But what does he know ?
David
Burt Rutan thinks AGW is BS
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ravingdave
- Posts: 650
- Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2007 2:41 am
Recently, he was misquoted in a magazine interview: he was said to believe aliens built them.mrflora wrote:Burt Rutan also believes that aliens built the pyramids.
Regards,
M.R.F.
"I told them that I had spent half an hour alone in the King's chamber of the Great Pyramid," Rutan explains. From his engineering perspective, his conclusions differed from what Egyptologists said.
"I just believe that we are yet to learn what technologies they had to assemble these perfectly fitting stones that high up in the King's chamber of the Great Pyramid."
What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
I notice he shares the climate skeptic's tendency towards schizophrenia. He simultaneously states;
1) There's no proof that global warming is a happening
2) The increased global temperatures would be good rather than bad.
In anycase this isn't a case of overhype global warming and people die. Its a case of ignore global warming and people could die. Reducing CO2 emmissions is a reasonable precautionary meassure.
Regarding temperature change being good, it really depends on what timescale we're taking about. A slow increase in temperature of a few degrees over 10,000 years might well be good a rapid increase in temperature in 100 years by the same ammount could be catastrophic.
Rising sea-levels won't flood that much of the Earth's surface, its just that 1/2 the world's population lives on the bits that will be flooded. The average turnover of house construction is about 100 years. If sealevels rose significantly in 50 years it would be an absolute disaster.
So far there we have a historical correlation between CO2 and rising temperatures, we've also learnt enough about methane hydrates and positive feedback from the reduced albedo of melting ice to get worried. As I said before the burden of proof is on the skeptics to show there isn't a problem.
The Earth is a complex self-regulating system and we don't understand what the climatological effects of perturbing it will be. We known we're emmitting enough CO2 to significantly change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, unless were sure that this is safe we should stop at the earliest convenient opportunity.
1) There's no proof that global warming is a happening
2) The increased global temperatures would be good rather than bad.
In anycase this isn't a case of overhype global warming and people die. Its a case of ignore global warming and people could die. Reducing CO2 emmissions is a reasonable precautionary meassure.
Regarding temperature change being good, it really depends on what timescale we're taking about. A slow increase in temperature of a few degrees over 10,000 years might well be good a rapid increase in temperature in 100 years by the same ammount could be catastrophic.
Rising sea-levels won't flood that much of the Earth's surface, its just that 1/2 the world's population lives on the bits that will be flooded. The average turnover of house construction is about 100 years. If sealevels rose significantly in 50 years it would be an absolute disaster.
So far there we have a historical correlation between CO2 and rising temperatures, we've also learnt enough about methane hydrates and positive feedback from the reduced albedo of melting ice to get worried. As I said before the burden of proof is on the skeptics to show there isn't a problem.
The Earth is a complex self-regulating system and we don't understand what the climatological effects of perturbing it will be. We known we're emmitting enough CO2 to significantly change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, unless were sure that this is safe we should stop at the earliest convenient opportunity.
Expalain how those statements are mutually exclusive.jmc wrote:I notice he shares the climate skeptic's tendency towards schizophrenia. He simultaneously states;
1) There's no proof that global warming is a happening
2) The increased global temperatures would be good rather than bad.
Killing off a billion or three humans might work as well. Which draconian reductions in CO2 output in the time frames imagined just might produce. You can never be too precautionary.In anycase this isn't a case of overhype global warming and people die. Its a case of ignore global warming and people could die. Reducing CO2 emmissions is a reasonable precautionary meassure.
Regarding temperature change being good, it really depends on what timescale we're taking about. A slow increase in temperature of a few degrees over 10,000 years might well be good a rapid increase in temperature in 100 years by the same ammount could be catastrophic.
Yes it could be. So far the variations in temperature seem to be in the +/- 1 deg C or less range. And such fluctuations are normal over 100 year or longer time scales.
So far the highest rate estimated from adjusted data is about 3.3 mm a year. About a foot a century. Even triple that would be easy to handle.Rising sea-levels won't flood that much of the Earth's surface, its just that 1/2 the world's population lives on the bits that will be flooded. The average turnover of house construction is about 100 years. If sealevels rose significantly in 50 years it would be an absolute disaster.
There is a correlation all right. Sometimes CO2 rise is coincident or slightly before temp rise. (according to ice cores) Sometimes it follows by 200 to 800 years. Seems like solid proof (of something) to me.So far there we have a historical correlation between CO2 and rising temperatures, we've also learnt enough about methane hydrates and positive feedback from the reduced albedo of melting ice to get worried. As I said before the burden of proof is on the skeptics to show there isn't a problem.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that the money wouldn't be better spent on large meteor protection or defusing the Yellowstone Caldera. Or advanced agriculture or fusion research or water purification or any number of really good things.
Talking to the hand is a waste of time. You will get better results talking to India and China.The Earth is a complex self-regulating system and we don't understand what the climatological effects of perturbing it will be. We known we're emmitting enough CO2 to significantly change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, unless were sure that this is safe we should stop at the earliest convenient opportunity.
Plants thrive at CO2 concentrations of 5,000 ppm. However humans have some trouble at those levels and above. I say keep it below 1,500 ppm. That is a nice compromise between plants and animals. Plants deserve our chemical love.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
A) The AGW hypothesis states that the activities of human beings are causing global warming. If your arguing against the theory that humans are causing global warming, its irrelevant whether a temperature rise would be good or bad.MSimon wrote:A) Expalain how those statements are mutually exclusive.jmc wrote:I notice he shares the climate skeptic's tendency towards schizophrenia. He simultaneously states;
1) There's no proof that global warming is a happening
2) The increased global temperatures would be good rather than bad.
B) Killing off a billion or three humans might work as well. Which draconian reductions in CO2 output in the time frames imagined just might produce. You can never be too precautionary.In anycase this isn't a case of overhype global warming and people die. Its a case of ignore global warming and people could die. Reducing CO2 emmissions is a reasonable precautionary meassure.
Regarding temperature change being good, it really depends on what timescale we're taking about. A slow increase in temperature of a few degrees over 10,000 years might well be good a rapid increase in temperature in 100 years by the same ammount could be catastrophic.
C)Yes it could be. So far the variations in temperature seem to be in the +/- 1 deg C or less range. And such fluctuations are normal over 100 year or longer time scales.
c)So far the highest rate estimated from adjusted data is about 3.3 mm a year. About a foot a century. Even triple that would be easy to handle.Rising sea-levels won't flood that much of the Earth's surface, its just that 1/2 the world's population lives on the bits that will be flooded. The average turnover of house construction is about 100 years. If sealevels rose significantly in 50 years it would be an absolute disaster.
D)There is a correlation all right. Sometimes CO2 rise is coincident or slightly before temp rise. (according to ice cores) Sometimes it follows by 200 to 800 years. Seems like solid proof (of something) to me.So far there we have a historical correlation between CO2 and rising temperatures, we've also learnt enough about methane hydrates and positive feedback from the reduced albedo of melting ice to get worried. As I said before the burden of proof is on the skeptics to show there isn't a problem.
E)The burden of proof is on you to prove that the money wouldn't be better spent on large meteor protection or defusing the Yellowstone Caldera. Or advanced agriculture or fusion research or water purification or any number of really good things.
F)Talking to the hand is a waste of time. You will get better results talking to India and China.The Earth is a complex self-regulating system and we don't understand what the climatological effects of perturbing it will be. We known we're emmitting enough CO2 to significantly change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, unless were sure that this is safe we should stop at the earliest convenient opportunity.
G)Plants thrive at CO2 concentrations of 5,000 ppm. However humans have some trouble at those levels and above. I say keep it below 1,500 ppm. That is a nice compromise between plants and animals. Plants deserve our chemical love.
Arguing that a temperature rise would be good just demonstrates that you aren't actually all that confident we aren't causing global warming.
B) Noone's suggesting killing off billions of human beings! The first steps are likely to be relatively gentle and simply result in a replacement of a relatively small fraction of our CO2 generating infrastructure with CO2 free energy generating technology.
In addition to that a carbon tax will likely result in better building design standards (passive housing) that will save money in the long term.
I doubt cap and trade will become Draconian unless we see temperatures rise by another 2 or 3 degrees.
C) The worry of rapidly rising temperatures and sea-level depends on positive feedback suddenly "turning on" a chain of effects that cause a rapid acceleration or that global demand rises rapidly causing our CO2 emmissionsto accelerate aswell, or that we run out of oil and gas and switch to coal and tar sands that cause a 50%-100% increase in the ammount of CO2 emmitted per unit utility produced or that natures carbon sinks become saturated and cease to absorb 1/2 of all man-made CO2 or a mixture of all of them.
D) Its not solid proof, its about 50-50 whether CO2 emmission will cause catastrophic global warming or whether the world's carbon sinks absorb it or non-linear negative feedback cycles kick in to reduce the multiplier effect.
50-50 isn't the kind of chance that I want to take on a global catastrophy.
E) Meteor protection? I think there's sufficient statistically evidence to show the chances of a catastrophic meteor strike are very low. If it didn't happen over the past 100,000 years its probably not going to happen in tthe next 100 (which is about how long it will take to decarbonize our economy.)
You might have a point about the Yellow stone caldera, volcanic explosions took out Krakatoa happened 100 years ago, Mount St. Helens exploded a few decades ago and a volcano took out the Minoans. There's also that tsunami that took out several 100,000 people.
Another thing you might want to worry about is space weather taking out the world's electricty grid, I believe a plasmoid strong enough to do that hit the Earth only 150 years ago, fortunately we did have a significant grid back then.
We already have water purification, its just a matter of implementing it more widely which could be done relativelty cheaply even while tackling global warming, desalination would be good though, but that consumes huge ammounts of energy and would massively increase demand for it so developing sustanable energy sources
Carbon trading would temporarily raise the energy prices of carbon producing sources compared with those that don't emit CO2, a side effect of this would likely be more funding for nuclear fusion. (Incidentally most nuclear fusion scientist are AGW/Energy supplies running out alarmists)
F) In case you weren't aware I'm not a diplomat by profession. Once carbon free technology undercuts fossil fuels in price, India and China will sit up and take notice. (Which is why I'm against carbon sequestration)
G) Messing around with complex systems you don't understand and can't afford to break isn't a good idea. That's why lab experiments are always made as small as possible.
The early Earth global warming problem has been solved. It was carbonyl sulfide -- not CO2.
So, as long as we don't massively reduce the oxygen content of the Earth we should be fine.
C) There's no such thing as "catastrophic" warming. Worst case, some people have to move inland (and that's unlikely because Antarctica will never melt). There, is, however, such a thing as catastrophic cooling, which could kill billions and destroy human civilization. So even if AGW has some merit, which is unlikely, it isn't necessarily a good idea to reduce emissions (see point A above).
D) More like a 1% chance of moderate consequences.
E) Meteors are a a real and actual threat, unlike CO2 which is speculative and probably wrong anyway. More than half the world population has no interest in the enviro-scaremongering AGW effort so you probably won't be decarbonizing the world economy.
F) That will be nice, be sure to stop back in 20 - 50 years with that miraculous new tech. Meanwhile, China is building a new coal plant every week.
G) And yet AGW proponents are proposing doing just that. See C above.
So, as long as we don't massively reduce the oxygen content of the Earth we should be fine.
A) No, this is basic risk management theory -- a given chance of catastrophe is much worse that the same chance of nothing much. If you think there is a 10% AGW is happening, then your response must be dictated by how bad that outcome would be.A) The AGW hypothesis states that the activities of human beings are causing global warming. If your arguing against the theory that humans are causing global warming, its irrelevant whether a temperature rise would be good or bad.
Some are. It has been suggested that population be reduced to a "sustainable" billion or so.B) Noone's suggesting killing off billions of human beings!
C) There's no such thing as "catastrophic" warming. Worst case, some people have to move inland (and that's unlikely because Antarctica will never melt). There, is, however, such a thing as catastrophic cooling, which could kill billions and destroy human civilization. So even if AGW has some merit, which is unlikely, it isn't necessarily a good idea to reduce emissions (see point A above).
D) More like a 1% chance of moderate consequences.
E) Meteors are a a real and actual threat, unlike CO2 which is speculative and probably wrong anyway. More than half the world population has no interest in the enviro-scaremongering AGW effort so you probably won't be decarbonizing the world economy.
F) That will be nice, be sure to stop back in 20 - 50 years with that miraculous new tech. Meanwhile, China is building a new coal plant every week.
G) And yet AGW proponents are proposing doing just that. See C above.
Actually, most fusion scientists are pimping for government hand-outs and will mouth any politically correct jibberish that will improve their chances of getting one. Even folks who have shown themselves to be steadfastly anti AGW in this forum have suggested Polywell as an antidote to AGW to acheive full funding.jmc wrote: ...(Incidentally most nuclear fusion scientist are AGW/Energy supplies running out alarmists)
I think economies come under the rubric of complex systems you don't understand and can't afford to break.G) Messing around with complex systems you don't understand and can't afford to break isn't a good idea. That's why lab experiments are always made as small as possible.
And as long as we are talking precautionary principle - how about ice ages? I hear the development of plants that can grow under ice is going slow.
If we are really into precautions and CO2 is in fact significant we need to burn as much as we can to prevent the next ice age. After all we are due. And possibly over due.
Longer growing seasons and faster plant growth can be adapted to.
Here is a movie on adaptations.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... nomic.html
BTW I do agree that if the alternatives give us economic gains we should use them. So far they produce only economic losses and some knowledge on how to integrate them into the economic system. Is the knowledge worth the economic costs? Maybe. So far the costs are low. Galling but low. However, with ever more mandates the costs will escalate.
I think it would be good to reduce solar and wind subsidies to zero over ten years. Such a move has the advantage of moving us down the cost curve rapidly i.e. to maintain and grow markets a learning curve of .90 per year or better would be required.
Mandates are one of the least efficient ways (and not the fastest) of moving a product down the learning curve. They also destroy capital. So do new technologies. Only the market can find out what the correct rate of change is.
So what would I do? Every two years the US government should buy a three hundred wind turbines (from 3 mfgrs) rated at 1.41X or more of the nameplate rating of the previous buy. First buy at 3.0 MW. In 12 years we would be up to 12 MW (peak).
If we assume no cost decline the total cost for the turbines at $1 a watt (peak) total cost about $10.1 billion.
Now suppose the costs come down at a rate consistent with both electrical generation history from 1900 to 1950 and wind power history - i.e. a doubling of plant size lowers the capital requirements per watt of capacity by .66.
Then the total costs comes to: about $6.1 billion.
At the end of all that you have 10 GW (peak) capacity with a base load capacity of about 2 GW. And most importantly - production capacity for 12 MW turbines.
It may be worth it to go one or two more cycles if engineers conclude further increases in capacity can be designed and safely installed with commensurate increases in productivity.
And while that is going on: lower subsidies to zero. That would get us to a significant industry that could stand on its own. No mandates required.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
It wasn't me. In fact I see AGW as a hazard if it proves false and have said so.KitemanSA wrote:Actually, most fusion scientists are pimping for government hand-outs and will mouth any politically correct jibberish that will improve their chances of getting one. Even folks who have shown themselves to be steadfastly anti AGW in this forum have suggested Polywell as an antidote to AGW to acheive full funding.jmc wrote: ...(Incidentally most nuclear fusion scientist are AGW/Energy supplies running out alarmists)
Polywell only makes sense if its costs are on par with or less than coal or nuclear. And even if not it may be cost effective for rockets.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Talldave:
The website you linked to on carbonyl sulfide wasn't very clear, an awful lot of comments posted and not much initial material, are there any better websites I could look at that explain it more clearly?
B) In terms of population reduction, its just murmurrings, it will only manifest itself in reality if things get a lot worse unless we really see significant temperature increases, rising sea-levels and general catastrophy, you have nothing to worry about. I don't think anyone would seriously be capable of implementing draconian population reduction programmes during a time of relative prosperity, and if the fear of global warming is unfounded then that kind of disaster scenario won't occur.
C) It takes a long time to build a city from scratch, the loss of infrastructure from mass flooding would be considerable, even if that flooding occured on a 30-50 year timescale. It terms of catastrophic cooling your right, but I believe the descent into an ice-age lasts about one or two thousand years. If emmissions really do cause the kind of warming that could protect us from an ice age we should reduce them right away as more could make it hotter still (although we shouldn't remove the carbon we've already put up there)
Incidentally, what you said about an ice age is one of the reasons I'm dead against geo-engineering. Putting SO2 into the upper atmosphere, seeding clouds on a mass scale, putting iron into the oceans to stimulate algal growth etc. etc.. If we let an exagerrated fear of global warming cause us to take panicked meassures to drastically cool the planet then I too fear we could push ourselves into a sudden ice age.
D) O.K maybe 25%, 50-50 chance historical correlations of CO2 and temperature are CO2 driving temperature rather than vica versa and 50% when we reach unprecendented levels of CO2 the relationship will remain linear and give positive feedback rather than other effects coming in to damp the multiplier term.
E) I think the statistical chance of a world destroying meteor hitting in the next 100 years is fairly remote, the event happening sometime in the next 10,000 years would be significant so it is a long term concern, but in a few hundred years we'll have technology that will make Earth Defense massively cheaper than it is today, I say keep developing space travel and technology until it becomes cheaper and then set up the defense system.
F) Well probably the most alarmist prophecies of doom in 50 years are exaggerated. If we want to eliminate CO2 emmissions globally rather than just in the developed world we'll definitely need to undercut fossil fuel prices with something carbon free. That's why I'm against carbon sequestration, it will never, ever, ever, undercut just burning them straight up. We need more energy research, but I disagree that research on its own will make things cheap. You need to establish a large scale manufacturing infrastructure to bring down costs.
Commercial Jet airlines weren't invented in a laboratory, they were the result of an accumulation of an uneconomically expensive infrastructure for building military aircraft gradually coming down in cost.
PCs weren't invented in a laboratory, they were the result of massive computers in universities, the military and NASA, gradually being made cheaper more powerful and more compact.
Nuclear fission energy didn't enter into the market unsupported by government funding, the initial plants were heavily subsidised to make weapons grade material in large quantities.
G) Not all AGW proponents support geoengineering. I certainly don't.
The website you linked to on carbonyl sulfide wasn't very clear, an awful lot of comments posted and not much initial material, are there any better websites I could look at that explain it more clearly?
B) In terms of population reduction, its just murmurrings, it will only manifest itself in reality if things get a lot worse unless we really see significant temperature increases, rising sea-levels and general catastrophy, you have nothing to worry about. I don't think anyone would seriously be capable of implementing draconian population reduction programmes during a time of relative prosperity, and if the fear of global warming is unfounded then that kind of disaster scenario won't occur.
C) It takes a long time to build a city from scratch, the loss of infrastructure from mass flooding would be considerable, even if that flooding occured on a 30-50 year timescale. It terms of catastrophic cooling your right, but I believe the descent into an ice-age lasts about one or two thousand years. If emmissions really do cause the kind of warming that could protect us from an ice age we should reduce them right away as more could make it hotter still (although we shouldn't remove the carbon we've already put up there)
Incidentally, what you said about an ice age is one of the reasons I'm dead against geo-engineering. Putting SO2 into the upper atmosphere, seeding clouds on a mass scale, putting iron into the oceans to stimulate algal growth etc. etc.. If we let an exagerrated fear of global warming cause us to take panicked meassures to drastically cool the planet then I too fear we could push ourselves into a sudden ice age.
D) O.K maybe 25%, 50-50 chance historical correlations of CO2 and temperature are CO2 driving temperature rather than vica versa and 50% when we reach unprecendented levels of CO2 the relationship will remain linear and give positive feedback rather than other effects coming in to damp the multiplier term.
E) I think the statistical chance of a world destroying meteor hitting in the next 100 years is fairly remote, the event happening sometime in the next 10,000 years would be significant so it is a long term concern, but in a few hundred years we'll have technology that will make Earth Defense massively cheaper than it is today, I say keep developing space travel and technology until it becomes cheaper and then set up the defense system.
F) Well probably the most alarmist prophecies of doom in 50 years are exaggerated. If we want to eliminate CO2 emmissions globally rather than just in the developed world we'll definitely need to undercut fossil fuel prices with something carbon free. That's why I'm against carbon sequestration, it will never, ever, ever, undercut just burning them straight up. We need more energy research, but I disagree that research on its own will make things cheap. You need to establish a large scale manufacturing infrastructure to bring down costs.
Commercial Jet airlines weren't invented in a laboratory, they were the result of an accumulation of an uneconomically expensive infrastructure for building military aircraft gradually coming down in cost.
PCs weren't invented in a laboratory, they were the result of massive computers in universities, the military and NASA, gradually being made cheaper more powerful and more compact.
Nuclear fission energy didn't enter into the market unsupported by government funding, the initial plants were heavily subsidised to make weapons grade material in large quantities.
G) Not all AGW proponents support geoengineering. I certainly don't.
Well not exactly. Microcomputers were actually the spawn of calculators.PCs weren't invented in a laboratory, they were the result of massive computers in universities, the military and NASA, gradually being made cheaper more powerful and more compact.
And you know it wasn't big labs shrinking big computers. It was a bunch of freelance guys putting in big efforts to advance the state of the art. Along with a few profitable companies supplying material to the hobbyists.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.