Burt Rutan: An Engineer's Critique of Global Warming 'Science'
rps3.com
rps3.com
He's got a lot of really bad arguments. His "Modern Human-Extinction Scares" slide is an ad-hominem at best. The very next slide is a blatant appeal to authority (in himself). And the very slide after that basically says "Scientists are stupid and get to be wrong a lot". And then he goes into the "CO2 is good for plants, so nothing we do with it could possibly be bad" gripe.
And the "this chart is intended to Inform, not Scare"? I've seen less biased charts from James Inhofe. And apparently, the decrease in deaths from lightning in the US is proof global warming isn't causing an increase in disastrous weather.
I expected more from someone of his background. With opponents this stupid, it's no wonder climate change is generally accepted. I'm generally inclined to agree with the general premise that while the earth is warming, there's no strong evidence it is doing so catastrophically as a result of human interventions. But I'm ashamed to say such a thing in the face of such a dreadful slide deck.
This is basically a nice collection of the arguments of the anti-global-warming crowd, not that well structured or anything but worth flipping through the slides at least.
I LOL'd at page 77, the trend-graph of seawater rise projections.
I doubt there is the evidence to support the twin claims that 1) a program of some sort could change the temperature trend and 2) humans would benefit from changing it.
I suspect that to the extent that humans have changed global trends, a large portion of it has to do with water vapor from our vast increase in agricultural irrigation and diversion. It is probably not possible to address that without starving a lot of people.
In fact, I think that inspite of any warming effect, we probably should be increasing the amount of water diversion and storage. If the water that is currently washing away whole towns in Australia could be stored somewhere or diverted into the desert, the payoff in world food prices and economy would be large. Those are the types of huge projects that typically can only be done by national or even international organizations, and if everyone is meeting in Copenhagen or whereever to discuss huge amounts of international money, that's what they should be talking about.
The fossil fuels are from old plants, the plants took the CO2 out of the air and turned it into carbon-based biomass via photosynthesis.
A question I don't have the answer to - at that time when all that CO2 was still in the air, what was the CO2 concentration and what was the temperature? And if the two are causally related, would we be OK if the Earth reverted to that state?
A flippant point... would someone like Burt Rutan whose life's mission is to build innovative aircraft running on fossil fuels be OK with the notion that fossil fuels were messing up the planet?