Burt Rutan writes in via email about an exchange he had with the proprietor of the website Scholars and Rogues, Brian Angliss. Burt writes:
I recently read a treatise showing that CAGW theory is a fraud. I thought it was a good summary and agreed to have my name used as a supporter of the facts when it was published by the Wall Street Journal. You can find it here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html
Then, shortly after publication, an alarmist engineer wrote and “open letter to Burt”.
http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2012/01/27/open-letter-to-burt-rutan/
I usually ignore these diatribes, but found a few moments to respond:
Scroll down to comment #4 for my answer.
I’ve reproduced Burt’s answer here for all to see:
Brian,
In my background of 46 years in aerospace flight testing and design I have seen many examples of data presentation fraud. That is what prompted my interest in seeing how the scientists have processed the climate data, presented it and promoted their theories to policy makers and the media.
What I found shocked me and prompted me to do further research. I researched data presentation fraud in climate science from 1999 to 2010.
I do not have time here to define the details; if interested in my research, a PPT or PDF can be downloaded at:
http://rps3.com/Pages/Burt_Rutan_on_Climate_Change.htm
In general, if you as an engineer with normal ethics, study the subject you will conclude that the theory that man’s addition of CO2 to the atmosphere (a trace amount to an already trace gas content) cannot cause the observed warming unless you assume a large positive feedback from water vapor. You will also find that the real feedback is negative, not positive!
Specifically, the theory of CAGW is not supported by any of the climate data and none of the predictions of IPCC since their first report in 1991 have been supported by measured data. The scare is merely a computer modeled theory that has been flawed from the beginning, and in spite of its failure to predict, many of the climate scientists cling to it. They applauded the correlation of surface temperatures with CO2 content from 1960 to 1998 as proof, but fail to admit that the planet has cooled after 1998 in spite of the CO2 content increasing.
The failure of the IPCC machine is especially evident in the use of “models” to justify claims, so it might be worthwhile to just look at modeling and science.
Modeling is more correctly a branch of Engineering and there are some basic rules that have been flouted by CAGW _ CO2 modelers.
Firstly there has to be a problem analysis which identifies relevant factors and the physical, chemical and thermodynamic behaviors of those factors within the system.
Any claim that this has been done in the CO2 warming problem is PREPOSTEROUS.
There are perhaps a thousand PhD topics there waiting to be taken up by researchers.
We could start with work on understanding heat transfer between the main interfaces; eg Core to surface / surface to ocean depths/ ocean depths to ocean surface / ocean surface to atmosphere and so on, not having yet reached the depth of space at just slightly above absolute zero.
To claim that the entire system of atmospheric temperature moderation has been described by the fluctuations of atmospheric CO2 content while excluding the other obvious factors such as atmospheric water vapour content, solar flux and orbital mechanics is just nonsense.
The whole point of modelling when done correctly is that it links accurately measured input of the main factors and accurately measure target output. Where you have major input factors that are not considered and poor and uncertain measurement of all factors then all you have is a joke or more seriously Public Fraud based on science.
You do not have science.
CO2 is not a pollutant. When the Dinosaurs roamed, the CO2 content was 6 to 9 times current and the planet was green from pole to pole; almost no deserts. If we doubled the atmospheric content of CO2, young pine trees would grow at twice the rate and nearly every crop yield would go up 30 to 40%. We, the animals and all land plant life would be healthier if CO2 content were to increase.
Do the study yourself. Look at how and why the data are manipulated, cherry-picked and promoted. I will bet if you did, you too would be shocked.
The mark of a good theory is its ability to be falsified by new data. The mark of a good scientist is the ability to accept that.
Burt
The Difference between an Environmentalist and a Denier.
You can easily tell if someone is a true environmentalist, i.e. an advocate for a healthy planet – he is one who is happy to hear the news that the arctic ice content has stabilized. He is one who celebrates when the recent climate data show the alarmist’s predictions of catastrophic warming might be wrong. The denier, if he is an eco/political activist, always denies new data that show the planet may be healthy after all. The Media usually defines deniers as those who deny the scientist’s computer model predictions. However, denying the measured climate data meets a better definition in the world of science.
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Smokey says:
So forget a cubic meter box. Make it a hundred cubic meters. And instead of 5,000 ppm CO2, make it all CO2. That gives you twenty thousand times more accuracy.
After two weeks time what will be the temperature inside the container? After one month? One year?
What is the container made of?
What is its source of heat?
Where is it located? What objects are nearby?
What is the partial pressure of CO2?
And, the volume is still very small.
Erinome says: January 29, 2012 at 7:19 pm
It’s kind of odd how much erinome sounds like Anthony Watts criticizing the Bill Nye / Al Gore experiment on the Climate Reality marathon awhile back… and Nye insisted on his own blog that he had successfully performed the experiment a number of times.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/
Just Sayin’.
Smokey says:
January 29, 2012 at 7:24 pm
TWICE tonight he’s said “Even if there were” (or was) some effect. If there’s an effect, the experiment should be able to be scaled up as to either verify or falsify the effect, don’t you think?
Smokey says:
Erinome wiggles and wiggles like a slippery eel, and never gives a straight answer.
I am, of course, trying to point out that Bob is asking simplistic questions.
Sorry, but science depends on analyzing and understanding the details. People like Bob and you have your neat, tidy answers — climate models are always wrong; CO2 is always caused by warming — that fail to address, or even acknowledge, the complexities of reality. Then, when challenged on them, you resort to responses like this (7:24 pm.) instead of addressing the questions. I see it time and again from you, and from Bob.
Skepticism is certainly necessary — if only you practiced it.
R. Gates says:
January 29, 2012 at 3:24 pm
All I need is a simple answer to a simple question
Here is a thought, US submariners spend upto 6 months in a rich C02 atmosphere, are there any health or physical effects?
R. Gates also says-Could CO2 levels rise to the point that human existence become a matter of doubt?
What level would that be, as levels in buildings can vary from 300 to 2000 pmm and higher. So people are already exposed to high level of C02 for long periods of time. Submariners can be exposed to higher levels on cruises lasting for months at a time. Greenhouse workers, high exposure at home and on the job, therefore long term exposure.
Erinome says:
“What is the container made of?
What is its source of heat?
Where is it located? What objects are nearby?
What is the partial pressure of CO2?
And, the volume is still very small.”
Like a slippery eel, Erinome never gives a straight answer.
So I’ll answer for him: the container’s temperature will be at ambient. No matter what the volume is, etc. CO2 has no magical properties, despite Erinome’s faith-based belief system.
@ur momisugly RGates – it seems you are getting close to understanding the point. If as you say natural variability is currently masking all further CO2 warming for over a decade then it is quite possible that it was in fact previously contributing to the warming seen in the preceding 2 decades because its contribution is not fully understood, at least not well enough to be modelled. To claim that it isnt possible for natural variability to have caused the observed warming would imply that its contribution to climate change is well understood which we know it isn’t.
I agree we are students of climate. if cycle 25 is a complete geomagnetic fizzer as some are predicting and assuming that volcanic activity is not hugely different in that cycle we will get to see the real role of CO2 because TSI has not varied significantly and CO2 is still increasing.
‘A physicist’ claims that ‘ “hockey-stick blades” …. continue to gain in length and strength in modern climate records, …’ and somehow strengthen ‘… Hansen-style climate science …’ To me, that Hansen-style climate science is simply fraudulent. Hansen stood up in front of the Senate in 1988 and said that warming had started. But here is a problem: satellites cannot see the warming he was talking about. According to satellite data real warming did not start until 1998, ten years after he spoke. As to those hockey sticks, they can occur in nature for reasons that have nothing to do with Mann. And they can be real while Mann’s was not, by his own admission. He did not like the way tree ring data of more recent years behaved, so he simply chucked them out and substituted thermometer readings he did like. You cannot throw out the part of your data set you don’t like just because it makes the rest of the data look good. And you cannot substitute an entirely different data set as he did to produce a desired outcome. That is scientific fraud. The journals that published it should officially withdraw his papers and he should have lost his academic status. Unfortunately none of this happened because all investigations were nothing but a whitewash. I recently saw a collection of articles containing independently produced hockey sticks that were advertized as proving that Mann’s stick was real. One of them turned out to be an article by Kaufman et al. with well-known co-authors like Ammann, Bradley, Briffa, Overpeck and others. They had produced a two thousand year old temperature curve of the Arctic that sure did look like a hockey stick. It was based on the temperature record preserved in sub-Arctic lake sediments. The blade of their hockey stick started to rise at the turn of the twentieth century and they thought this correlated well with major anthropogenic changes in global atmospheric composition. Unfortunately they had not thought the science through. The important clue was that the warming started very suddenly after two thousand years of slow cooling. I checked what carbon dioxide was doing at the time and it was doing nothing. If this was greenhouse warming there had to be a sudden increase in carbon dioxide in synch with the start of the warming, and this did not happen. Since it wasn’t greenhouse warming the only logical cause that was left was a change in currents that bring warm water to the Arctic. I so informed Kaufman but he ignored it. Confirmation that warm water reaching the Arctic in the year 2010 was warmer than anything reaching it during the previous two thousand years followed. In the end I wrote it up as an article and published it. You can get it here: http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/arno-arrak.pdf
And yes, the curve that started it all is a beautiful hockey stick, no thanks to Mann.
‘Climate science’ nail, meet Maus, the hammer.
Warmists, wake me when you have a testable hypothesis.
/Mr Lynn
My comment will hardly rank much above trolling and ad hominem, since I’ve only skimmed the well over 300 comments here and dont have the temporal resources to enter the debate, so if I am snipped – whatever
To Smokey – keep up the good work with all these Chicken Little n’er do wells.
And to R Gates – keep it up as well – Anthony draws great characters here (Rutan, Eschenbach, Smokey, et al) but the character foil is quite helpful….
This has been fun.
It appears that the alarmists, reacting like Counter-Reformation Jesuits, have come out in force to defend the faltering faith.
William M. Connolley, being the most distinguished amongst them sets forth the creed, ‘…the “recovery from the LIA” idea. I don’t believe that. The trend is caused, principally, by increasing CO2 consentrations; it can be stopped by slowing and halting the CO2 increase…’ and goes on to refer us to holy script, “…As to Why: you can read IPCC for that…”.
‘A physicist’ the evangelist, continues to preach the words of the prophet that yea verily, the Northwest Passage shall be opened and Earth’s temperature will warm ‘hockeystickwise’.
You have to admire that dogged never-say-die disciple R. Gates. Even his howler @ur momisugly 10:26 am about primitive humans did not faze him and he pressed on regardless gradually easing himself out of trouble — a talent greatly appreciated by Maus (4:26 pm).
His parable of the water drop on the pane of glass impressed me most as it perfectly demonstrated the circular reasoning loop in which climate models “models [which] are not meant to capture natural variability” are trapped.
nc says:
January 29, 2012 at 8:00 pm
R. Gates says:
January 29, 2012 at 3:24 pm
All I need is a simple answer to a simple question
Here is a thought, US submariners spend upto 6 months in a rich C02 atmosphere, are there any health or physical effects?
R. Gates also says-Could CO2 levels rise to the point that human existence become a matter of doubt?
What level would that be, as levels in buildings can vary from 300 to 2000 pmm and higher. So people are already exposed to high level of C02 for long periods of time. Submariners can be exposed to higher levels on cruises lasting for months at a time. Greenhouse workers, high exposure at home and on the job, therefore long term exposure.
_________
It would not be direct exposure to high levels of CO2 that would cause me to have concern for human existence. Mind you, I am not a believer in catastropic run-away global warming from CO2 either, but rather what it might do to food supplies. First, high levels of CO2 could have some effect on the ocean food chain, as certainly acidfication of the oceans could present a problem. More importantly, high levels of CO2 could alter the biosphere in other unpredictable ways. Some are wanting to try to say that “more is always better” when it comes to CO2, and life on Earth, but in regards to human civilization in particular, and the ways we feed the 7 Billion of us on Earth, we need a biosphere that is able to support us. We are not tree shrews like our ancestors of 50 million years ago and need a bit of a different diet than one might find living the life of a tree shrew in a high CO2 world of tropoical forests. The Holocene has been good to us (and the grain plants that have supported our civilzation) overall, and to leave it, for a warmer or colder world, is probably not something we should intentionally do if we can avoid it..
The debate has moved on from “how much warming does Co2 cause?” to “whether or not Co2 causes warming”. The purveyors of “the cause” have not realized this.
One theory has been substantiated here; what wild animals do when cornered.
For what it’s worth, my comment was ironic, although it caught at least two irony-free posters – one of whom was, ironically, AAIM…
It’s never any fun when one has to explain a joke.
In other news, it appears that Rutan made some rather egregious blunders in his ‘analysis’…
Oopsie.
Bernard J, have you even looked at what Tamino posted? That is a joke that needs to be explained.
Look, erinome, if you want to be incoherent, at least make it rhyme.
==================================
Bernard J
You opinion of Burt Rutan is based on cherry picked data and false claims.
David Ball says:
January 29, 2012 at 10:16 pm
The debate has moved on from “how much warming does Co2 cause?” to “whether or not Co2 causes warming”.
——-
If the debate has moved on, it has moved on only for the willfully ignorant. Only the most ignorant would doubt as to whether CO2 causes warming…even the good Lord Monckton gets this basic science. Sensitivity is, and has been for some time, the issue among the the willfully informed…
Erinome
It would be a good exercise for you to look up that data for yourself.
My impression was that the actual temperatures were well within the spread of model runs – although a little cooler than the multi model mean – some of the models seem well out – perhaps there is an argument for ditching some of them from those considered by the IPCC
e.g. Here from Lucia’s
http://rankexploits.com/imageDiversion.php?uri=/musings/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/MichaelHauberRequest.png
http://rankexploits.com/imageDiversion.php?uri=/musings/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/MichaelHauberRequest.png
AAiM:
Absolutely.
And if Rutan didn’t cherry-pick, and if he didn’t make false claims, my opinion of him would be different.
Babsy says:
Err, yes, foreign policy is a three letter word spelt OIL. I think my point was in the last sentence
“Science never drove policy. The climate scientists are just spouting what they are paid to say and the useful idiots of the world – environmentalists and others – sing along it tune”.
David Ball:
Tamino has explained Rutan’s joke of an analysis. If you’d looked at the post you’d possibly understand why Rutan was not even wrong.
And there are some insightful comments that follow (see, for example, those of Erinome and EFS_Junior), so if the explanation has escaped you perhaps you should post there and ask for even more clarification.
Pasting this from C02 Science; Based on the wealth of information we have acquired on the cycling of climate on a millennial time scale, going back from the Current Warm Period to the Little Ice Age to the Medieval Warm Period to the Dark Ages Cold Period to the Roman Warm Period and etc. (when there was consistently much less CO2 in the air than there is today), we conclude that our current level of warmth — which is in no way unprecedented — owes next to nothing to earth’s currently higher atmospheric CO2 concentration. And also knowing of the tremendous growth-enhancing and water-conserving effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment, which have been demonstrated to occur in literally thousands of laboratory and field experiments (see results archived in our Plant Growth Databases), we feel that we must allow anthropogenic CO2 emissions to continue to rise unimpeded, until they are naturally abated by the natural, unforced and non-subsidized development of economically viable non-fossil-fuel energy sources.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
R. Gates says; “certainly acidfication of the oceans could present a problem” Mr. Gates here is some reading, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/28/the-fishes-and-the-coral-live-happily-in-the-co2-bubble-plume/
RobW> you answered exactly squat at 146pm
My comment is here;it is easy to see that you’re wrong.
> It is well documented that the global atmosphere was 6-9 times higher in CO2 than it is today
No, it isn’t. You haven’t even said *when* you think this “well documented” period occurred. I’ve pointed you to evidence that shows, to the contrary, that CO2 levels before the ice age period (ie, before 800 kyr) aren’t terribly well known. There were, very likely, times in the past of high CO2 levels, but the last clear such time was ~300 Myr ago.
> So when CO2 was very low during the Holocene, temperatures were routinely higher than they are now
No, global temperatures were not routinely higher. You’re looking at Greenland. And durig the Holocene CO2 wasn’t very low, at least not by glacial-interglacial standards, only by present-day standards.
RobW> today one tenth of that historic CO2 level is a significant risk factor for runaway global warming? Is that your position?
No.
> Co2 was not the driver that stopped the LIA from continuing
Not conclusive, but likely.
> Co2 was not responsable for the early 20th century warming. Solar was not responsable for the early 20th century warm spurt
You don’t have evidence to conclude either. But I’ve already quoted IPCC on this.
> According to AGW theory, the rate of warming should accelerate because of the increased co2
Not according to the theory I know. CO2 increases nearly exponentially, the forcing is roughly logarithmic in CO2, so the overall forcing (and hence, roughly, the expected temperature rise) is linear in time.