Cool-Headed Climate Conversation With Aerospace Legend Burt Rutan

“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”.

Burt Rutan with his SpaceShipOne , the first privately developed and financed craft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period and receive the Ansari X-Prize. (Photo credit: Burt Rutan)

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 claims of planet catastrophe.

Read all of this fantastic interview:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/09/09/a-cool-headed-climate-conversation-with-aerospace-legend-burt-rutan/

Thanks to Burt Rutan for this link

Burt Rutan designed Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the globe without stopping or refueling. He also designed SpaceShipOne financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen which won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately-funded manned craft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period. Both, along with three other of his aircraft, are on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.  Burt’s recent projects include a flying car, and the Virgin GlobalFlyer which broke Voyager’s time for a non-stop solo flight around the world.

During his 46-year career, Rutan has designed 372 new types of aircraft, of which 45 have been built and taken through flight test. Right now he is designing a seaplane, just for himself.

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Larry Bell is a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where he founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and heads the graduate program in space architecture.

Bell recently wrote a new book titled “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax”. It can be previewed and ordered at www.climateofcorruption.com. Additional information about the book and Bell’s views can be found on his YouTube address: http://www.youtube.com/climateofcorruption.

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Here are two articles that I posted more than a year ago about Burt Rutan:

http://www.iceagenow.com/Burt_Rutan_calls_AGW_a_Fraud.htm

http://www.iceagenow.com/An_Engineers_Critique_of_Global_Warming_Science.htm