Another WUWT.TV segment – Engineer and aviation pioneer Burt Rutan on why he doubts global warming

This aired on WUWT.TV on November 14th in response to Al Gore’s “dirty weather report”. Engineer and aviation pioneer Burt Rutan gives his presentation on why he doesn’t think global warming/climate change is a problem, by presenting the data that convinced him it is a non-issue from an engineering standpoint. Burt gets a bit fired up in this presentation, saying to me afterwards by email that “it was fun!”.

It was my honor, Burt.  Burt has been in the business of assessing data for years, and in his case he always had to get it right, or people died. Engineers don’t get second chances when designing mission critical aerospace systems. If only climate science had the same rigor.

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November 26, 2012 6:29 am

Excellent presentation Mr Rutan. I loved the relation in Siberian weatherstation returns and the amount of fuel they received to operate in the cold.

November 26, 2012 6:46 am

Thank you for this Anthony. Due to US/UK time zones this was one of the ones I sadly missed yet was most looking forward too. Thank you and Burt for taking the time for this.

anarchist hate machine
November 26, 2012 6:59 am

Oh one of the ones I wanted to see but missed!

November 26, 2012 7:02 am

Riveted, watching.

John Blake
November 26, 2012 7:10 am

Unless and until active younger academics without tenure make the objective, rational case for “Climate Science” (sic) in defiance of such as Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth and their ilk, these issues will fester regardless of celebrity PR from Michael Crichton, Burt Rutan. Meantime, as Earth inexorably enters a solar-irradiance induced Dalton if not a Maunder Minimum, catastrophic mid-1690’s famine episodes loom ever closer, this time affecting not some few hundred thousand but seven thousand million souls.

TomT
November 26, 2012 7:18 am

I just saw the Discovery Chanel Curiously show the evolution of Humans. Funny they called CO2 a noxious gas and that the dinosaurs died and the deserts form because CO2 rose and the temperature rose. They then skipped over several ice ages.
But Mr Rutan says the deserts were causes be lack of CO2. Now I’m confused.

Paul Martin
November 26, 2012 7:25 am

Anthony… your audio is leading by about 200ms (5-6 frames). It’s a little disconcerting to watch without downloading the content and using a player that allows you to tweak the A-V delay.
REPLY: You know, some people claim that I’m funded by big oil, and this production was done on a shoestring with Skype, which has its own set of issues. I wear this technical issue as a badge of honor, because it should be abundantly clear to anyone watching that I don’t have the resources to put on slick presentations like Mr. Gore. Besides, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. You’ll just have to live with it. – Anthony

Richard Bell
November 26, 2012 7:36 am

I have watched Burt several times and I never get tired of his presentations …….. it is wonderful every time …..Thank you Anthony for making this presentation available and thankyou to Burt for this common sense presentation of what is the real deal .

more soylent green!
November 26, 2012 7:37 am

Anthony — Are any of these presentations or segments from WUWT-TV available on Youtube?

November 26, 2012 7:41 am

Excellent – I’ve been looking forward to this.

November 26, 2012 8:05 am

Excellent presentation.
BTW, there is no audio delay when watched on YouTube directly.
Click the YouTube icon at the bottom right of the video above and see for yourself.

Mike McMillan
November 26, 2012 8:25 am

I notice Burt’s bookshelves are non-conventional, too. They slope, eliminating the need for bookends. Very efficient.

Jon
November 26, 2012 8:25 am

Did he engineer the bookcase??? 🙂
REPLY: he has it that way for a reason – Anthony

Richard Bell
November 26, 2012 8:57 am
Bill Taylor
November 26, 2012 9:01 am

his first point there about the simple science reality that co2 is a nutrient rather than pollution, shows right off the bat that the GW crowd is LYING about the most basic science involved.

Roger Knights
November 26, 2012 9:18 am

TomT says:
November 26, 2012 at 7:18 am
I just saw the Discovery Chanel Curiously show the evolution of Humans. Funny they called CO2 a noxious gas and that the dinosaurs died and the deserts form because CO2 rose and the temperature rose.

Here’s a cockle-warmer: If temperatures take a nose-dive, all the numerous documentaries that have slipped in knowing asides and warnings on CO2 and global warming are going to be tainted and harder to sell to broadcasters, because audiences will laugh at them. They’ll become latter-day Reefer-Madness-type films.
I bet their producers never considered that possibility. Arrogant of them. They were riding high on the bandwagon. Riding for a fall.
As a bonus, future audiences will receive an unending reminder that it’s wise to be wary of scientific consensuses and all-knowing pontifications from on high.

RockyRoad
November 26, 2012 9:34 am

Wow–new stuff I hadn’t seen before, and explained in my native language–engineerese. I’m almost sorry Burt left the realm of advocating for a sane evaluation of the data in refuting (bogus) Warmista claims.
Good stuff, Burt. Thanks for including this, Anthony.

Michael Moon
November 26, 2012 9:36 am

Anthony,
Are these charts available to download somewhere? Burt Rutan is brilliant, thinking as clear as clear can be. Our side needs him. Our side also needs a dynamic public speaker to take these and make them sexy enough for high school kids to be able to enjoy a You-Tube video with the truth. I might take a crack at it myself if I could download these, with many and ample credits to the father of Space Ship One and many others.
We need an anti-Mann, a McKibben-nemesis, a Schmidt-slayer, compelling, charismatic, truthful.

tgmccoy
November 26, 2012 10:03 am

Burt Rutan is one of the great aviation pioneers, outside the box thinking. Thanks,
Anthony…

outtheback
November 26, 2012 10:29 am

Tom T
Did the Discovery Channel also show that when our homo sapiens ancestors first evolved the climate was cooling and became drier. Current theory of this evolution holds that this created the vast grasslands as still around today. As the competition for food in the trees increased the need to forage in the grass became a necessary task. Being able to walk upright was an advantage in this situation as one could cover much bigger distances. And we all know the rest.
When the Aboriginal people first came to what is now called Australia, generally thought to be around 40,000 years ago, the whole continent was covered in trees. Look at it now.
Climate will continue to change and other then adapt there is nothing we can do about it. But we do need all the CO2 we can get to make sure we can grow enough food for the ever increasing number of great ape descendants.

FrankK
November 26, 2012 10:32 am

Burt has an Interesting bookshelf in his office. Is this a new design Burt? The sloping bookself must have some new aerodynamic stability facility. I’m intrigued (lol).
A very sensible and commonsense analysis of the data.

Bruce Cobb
November 26, 2012 10:45 am

I loved it, and may even watch again (on youtube). He packs a lot of information in, but in a folksy style which makes it easy to listen to.

Mike Fowle
November 26, 2012 11:02 am

Seeing individual segments like this (I had problems watching the whole thing live) brings it home what a remarkable achievement your broadcast was.

blueice2hotsea
November 26, 2012 11:02 am

Thank you Anthony and Burt Rutan.
I especially appreciated the question and answer period and the Rutan original graphs. In fact, I wish the presentation would have focused more on those parts at the expensive of Mr. Rutan revisiting some the details.
It is undeniable that Rutan has exercised live-long care in forming his conclusions to various questions of murky issues. And THAT compels attention to his insights, conclusions and wisdom.
Thanks, again.

Mike Nystrom
November 26, 2012 11:59 am

Burt Rutan has spoken. It’s over 🙂

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