I still like Burt Rutan's take on the AGW question (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.
He looks at it as an engineer, using generally-accepted data. His conclusion is that the alarmists are wrong.
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.
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...
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".
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.
Don't leave us hanging here!
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.
Purposefully cooling us outside that range would also be bad, albeit in different ways.
The rate of change matters too, because people do migrate and refresh their infrastructure. If the rate of change is equal to, or less than, our migration and infrastructure rates, then we can adapt without much additional cost or social strife. Right now, it's predicted to be quite a bit faster. Edit: because of our own activities that are causing warming.
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.
Here's an opportunity to demonstrate what fools the 'denialists' are and moreover win $100,000 into the bargain.
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_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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.