UPDATE: Graph added below per request from Joe Bastardi.
But first, let’s listen to expert on all things public, scientific, and climatic, Rosie O’Donnell
From Fox News:
Living in an era when pop culture celebrities can assert “expert” opinions on any subject, why wait for science to catch up with pesky facts?
If Rosie O’Donnell says global warming caused Joplin’s destruction, then it must be true, right? As Hollywood knows best, there’s no need for lab research, instant proclamations are good enough. It worked for claiming fire hadn’t melted steel before 9/11, so why not weather can’t cause deadly tornadoes outbreaks before this? Must be global warming then. Yeah that’s the ticket.
Alright, now having weathered that, here’s Joe Bastardi on Fox News talking the science.
UPDATE: Joe Bastardi writes in and asks this graphic to be included (which apparently never made it into the interview). Click for a very large version.
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Maybe we need to start another web page just to discuss the WTC collapse.
Steel fails in fires all the time. Truss type roofing is especially vulnerable because it is so light in weight. Lots of cases of this happening as even a small, localized fire can collapse a roof. That’s why sprinklers spray up, to protect the structure.
Charts showing the allowable loads on columns and beams have a temperature limitation noted, above which they no longer maintain their rated strength. It’s not all that high. At 550 deg. C, steel loses about half it’s tensile strength.
In the case of the WTC, the fireproofing was removed by the impact of the aircraft, which were moving at about 400 knots. For an exercise, calculate the kinetic energy of 90 tons moving at 400 knots stopping in a few feet. Without fireproofing, all that is needed for structural failure is for one beam or column to fail in the right place. Remember that several columns and the outer structural walls were compromised by the impact, placing abnormal stress on the remaining components. They didn’t need to get very hot to fail.
Some people claim that hot, molten material running out of the building is evidence of some especially hot incendiary device. Ever see a car that was allowed to burn? Rivers of molten aluminum if it had an aluminum engine block, transmission case, or other major component. Now, where could aluminum come from? What did those airplanes weigh? Melting point of Al, 660 deg. C.
Now, let’s get back to global warming and tornadoes.
Charlie Foxtrot says:
June 3, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Nah, we don’t need to discuss the WTC. The engineer won.
Joe Bastardi just graded Rosies misinformed ticket. She flunked.
The meteorologist wins.
@SteveSadlov:
Nice article. I took a stab at translating it to English here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/la-tierra-se-enfria/
Many of my critics are missing my point. I am not arguing that the fire didn’t weaken the structural members sufficiently to initiate collapse. I am not trying to make the case that the collapse shouldn’t have happened. That is an entirely different discussion. Instead, I am arguing that there is abundant eye-witness testimony of molten metal found in the rubble – days, weeks and months after the attacks, including the structural engineer who was part of the WTC design team. You can read a summary here:
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/moltensteel.html
NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, consider this the equivalent of the IPCC) performed a computer simulation of the fire conditions in the WTC towers. They report that the maximum fire temperatures reached peaks of only 1000 deg C, and these were short-lived (15-20 min) and mobile. These conditions could not have melted the steel found in the rubble, which require persistent temperatures in excess of 1600 deg C. (ref. NIST NCSTAR 1-5F)
As the guy said: “Only human beings create knowledge and science, and those who bet on the computers made a wrong diagnosis. It will be Nature that will show which theory is correct, “and yet” the professor concluded, “the Earth cools.”
This request stems from the phrase “the science behind global warming “ quoted by a much responded to comment above.
Please, please, please, where oh where, are there any tutorials on THE SCIENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING that explains how “greenhouse” gases “trap” anything in the atmosphere?
The AGW crowd have had some fourty years to prepare a few courses. Anybody know?
>>thereisnofear
>>I am a professional civil engineer. Believe me when I say that it would
>>fly against every known engineering principle to specify a building
>>material that melts if the fireproofing were ever exposed. That would
>>be insanity.
Err, you mean like the insanity of building wooden houses all over America? See the pic I posted, of the melted steel RSJ support (a pretty meaty support too).
.
I think people arguing the steel did not melt but only weaken should realize that there are four independent and well documented lines of evidence that indicate that is what did, in fact happen.
1) Eyewitness reports
2) Satellite imagery
3) Iron sphere’s in the dust
4) Footage of molten iron pouring from the buildings
For 1 see:
Numbers 2 and 3 are well attested by official sources such, Fema and Nasa respectively I believe.
As for 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbuwqU9oxf4
Having established that it certain looks and behaves like molten iron it has been a longstanding challenge to demonstrate that any other candidate metal can be made to look like that. This challenge has never been met.
It is only in people’s imagination that anything but molten iron looks like that.
So…
The question isn’t IF there was molten iron, but why it was was there.
Also. Most people would not use the word “fire” to describe an oxy-acetylene torch or a furnace and plasticized steel is not molten steel.
@The Folks Advocating for Molten Iron:
There is no way to know what any falling molten “stuff” was by inspection of a bit of tape. All you know is the color temp and a bit about the way it interacts with air. I’ve melted a LOT of metals (that “smith” in the name is hereditary as the family were working smiths and my Dad taught me some of the craft…). You have NO IDEA what the alloy was that was falling (IFF if was metal…). To me it looks about like any of a dozen different alloys, potentially with a lot of entrained carbon (i.e. bits of carbonized paper making some sparks as the carbon burns off). It could also be brass (any guesses as to what furnishing were like on any specific floor? Any statuary? Were there added power transformers on that floor? Elevator motors? Yeah, no clue…
It is about where the airplane hit. Care to speculate what metals IT was made of and what they might have interacted with inside the work space? Don’t forget all the moving parts inside the engines, all the electric motors and miles of wiring. Molten copper is quite red. There are so many moving parts to that and so many potential odd alloys to form that I’d not even begin to hazard a guess what the melting temp was of any resultant stuff.
FWIW, I’ve had aluminum up to red hot before… if flows about like iron, but the surface is a bit more oxidized and the slag is a bit different. It does rapidly cool and get a silver surface again, so folks dumping it into a pan and saying “look it is silver” have just cooled it off again. Now figure that the stuff is NOT pure after it has run all over a building and you have No Clue what alloy and what temp you are seeing.
So until someone picks up a chunk, does a chemical assay of it, and a melt test, you can say exactly nothing about what will, or won’t, melt it.
As to fuels: Buildings are just FULL of fuels. Paper, plastics, metals, you name it. You have no idea what fuels were burning (nor, I might add, what the air velocity was…) At best you can guess from the visible color temperature, but that does not tell you interior temps.
As to what it means:
Doesn’t mean jack. There was ample heat to soften the floor pan and start a cascade failure of floor pancaking. Anything else is just a “distractor” from those simple facts.
The building was a stressed skin design at the limit of technology. That it continued to stand at all after the plane crash is a miracle. Don’t think so? Stand (carefully!) on an empty beer can with one foot. Slowly bend over and “tap” the sides of the can with something (if your fingers, get them pulled back fast). You will rapidly be standing on a crushed can. That’s what happens to stressed skin structures when the skin gets deformed… The interiour was advertized as “special” for the lack of internal columns. It all was “hung” on that skin. Once a fire weakens a floor and it sags, the building is toast. It does not matter what glowing stuff is running out from where the plane crashed, burned, and potentially melted…
Can we just lose the “Conspiracy Theory” stuff? Please? It’s just a waste of brain cells…
This credulousness goes straight to the heart of AGW, people think with their emotions instead of their intellect. It is the same lack of a well developed skeptical faculty that causes everything from the financial crash of ’08 to the hockey stick.
If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything. I stand for consistent empirically based skepticism, I would have thought anti-AGW sentiment derives from the same source.
Molten copper:
Molten Aluminum:
As I said, it is only in your imagination that this looks anything like molten iron. And that is only one of the lines of evidence.
hear, hear mr. smith,
i believe you have it.
C
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Tornadoes-vs-temperature-US1.png
Flipped and scaled: http://virakkraft.com/tornadoes-temp.png
Just hold on tight, solar activity remains low despite sunspot groups, volcanic activity remains high and shows no sign of slowing to speak of. Sharp temperature gradients, probably like it was going into the LIA.
I find it ironic that one could find Mr. Smith’s tale convincing, given that the idea that the skin was the main structurally element flies directly in the face of the facts of the matter.
The idea that it was a miracle that it survived a plane crash flies directly in the face of the facts, since this was a design requirement of the structure.
So does the idea that the fire was super intense.
The “official” telling of the facts that is, not even conspiracy nut’s versions of events.
It is the same thing that leads one to believe AGW, if you are inclined to imagine big bad factories making everything dirty you will be lead to deny the simple facts of reality. If you believe that governments never lie to their citizens then you have already let go of reality and so ignoring the facts, however disconcerting, becomes trivial.
My takes a litttle different. My hobby is silver smithing. But I have made a number of my own tools. Give me a torch and a piece of tool steel. I can twist or bend it pretty fast. Doesn’t take long at all. An that’s all you need.
But I’m not an expert like Rosie.
It’d be interesting to also see the lower troposphere too.
“Anthony, watch out for Senate Bill 978. You might have to forego YouTube in the near future:” http://www.infowars.com/embedding-youtube-videos-may-soon-be-a-felony/
There is a risk that Osama Bin Landen will have the last laugh. The “land of the free” is quickly becoming a totalitarian state. Fear of 911 has replaced freedom with a police state, where personal liberty is subverted in the name of “the greater good”.
The founding principle of the US constitution, “without freedom there can be no justice” has been replaced by “without justice there can be no freedom”. This transposition of words is a small but important political change, as it subverts freedom in the name of the law, and replaces the US constitution with the courts as the final authority on liberty
The proof?
“The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. At year-end 2009 it was 743 incarcerated per 100,000 population.[2][3][4][5][6]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
thereisnofear writes:
Ordinary office and hydrocarbon (kerosene jet fuel) fires only burn at about 50% of the temperature required to melt steel under atmospheric conditions.
I am a professional civil engineer. Believe me when I say that it would fly against every known engineering principle to specify a building material that melts if the fireproofing were ever exposed. That would be insanity.
Then I suggest you update your PE license, for anyone who is familiar with material properties knows you do not need to melt a solid in order to significantly weaken it. And in fact, the Young’s Modulus of steel will drop approximately 40% when heated from 20 deg C to 500 deg C, which is WELL below your office fire.
Melting of the steel is NOT required to cause the part to fail; you just have to heat it enough that the Young’s modulus falls to a point where it fails, and that often happens WELL below the actual plastic temperature point of steel. Even if you over-engineered your building for a factor of 2 loading, that would buy you – at most – heat resistance to roughly 650 deg C (E dropping by more than 50% at this point). Again, well below your 810 deg C office fire temperature.
Rosie has an excuse for her ignorance; she’s an entertainer. Much like Algore is a politician and not scientist, and thus his ignorance had at least an understandable foundation (its continuance in the face of copious facts to the contrary points to his lack of wisdom, as well). As a person with a supposed PE, your cover is considerably thinner…
“Maybe we need to start another web page just to discuss the WTC collapse.”
Follow the money. The hundreds of billions of dollars that were transferred immediately ahead of the 911 attacks indicate a wider conspiracy. The collapse of the WTC and especially the neighboring buildings covered up the transactions and their source.
The governments of the world were more than capable of cooperating to trace these transactions, as the banks involved were not destroyed. These transactions have never been traced. This points to very high level involvement.
Some person or persons with access to hundreds of billions of dollars in credit knew the attacks were going to take place. Rather than sound the warning they kept quiet and transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to take advantage of the confusion.
Had the attacks not occured, they would simply have been out the cost of the transfer fee. If the attacks succeeded, they stood to make hundreds of billions of dollars. The real question for the US citizens is not whether the attack was a esult of a conspiracy, it is simply “who benefited”?
Where is the money that was transferred on 911? Why have the banks involved not come forward to name names?
Joe is beautiful! A simple and clear exposition that should clear up any debate on the subject.
To Anything is possible:
Instead of attacking something that you, in your imagination, would have thought he would have said if he had more time to speak, why don’t you dare to comment instead on what he said?
Bulbhead (way down on the list):
Joe Bastardi didn’t attempt to refute whether or not humans are causing warming (I believe without a doubt we are, to at least some extent). As anyone checking the current status of the world’s climate knows, the recent and intense La Nina has caused a general cooling of the planet. Thus, if this current global cooling is relatively concentrated outside of the tropics (any comment on this here?), then the temperature difference between arctic and tropic would be increased thus increasing the probability of tornadoes in the US Midwest. Bastardi’s hypothesis is therefore reasonable while yours appears not.
E.M.Smith says:
June 4, 2011 at 1:16 am
Excellent explanation.
Regarding the appearance of the falling “molten metal” …for those of us old enough and lucky enough to have seen the daily evening “Firefall” at Yosemite National Park (in days of yore), the appearance is similar to that of the tower footage. And that [the Firefall] was nothing more than falling embers from a wood fire begun earlier in the day. I am not saying that is what we are seeing in the tower footage, but simply that there are multiple possible explanations.
Noelene, the youtube link of your video clip contains the following corrections from the publisher of the video: “the claim in this video that the fires were “likely fed by a series of diesel generators” turned out not to be the case, and the hypothesis that the collapse started with Truss 1 was also incorrect. The collapse actually started in the same vicinity only a few floors up, with the collapse of Column 79.”
There are other inaccuracies, such as contrary to the video clip firefighters did report hearing explosions before the building collapsed. For a “debunking of the debunkers” see:
“Ray says:
June 3, 2011 at 12:30 pm
thereisnofear says:
June 3, 2011 at 11:31 am
You are right. Any structural engineer will tell you that no office or hydrocarbon fire can melt steel alone. Given that the tower fires were oxygen poor (i.e. lots of black smoke), the temperature of the flames were no where close to weakening and even less close to melting structural steel.”
Do you own a steel columned building? I do. And the steel columns are not “fireproofed” and because of this the building’s insurance bill is double that of another similar building we own that is built solely from concrete. Why would that be? And yes, during construction a structural engineer told us why.
Doing your own homework and getting the real facts is a lot harder than passing on hearsay……..
Jose
@ur momisugly ferd berple:
June 4, 2011 at 8:04 am
If you read the article you cited . . . . Bryan McCarthy going to stream the Super Bowl . . . that like stealing cable signals . . . . it is illegal . . . . just like stealing electricity or phone service . . .
Anyone can link to the utube on the site itself . . . .
Giving credit where credit is due . . . is right . . . .
So I don’t know what alarmist fire you are trying to start . . .