Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. -- MaxedOutMama

I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. -- Kim du Toit

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.-- Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. -- Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. -- Billy Beck

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

OK, I've Reached a Conclusion

I was aware the recently deceased author Michael Crichton had investigated the available data in the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming controversy, and had concluded that it was a farce - so much so that he changed the subject of his 2004 book State of Fear from being an eco-disaster novel to being an eco-terrorism novel. It's the first novel I've ever read that had footnotes and a bibliography.

Here he is discussing the topic with Charlie Rose (about 9 minutes):


And he gave a lecture at CalTech in 2003, entitled Aliens Cause Global Warming that is also worth your time.

As a result of his anti-CAGW activism, he was, of course, labeled a "denier," and vilified.

In addition to Mr. Crichton's opinion, I'd read a lot but still I hadn't reached a definitive conclusion on the question of whether the burning of fossil fuels was having a measurable, detrimental effect on global climate. Is the world getting warmer? Quite possibly. Is it due, in whole or in part, on increased CO2 due to human consumption of fossil fuels? I didn't know. Is a warmer Earth a bad thing? I didn't know. I suspected that it wasn't, and I was very skeptical of the positive-feedback argument the doomsayers were predicting.

Day before yesterday I was made aware of another skeptic - Burt Rutan. Burt is the designer of Voyager, the first airplane to circumnavigate the globe without refueling, and of SpaceShipOne, winner of the Ansari X Prize. Burt Rutan's argument is that, as an aeronautical engineer, he has analyzed test flight data for decades. All of the climate data had been analyzed by scientists. What would an engineer make of it?

The result was a 98-page PowerPoint presentation (also available as a PDF) that covers five specific issues propounded by Climate Scientists:
  1. Recent burning of fossil fuels suddenly and dangerously increased CO2 beyond previous levels.
  2. Human CO2 emissions causes greenhouse warming.
  3. Dangerous, sudden global warming occurred the last 50 years.
  4. The current temperature is too hot, and further warming is BAD.
  5. It is more difficult to adapt to climate changes than to attempt to control them.
He tackles each issue in turn, in detail, and using the data the Climate Scientists use.

He made a presentation of his conclusions at the 2009 Oshkosh fly-in, entitled Non-Aerospace Research Quests of a Designer/Flight Test Engineer, stating:
I put myself in the (Those who fear expansion of Government control) group, and do not hide the fact that I have a clear bias on [ Anthropogenic global warming (AGW)]. My bias is based on fear of Government expansion and the observation of AGW data presentation fraud - not based on financial or any other personal benefit. I merely have found that the closer you look at the data and alarmists' presentations, the more fraud you find and the less you think there is an AGW problem... For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion – "if someone is aggressively selling a technical product whose merits are dependent on complex experimental data, he is likely lying". That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.
I'm convinced. CAGW is complete bullshit.

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