Recently after some conversations with a former chemical engineer who provided me with some insight, I’ve come to the conclusion that many engineers have difficulty with many of the premises of AGW theory because in their “this has to work or people die” world of exacting standards, the AGW argument doesn’t hold up well by their standards of performance.
Today I was surprised to learn that one of the foremost and world famous engineers on the planet, Burt Rutan, has become an active climate skeptic. You may be familiar with some of Rutan’s work through his company, Scaled Composites:
Thanks to WUWT reader Dale Knutsen, I was provided a PowerPoint file recently by email presented by Mr. Rutan at the Oshkosh fly-in convention on July 29th, 2009 and again on August 1st, 2009. It has also now been posted online by an associate of Mr. Rutan’s.
There were a number of familiar things in the PowerPoint, including data plots from one of the USHCN stations I personally surveyed and highlighted, Santa Rosa, NM. Rutan had an interest in it because of the GISS adjustment to the data. For him, the whole argument is about the data. He says about his presentation in slide #3:
Not a Climatologist’s study; more from the view of a flight test guy who has spent a lifetime in data analysis/interpretation.
In the notes of his PowerPoint on slide #3, Rutan tells us why he thinks this way(emphasis mine):
My study is NOT as a climatologist, but from a completely different prospective in which I am an expert.
Complex data from disparate sources can be processed and presented in very different ways, and to “prove” many different theories.
For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion – “if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who’s merits are dependant on complex experimental data, he is likely lying”. That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.
Now since I’m sure people like foaming Joe Romm will immediately come out to label Mr. Rutan as a denier/delayer/generally bad person, one must be careful to note that Mr. Rutan is not your average denier/delayer. He’s “green”. Oh horrors, a “green denier”! Where have we seen that before?
From his PowerPoint, here’s his house, note the energy efficient earth walled design.
In his PowerPoint notes he says about his green interests:
My house was Nov 89 Pop Science Cover story; “World’s Most Efficient House”. Its big advantage is in the desert summer. It is all-electric and it uses more energy in the relatively mild winters than in the harsh summers – just the opposite of my neighbors.
The property has provisions for converting to self-sustaining (house and plug-in hybrid car) via adding wind generator and solar panels when it becomes cost effective to do so.
Testing Solar Water Heat in the 70s at RAF; the Rutan Aircraft Factory was converted to solar-heated water in the 70s, when others were only focused on gasoline costs.
My all electric EV-1 was best car I ever owned. Primary car for 7 years, all-electric with an 85 mile range. I was very sad (just like the guy shown) when the leased cars were recalled and crushed by General Motors. I will buy a real hybrid when one becomes available (plug-in with elect-range>60 miles). The Prius “hybrid” is not a hybrid, since it is fueled only by gasoline. A Plug-in Hybrid can be fueled with both gas and electricity. You might even see a ‘plug-in hybrid airplane’ in my future.
Interest is technology, not tree-hugging
Well that right there is reason enough to put all sorts or nasty labels on the man. Welcome to the club Burt, we are proud to have you!
Rutan’s closing observations slide is interesting:
And, in his notes he makes this mention:
Is the debate over? – The loudest Alarmist says the debate is over. However, “It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry”.
I think by the “loudest alarmist” he means Al Gore.
And his final slide:
Rutan’s PowerPoint file is posted at:
http://rps3.com/Pages/Burt_Rutan_on_Climate_Change.htm
For those that don’t have PowerPoint, I’ve converted it to a PDF file for easy and immediate reading online which you can download here.
I wonder if in conversations with his biggest client, Virgin’s Richard Branson, he ever mentions Gore and their joint project? I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
RW, linear trend lines are the ultimate smoothing. If you don’t like Joe’s use of smoothing, why do you insist on using it by linking to linear trended graphs? Hell, I could get my grandmother’s sleep cycle over the years to correlate with temps if I trended it with a straight line.
Rob Ryan (07:58:13) :
That is, if it’s predicted by known physical principles (note the distinction from “computer models”) that a doubling of CO2 will result in a 2.5 K increase in global mean temperature with a standard deviation of 2.5 K, then a 5 K increase is equally likely as no increase. Note that no application of known physical principles has led to a prediction of 0 K.
The strawman used by the posters here is “computer models.” Computer models are nothing more than the application of known physical principles to initial conditions with a machine that can do a lot of calculations in a hurry.
Guide me to the experiment that determined the effect of increasing CO2 on temperature in an open environment subject to circulation and convection in the presence of other IR absorbing molecules at atsmospheric concentrations. Then produce empirical data illustrating a positive feedback to that effect. Until then, your “known physical properties” are not.
RW (09:01:07) :
“I get nothing but pleasure from the open vitriol being directed at me, and Anthony’s encouragement of it. If all you can do is call me names, rather than talk science, do you think it makes me look bad, or do you think it makes you look bad?”
Vitriol? Names? You call this vitriol? Here’s an experiment for you. Pretend to be a ‘skeptic’ and try posting on RC.
“”” RW (09:01:07) :
“We then have a cooling from 1950 to 1979 coinciding with a serious CO2 increase. This was followed by the 1979 – 1998 warming. Then a decreasing trend from 1998 – present. All of this occurred with CO2 on a steady rise.”
There is “no decreasing trend from 1998″ – only by ignoring statistics can you think so. The last decade has in fact been the warmest in the instrumental record.
Lucy Skywalker: “Ref 1 stopped at 2000 – missing the recent cooling that no model predicted”
Replace ‘missing the recent cooling that no model predicted” with “missing the warmest decade on record” and your statement becomes accurate. How many sets of climate model outputs have you ever looked at, by the way? “””
What is it RW, that you do not seem to understand about the concept of a “maximum” (or a minimum) in a function.
It seems self evident (at least to me) that when a function has a “maximum”, that the values lying on either side of that maximum will be less than the maximum; and likewise when the function has a “minimum” then values of the function lying on either side of that minimum will be higher than the minimum.
So when your refer to the recent decade (anomalies) as the highest decade in the instrumental record; you are merely stating the obvious, when the function clearly reached a maximum during that decade, and values have been declining since then.
And as for the “warmest decade on record”; well that may be true for the period since about 1979/80 when the Argo buoys, and polar orbit satellites were depployed; but we know from Christy et al, that all of the global temperature information before that time is corrupted and in such a way as to be unrecoverable.
So prior to the 1980s, we have only proxy guesstimates as to what global temperatures might actually have been.
But just remember, when you have a maximum; expect to find high values clustered around that maximum, and vice versa for a minimum.
And if you believe that the virtually monotonic (sans annual cycle) CO2 record as represented by the Mauna Loa data; is in any way correlated to the up and down temperature record over the 20th, and early 21st century; at least that obtainable from believable data; then you would believe that almost any two curves are correlated.
And in any case correlation does not prove causation; and I don’t see any physical reason why one would expect to get any sort of surface warming from the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, that is anywhere near the amount of warming that appears to be caused by water vapor; nor do I see any mechanism by which CO2 effects can overcome the negative feedback cooling caused by clouds blocking sunlight from reaching the ground.
RW (09:01:07) :
Open vitriol?
I would characterize what I see on this thread more as mild amusement, and I see a genuine attempt to correct your numerous misconceptions… but open vitriol? Hardly.
But then, people like you seem to thrive on attention, even if it has to be fabricated.
Personally, I’ve always been amused by people who cry “science”, then proceed to almost completely ignore all principles of “Science” in order to justify a belief.
bluegrue: if you are still reading this thread, what part of the process control fundamentals, as that relates to global temperature, do you want to discuss?
RW (09:01:07) :
“RW: If you follow the temperature trend from 1900 to present and match CO2 with temperature you get a different picture.”
No, you don’t. You see the same strong correlation.
You get no correlation, period!
See:
http://leif.org/research/CETandCO2.pdf
Thank you for your reply. I’m afraid that I don’t equate “postdicting” with successful prediction. The point is to know whether the models are correct or if they contain systemic problems and errors. One basic criticism is that the climate is too chaotic to predict. The only way to show that the climate can be predicted is to predict it successfully. Hindcasts don’t count, especially on a computer where there are many variables and tunings available. Now the ususal objection I hear is that if we waited until we could know if a prediction 50 years out would turn out to be correct, then we would be caught out as it would be too late. Well, that is true, but it doesn’t get you out of the original problem, which is that the future is often unpredicable. Hindcasts are worthless, a simple fact that we all know to be true and that we store in common sense expressions like, “hindsight is 20/20”. Google hindsight and the first hit is Wikipedias entry on Hindsight Bias, the tendency to believe you could have predicted that thing that just happened.
Models are based on physical principles, but they add a great deal more also. And we’re not even sure that the physical principles are themselves properly understood, clouds being the big obvious problem. I simply don’t understand how the IPCC can on the one hand say that clouds are one of the greatest uncertainties, whilst projecting scenarios 100 years out. Only an academic could find that sort of thing interesting. The rest of us know we have to deal with the existing world as it is in present day. The objection to computer models is not a straw man—-we all know they are calculations, but then you compare them to calculations of the acceleration of a mass, as if to say, climate is that simple. Well fine, show us the simple equation for the climate. But no, it is a chaotic system and so we have to try to model every interaction in the naive faith (and it is a faith) that the system will follow some vague trajectory, whilst on the other hand claiming that the system is highly sensitive and can swing through tipping points and sudden cataclysmic surprises. You can’t have it both ways. Either the climate is simple and stable enough to predict, or it is flaky and unpredictable. Most things are complex and that’s why real engineers test things to death in the real world. And the devil is in the details. If the design says you use one type of bolt and fixing, and you build it with a slightly different configuration that looks equally strong, people do die. That’s what happens. It has happened even with simple well known stuff, like a walkway in a hotel foyer. Even with such simple structural stuff, which could be modelled on a small computer compared to the computer power required to (vaguely) model the climate, mistakes are made, even when all involved are experienced professionals. But perhaps you’d compare the engineers who would sweat the details to those whom, as you put it,
Climate models prove nothing because the climate models themselves have not been proven. If I hear of an outfit making predictions, and 2, 5, 10 years later we find all their predictions coming true, I will sit up and take notice, and I will believe their predictions, and I don’t care if their method relies on three psychics in the back room smoking strange substances. If the predictions work they work. Computers and math sounds sciency, but science does not guarantee success—-some problems are just very very hard.
Bruce Cobb
You have a perception of costs that doesn’t bear up under examination. Perhaps it’s out of date. Costs are continually reducing you know.
Geothermal isn’t really that expensive now and it lasts for a very long time. The payback is around 7 years on saved heating bills. Not too long. This company even says 3-5 years here:
http://www.econar.com/faq.htm#cost
It might be a good idea if all new homes had it by default. Such a widespread roll-out would reduce startup costs for everyone and could be stuck on the mortgage. On the other hand we could have low interest credit deals as we do for cars. Never mind cash for clunkers, how about cash for geo!
Solar panels are expensive but nevertheless Walmart is buying them now:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/01/walmart_solar_panels/
Why? Because they it will save money long term. And purchases like this will encourage others, which should create competition and hence reduce prices. Solar air heating has an even faster payback:
http://solarwall.com/en/home.php
The funny thing about those who say they can’t afford this or that is that they always seem to be able to buy a new car every year, losing thousands in depreciation just by driving it out of the showroom. Yes that’s because driving a new car is “trendy”, Just like an iphone is expensive but trendy and hence popular. So give ME a break! Our focus is wrong. We need to spend more on gadgets that reduce our home energy bills rather than spending so much on an item that just takes us from a to b but which has that all important snob value.
Again though I suspect your objections are mainly about power plants, whereas I’m talking conservation of home energy. Europe by the way has had far higher gasoline taxes than the US for a very long time now. People adapted and car companies made very efficient, small Diesel engines.
Rutan by the way is a living example that smarter thinking can allow something to be made for a heck of a lot less than people previously supposed. People like you would have talked yourself out of it beforehand.
RW – The first rule of statistics… correlation is not causality. If that were true, until Tony George took over the Indy 500, the winning speeds at the Indy 500 CAUSED the GDP to rise (and with better correlation). That is a weak argument, which is the whole point. CO2 is not the issue. If you really want a cause, join SOTS – Created at Wash U in 1982. Stamp Out the Sun because “any level of radiation is harmful” and now we know it causes global warming too. The 3rd strike is increasing the risk for skin cancer.
SOTS was our splinter group in CORPSE (a sanctioned group). My roommates started Committee On Ridiculous Posters, Slogans, Etc. All the protesters gave us material for free. SOTS came from an anti-nuke protester. COPTAR was created from a creationist – Committe On PTolemaic Astronomy Revival – because we know that the sun orbits earth too.
@ur momisugly Tim Clark
Yet another strawman. Clearly, no one has made an atmosphere in the laboratory and experimented with the variables, though one at a time each pertinent process has been identified and its behavior examined and verified.
No one has created the conditions in a star when its core has run out of fuel either, that does not mean that models (read “calculations of the effect of known physical principles” do not accurately predict the results of this eventuality.
So what you are saying is “I don’t believe that Stefan’s Law, Wien’s Law, the laws of thermodynamics, the Navier Stokes equations, Boyle’s Law, Fourier’s Law of Conduction, etc., etc. are still valid when scaled up to the size of the ocean/atmosphere geophysical system.” I doubt you actually believe these things and if you do, I don’t see the point in discussing it. But if in fact you don’t believe them, I suggest you consider whether what you are saying implies the opposite of what you believe.
The more I think about this, the more disappointed I become in Burt Rutan who is, as I previously said, someone whom I greatly admire and respect. But he gives the “it’s not warming and if it is mankind isn’t causing it and if we are then it’s beneficial” argument. If one is truly convinced it’s not warming then the argument that man isn’t causing this non-existent warming is spurious. If it’s not warming and we didn’t do it then what sense does it make to argue that it’s good? This is an entirely incoherent train of thought and for the man who created the Vari Eze and the Long Eze and Defiant, etc. it’s quite surprising.
Since 2002-03, the planet has been cooling. The global temperature is no different now than it was thirty years ago. Using a non-alarmist y-axis, we see a non-alarming temp graph.
1. There is no “heat in the pipeline.” If anyone believes there is, specifically identify it with empirical, real world measurements; not with speculation, and certainly not with always-inaccurate computer models.
2. The oceans are cooling. I have more graphs if you like.
3. The planet itself is cooling; and it is well within the parameters of natural fluctuation. Nothing out of the ordinary is occurring. Nothing.
4. The atmospheric CO2 concentration is steadily increasing [a very beneficial development for all life on Earth], while the planet is cooling. Alarmist explanations for this embarassing divergence begin to sound like they are describing crystal spheres within spheres in the firmament to explain planetary motion.
5. Global ice extent is increasing. That is the reason why alarmists only point to the Arctic. However, look at the Arctic for the past 3 years [click in the image to expand]. Look closely. It is clear that even Arctic ice is increasing.
The long-accepted theory of natural climate variability completely explains what is going on, without the necessity of adding an extraneous variable like an extremely minor trace gas; they might just as well replace CO2 with postal rates.
Natural climate variability predicts exactly what has been happening for millenia: the climate fluctuates above and below its long term trend line on a multi-decadal time scale, going back to the LIA, and to the last great Ice Age before that. There is no reason to add a extra variable like CO2. By doing so, the alarmist contingent has fallen flat on its face.
Rob Ryan,
I think that what Tim Clark is saying is simply that there is still a lot of uncertainty about the behaviour of clouds and feedbacks in a complex climate system. If you know a way to use Stefans law or Wiens law to model cloud feedbacks then a nobel prize surely awaits!
E.M.Smith, NS, Roger Sowell
I’m still reading but right now real life calls. Replies will have to wait until next week, I’m sorry for the inconvenience. See you then.
Roger Sowell (10:57:06) :
bluegrue: if you are still reading this thread, what part of the process control fundamentals, as that relates to global temperature, do you want to discuss?
You claimed “For atmospheric CO2 to be the driving force behind the gradual climate warming since 1850, the Little Ice Age, would violate fundamentals of process control.” Which fundamentals would be violated and why?
Bluegrue:
Let me answer by quoting Dr. Pierre Latour in his January 2009 Letters to Editor of Hydrocarbon Processing:
“. . .[fundamental process control parameters of] measurable, observable, controllable, stable and robust characteristics of the dynamic, multivariable nonlinear atmospheric temperature control system under design by Kyoto Protocols. . . These mathematical concepts are part of the foundation of control systems engineering recorded in AIChE Journal, ACS I&EC Journal, IEEE Transactions, ASME Transactions and annual JACC conferences since 1960. They provide exact necessary and sufficient conditions for these characteristics for all linear systems and some nonlinear systems. . . All competent refinery control system engineers and thermostat closers should assure themselves these criteria are met before embarking on designing, implementing and closing feedback control systems. Not to mention assessing the possible performance, merit and value of such systems. . . The tenuous link between CO2 greenhouse effects and the Earth’s temperature indicates humanity has no effective manipulated variable to control temperature; the steady-state gain dT/dCO2 is almost zero. If so, the system is uncontrollable. Kyoto will fail no matter what the political consensus may be. . .”
Essentially, Dr. Latour is saying that there is insufficient causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature for there to be any hope of controlling temperature by adjusting CO2.
This is quite apparent by noting that, even though CO2 increases steadily over decades, global temperature at times decreases, at times remains fairly constant, and at times increases. Just as one cannot hope to control a vehicle’s speed if pressing the throttle sometimes slows the vehicle, sometimes has no effect, and sometimes increases the speed, so too with CO2 and the earth’s global temperature.
Yeah, Branson’s marketing vids for SS2 rides are so zombified with the AGW kool-aid its embarassing.
Richard M. (17:49:28):,
Once you look at evolution you will quickly understand that NOBODY understands everything that would be needed to deal with the complexities. There are just too many overlapping fields. OTOH, many of the aspects of evolution are not difficult for any educated person to understand. Just how hard is it read the bible 🙂
I just thought I would point out the silliness of such an argument. Just because we do not know everything, does not mean we know nothing. For both climate and evolution we know more than enough to say that the theory (for evolution) or the experimental result (for climate) is correct.
@ur momisugly Vincent
That probably is what Tim Clark is trying to say but, as I mentioned earlier, uncertainty should be more alarming, not less. If about half the results of calculating outcomes based on reasonable inputs and known physical principles (I won’t say models or computer models) resulted in no change or in cooling and half resulted in no change or in warming, it would be reasonable not to reject the null hypothesis. That’s not the case. Each result is warming, the difference being in the amount. Consequently, it’s reasonable to reject the null hypothesis.
The greater the uncertainty based on clouds and other factors not fully understood, the larger the standard deviation and the farther up (and down) from the mean prediction the 49% upper and lower 2Z deviations are. Thinking as a “conservative,” this would motivate me to prudently elect to act to mitigate the threat.
Rob Ryan (18:36:11) :
Are you for real?
Damn it, we can’t even explain the
MWPMedieval Climate Anomaly!You know, that period of warming that didn’t exist but now we know it did, we still can’t explain it!
Stupid games played with the lives of real people, mainly POOR people!
The only uncertainty is whether we have any effect at all and if we don’t understand what caused previous warming, it is folly to assume it’s us causing any current warming! (See E.M.Smith at his chiefio site).
DaveE.
What ‘experimental result is that’?
The comparison between evolution and climate is specious. Evolution is a fact (evidenced by the fossil record), the mechanism explained by the theory of natural selection, well attested to by observation and experience
Climate change is a fact, but the mechanism(s) are still speculative. The politically-motivated hypothesis that carbon dioxide (or even more narrowly human-generated carbon dioxide) is the controlling factor in climate change has not been demonstrated; instead it has been falsified by observation (lack of a predicted ‘hot spot’ signature, lack of warming for the past decade, weak correlation in both recent and geological history between temperature and CO2, etc.).
/Mr Lynn
Smokey says:
I could point out the utter silliness of comparing individual monthly anomalies. But instead, I will just ask a very direct question: Why did you choose to show a graph up to only June 2009 when we now have the July 2009 anomaly (besides the fact that it would totally undermine your point)?
Joel Shore,
And I will give a very direct answer: I posted what I had. If you have a newer graph, post it and I’ll add it to my graph folder. Why do I suspect that if the tables were turned, you’d say that a one month fluctuation is statistically meaningless?
Better yet, take up Anthony’s invitation to post your own article, instead of always sniping from the sidelines. Do you good to face some real peer review, instead of the peer review petting you’re used to.
No, you don’t. You see the same strong correlation.
Not on the ups and downs. PDO/AMO correlation is stronger.
CO2 was not relatively flat until post WWII. Look at the data! From its pre-industrial 280ppm, CO2 increased to 310ppm.
That is relatively flat. It is over 385 ppm now. But the warming for 1900 – 1950 is about equal to that of 1950 – 2000.
There is “no decreasing trend from 1998″ – only by ignoring statistics can you think so. The last decade has in fact been the warmest in the instrumental record.
The two statements are unrelated. There is a decreasing trend. It is also the hottest in the instrumental record. The buildup was quick from 1979 – 1998. It was fairly flat from that point until 2007. In the last two years there has been a considerable drop. That is what the instrumental record shows.
Joe D’Aleo smoothed the data, thus artificially inflating the correlation, and the temperature data used was for the US only. Thus, the claim is meaningless.
True but not meaningless. The AMO/PDO combination affects North America more than any other land mass.
And in any case, even stipulating that CO2 is responsible for 100% of the increase (no recovery from LIA, no nothing), AND stipulating that FILNET et al. adjustments are correct, AND that station siting “doesn’t matter”, 0.7 to 0.8 C warming per century is complete chickenfeed. Only if positive feedback comes roaring into play is there a problem. And positive feedback seems to be a mistaken premise.
So prior to the 1980s, we have only proxy guesstimates as to what global temperatures might actually have been.
Actually, in the US we have measurements. The average USHCN station warmed +0.14C.
(After good old FILNET it is +0.59 . . . )