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Cool-Headed Climate Conversation With Aerospace Legend Burt Rutan
September 11, 2012
“I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper
I looked,” says Rutan.
Although Burt is world renowned for his remarkable record-setting achievements
in aircraft and spacecraft design, he has devoted a great deal of attention to
the global warming “debate”.
Since he is very accustomed to analyzing a lot of data, many anthropogenic
(man-made) global warming claims caught his attention.
Recently, Larry Bell conducted an excellent interview with Burt, now published
in Forbes magazine. Here are excerpts from that interview:
Cool-Headed Climate Conversation With Aerospace Legend Burt Rutan
By Larry Bell
Burt, as someone with such intense involvement in aerospace design and
development, what got you interested in climate issues?
The first thing that got my attention, a lot of people’s attention was
statements that the entire planet is heading towards a future climate
catastrophe that is attributable to human carbon dioxide emissions. So I decided
to take a look at that and just see if this conclusion was arrived at ethically.
I was particularly concerned because the proposed solutions will have enormous
impacts upon costs of energy, which of course, will increase costs of everything.
I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn’t
share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs
that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I
began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I
looked.
I even read Al Gore’s book, which was very enlightening…but not in a good way.
When you look for data to back up his claims, you immediately discover that they
are totally unsubstantiated.
Tragically, policymakers have thrown horrendous amounts of taxpayer money needed
for other purposes at solving an unsubstantiated emergency. It is scandalous
that so many climate scientists who fully knew that Al Gore had no basis for his
irresponsible claims stood mute. Meanwhile, that alarmism has generated billions
of dollars more to finance a rapidly growing climate science industry with
budgets that have risen by a factor of 40 since the early 1990s. I consider this
failure to speak up just as unethical as the behavior of those who put out the
false catastrophic claims.
One of the first things I did was to get out the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change] IPCC summary for policymaker’s reports. Inexplicably, the
Medieval Warm Period appearing in the first report which was warmer than today’s
temperatures, disappeared from the second. The last Little Ice Age disappeared
as well. They were replaced by the infamous “hockey stick” graph, which appeared
multiple times. That was a big disconnect.
Actually, looking back over the past 11,000 or so years since Earth began to
recover from the last big Ice Age, we’re experiencing a very moderate and stable
climate stage. And going back nearly half of the past million years, a long Ice
Age occurred about every 90,000 years or so with a large percentage of the
planet uninhabitable. We’re talking about ice as much as a mile or more thick
covering large portions of North America and Europe. Any local warming that
alarmists talk about is only a brief and tiny blip.
There’s certainly nothing alarming about the stable period we currently enjoy. I
was struck by claims that we are experiencing unprecedented warming caused by
Man, where data clearly shows that our recent warming isn’t unprecedented.
Another important thing that caught my attention was that the increased
atmospheric CO2 that all this alarmism centers on is of huge benefit for
agriculture. Green houses actually supplement CO2 to make plants grow better. It
has been shown that crop yields actually go up some 30% or more with doubling of
CO2 in the atmosphere. So I’m a very confused as to what’s wrong with CO2. It’s
the food plants need to grow and feed all animals, including us.
I’m very impressed by all the data that you have made available on charts you
prepared for your website. Readers can find that and much more at:
www.burtrutan.com
So Burt, what are some of the most important points that you wish to emphasize
to readers?
One of the most important is to have the general public, the media, and
policymakers understand is that any claims that 97%, 98%, or whatever, of all
climate scientists agree that our planet is heading for a climate catastrophe
are totally bogus.
It doesn’t require anyone with a climate science-related degree to recognize,
for example, that 1938 was the warmest year in recent times, and that CO2 levels
were much lower then. These consensus issues are discussed in some detail in
three PowerPoint charts included near the end of my “An Engineer’s Critique of
Global Warming Science” report. The bottom line: there is no consensus on the
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