An Engineer’s Critique of Global Warming ‘Science’ (2011) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

An Engineer’s Critique of Global Warming ‘Science’ (2011) [pdf]

burtrutan.com

28 pointsphkahler22 comments

He offers very little charity to the subject of his critique and dives right into reactionary rhetoric. I waited patiently for the slide with the lizard-people but it didn't come. Sadly, it seems, this whole boon-doggle has been caused by grant-seeking academics, ratings-obsessed media, and opportunistic eco-political activists. Too tame for my liking.

I'm not involved enough in climate science to know one way or another if the IPCC's findings are biased. However I like to believe that the simple solution is the answer: that a team of hundreds (thousands?) of highly-specialized people have staked their lives on this project. From talking with my acquaintances in various science fields I find it improbable that people do it for the money. You could have a more comfortable working environment writing Javascript web apps to share photos with strangers. That leaves out grant-seeking academics -- hardly pay dirt. Ratings obsessed media? Even Al Gore's stunts pale in comparison to the deluge of profits from block buster films. Weather is a good scare for news but murderers and corrupt officials tend to make the prime time. That leaves opportunistic activists?

I guess? Seems unlikely that they'd have been able to orchestrate a conspiracy of this scale on their own simply to get their message out. Fudging ICPP data from hundreds (thousands?) of experiments alone would be rather difficult to do as an activist on the outside...

but what about on the inside? Might make a flop of a movie but I doubt it could be true.

All we have here are some lofty claims that science is wrong and a lone test-engineer has found the truth: climate change is just a scare tactic used by the Alarmists to fool you into... buying electric cars, trying to use less energy, and recycling? I don't get it.

Just a lone test-engineer? Sorry to be a bit rude but it does appear you're too lazy to bother to look at the arguments. There are plenty of people with distinguished careers in science whose sceptical positions are very well argued. There's Richard Lindzen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen and Judith Curry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry (chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology) for instance but there are many more if you look. Two websites to check are http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and http://bishophill.squarespace.com/. Both sites invite counter-arguments from 'warmists' whereas you'll find it difficult if not nigh impossible to post a sceptical comment on a non-sceptic site. That tells you a lot about how the science is conducted.

If you want to skip the science and move on to the economics try this one. Billions of dollars are being spent world wide on the basis of lousy climate models in so-called climate effect mitigation. However let us assume they correctly predict the future. The expenditure is demonstrably insane - there is no other word to describe it. Countless billions to lower temperatures by literally immeasurable fractions of a degree! http://topher.com.au/50-to-1-video-project/. And would you like to argue that the stupendous flow of cash doesn't influence anyone? That has to be a fairy story.

Watts Up with That is an instructive example, really.

Mr. Watts really tipped his hand a few years back. He had been banging the drums on insisting that the measured increase in low atmospheric temperatures had been an artifact of the heat island effect. He insisted that if we take a closer look into the techniques climate scientists use to correct for the heat island effect, we would find that mean surface temperatures had been drastically overestimated. He worked together with some folks to come up with a plan of attack to do just that, and off to the races we went.

So what did he do when the numbers came back and it turned out that climatologists had actually been overcorrecting for the heat island effect, with the result being that the study supported the exact opposite of his hypothesis? He moved the goalpost, and carried on.

The whole episode really wasn't much different from what we see with other junk scientists who've proven similarly capable of supporting an untenable position in the face of overwhelming evidence on the subject of the supposed vaccine-autism link, or whether or not dogs have ESP. Any of these propositions may be true; in principle any scientific consensus can be overturned (and it has happened in the past). But anyone who wishes to do so needs to be extremely scrupulous in how they assemble and present their arguments. Folks like Lindzen, Watts, and Rutan simply haven't proven themselves to be up to the task. Those who would like to challenge the scientific consensus on scientific grounds rather than the court of public opinion (which is influenced by the Dunning-Kruger effect more than evidence) would do well to try and find more capable spokespeople.

Let's suppose I am lazy (I am, most of the time) but that I actually did read every single slide (I did). What do you find wrong with my analysis?

"Sorry, but..." is just an excuse to be rude and not feel guilty about it. You don't have to sugar coat it. If you don't want to be rude then don't say rude things. Just say what you mean and get on with it.

The only statement closely resembling a premise is the question on slide 7: "Is 'Climate Change' just another over-blown scare?" The other 91 slides go on to support his foregone conclusion.

He offers few, if any, citations. No counter-evidence. He sketches on blurry graphs without explaining his data or methods. He takes quotes from other people to prove his point without giving the context from which they were taken. He even quotes himself a few times. He uses an imaginary taxonomy of Alarmists and skeptics -- guess which one is virtuous? Rutan may be a brilliant aviation engineer but he is not persuasive in his arguments against climate science.

The problem climate "skeptics" have is not one of a dominant conspiracy. It's over-whelming evidence.

I am increasingly of the view that we need publications for a lay audience that focus on debate between experts. While an opinion piece can seem reasonable on its own, it may be full of errors that are easily highlighted by an expert. However, popular publications today focus on publishing the opinions of well-known figures, and if there is scrutiny of their views it typically appears in a different publication. While this approach gives the non-expert reader a warm and fuzzy feeling of being informed, they may worse off than if they had read nothing at all.

Unfortunately one of the skills experts develop is the ability to detect bullshit arguments. It is difficult to convey skepticism to a lay audience.

One of the red flags this Rutan thing immediately sets off is that it is INCREDIBLY long, and despite that, doesn't provide any sense of what the structure of the argument it is providing will be.

Does he dispute the data that scientists have collected? Does he dispute the analyses? On what basis? Can he attribute the effects the scientists are pointing to to other causes? Does he simply think that the effects don't matter?

The main thing that's clear from all of his graphs is that he thinks that there's a lot of "scare tactics" going on.

But the fact that this thing is 100 pages long and doesn't appear to have any structure should trigger alarm bells by itself.

It does have some structure to it. It seems he leads with an introduction to try to give himself some credibility (engineer, done solar farms, energy efficient housing, drove an ev). If you go to page 11, he has a list of 5 points he goes through and refutes.

I thought it was interesting that he leads with a 150ppm argument. He basically states that increasing CO2 saved us from certain doom.

Interestingly, I don't hear anyone here refuting his primary point so it must be too new for realclimate.org to have a page giving marching orders to the drones. Mostly all I see is sarcasm and name calling... ie. Quality comments in league with Yahoo news and YouTube.

I'm glad this didn't make it to the front page. It's pretty off topic for this site. It doesn't really belong on hacker news.

OP here. I'm kinda glad it didn't make the front page too, but some stuff from the other side has made it there so I figured what the heck. I find the comments here on HN interesting - attack on him for length of presentation, failure to address ocean acidity, not being a climate scientist (not in the club, so screw him) and such are mostly what you get anywhere else. The guy presents data, but nobody talks about the data - as usual. I would say the HN comments are better than the internet at at large, but not as much better as I had hoped.

A good place for the non-specialist, but mathematically aware, to start is a basic energy balance model: http://puzlet.com/m/b00gf . (Disclosure: I am an engineer; I wrote the visualization.). By all means, dig into the data and reports, but I personally felt much more comfortable with the whole area once I understood the basic physics and sensitivity to the main parameters.

I find his engineering approach interesting, if heretical. He seems to dislike scientists as they have no skin in the game:

"The focus is on an Engineering Approach – where data are critical and there are consequences for being wrong; not the Scientist approach – where a theory is the product and it can be right or wrong without repercussions."

It's amazing how often the cranks and pseudoscientists in math, evolution, 9/11 conspiracy-theories, and global warming turn out to be engineers.

> Carbon Dioxide content is very small, invisible on a bar chart.

Anyone raising the point that "CO2 is only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere" immediately makes me suspicious. The implication, I guess, is that because it is a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, CO2 can't possibly be that important.

But of course every plant, every animal, and every person you know is made out of carbon that was very recently atmospheric CO2. So it's at least a little important.

And if someone is .0001% ricin, they are dead. A few parts per billion turn a crystal of silicon into a semiconductor. A dosage of 0.05% chromium turns a crystal of aluminum oxide into a ruby. So even small chemical changes can have a big effect.

Anybody with knowledge and evidence to answer a couple of questions from a very non-expert that were raised in my mind after reading the pdf and then the comments here?

1) It is the statement in the paper true that CO2 loses it's warming effect as concentration goes up?

2) Although I'm fuzzy on the warming, I'm pretty convinced we are killing our oceans. Still a little fuzzy on the exact mechanism though. If the oceans are acidifying from atmospheric CO2 (as opposed to fertilizer runoff or some such) is there evidence of this problem earlier in our planet's history when CO2 levels were much higher?

These are sincere questions hoping for informed answers.

Hey look, another climate change denialist who doesn't mention the fact that we are measurably acidifying the oceans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

Humans are releasing enough CO2 into the atmosphere that is being absorbed by the oceans as carbonic acid and killing ocean life.

A DJ's investigation of denialist "critique" etc.

He gives the "outlawing DDT killed millions" canard, and on the same slide claims the ozone hole was not due to CFCs, but I didn't see anything about vaccines or birth certificates.

> claims the ozone hole was not due to CFCs

Was there any even halfway plausible evidence for this in 2001?

The only things I can find on this are in 2007, there was some indication that the Cl2O2 photolysis rate was much lower than expected. But that appears to have been resolved in 2009.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090507/full/news.2009.456.ht...

The entertaining thing is ddt was not outlawed for the purposes of mosquito control. it was only outlawed from agricultural use.

We're posting things on climate science now?

So here we have one not a climate scientist and it's been linked once, so I guess I'll post the relevant sections from the IPCC fifth assessment report as many times in number as there are contributors. I'll cap it at 30 because I like misrepresenting scientific consensus.

This comment would have to be about 9 times longer, but that'd be unfair to the other commentators in here. That said, I've read bits of the IPCC report, and it's quite a good read. More people should read it.

Please don't do this.

You've got to be kidding me. Really?!

How about we get a climate scientist's critique of the Swift "language" while we're at it? Or have a CEO tell us how that change to their product should be "simple".

Let's let the experts do their jobs, ok.

I thought this was more of a data analyst looking at data. He does have harsh words of the other side, but if you've ever heard him speak he does the same with his peers in aerospace.

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