Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, has stepped in the climate issue again, by suggesting that climate change in Syria is the root cause of their barbarous civil war.
According to Charles;
“And, in fact, there’s very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria, funnily enough was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.” Asked if there was a direct link between climate change, conflict and terrorism, he added: “It’s only in the last few years that the Pentagon have actually started to pay attention to this. I mean it has a huge impact on what is happening.
“I mean the difficulty is sometimes to get this point across — that if we just leave it and say, well there are obviously lots of, there are endless problems arising all over the place, therefore we deal with them in a short-term way, we never deal with the underlying root cause which regrettably is what we’re doing to our natural environment.”
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/prince-charles-climate-change-to-blame-for-terrorism/news-story/409c6a0191b9dcbd028d07a1d697928f
California is suffering a severe drought, yet very few Californians are flocking to join terrorist groups or commit atrocities. Perhaps there are factors other than the weather, which motivate some people to murder and brutalise their neighbours.
The bloke must have sand between his ears. Too stupid for words.
Weapons grade stupidity.
Time to bring back ” Kings and Queens and GUILLOTINES ” ??
Steady on, mate.
Ye Olde English ?????
…and the sun never sets…
…Kings and queens and guillotines
Taking lives denied
Starch and parchment laid the laws
When bishops took the ride
Only to deceive…
If both sides don’t feel the guilt for being the cause of the conflict, then we’ll have to improve morale!
=============
Yes! That’s it, kim. Let the shooting continue until everyone is friends all ’round again. Sunny days ahead!
.
.
.
.
uhhhh… /sarc
I don’t want Charles the Clown to become King of Australia
Or of Canada! with our new “king” recently elected we already have a larger problem.
The royal family and the pedophile:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2894970/The-Prince-paedophile-Andrew-enjoyed-sensual-massages-sex-offender-friend-s-Florida-mansion-Duke-invited-heart-Royal-Family.html
An appeal to the authority of the Pentagon is ironic. Congress funds what it wants and the Pentagon provides it.Well other than cost efficient weapons programs.
Our foes have long been getting all of the major institutions into gear. This was Al Gore’s specialty as Vice President. Clinton who now makes money on it was happy to let him lead.
step 1 Help overthrow Syria.
step 2 Blame the weather for refugee crisis after overthrow.
step 3 Hope people are dumb enough to buy what you are shovelling.
WUWT?
Gas pipelines are at the heart of the Syrian conflict. The victor gets the EU market.
Thanks, finally some one brought up the true underlying motivation. And now that the USA ( if allowed by their “boy king”) can be independent, the Arabians in SA are getting heavily involved
Nonsense. Assad’s father had exactly the same uprising and put it down in exactly the same manner. Was the 1982 Hama massacre because of oil or gas pipelines? Of course not.
The reality is that this is a very old sectarian dispute. Asaad’s Alawites are half Xian, and so lived in the gutters of Syrian society for more than a millennium, until put into the army and into power by the French. The Sunnis want to return the Alawites to the gutters (and worse), and not surprisingly Assaad’s Alawites don’t want to go.
Remember he is friend of the good kind of muslims , the kind that don’t let their women drive a car.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2014-02/19/133127446_13928033953881n.jpg
https://youtu.be/u-RaorQXqm0
men can have fun.
Who’s the chap with the rosy cheeks ??
The one on the far left has Ipad hooked up to his sword LOL, probably needs instructions on how to use the knife ( and btw we had 2 cm of global warming this morning with another 10-15 cm of global warming in the forecast)
Ahhhhh, Prince Charles, hmmmmm
This man who would be king is a man who would be the best actor for a theatrical production of ‘Peter Pan the Climate Movie’. He could co-star with Naomi Orestes and Giggles the trained chimpanzee.
John
Inbreeding experiment?
asybot,
Intellectual inbreeding (ie; dogma /group think / PC) for sure.
John
Prince Charles is referring to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that makes the link between climate change and the civil war/refugee crisis in Syria. So unlike most of the posters here his statement is based on peer-reviewed science. I suggest you take a look at the paper and submit a rebuttal if you feel you can refute their study.
Here is the abstract and url:
There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.abstract
hmmmmmm –
http://www.weatherbell.com/saturday-summary-november-14-2015
You mean — it’s not Bush’s fault?
Climate scientists are now experts on the causes of civil wars and rise of terrorism?
So if not for drought, Obama wouldn’t be supporting efforts to overthrow those in power? Without drought, ISIS wouldn’t exist?
How is a population shift from rural areas to big cities responsible for Syria’s tyranny and warring factions?
Are you really this stupid, Luke? Al Gore tied global warming to declining IQs…are you the poster child?
I suggest you read the paper and then we can have an intelligent discussion.
Urban migration is an observable event happening all across the developed world.
Drought is also observable all across the developed world, notably California.
In the event that Climate Change could be linked to either event directly it doesn’t explain why those events can be occurring in Syria AND in various locations all over the world but Syria is the one with an ISIS problem.
I don’t doubt that to a certain extent those factors COULD have influenced the foothold ISIS has in Syria. But I would ask whether having a ton of unstable countries around them, poor border controls, an unpopular government, and a strong Anti-West sentiment might have had just a tiny bit more to do with it.
They don’t attribute any amount of the conflict to Climate Change, it is simply implicated to some degree. Charles is directly insinuating with this line:
“…well there are obviously lots of, there are endless problems arising all over the place, therefore we deal with them in a short-term way, we never deal with the underlying root cause which regrettably is what we’re doing to our natural environment.”
That statement isn’t supported at all by the article you linked. Charles is inferring with a great deal more confidence then the authors of that study that events that may have been influenced by Climate Change may have influenced the war in Syria.
But that is textbook modern environmentalist. A scientist publishes a fairly benign and inoculus study that “suggests” or “finds cause for” or “possible linkage” and idiots like you turn it into an absolute statement of unassailable truth.
In short I don’t need to rebut it because the peer reviewed paper you linked doesn’t support the position you put forth.
Dear Luke,
Good for you to try to cite some science, here. I’m afraid you have been duped by the scientists-for-hire who will say anything for money (those behind their getting paid, ultimately, are: the “Sustainability” Industry and Big Wind and Big Solar and other Enviroprofiteers and their lackeys in government). They likely say quite a few reasonable things in that paper. The abstract told me I need not bother to read it, however, for there is a BIG (………………………….) HOLE in their “evidence.”
To wit:
The proven-failed (e.g., see Climate Models Fail, by Bob Tisdale) code that cranks out hilariously wrong results, time after time after time (at least they are consistent, boys and girls!!), a.k.a. “climate models,” is not evidence of anything except their own lack of skill.
There is, as of this hour, NO evidence, NONE, that CO2 causes changes in the climate zones of the earth.
Pick up that paper, hold it up to your eye and peer through that big hole……(o_O)…. look down, waaaaay down, into the depths of the ocean……. look up……. waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay up, into the troposphere………….. look around………. ALL OVER (right–> right –> right –> 360 deg…)……… for the evidence that should fill that hole…… .
There is none. Just a bit, empty, hole, with the wind whistling through it…. .
And maybe, someday, you will open your mind to realize just what that means vis a vis anthropogenic global climate change.
Hoping for you,
Janice
Janice states “I’m afraid you have been duped by the scientists-for-hire who will say anything for money (those behind their getting paid, ultimately, are: the “Sustainability” Industry and Big Wind and Big Solar and other Enviroprofiteers and their lackeys in government).”
You have just shown your complete ignorance of government funding of science.
Oh, I think not, Luke.
Rather, you display an idealistic, unrealistic, view of how politics actually works.
Or, perhaps, you were in a hurry when you read my post and missed the “their lackeys in government” link in the funding chain.
Luke says:
I suggest you take a look at the paper and submit a rebuttal if you feel you can refute their study.
From their abstract, my responses in bold, and a question to you at the end:
Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record.
Per references to Bastardi above, the working assumption is falsified from the get go. But let us put this aside for the moment.
For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest.
So, the primary factors are poor governance and unsustainable agriculture and environmental policies! RIGHT IN THE FREAKING ABSTRACT HOW DID YOU MISS THAT?
We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend.
the drought that doesn’t exist is comprised of….natural variability…. but it is worse because of long term drying trend. Doesn’t say how much worse. In the current state of the climate debate, your side of the debate insists that natural variability is so large that it is swamping the anthropegenic signal. So natural variability is dominant according to your side, and the long term drying trend (again, according to your side) cannot be significant.
Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends,
Well the abstract first started yammering about natural variability which the climate community says is swamping the anthro signal, and in the same breath wants to claim that no natural cause is apparent. The nose on your face isn’t apparent either
whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases.
Oh goodness. Would that be modeled responses from which of the (I can’t remember how many) climate models, each and every one of which has completely failed to produce results remotely related to actual observations? THOSE MODELS? THE ONES THAT ARE SO WRONG THEY HAVE BEEN FALSIFIED BY THE EXACT METRICS DEFINED AS FALSIFYING THEM BY THE CLIMATE MODELING COMMUNITY ITSELF?
Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean.
Oh wow. So now FUTURE climate is causing current instability? ROFLMAO
Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system.
<b? Which freaking observations would this be since ALL the observational records FALSIFY the models based on the criteria that the modeling community itself set!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
OK, and now the question. Apologies for the length of it.
How is it that this drought appears to have avoided destroying civilization in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Turkey, which border on Syria from every direction AND appears to NOT drive to war (except in self defence) Yazidis, Kurds, Christians, Imailis and Druze?
I effing blew the html, apologies. Most people will be able to figure it out.
good response David,
michael
DavidMHoffer (smile) — I think your BOLDLY STATED, nicely argued, and well-written, riposte above deserves only:
Remember, that this kind of thing happens to even the davidmhoffers among us is a great comfort to many a more timid soul, here on WUWT.
And, personally, given that the stakes involved are human lives, I think such a tone is completely appropriate.
Remember, that this kind of thing happens to even the davidmhoffers
The sad part of it Janice is, I blow the html tags almost EVERY time, LOL.
Sounds like you think you can easily rebut their paper. If so, I suggest you send a rebuttal to the editor. Science does not advance in the comments section of a website, it advances in the pages of peer-reviewed journals.
Luke November 23, 2015 at 8:20 pm
Sounds like you think you can easily rebut their paper. If so, I suggest you send a rebuttal to the editor. Science does not advance in the comments section of a website, it advances in the pages of peer-reviewed journals.
You demanded a rebuttal and you got one.
You now retreat to the position (having admitted that I easily rebutted the paper) that it doesn’t count unless it is in a peer-reviewed journal. That is the retreat of cowards who have no reasoned argument of their own to present.
I’ve got news for you Luke, if science advanced only in peer reviewed journals we would have no airplanes to fly in, cars to drive, light bulbs to read by, sound systems to listen to, televisions to watch or blogs to argue with one another on. If you are so bold as to issue a challenge (as you have) then have the temerity to defend your position.
Have at it Luke. Have a discussion based on your own words, defend your own challenge. If you do not, the only conclusion anyone will draw from our discourse is that you can’t.
Sincerely, I urge you to engage honestly. Otherwise this is just an echo chamber with the odd rodent scurrying about.
Water shortages in Syria, if there are any, have been exacerbated by the new Attaturk Dam in Turkey, which has drained off 30% of the flow of the Euphrates for irrigation projects in Turkey.
R
“ralfellis
November 24, 2015 at 2:08 am”
Correct, and this has been happening for decades. A similar situation is likely to occur in countries downstream on the Nile from Ethiopia once their dam project is complete.
First off Luke wrong venue for for a “geo-political” paper. Should have been submitted to to a journal of the proper “field of study”. A climate science periodical ain’t it. You should know better.
There is NO evidence that climate played an issue. None zip. The players in the conflict are acting in their interests based on theology, culture, history, nationalism and good old fashion human ambition and greed. You do know what these words mean don’t you? You know where the proper schools of study are don’t you? History, Political science, Anthropology and theological history just to point you in the correct direction. Proper venue for peer review Luke, proper venue.
michael
“There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria … anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region”.
=============================
The rainfall anomaly for the region since 1950, the earliest human CO2 emissions could have been an influence, shows no notable trend but even if it did economically crippling the western democracies is no solution to occasional droughts in failed Middle Eastern states.
http://www.bom.gov.au/web01/ncc/www/cli_chg/trendmap/global_r/0112/global/1950/latest.gif
Please note the Syrian Civil war started in 2011.
So why did the drought not cause any disruption until after it ended?
Indeed, if fears of famine caused by the drought was the problem wouldn’t the workers have focussed on exploiting the new chances for growing food.
Even if you think you can ascribe any regional weather to anthropogenic global warming (good luck with that) it seems ridiculous to link that weather event to the Syrian Civil War.
For further reading look up “the Arab Spring”.
Luke, the rebuttal to this…”Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results…” is both simple and impossible to dispute. Impossible to dispute because it is a climate model prediction and has not happened, and simple to dispute as there is no observation of increase in droughts in the area. If your theory has no observational evidence, it is not even a theory. To further extrapolate this to the cause of civil strife in the area is to ignore ALL the political realities on the ground.
David, you conveniently ignored the first part of the statement “Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure”. The authors did not say the drought was the only factor that lead to the civil strife, just a contributing factor.
Luke,
You haven’t answered my question from upthread. I reproduce it here now for your convenience:
How is it that this drought appears to have avoided destroying civilization in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Turkey, which border on Syria from every direction AND appears to NOT drive to war (except in self defence) Yazidis, Kurds, Christians, Imailis and Druze?
Read the whole thing, and saw no causal connection between the climate and the war.
So much for the peer reviewed science. They made no scientific connection at all.
How much wind & solar farm income is generated from crown estates I wonder ?
A record paltry £19.1M profit ($28.8M) from offshore wind alone, I would love to know how much on land from the property of the rest of the minor Royal family. Now his Dad may well claim to hate the eyesore of the eco crucifixes littering this green and pleasant land as any sane and rational person would, but i’m also sure he appreciates the fruit that it bears.
“Sustained growth for the UK’s world-leading offshore wind industry
With the UK remaining the most attractive place to invest globally in offshore wind, The Crown Estate’s offshore wind portfolio has continued to be a key driver of our commercial success. Generating income by leasing the seabed to developers, the business continues to take an active approach to management and unlocking value by capitalising on our strategic overview to identify common challenges facing industry, bringing the sector together to share knowledge, best practice and reduce costs. Key highlights included:
The business’s operational offshore wind portfolio generated £19.1 million, up from £15.6 million last year, with portfolio value increasing by 18% to £590 million.
Offshore wind currently meets over 4 per cent of the UK’s electricity demand. It is on course to meet around 10 per cent of UK’s electricity demand, and bring costs down below £100 per MWh, by 2020.
A total of 4.6 GW of operational offshore wind, with 813 MW of new offshore wind farm capacity last year accounting for more than half of all new installations across Europe.”
http://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/news-and-media/news/2015/another-record-breaking-year-with-285-million-return-for-public-finances/
Overall revenue and property value is increasing massively when you also factor in carbon capture (CCS) and tidal/wave on top of it.
http://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/energy-and-infrastructure/energy-and-infrastructure-business-at-a-glance/
This senile before his time wally has a fortune tied up in windmills. That is all that is on his mind; if you can call that ball of shit a mind.
I am beginning to understand why his eyes are so close together, to accommodate the size of hjs brain. Too much inbreeding within the royalty class.
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/11/weekend-untheaded/#comment-1765836
Prince Charles features
Was looking for the Kingston Trio quote that said that Bonnie Prince Charlie actually posed for the “What me Worry Kid ie. Alfred E. Newman”:
Couldn’t find the quote on YouTube etc., but this is the best I could do…
“Funnily enough?” Wow.
Indeed. (Michael Jankowski at 4:47pm)
Charles to TV reporter: (giggle) “Funnily enough” {giggle, snort, … cover face with hand, smother giggling… gg……}, I say, “funnily enough,” {superstraightface} all those people who died of thirst or at sea trying to escape war and poverty {stifle smile still playing at lips}….. (ahem)…. (AHEM)… did a lot to ensure that my windmill investments will continue to make money for me. I mean, I say, you know that those people all died because we haven’t yet built enough of them — windmills, I mean. They continued to build those damned little coal fires and…. human CO2 {choking back a laugh at the delightful irony} — killed them. {Distinct shift in mood….. eyes harden…….. lip curls slightly….} Pity. {nothing but cold contempt as camera pans away to reporter}
*******************************
Wow, indeed. Truly psychopathic (personality) and frontal lobe-deficient:
That is:
1) no conscience to correct his happy emotion over making money off a tragedy (given, that he believes, and I have a feeling he may…, CO2 really did cause the drought); and
2) no frontal lobe “brakes” to at LEAST not say such a blatantly crass thing.
+ 20
Marcus!!!!!!!!
Thank you. #(:))
Isn’t a desert just an area that has experienced a long series of droughts? How is this climate *change*?
When there is a Climate Conference coming up and Charlie boy (he has never grown up) is a keynote speaker.
It was great to be invited by Sky News, the British News Channel, to speak on the topic of the Prince’s interview It was three to one for the half hour. Here is my first effort.
https://twitter.com/lawiegers
If hot and dry was the problem, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas etal would be the head chopping center of the universe.
I’m not a Republican (in the anti-monarch sense of the word not American political party) but I’d very, very quickly become one if this twit became King. A big part of the reason I support or don’t actively want to leave behind our monarch as a Canadian is because of the difficulties associated with opening our constitution versus her activities. Given that she is entirely benign and stays out of political affairs as a rule but opening our constitution would open the door to a wide range of Quebec separatist demands I opt to support the Queen.
Given Charles becoming King I’d take my chances with Quebec separatists.
A monarchy with an almost symbolic head of state normally seems to be a very stable form of government. The ambition of presidents, their grasping for ever greater executive authority, often leads to the downfall of democracies. Having said that, you sure miss that voting thing when the monarch is an idiot.
Well if that is the case that climate change is the cause of problem then western powers have no justification to remove assad because it is western powers that caused the problem its not assads fault.
Perhaps if Assad had built a few wind turbines it would all be OK…
Spot on. The US was fine with Assad until Syria blocked the US backed pipeline.
Anthropogenic Water Shortage
From..http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/syria-too-much-rain-but-too-little-water
Ninety per cent of Syria’s water is used to irrigate farmlands and, according to one agricultural expert, it remains highly wasteful. “Irrigation systems here are only 38 per cent efficient, which means we throw away 62 per cent of all of our national water supplies before it even reaches the crops,” he said. “We have irrigation channels built on soluble rock – which is the worst thing you can do – and the engineers told them it was bad idea, but they did it.”
Jihadists have inflicted heinous wars and acts of terror against their own people and the infidel since the 7th century…. This is NOT a recent phenomenon.
For Prince Charles to attribute recent ISIS atrocities on Climate Change, in light of 1,400 years of historic Jihadist mayhem shows he has no understanding of history and seriously lacks common sense, reason and logic.
Liberals do not like reality !!
Marcus– Don’t call Leftists “liberals”. They are anything BUT liberal.
Call them: Statists, Leftists, Socialists, Communists, Totalitarians, Progressives, nut jobs, loonies, crazy and insane, but never use the term “liberal” when describing Leftists as their ideologies are the antithesis of Liberalism.
Yes, Leftists do not like reality, which is why they created Politically Correctness, to obfuscate their insanity and prohibit open debate on their insane ideologies.
I was trying to be a little gentler than you,…must have been a temporary brain fart, sorry !!! LOL
“…..lacks common sense, reason and logic.” He will have plenty of company at Cop21. So much so, I think Charlie can consider himself as a Climate Scientist
… and why not. What is the definition of a “Climate Scientist” anyway?
I believe it stems from the vernacular “rocket scientist”. There are no “rocket scientists” either. There are a wide variety of disciplines that are required to adventures in space. But on the street this term came to mean someone clever. “It’s not rocket science” is a saying that came about in the ’80’s. The climate scam hijacked the idea so that fine arts students, journalists, and other activist could call themselves “climate scientists” to suggest that one should not argue with them. It is a travesty of science. Furthermore it is “A disgrace to the profession”.
karabar:
You say;
Not so. There have been rocket scientists for more than 2,000 years.
Rocket scientists conduct the science which provides new knowledge that can be engineered into rocket technology.
It is thought that Archytas, 428 to 347 B.C., was the first rocket scientist. He developed the principle of ‘action and reaction’ that he demonstrated by constructing his “bird” that was the first reported device to use rocket propulsion. Steam or compressed air was the propellant.
Chinese rocket scientists used fireworks to provide rocket propulsion that they attached to arrows for increased range. In 1232 these ‘fire arrows’ were used to repel Mongol invaders at the battle of Kai-keng.
William Congreve was in charge of British military rocket companies. Among his many developments of rockets, he invented launching rockets from ships. The phrase “by the rocket’s red glare,” coined by Francis Scott Key during the War of 1812, referred to Congreve rockets launched from British ships.
Konstantin E. Tsiolkovski, 1857 to 1935, is often said to be the father of modern rocketry, cosmonautics and human spaceflight.. He was a Russian immigrant from Poland. His rocket equation, based on Newton’s second law of motion, relates rocket engine exhaust velocity to the change in velocity of the vehicle itself. That equation is pure science and is among the rocket science he published in “Research into Interplanetary Space by Means of Rocket Power” that was published in 1903, the same year the Wright brothers achieved powered and controlled airplane flight. Tsiolkovski
advocated liquid propellant rocket engines, orbital space stations, solar energy, and colonization of the Solar System.
In the West, Robert H. Goddard, 1882 to 1945, is often called the “father of modern rocketry”. He built and flew the world’s first liquid propellant rocket on March 16,
1926. His work was less theoretical and more practical than that of Tsiolkovski.
In reality, Hermann Oberth, 1894 to 1989, was the most influential of the rocket scientists in the early twentieth century, and if there was a “father of modern rocketry” then it was probably him. Originally a Romanian he became a naturalized German citizen. His dissertation for the University of Heidelberg was rejected for being too speculative, but became the basis for his book Die Rakete zu den Planetanraumen (By Rocket to Space) that explained the mathematics of spaceflight and proposed practical rocket designs and space stations. That book was used as the basis of German rocket science which enabled the technologies of the V1 and V2 weapons.
300 trainloads of V2 rockets and parts were captured and shipped to the United States
along with the majority of the principal German rocket designers when WW2 ended in Europe. Most of the designers had decided to surrender to American – in preference to Russian – troops. The V2 became the basis of the intercontinental ballistic missile development programs of both Russia and America which led directly to their manned space programs.
Two names are important here when considering the American capture of V2 technology.
Wernher von Braun, 1912 to 1977, was one of the German rocket designers who went to America where he became a US citizen. An engineer who made use of rocket science, he was an important contributor to pre-war Germany’s rocket program, to the German V2 development, and was a leading advocate of America’s space program. He worked on the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, led the development team that launched Explorer 1, and was the chief architect and engineer of the Saturn V Moon rocket.
Fred Singer is most known here as being a leading – perhaps the greatest – opponent of the global warming scare. He was one of the American scientists who went to Germany and obtained the 300 trainloads of V2 rockets and parts America took to America at the end of WW2. A physical scientist, Fred worked to discover how rockets could be used to obtain scientific information; for example, he worked with Van Allen to discover the Radiation Belts. He was in charge of the project that created the first orbital weather satellites.
Fred Singer is a rocket scientist who would rightly be offended if anybody tried to claim he is not.
Richard
If I were in conversation with Mr. Fred Singer, or even if I had his email address, I should like to pose the following question:
In the vernacular, “rocket science” is very intellectually demanding, and a “rocket scientist” is intelligent to the point of genius.
Is there such a profession as “rocket scientist”, meaning one single professional group that is acquainted with all there is to know about launching a vehicle into space, or does it require a variety of professions, such as aeronautical engineers, jet propulsion engineers, astrophysicists, atmospheric physicists, and so on? Is there degree granting university which offers a programme so extensive and complex that graduates acquire every single one of the skills required for such a profession, and does this said institution offer a degree called “Bachelor of rocket science” or some such thing?
In context, Mr. Singer, are the skills, knowledge and abilities necessary to adequately the analyse Earth’s weather systems and their characteristics over millennia of geologic time (and therefore requiring a myriad of disciplines) similar in fact to the myriad of disciplines required to adequately operate a successful space programme?
karabar:
Being any type of scientists does not require a practitioner to have expertise in every part of the discipline; for example, not every chemist is familiar with all details of photochemistry.
I assure you that in conversations Fred Singer has said to me that he is a rocket scientist. And – knowing his history – I certainly agree that he is.
I am not willing to give his email address to an anonymous internet pop-up.
Richard