8 ms·

I still like Burt Rutan's take on the AGW question (http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Scien

by cpr 11y ago

I still like Burt Rutan's take on the AGW question (http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf). He looks at it as an engineer, using generally-accepted data. His conclusion is that the alarmists are wrong.

epistasis 11y ago
Wow, that slide presentation is a masterpiece in how to deceive engineers. He's not looking at it "as an engineer," he's looking at everything with preconceived notions and trying to cherry pick his way to his conclusion.
- cpr 11y ago
  That's fairly ad hominem. Can you give some examples?
  - platz 11y ago
    It's pretty obvious that there is a clear bias from the beginning, and the tone is revealing as well.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    Interesting, you find my comment to be fairly ad hominem but you don't the slide deck you shared? Basically all the "data" and arguments that he's presenting are cherry picked to be on the edge of plausibility, but as soon as you poke at them at all they fall part. It's really just a standard piece of denialist schlock. For example on slide 4 look at his plot and compare to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_in_IPCC_reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Wa... It's a bunch of canned and repeated arguments that are easily shot down, but doing each one takes so much time. It's like "debating" a creationist, shooting down an argument means that many more easily shot down arguments come right back up, with the denialist side somehow never loosing credibility while trying to assail the credibility of others. If somebody finds that slide deck interesting, please read other data too, it's a completely biased picture, meant to trick people. Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up.
    - hueving 11y ago
      >Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up. How could an organization dedicated to a topic filled with people who dedicated their life to said topic be trusted to have a balanced view of whether or not that topic has an impact? Just purely from a conflict of interest perspective, it seems similar to asking for a balanced view of religion from the 'international panel of priests and pastors'.
      - epistasis 11y ago
        That seems like an argument for getting programming best practices advice from an auto mechanic. Climate scientists are not dedicated to advancing the idea of anthropogenic climate change, they are dedicated to studying the climate, where ever that leads them. If this were not true, then some of the contrarian scientists in the field would have much stronger criticisms of the work. As it is, their criticisms are relegated to rather minor details, without any good rebuttals of the primary thrust. If you want to make the claim that the IPCC is not balanced on this, then there should be much stronger criticisms of the science in the IPCC, rather than the easily knocked down trivialities that appear in denialist memes.
      - HiLo 11y ago
        What? So these otherwise very intelligent people, don't see the flaw with discrediting their own profession for the sake of getting respect? You think that is what's going on?
  - kzhahou 11y ago
    No -- ad hominem is a personal attack unrelated to issue under discussion. Saying an author cherrypicked to arrive at a desired conclusion, is not that.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    The most obvious weakness in it is that he criticises numerous regression models (and presumably knows how to build one himself) and even sneers at the concept, but his own arguments are all based on simplistic "the line looks different during the sunspot activity period" generalisations. Which isn't going to impress people on here that work with messy datasets on a daily basis, and know that once you've acknowledged multiple uncorrelated factors impact the variables, the shape of the basic scatter plot doesn't tell you very much. The scaling of the "to inform, not to scare" graph to show "normal CO2 limits in a confined space" is particularly silly since afaik absolutely no climate scientist has ever speculated we're all about to suffocate from the additional carbon dioxide released. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to his argument that climate forecasts are an inexact science, humanity is perfectly capable of living at higher average global temperatures and engineers might be better focusing attention on structural adjustment problems (like flooding and regional disruption to crops). But this is a polemic rather than a more compelling approach to reading the figures. And the idea mooted at the end that airline certification levels of certainty should be applied to all public policy decisions is just... amusing.
mdpopescu 11y ago
The graph on page 10 is absolutely beautiful. I have discussed the same idea with others and I was told that the real 50 degrees difference between summer and winter is irrelevant while the 2 degrees increase in the average temperature over the next 100 years will be devastating. Having been told that a human construct (average) is more important than a real fact, I gave up. :)
XorNot 11y ago
So from slide 2 of that link: Note, the green life along the Nile river and the dead desert elsewhere. When co2 is greater in the atmosphere, plants need less water to thrive. When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole Near catastrophe when co2 declined to 180 ppm, since below 150 ppm plants, then animals die. If you promote a green healthy planet, then you should lobby for a co2-fertilized atmosphere, not a co2-starved atmosphere. If that's the argument you open with, then as an engineer you have missed the point entirely.
- Brakenshire 11y ago
  > When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole ... If you promote a green healthy planet, then you should lobby for a co2-fertilized atmosphere, not a co2-starved atmosphere. Genuinely embarrassing as a key argument. He neglects to mention that sea levels fluctuated 50-150m higher during the period of the dinosaurs! God knows how many major cities around the world are coastal. This is the effect on the San Francisco Bay Area of a 1.5m sea level rise plus 1m storm surge: http://sfist.com/2015/07/31/mapping_the_projected_8_foot_sea_le.php http://sfist.com/2015/07/31/mapping_the_projected_8_foot_sea...
  - gd1 11y ago
    What's genuinely embarrassing is that you think there is enough ice on the planet to raise sea levels 150m.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Clearly a typo for 150 cm.
      - Brakenshire 11y ago
        It's not a typo, historic changes in sea level are in the hundreds of meters, from over 100m below current levels (in the relatively recent history) up to a maximum of perhaps 200m. A lot of that is to do with shifts in geology - configurations in the continents, levels of continental shelfs etc, but there's about 75m of potential increases which are locked into ice-sheets, glaciers, etc, and/or dependent on thermal expansion. Of course, even under the most catastrophic scenarios seeing increases on that scale would take thousands, probably tens of thousands of years. I'm just trying to illustrate how absurd it is to say "oh yeah let's return to the climate in the Cretaceous, everything would be lovely".
pavlov 11y ago
What terrible arguments: The temperature trend is so slight that, were the global average temperature change which has taken place during the 20th and 21st centuries were to occur in an ordinary room, most of the people in the room would be unaware of it. Well, yes, people are bad at noticing gradually increasing temperatures. A room full of people can heat up from 23°C to 26°C without most people noticing. That has nothing to do with whether a global temperature increase of 3 degrees would be healthy for the planet.
- criddell 11y ago
  > That has nothing to do with whether a global temperature increase of 3 degrees would be healthy for the planet. Don't leave us hanging here!
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    It helps to think about temperature as what it really measures: the amount of energy stored in the system. A small room that increases by a few degrees is storing only slightly more energy. Humans won't really notice it. A global biosphere is a much larger volume, so a few degrees stores much more energy, compared to the human scale. And that energy is what powers our weather. Can you think of a weather system you would enjoy with more energy powering it? Stronger storms, stronger winds, greater temperature fluctuations, greater precipitation fluctuations, greater groundwater fluctuations, etc. Ultimately "the planet" will be just fine under those circumstances, but human society might suffer.
    - criddell 11y ago
      So, if we had the technology to do it, how many degrees should we cool the planet? Could we eliminate hurricanes and other catastrophic weather?
      - snowwrestler 11y ago
        The infrastructure of human society was built for the condition ranges of a certain climate. The current global warming trend is seen as bad right now because a) it's taking us outside that range, and b) it's preventable. Purposefully cooling us outside that range would also be bad, albeit in different ways.
dogecoinbase 11y ago
He looks at it as an engineer... Well, you're not wrong -- he's chosen a goal, and desperately tries to fit his processes to accommodate it. It's a shame he couldn't have tried looking at it as a scientist.
nmrm2 11y ago
His conclusion isn't that alarmists are wrong; his conclusion is that global warming would be a net good for humanity, that CFCs don't cause ozone depletion, and that DDT is actually A Good Thing. And the last two, despite being flagrantly unpopular opinions, are apparently so self-evident that they don't even require explication. And that's just in 2 slides. In general, there's a cogent argument to be made that some of the more extreme predictions people have made about the ultimate impact of global warming are maybe a little bit over-dramatic (and in fact, some prominant climate scientists called out Sanders for this). But this guy? Nutjob.
thieving_magpie 11y ago
Mate this is a pile of biased, self-aggrandizing, rambling shit. Love the justification of his methodology over the Scientific Method: • Not responsible for adequacy or value of product. • Frequently being wrong is not a problem. Whereas the engineer has to be concerned with: • Consequences if wrong (people die). Come on, dude.
drewrv 11y ago
I haven't read this whole thing but by just by skimming it I find all the usual denialist BS with some engineer hubris mixed in. There's the claim that CO2 isn't bad, it's needed for life. This is a common among denialists, ignoring the fact that lots of things which are needed for life are also unhealthy in large quantities. There's the claim that far back in the earths history CO2 levels were higher, ignoring the fact that the speed with which we are altering these levels is what's unprecedented. There's the claim that CO2 is such a small part of the atmosphere's composition that we have no need to worry, which I find hilarious because he's not an expert in atmospheric composition but the scientists he's trying to refute are. The whole "those silly scientists don't know how to interpret data" thing is a new spin on it though.
- vixen99 11y ago
  Never mind all this rhetoric. Where is the beef i.e., where is the data that you believe shows that global temperatures have been increasing more than would be reasonably expected by random natural variation? Here's an opportunity to demonstrate what fools the 'denialists' are and moreover win $100,000 into the bargain. http://www.informath.org/Contest1000.htm http://www.informath.org/Contest1000.htm
oberstein 11y ago
I'm a fan of: http://stanford.edu/~moore/Boon_To_Man.html http://stanford.edu/~moore/Boon_To_Man.html Near the end: "If mankind had to choose between a warmer or a cooler climate, humans, most other animals and, after adjustment, most plants would be better off with higher temperatures. Not all animals or plants would prosper under these conditions; many are adapted to the current weather and might have difficulty making the transition. Society might wish to help natural systems and various species adapt to warmer temperatures (or cooler, should that occur). Whether the climate will warm is far from certain; that it will change is unquestionable."

by cpr 11y ago

epistasis 11y ago

Wow, that slide presentation is a masterpiece in how to deceive engineers. He's not looking at it "as an engineer," he's looking at everything with preconceived notions and trying to cherry pick his way to his conclusion.

cpr 11y ago
That's fairly ad hominem. Can you give some examples?
- platz 11y ago
  It's pretty obvious that there is a clear bias from the beginning, and the tone is revealing as well.
- epistasis 11y ago
  Interesting, you find my comment to be fairly ad hominem but you don't the slide deck you shared? Basically all the "data" and arguments that he's presenting are cherry picked to be on the edge of plausibility, but as soon as you poke at them at all they fall part. It's really just a standard piece of denialist schlock. For example on slide 4 look at his plot and compare to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_in_IPCC_reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Wa... It's a bunch of canned and repeated arguments that are easily shot down, but doing each one takes so much time. It's like "debating" a creationist, shooting down an argument means that many more easily shot down arguments come right back up, with the denialist side somehow never loosing credibility while trying to assail the credibility of others. If somebody finds that slide deck interesting, please read other data too, it's a completely biased picture, meant to trick people. Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up.
  - hueving 11y ago
    >Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up. How could an organization dedicated to a topic filled with people who dedicated their life to said topic be trusted to have a balanced view of whether or not that topic has an impact? Just purely from a conflict of interest perspective, it seems similar to asking for a balanced view of religion from the 'international panel of priests and pastors'.
    - epistasis 11y ago
      That seems like an argument for getting programming best practices advice from an auto mechanic. Climate scientists are not dedicated to advancing the idea of anthropogenic climate change, they are dedicated to studying the climate, where ever that leads them. If this were not true, then some of the contrarian scientists in the field would have much stronger criticisms of the work. As it is, their criticisms are relegated to rather minor details, without any good rebuttals of the primary thrust. If you want to make the claim that the IPCC is not balanced on this, then there should be much stronger criticisms of the science in the IPCC, rather than the easily knocked down trivialities that appear in denialist memes.
    - HiLo 11y ago
      What? So these otherwise very intelligent people, don't see the flaw with discrediting their own profession for the sake of getting respect? You think that is what's going on?
- kzhahou 11y ago
  No -- ad hominem is a personal attack unrelated to issue under discussion. Saying an author cherrypicked to arrive at a desired conclusion, is not that.
- notahacker 11y ago
  The most obvious weakness in it is that he criticises numerous regression models (and presumably knows how to build one himself) and even sneers at the concept, but his own arguments are all based on simplistic "the line looks different during the sunspot activity period" generalisations. Which isn't going to impress people on here that work with messy datasets on a daily basis, and know that once you've acknowledged multiple uncorrelated factors impact the variables, the shape of the basic scatter plot doesn't tell you very much. The scaling of the "to inform, not to scare" graph to show "normal CO2 limits in a confined space" is particularly silly since afaik absolutely no climate scientist has ever speculated we're all about to suffocate from the additional carbon dioxide released. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to his argument that climate forecasts are an inexact science, humanity is perfectly capable of living at higher average global temperatures and engineers might be better focusing attention on structural adjustment problems (like flooding and regional disruption to crops). But this is a polemic rather than a more compelling approach to reading the figures. And the idea mooted at the end that airline certification levels of certainty should be applied to all public policy decisions is just... amusing.

mdpopescu 11y ago

The graph on page 10 is absolutely beautiful. I have discussed the same idea with others and I was told that the real 50 degrees difference between summer and winter is irrelevant while the 2 degrees increase in the average temperature over the next 100 years will be devastating. Having been told that a human construct (average) is more important than a real fact, I gave up. :)

XorNot 11y ago

So from slide 2 of that link: Note, the green life along the Nile river and the dead desert elsewhere. When co2 is greater in the atmosphere, plants need less water to thrive. When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole Near catastrophe when co2 declined to 180 ppm, since below 150 ppm plants, then animals die. If you promote a green healthy planet, then you should lobby for a co2-fertilized atmosphere, not a co2-starved atmosphere. If that's the argument you open with, then as an engineer you have missed the point entirely.

Brakenshire 11y ago
> When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole ... If you promote a green healthy planet, then you should lobby for a co2-fertilized atmosphere, not a co2-starved atmosphere. Genuinely embarrassing as a key argument. He neglects to mention that sea levels fluctuated 50-150m higher during the period of the dinosaurs! God knows how many major cities around the world are coastal. This is the effect on the San Francisco Bay Area of a 1.5m sea level rise plus 1m storm surge: http://sfist.com/2015/07/31/mapping_the_projected_8_foot_sea_le.php http://sfist.com/2015/07/31/mapping_the_projected_8_foot_sea...
- gd1 11y ago
  What's genuinely embarrassing is that you think there is enough ice on the planet to raise sea levels 150m.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Clearly a typo for 150 cm.
    - Brakenshire 11y ago
      It's not a typo, historic changes in sea level are in the hundreds of meters, from over 100m below current levels (in the relatively recent history) up to a maximum of perhaps 200m. A lot of that is to do with shifts in geology - configurations in the continents, levels of continental shelfs etc, but there's about 75m of potential increases which are locked into ice-sheets, glaciers, etc, and/or dependent on thermal expansion. Of course, even under the most catastrophic scenarios seeing increases on that scale would take thousands, probably tens of thousands of years. I'm just trying to illustrate how absurd it is to say "oh yeah let's return to the climate in the Cretaceous, everything would be lovely".

pavlov 11y ago

What terrible arguments: The temperature trend is so slight that, were the global average temperature change which has taken place during the 20th and 21st centuries were to occur in an ordinary room, most of the people in the room would be unaware of it. Well, yes, people are bad at noticing gradually increasing temperatures. A room full of people can heat up from 23°C to 26°C without most people noticing. That has nothing to do with whether a global temperature increase of 3 degrees would be healthy for the planet.

criddell 11y ago
> That has nothing to do with whether a global temperature increase of 3 degrees would be healthy for the planet. Don't leave us hanging here!
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  It helps to think about temperature as what it really measures: the amount of energy stored in the system. A small room that increases by a few degrees is storing only slightly more energy. Humans won't really notice it. A global biosphere is a much larger volume, so a few degrees stores much more energy, compared to the human scale. And that energy is what powers our weather. Can you think of a weather system you would enjoy with more energy powering it? Stronger storms, stronger winds, greater temperature fluctuations, greater precipitation fluctuations, greater groundwater fluctuations, etc. Ultimately "the planet" will be just fine under those circumstances, but human society might suffer.
  - criddell 11y ago
    So, if we had the technology to do it, how many degrees should we cool the planet? Could we eliminate hurricanes and other catastrophic weather?
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      The infrastructure of human society was built for the condition ranges of a certain climate. The current global warming trend is seen as bad right now because a) it's taking us outside that range, and b) it's preventable. Purposefully cooling us outside that range would also be bad, albeit in different ways.

dogecoinbase 11y ago

He looks at it as an engineer... Well, you're not wrong -- he's chosen a goal, and desperately tries to fit his processes to accommodate it. It's a shame he couldn't have tried looking at it as a scientist.

nmrm2 11y ago

His conclusion isn't that alarmists are wrong; his conclusion is that global warming would be a net good for humanity, that CFCs don't cause ozone depletion, and that DDT is actually A Good Thing. And the last two, despite being flagrantly unpopular opinions, are apparently so self-evident that they don't even require explication. And that's just in 2 slides. In general, there's a cogent argument to be made that some of the more extreme predictions people have made about the ultimate impact of global warming are maybe a little bit over-dramatic (and in fact, some prominant climate scientists called out Sanders for this). But this guy? Nutjob.

thieving_magpie 11y ago

Mate this is a pile of biased, self-aggrandizing, rambling shit. Love the justification of his methodology over the Scientific Method: • Not responsible for adequacy or value of product. • Frequently being wrong is not a problem. Whereas the engineer has to be concerned with: • Consequences if wrong (people die). Come on, dude.

drewrv 11y ago

I haven't read this whole thing but by just by skimming it I find all the usual denialist BS with some engineer hubris mixed in. There's the claim that CO2 isn't bad, it's needed for life. This is a common among denialists, ignoring the fact that lots of things which are needed for life are also unhealthy in large quantities. There's the claim that far back in the earths history CO2 levels were higher, ignoring the fact that the speed with which we are altering these levels is what's unprecedented. There's the claim that CO2 is such a small part of the atmosphere's composition that we have no need to worry, which I find hilarious because he's not an expert in atmospheric composition but the scientists he's trying to refute are. The whole "those silly scientists don't know how to interpret data" thing is a new spin on it though.

vixen99 11y ago
Never mind all this rhetoric. Where is the beef i.e., where is the data that you believe shows that global temperatures have been increasing more than would be reasonably expected by random natural variation? Here's an opportunity to demonstrate what fools the 'denialists' are and moreover win $100,000 into the bargain. http://www.informath.org/Contest1000.htm http://www.informath.org/Contest1000.htm

oberstein 11y ago

I'm a fan of: http://stanford.edu/~moore/Boon_To_Man.html http://stanford.edu/~moore/Boon_To_Man.html Near the end: "If mankind had to choose between a warmer or a cooler climate, humans, most other animals and, after adjustment, most plants would be better off with higher temperatures. Not all animals or plants would prosper under these conditions; many are adapted to the current weather and might have difficulty making the transition. Society might wish to help natural systems and various species adapt to warmer temperatures (or cooler, should that occur). Whether the climate will warm is far from certain; that it will change is unquestionable."