kill a project, you study it to death, and you stack the studies and the computer models.
The ploy being used was a claim that SDI would create too much orbital debris. NASA's contractor created a computer model for debris collisions that was obviously ridiculous. When two pieces of debris collided and generated some number of new pieces of debris, each of the new pieces had as much mass as the two originals.
The beauty of this model was that NASA could claim that by 2050 it would be impossible to operate satellites in space.
NASA wanted the study to say that trackable space debris would grow at a rate of 8% compounded annually. By being very selective in choosing their data points, they found a period in history where space debris had grown at their desired geometric rate.
My argument, which wasn't accepted, was that debris growth over the 30 years man had been putting objects in space was linear. The report, as written, projected a 4% growth. Because my presence as the SDIO representative added credibility, my name was placed in the back of the bound study as a contributor.
Fast forward to about three months ago. Astronomy magazine had a scare story about orbital debris. They were using the same charts that had been created 20 years ago. While the story hadn't changed, the charts had been updated.
Until immediately before the Chinese did their really stupid ASAT test, the growth of space debris was linear, not geometric. The slope of the line from 1960 to 1989 was almost identical to the slope of the line from 1960 to 2008.
I tell this story not to embarrass Don Kessler and the folks at NASA at the time, though they ought to be embarrassed. Rather I tell it to illustrate that the people whose names get attached to a study don't all support the conclusions. Some may object vigorously.
Would it surprise anyone to discover that IPCC was doing the same thing? An Australian site has done great work to show that an IPCC claim that 2500 scientists had reviewed a 1000 page report is, in their words, a hoax:
The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less than a quarter of the whole, a little more than 600 in total. The other 1,900 reviewers assessed the other working group reports. They had nothing to say about the causes of climate change or its future trajectory. Still, 600 “scientific expert reviewers” sounds pretty impressive. After all, they submitted their comments to the IPCC editors who assure us that “all substantive government and expert review comments received appropriate consideration”. And since these experts reviewers are all listed in Annex III of the report, they must have endorsed it, right?
By doing a careful analysis, they get the number of reviewers of the summary chapter without a vested interest down to seven:
Two of these seven were contacted by NRSP for the purposes of this article - Dr Vincent Gray of New Zealand and Dr Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Canada. Concerning the “Greenhouse gas forcing …” statement above, Professor McKitrick explained “A categorical summary statement like this is not supported by the evidence in the IPCC WG I report. Evidence shown in the report suggests that other factors play a major role in climate change, and the specific effects expected from greenhouse gases have not been observed.”
Dr Gray labeled the WG I statement as “Typical IPCC doubletalk” asserting “The text of the IPCC report shows that this is decided by a guess from persons with a conflict of interest, not from a tested model”.
Beware of these kinds of studies. They are often much more politics than science. So much for the consensus claim.
Comments