Burt Rutan on global warming

Burt Rutan is quite an amazing engineer who has designed original, efficient, unusual-looking, and record-breaking airplanes, some of which are not far from competing with NASA. Rutan has formed The Spaceship Company with Richard Branson.

But he is also a global warming lecturer. Rutan is not just an ordinary global warming skeptic who becomes important by inventing a new, crisp expletive for CAGW. He is actually giving talks based on a 95-slide presentation of the whole topic:

Burt Rutan on CAGW v4.0:

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PDF, PDF to HTML, PowerPoint

We appreciate Gene's viewpoints on science but one can say that Gene has been a scientist. It's comparably refreshing to see how an engineer who actually worked with engines :-) looks at the difference between science and engineering, especially when it comes to the responsibility and the frequency of errors.




The July 2010 presentation reviews a lot of material we are familiar with and some of it may be new for us. Amusingly enough, page 37 of the presentation contains a picture taken from this blog - the collection of 11 graphs of energy flux predicted by models that happen to be beaten by just 1 reality that insisted on the opposite sign.



The dark green background - #003322 or #113322, I never remember which of them I actually chose haha - is a welcome side effect of making the background colors coincide on TRF. This side effect sometimes forces you to realize that a picture was taken from this blog, e.g. in the case of this graph of Lindzen and Choi. ;-)

There are lots of useful "philosophical" summaries in the talk - especially about the reduced reliability resulting from contrived and complicated models and from the desire to aggressively sell a product. I recommend you to spend some time with the presentation. But let me copy this conclusion:

“The Alarmist (scientist, journalist, politician etc.) chooses to huddle with other alarmists inside an echo chamber, attacking messengers who arrive, but spends no time to carefully inspect the data that forms his opinions, nor to notice the reporting of fraud”

Burt Rutan, 2009

Thanks to Bill Zajc