Himself@davidlindsley.info

Welcome to my personal website, where I tell you something about myself, and where I offer an engineer's view of our world.

Engineering has been a great career for me and one I feel that I’ve be privileged to have enjoyed.

But I fear for the future of my profession. Unless we can encourage young people to enter it, unless we ensure that society accords it the status it deserves, we will see a rapid erosion of our country’s skills and abilities.

I have undertaken to do everything I can to help correct that situation, and this website tells you about the efforts I am making in this respect.

Do please tell your friends and colleagues about this site - the more we can spread some commonsense views, the better!

DAVID LINDSLEY  

ENGINEER AND AUTHOR

CURRENT THOUGHTS

On May 4th NASA published what it called ‘evidence’ that global warming is man-made. This appears on their website and it will certainly look convincing to those who have little or no scientific training, so let’s take a critical look at their findings (which are in italics below):

 Based on a combination of paleoclimate data and models, scientists estimate that when ice ages have ended in the past, it has taken about 5,000 years for the planet to warm between 4 and 7 degrees Celsius. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed about 0.7 degrees Celsius, which is roughly eight times faster than previous warming.

o Two questions: how do they measure temperatures to such accuracy, and how do they do so over thousands of years? Ask any instrumentation engineer if he or she could measure such parameters today – and to detect a change of under 1 degree – and they’d laugh out loud.

 … scientists know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that it is released into the air when coal and other fossil fuels burn. Paleoclimate data show that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than they have been in the past 800,000 years. There is no plausible explanation for why such high levels of carbon dioxide would not cause the planet to warm.

o OK, but as mankind contributes just around 7% of the annual global production, how come we are held to blame for all of the effects?

Another problem I have is with NASA’s claim that ‘scientists think that humans are causing global warming’. This is patently untrue: some scientists may say that, but an awful lot say it’s rubbish.

Once again, we have an example of a Government-funded agency putting out incorrect and unsubstantiated statements to please its masters’.

Himself@davidlindsley.info