Burt Rutan Joins The Ranks Of Active AGW Skeptics

Aviation pioneer and long-time flight test engineer Burt Rutan has begun making a public case against Anthropological Global Warming, or AGW, saying the data does not support a case for global warming, or climate change of any kind, caused by human activity.

In the presentation Rutan made twice at Oshkosh, he says man can measure the past, but cannot create a reliable computer model that will predict global temperatures in the future, and that warm periods are brief, not the natural state of the planet. If anything, he says "Warm periods are good, not bad. It would be beneficial to have more warming than present."

In the Powerpoint presentation used at Oshkosh (link provided below),and his accompanying notes, Rutan takes what he calls a test pilot and engineer's approach of data analysis to the available data on global warming, and finds it lacking. Some of the problems are very basic. A noted rise in global temperature, he says, corresponds directly with loss of many temperature recording stations abandoned when the Soviet Union collapsed, most of them in very cold climates. And deeper study of the data from ice core samples spanning over 400 thousand years shows brief warm periods, the current 12 thousand years being the most stable over the study, interspersed with lengthy periods of declining temperatures, with the total change between the two being about 12 degrees centigrade.

Rutan does not advocate abandoning alternative energy research, but he says his interest is in "technology, not tree hugging." His home in the desert uses high interior thermal mass and is sheltered by earth berms, making it very energy efficient. It also has "provisions for converting to self-sustaining (house and plug-in hybrid car) via adding wind generator and solar panels when it becomes cost effective to do so," according to the notes he provided.

Rutan notes that the nomenclature change from global warming to climate change came as scientists began to realize that the data didn't add up for AGW. He calls climate change "The worlds safest bet," and says to call climate change a crisis is "silly." Climates change all the time.

Rutan recommends the government drop its Climate Change Crisis and Cap and Trade legislation, saying the only real effect would be to make U.S. businesses less competitive in the global marketplace. He says the best way for money to be spent to protect the planet is research into a planetary defense system against asteroid strikes, "the only real extinction threat the planet has ever had and the only one in which Man can indeed use his intelligence and sweat to successfully defeat."

THE ACQUITTAL OF CARBON DIOXIDE
by Jeffrey A. Glassman, PhD

ABSTRACT:

"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere [historically] is the product of oceanic respiration due to the well-known but under-appreciated solubility pump. Carbon dioxide rises out of warm ocean waters where it is added to the atmosphere. There it is mixed with residual and accidental CO2, and circulated, to be absorbed into the sink of the cold ocean waters. Next the thermohaline circulation carries the CO2-rich sea water deep into the ocean. A millennium later it appears at the surface in warm waters, saturated by lower pressure and higher temperature, to be exhausted back into the atmosphere. Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation.

Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases. Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause. Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase.

If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere."

http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
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The graph above represents temperature and CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. It is the same exact data Al Gore and the rest of the man-made global warmers refer to. The blue line is temps, the red, CO2 levels. The deep valleys represent 4 separate glaciation/ice-age periods. Look carefully at this historical relationship between temps and CO2 levels (the present is on the right hand side of the graph) and keep in mind that Gore claims this data is the 'proof' that CO2 has warmed the earth in the past. But does the data indeed show this? Nope. In fact, rising CO2 levels all throughout this 400,000-year period actually *followed* temperature increases -lagging behind by an average of 800 years! So it couldn't have been CO2 that got Earth out of these past glaciations. Yet Gore continually and dishonestly claims otherwise. Furthermore, the subsequent CO2 level increases due to dissolved CO2 being released from warming oceans, never did lead to additional warming, the so-called "run-away greenhouse effect" that Al Gore and his friends keep warning us about. In short, there is little if any evidence that CO2 had ever led to increased warming, at least not when the levels were within 10-15 times of what they are today. -etl
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"The above chart shows the range of global temperature through the last 500 million years. There is no statistical correlation between the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the last 500 million years and the temperature record in this interval. In fact, one of the highest levels of carbon dioxide concentration occurred during a major ice age that occurred about 450 million years ago [Myr]. Carbon dioxide concentrations at that time were about 15 times higher than at present." [also see 180 million years ago, same thing happened]:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010405M
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So, greenhouse [effect] is all about carbon dioxide, right?

Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds [clouds of course aren't gas, but high level ones do act to trap heat from escaping, while low-lying cumulus clouds tend to reflect sunlight and thereby help cool the planet -etl]. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere.

In simple terms the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total tropospheric greenhouse effect (e.g., Freidenreich and Ramaswamy, 'Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models,' Journal of Geophysical Research 98 (1993):7255-7264).

The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other 'minor greenhouse gases.' As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.

http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
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Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System

Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many 'facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.

Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).

Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
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Water Vapor Confirmed As Major Player In Climate Change

ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2008) — Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117193013.htm

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