American Physical Society and Monckton at odds over paper

“Uncommon Descent” ? ! ? ! ?
If you had not pointed it out, I would never have found out.
From the moment I found out, I didn’t bother to read.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Pity such important issue has to go through such channels…
JFA in Montreal

From the original post on this issue, I found the following comment:
Manfred (00:29:40) :
I have seen on a AGW defender website, that they have started an email campaign against Jeff Marque.
We have seen how effective this was during Anthony’s recent poll.
I think the majority of scientist prefers to have an open discussion.
Manfred goes on to suggest that readers here also let their feelings be known on this subject by sending emails. The following is an email I’ve just sent as suggested. I’ve sought to keep the text neutral so as to keep the focus on support for a continuation of this debate.
jjmarque@sbcglobal.net
azwicker@pppl.gov
krauss@case.edu
ams@physics.wayne.edu
I applaud the bold initiative of Jeffrey Marque, one of the editors of the newsletter of the Forum of Physics and Society, for opening the pages of the newsletter to an open public debate on the scientific merits of different views on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
At a time when science is being dangerously corrupted by dogmatic politicization in which differing views of AGW are viciously attacked through appeals to authority and ad hominem attacks, this move represents the truest spirit of scientific inquiry. In placing this discussion in the pages of the newsletter, the public, both scientist and layman, can see the purest expression of peer review over the coming issues as opposing views on the significance of man’s influence on the changing climate are presented and reviewed on their scientific merits.
Regards,
Leon Brozyna

wouldn t “PEER” review require Monckton to be a “peer” to who ever did the review?
REPLY: They invited him to submit, that would be acceptance as “peer” enough. Not only that they had at least one of the members review the paper, and suggest changes. If they didn’t think the paper or Lord Monckton was worthy of attention, they would not have bothered.

I think, perhaps, it all depends on what the definition of “peer review” is.
Realistically, while Lord Monckton’s paper has been reviewed and accepted for publication, it hasn’t really been peer reviewed as such…..in other words, there has been no opportunity for any and all interested scientists to read, discuss, object, and point out flaws, if any.
While I’m not so sure that there is much (or indeed, any) value in peer review anymore, I’m inclined to accept this definition.
Of course, if we use this definition for peer review here, we need to use it elsewhere as well, meaning certain papers by Mann, Hansen, Briffa, Thomson, Jones, etc haven’t really been peer reviewed either as they have yet to make the complete data and methods available for an honest and full reading/review of their papers.

sod wouldn t “PEER” review require Monckton to be a “peer” to who ever did the review?
I understand that the person doing the reviewing was seriously outranked, but if Lord Monckton is willing to overlook it, I fail to see why we should make an issue of it.
After all, it must be difficult to find enough lords well-versed enough in the arts to effectively peer review it.

The problem with peer review is that the peer reviewers are all AGW advocates…

This is really starting to stink. These AGW alarmists are only making it tougher on themselves when they eventually have to turn and face reality.

Though not quite the rank of Viscount, for a Peer with scientific credentials perhaps APS might consider recruiting
Lord Robert May, Baron of Oxford
However, could Lord May provide objective scientific peer review, considering his stated position that “within the scientific community there is no questioning of those facts” (“Climate change is real, is humanly created”). See: Lord Robert May : The Science of Climate Change and his characterization of “a traveling road show of dissenters”?

Richard DeSousa The problem with peer review is that the peer reviewers are all AGW advocates…
Yep. It’s a major problem in medicine as well….specifically in the entire realm of “public health” and anything regarding pharmaceutical trials….both aspects of medicine that overuse torturous statistical manipulation and often have “special interest groups” external to the field heavily involved.
In fact, it’s actually a worse problem there, with reviewers often being directly in the pockets of the drug companies quite openly and nobody bats an eye.
If you want to see what will happen in Climate Science publication in the next decade or two, take a good look at The Trouble with Medical Journals by Richard Smith.
“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.” – Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet

Monckton and Jeez,
Great stuff. Great paper. Proud to have read it. Proud of this site for publicizing it. The desperation of the AGW crowd is amazing. The APS management attempt to mold opinion before the reading of the submission tells all that we need know.
Mike Asher and Anthony Watts have changed the game through their blogs and the truth may out yet!
Grant Hodges

It is very difficult to prove a negative. I believe the onus should be on the APS to prove that there HAS been any “global warming” over the past 10 years. I have seen no data that suggests that there has been.

Even if the paper gets “torn to shreds” the debate will be on. It should provoke more creative insight into the climate process and reveal areas requiring more concerted study and better data. Kudos to Lord Moncton.

Monckton of Brenchley —thank you so much for all you do as well. You fight the good fight much as Winston.

On the other hand, Monckton has released papers making this argument before which have been pulled apart on RC and described as “Bafflingly bad physics” by Moinbot.
Monckton seems to have a poor track record which might be why it’s being treated like this.

I’ll accept the label “Skeptic” as sort of a badge of honor, but what I am is a Realist. I used to believe. I checked out the science and evidence, examined the credibility and motives of the major players ON MY OWN (without someone telling me where to look), and now absolutely disbelieve.
At 44 I’m old enough to remember the cooling scare of the 70s, barely, and young enough to not be part of that generation’s apparent obsession with “revolution” (at any cost).
This APS action is reprehensible and shameful.
If there is any justice in the world, though, this should be a major step toward “forcing” the debate out into the open. The myth of the “consensus” has to be shattered.

Jeff: You’re right, Monbiot is not a scientist, he’s a writer – much like Monckton! Writes Monckton to Monbiot, “You say I’m not qualified to discuss climate physics. With all respect, no more are you.”
But look, in addition to the rebuttal from NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt above, I found another via his Wikipedia entry where Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter Dr Stephan Harrison briefly points out a key flaw.
Lord Monckton, given you’re commenting here, perhaps you can say how your latest paper takes into account the flaw raised by Dr Harrison?

Sam Vilain I am shocked that you would put forth a Senior Lecturer as an expert. Correct me if I am wrong but aren’t senior lecturers academics with no scholarship? I fail to see how a senior lecturer has more scientific status than Monckton of Brencley.
By coincidence Obama was only a senior lecturer though he claims he was a professor. One of a large number of exaggerations from the selected one.
As for Gavin Schmidt, when he stops censoring blog posts that are inconveinient I will start taking him seriously. Correction: As long as Fenton Communication operates Real Climate I will not take it seriously.

Sam Vilain,
An old litigation strategy appears to apply here. If you are weak on the law, attack the facts. If you are weak on the facts, attack the law. If you weak on both the facts and the law, attack the person. In AGW terms the law may be substituted as theory and facts as observation. It is telling that skeptics are invariably attacked, rather than their theory, or observations. I hear no rebutting of the fundamental points raised by Monckton.
1., The IPC model predict a positive feedback mechanism. Such a positive feedback – if it exists – would result in an unstable climate which is contrary to millions of years of climate history.
2. While the atmospheric concentration of Carbon Dioxide went up every year since Hansen made his predictions 20 years ago, today’s temperature is slightly lower that 20 years ago. This does not indicate that carbon dioxide is the main driver of the climate.
I think these are the real debating points and not whether Monckton has a degree in literature, or what somebody said about him.

You know, when I studied Physics all those years ago, I do not remember any of my university professors saying degrees or qualifications were a requirement to be able to produce scientifically valid results. I have always thought that was what experimentation was for. Don’t know, maybe American Physics are done differently or things have changed a lot since then…

You’ve got to wonder, if Monckton is a mere “writer” or “journalist” with no qualifications and a “poor track record”, why was he invited by the APS to write a technical paper on the subject in the first place? Maybe, just maybe, some in the APS think that what he says has substance.
Or maybe it was a setup.
I sense warring factions in the APS.

” It is telling that skeptics are invariably attacked, rather than their theory, or observations. ”
I agree 100%. I have debated these issues for a while on the internet, and inevitably the warmists’ ultimate argument is that I’m going against the consensus of thousands of credentialed scientists and thousands of peer reviewed papers.

I don’t think it’s fair to castigate the editor of the P&S Newsletter. Clearly, Jeffrey Marque intended to begin a real debate, but was overruled by his board.
Excertpt from the Editor’s Comments, Physics and Society Newsletter, July 2008:
With this issue of Physics & Society, we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, to¬gether with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion. This editor (JJM) invited several people to contribute articles that were either pro or con. Christopher Monckton responded with this issue’s article that argues against the correctness of the IPCC conclusion, and a pair from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, David Hafemeister and Peter Schwartz, responded with this issue’s article in favor of the IPCC conclusion. We, the editors of P&S, invite reasoned rebuttals from the authors as well as further contributions from the physics community. Please contact me (jjmarque@sbcglobal.net) if you wish to jump into this fray with comments or articles that are scientific in nature. However, we will not publish articles that are political or polemical in nature. Stick to the science!
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/upload/july08.pdf

Grant Hodges: You say: “Mike Asher and Anthony Watts have changed the game through their blogs and the truth may out yet!”
While I agree, I think that Anthony would insist that you give credit as well to Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick as having done a sterling job in addressing the issues. And there are many others as well, one of the most compelling being Roger Pielke Sr.
REPLY: McIntyre and McKitrick are the pioneers, and they deserve more credit than I on many fronts – Anthony

The APS has been doing this same dance for 30 years now.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q3/view527.html#Saturday

Robert Wood — (The fact that, for 4.5 billions years, dispite large excursions in planetary conditions, the climate has not gone to the positive or negative limit strongly suggests that there are no positive feedback elements in the climate system.)
It could also suggest that there are positive and negative feedbacks that are relatively balanced out. The AGW hypothesis (as put forth by the catastophic sect) maintains that the ‘A’ bit is unbalancing the feedback dynamic. This is the meat and potatoes of their argument.
How/why this is believed by almost all is pretty simple and isn’t evidence of mass hysteria or brainwashing: in all aspects of life there is a balance and counterbalance, a yin and yang, and so on. All of popular culture and our collective aphorisms (what goes up must come down) throughout history relies on the certainty of this premise. You can’t turn on a TV set and not be bombarded with cereal adverts etc vowing to restore balance. The very notion of balance is so embedded that you couldn’t successfully mount an argument that said otherwise.
And in truth, the collective human experience since time immemorial suggests that positive/negative feedbacks probably DO exist and DO in fact balance each other out. The real question then is whether or not the ‘A’ can unbalance the equation. Note that many sceptic arguments work from this angle — e.g. “the ‘A’ contribution in CO2 is measured at 3% or so, which suggests that this is not enough to upset the cart” — and so on. Note that the standard AGW poster image is a “runaway greenhouse effect” pointing to Venus; i.e. a system that went out of balance.
Were I you I’d be wary of advancing the argument that positive feedback doesn’t exist.

Congratulations Anthony on the superb quality of your commenters. And Lord Monckton, deepest gratitude for your efforts and forbearance.
The AGW crowd is on the run. Their theories have been demolished, and the empirical evidence refutes them as well. It is time to restore NASA, once a great institution, by purging its ranks of political operatives and replacing them with qualified scientists and engineers.
NASA is a public agency and so subject to public control. I fund it and I want it fixed. The American Physical Society is private and so subject to the control of its members. I am not one, but I do recommend that they undertake some self-review and determine if they wish to remain relevant or sink into the political mire.

I recently read a book titled “The Emperor of Scent” by Chandler Burr. It is a factual story about Dr. Luca Turin who developed a theory of smell that differed from the consensus. The chapters “Nature” and “Author’s Note” about Dr. Turin’s and the author’s experiences with the journal “Nature” do not inspire confidence in the peer review process or in the openness and objectivity of the journal’s gatekeepers. The description in the book was anecdotal, but it had the ring of truth, an eye-opening look at journal politics, peer review and consensus science.

Marc Sheppard at The American Thinker has weighed in with a blunt essay: The American Physical Society Owes Lord Monckton an Immediate Apology
“Are we expected to believe that the “Council” was somehow unaware of P&S’s invitation to Lord Monckton, a well-known “denier” of AGW dogma? Perhaps, but my Bravo Sierra alarm suggests that they were just as likely “convinced” post-publication — by the same pathetic political forces that taint the science of the IPCC — that there can be but one “truth” about climate change.
While the Viscount tactfully chose the word “discourteous” in describing the treatment he’d received, far harsher adjectives certainly come to mind. The crimes against progress feckless scientists the likes of the APS “Council” are guilty of know no ample punishment. There should be a special place in hell for each and every one of them as penance for the offense of falsely empowering the laughably inane yet widely accepted fantasies of Al Gore alone.
But inviting a man of Monckton’s measure to participate in an evenhanded analysis of both sides only to summarily demean the very position they requested of him is beneath the dignity of any true society of science. . . .These are desperate times for the alarmists, and they are resorting to desperate measures. But I suspect they’ll soon regret the attempt to turn Lord to Pawn.”
Pacific Decadal Oscillation switches to COOL.
Of major interest to complement Monckton’s analysis is: Shifting of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from its warm mode to cool mode assures global cooling for the next three decades. Don J. Easterbrook
Note the major cool PDO period from about 1945 to 1977 followed by the warm PDO period from 1978 to 1999. Compare this with the increase in CO2 and it is easy to see how global warming alarmists might conclude from looking just at that time frame and so tuning models that CO2 was the culprit -when a major portion was a natural climate oscillation.
REPLY: Don Easterling sent me his original manuscript, I plan on posting it tomorrow. – Anthony

The trouble is that here in Australia they are now going to spend $AUD5 billion on cooling a cooling planet. This is a real worry. I wish it was a laughing matter but it ain’t! LOL

That said… previous, We should have no objections to many of the greens/AGW’s agendas: that is reducing populations, reducing emissions, reducing city sizes ect no problems. The only only point I think that this blog is about is that C02 does NOT cause changes in Global temperatures?

Randomengineer,
Regarding feedbacks, of course there are positive feedbacks. What matters is the net balance of all the feedbacks. Feedbacks are very easy to characterize as long as you are not trying to characterize individual processes, trying to find out whether they contribute a positive, or negative feedback then try to guess the magnitude of their contribution. It is a Herculean task and by its very nature is very imprecise.
Fortunately electronic engineers, who first characterized feedbacks came up with rather simple and effective tools. The first and probably most important and least well known concept is the so called “Black Box” description which tells you that as long as the input and the output of the system is known, you can ignore all the complexities inside the system. Makes sense that you are interested in the input and output of an amplifier and not what little electrons inside the transistors are doing.
Hence the name “Black Box” The feedback is obtained when you connect the output to the input. The climatic equivalent is that heating generated by CO2 -output – is acting as an additional input by making water evaporate and create additional greenhouse heating. The question is how much is this additional heating. Modellers predict that it is substantial and this why they came up with huge climate sensitivity numbers. The latest by number by Hansen is 6.5degree C temperature rise for doubling the carbon dioxide concentration. Electronic engineers have long learnt to measure feedback and characterize it. It has two components, one is the coupling factor between output and input the other is the amplification. If the product of the two factors is greater than one then you have a system with a net positive feedback. You can get an output value which is larger than the output without feedback, but the system will not be stable. A lot of you probably experienced what happens to a public address system when your microphone (input)
gets too close to the loudspeakers (output). The acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone times the amplification gets greater than one (positive feedback) and you get a very loud annoying whistle. The system is no longer stable and you amplifier is driven to produce its maximum output. This is why any climate model that predicts an output which is enhanced by positive feedback is an incorrect description of the climate because we know from millions of years of climate history that it is stable.

paminator and Drew Latta –on Venus — e.g. (“So making the connection between anthropogenic CO2 and runaway global warming a la Venus is pretty darn tenuous.”)
What I was pointing out was simply that with millenia of human history telling us that things are balanced, advancing an argument that balance doesn’t exist (there’s negative feedback but no positive feedback) won’t “sound right” to most folks — regardless of whether or not the argument is correct. It could well be correct; and if it is, it will be one tough sell. Venus got mentioned merely due to it being what the AGW’s sell.
Like it or not, winning the argument with the public at large will have to involve some from of readily digested, easily understood imagery/metaphor, and the public at large is being sold Satan’s personal vacation realm at a mere 900 degrees F on a nearby planet. In more than one way, fighting AGW and winning well be the modern equivalent of Henry VIII’s smackdown of the papacy.
***
Evan Jones — (Even dirty snow is probably more significant. )
Undoubtedly. Certainly this site seems to illustrate that temps seem to be largely — if not wholly — influenced by land use. Take GISS (take it please, and apologies to Henny Youngman) for example; they interpolate everything north of 80 degrees based on a belief (magical, methinks) that temps must also be changing there as well, and from what I can tell they’re ignoring the effect of particulates. Certainly one could argue that albedo change is the same animal as land use change.
I reckon it’s a funny thing to think that they’re partly right; temps seem to be going up because they ARE and these are because of land use; the north pole melts “too much” for the same reason. CO2 need not apply. I say this because there’s no widespread melting or otherwise similarly strong GW signal in the southern hemisphere. One would think that atmospheric mixing of CO2, if this were indeed the planetary virus, would affect… erm… uhhh… well, the entire planet and not seem to track land use change (mostly in the north…) Simply observing land use alone explains the apparent phenomenae without resorting to their (modeler’s) overly complex explanations and hand waving concerning oceanic convection and conveyors that they demonstrably don’t really understand.
So yeah, I think you’re right.

Monckton of Brenchley.
Well done. There are many that stand shoulder to shoulder with you.

Once again the global warming propoganda and disinformation war has broken out. Yet, let’s recall that this is all background noise designed to distract us from the real science and data.
The APS are sheninigans and best ignored. Here readers would be well advised to go back looking at CLIMATE DATA. And what do they show?
Correct!
NO WARMING OVER THE LAST 10 YEARS.
Sea levels have stagnated
Sea ice is back
The AGW pretenders can pretend all they want that the globe is overheating. But the data tell another story.

Congratulations APS,
You’ve suceeded in admitting your intellectual bankruptcy.
The APS and other similar organisations may not know it, but my gut feeling is that a lot of scientists are beginning to be awfully turned off by this sort of intellectual bullying. Science by bullying and other dictatorial methods are things the Nazis and Stalinists had to stoop to.

Geting back to the data:
“Instead of a rise of 1°F during the first decade of this century as predicted by IPCC climate models (Fig 2), global temperatures cooled slightly for the past nine years and cooled more than 1°F this year (Fig 3). Global cooling over the past decade appears to be due to a global cooling trend set up by the PDO cool mode and a similar shift in the Atlantic.”
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/WashingtonPolicymakersaddress.pdf

We learn from Monckton’s letter that he doesn’t know what peer review is.
Paul, $50 billion in research on warming? Did you have your excrement detector off when that figure came to you?

I feel proud to be here along with the Allies and La Resistance, sometimes risking personal situations for Truth to be heard.
Like Aussie David Evans “I devoted six years to carbon accounting”, I was an AGW activist – because I cared. But after having enthusiastically joined Transition Towns, I kept on researching. Eventually I ventured outside the AGW oasis / fortress, and discovered the true state of climate science. I did a U-turn which rendered me pretty well persona non grata regarding the present conditions for setting-up Transition initiatives. I became a proud supporter of Monckton of Brenchley. I discovered his courteous and thorough scientific reply to Gavin Schmidt’s “Cuckoo Science” attack.
I discovered something else of significance IMHO. Searching Climate Science’s index for a reply to Monckton’s reply “Chuck it Schmidt”, I found nothing. A loud silence. I Googled and still found nothing. Yet if there was any truly scientific point where the skeptics could be answered and silenced, this was surely it, and Schmidt would not have let such an opportunity slip.
No wonder APS are nervous.
It has been a real joy to follow Vilain’s sea change, and John London’s shift – and I guess there have been many others here. This gives me great hope for those who follow the AGW stuff that, deep into the “science”, seems to refute the skeptics’ challenges eg. SkepticalScience.com. How did the Germans feel when they realized they were starting to lose WW2? How many simply did not know of the atrocities? How many tried their best to do good, trapped in an intolerable setup? How many might still experience a change on the “Road to Damascus”? How can we actually help support “detox” for those whose “addiction” to the AGW thesis threatens to be exposed? How can we prevent such mass psychosis happening again?

Monckton of Brenchley,
“He regrettably cites one Monbiot, a zoologist, as though he were an authority on the climate:”
I find this statement a bid odd considering that a zoologist actually has more training in science than you do. You are not an authority on climate either.
“In my own papers, some of which are in the peer-reviewed literature”
A Web of Science search only turns up one article by any Monckton on climate change:
Title: Free speech about climate change
Author(s): Monckton, CW
Source: SOCIETY Volume: 44 Issue: 4 Pages: 14-17 Published: MAY-JUN 2007
Times Cited: 0
And this doesn’t appear to be a scientific publication.
Perhaps your publications are not indexed by ISI?
REPLY: let’s see who else isn’t an authority on climate:
Me (Meteorologist)
Boris ( unknown phantom)
Tamino (Astronomer )
Rabett (Chemist)
Hansen (Astronomer)
Gore (Divinity School, politician)
Flannery (Zoologist)
McIntyre (Mathematician)
Connolley (Mathematician)
D’Aleo (Meteorologist)
Lambert (Computer Scientist)
…and others
So Monckton isn’t a climatologist, neither are some of your faves or mine.
The real issue here with Boris and his ilk is that they just can’t stand the fact that Monck was invited to submit a paper to the APS, and the flap is now drawing attention to it. So the AGW proponents (real and phantoms) are in full press to discredit Monckton to minimize the damage.

Honest and good discussion. Reminds me of a white haired southern politicals comments after the civil right battle. It was something like this. I may have had to support segregation but I never agreeded with it. I’m glad it’s over.
When ideas are supportred by the main stream of society and supported violently as well it is difficult and dangerous to have a honest and open discussion. As I well know. I’ve had my property damaged for just expressing an opinion contrary to the popular view. Am I sorry I expressed it no!!! would I do it again yes. And I still think the person who snuck on my propert at night while I was out is a coward.
I’m glad a few men with courage are willing to speak out. Hopefully we can have an open discussion and come to a conclusion that is scientifically justified and politically acceptible.

Paminator: “I have run into this a lot at various other blogs. I think Venus is as much in balance as Earth. Venus has a lot more atmosphere (93 bar) than Earth, which leads to the higher temperature difference between surface and TOA, even with its higher overall albedo (0.7 versus Earth’s 0.3). To move Earth towards a Venusian surface temperature requires increasing the atmospheric pressure on Earth by a factor of 93, or adding 93,000,000 ppm of CO2 to the present atmosphere.”
Don’t forget you’d need to move it ~27 million miles closer to that big ball of fire, too. 😉

Sam consider the source.
NASA J Hansen .. employee Gavin Schmidt.
NASA web site contributors Gavin Schmidt and M Mann
GISS Modeler Gavin Schmidt
RC run by Gavin Schmidt and own by M Mann contributor WM Connolly
Wikipedia editor WM Connolly.

Ray Reynolds (07:04:34) :
I live 400 smokey miles down wind of Anthony at 5800 ft elevation and had a crunchie layer of ice under a lawn sprinkler at 5 am the other morning (mid July)
Would that have been Wednesday night by any chance? That was a topic of conversation around the water fountain on Thursday morning here in the UK, believe it or not.

Gerry Marsh’s paper is highly interesting and stimulating.
He rightly points out the fact that our climate is indeed NOT stable. In fact, the glacial ages have all the characteristics of a bistable system: two stable states, one cold, one warm. A tiny change in solar irradiation (or other forcings for that matter) is sufficient to make it switch between states.
What is stimulating here is the link between the carbon cycle and those unstable periods (glacial ages). It made me wonder how geological transformations (continents drifting, and more recently the closing of the isthmus of Panama ) can affect the carbon cycle, and lower the CO2 concentration to the point where the climate reaches a point of instability. I really like the idea of a higher level of CO2 to stabilize the climate. At first sight it seems to make some sense. It certainly has the merit of offering a new perspective on what is called “stability”, a concept that is used and abused by the AGW alarmists. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to realize that the current “stable” climate of the past few thousand years is of insignificant duration on most geological scales.

AGW will flip just like the PDO. I expect to see a large number of peer reviewed climate science papers claiming the sharp cooling confirms that climate change is ravaging the planet. The IPCC AR5 report will claim the sharp cooling was predicted by GCM’s. A new field called Climate Chaos will be established. Of course rising CO2 has to be kept as the main problem.

The APS has completely disrespected Lord Monckton with this fallacious politicized statement heading his invited and peer reviewed scientific paper disputing the IPCC’s view of climate sensitivity. Though, I’m not surprised, I cutoff my membership to most technical societies years ago. They’re agenda is to the status quo and bottom line first, and their member’s second.

Given that they’ve taken the extraordinary step of explicitly stating that they disagree with the conclusions of Lord Monckton’s paper (all of them?) it occurs to ask if this implies that they agree with all of the conclusions of every paper published with which no accompanying disclaimer is posted? Doesn’t the fact that they ‘disagree’ with the conclusions mean that it was reviewed, otherwise what is the basis for the disagreement? If they actually do disagree with all of the conclusions, why did they publish it in the first place? Certainly seems to me to be plowing new ground for a publisher of a ‘scientific’ journal. I think it is incumbent upon them to publish more explicitly what they disagree with and why.
Having trouble sleeping tonight (something that seems to occur with increasing regularity as I ‘mature’) I re-read the paper and, out of curiosity, ran the equations using the figure of 7000ppmv CO2 as existed millions of years ago (good thing we weren’t around back then because, as I understand it, CO2 becomes toxic to humans at around 5-6000ppmv). I used that figure based on the IPCC graphic showing past CO2 and corresponding temperature. The equations( with feedbacks as calculated by the IPCC) yield an expected increase in forcing of around 17.6 W/m2 increase over pre-industrial CO2. Then using the IPCCs methodology I came up with a temp increase of 54C (interestingly the no feedback temp increase was only about 5.5C). I’m sure I’ve done something horribly wrong in my lack of sleep induced stupor.

In his video Lord Monckton stated he was not a scientist. Yet his paper demonstrates a strong knowledge of math and science. As I understand it, he was also the former science and technology advisor to Margaret Thatcher. In my opinion he is well qualified for the title “scientist”. This is a stark contrast to Al Gore.
I was also delighted to read Lord Monckton’s letter to two US senators admonishing them for trying to stifle freedom of speech. http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=20513
It’s sad that two US senators must learn about the US constitution from an Englishman.

“It’s going to become very easy for even the least educated to figure out that there’s a flaw in AGW theory as they sit shivering in the dark. The climate scientologists had better begin thinking about where they are going to be employed when the dung hits the fan.”
One could envision them trying to keep their hands warm by standing around barrels of burning IPCC reports.

I know this is off topic.But I think relevant on how AGW believers react to anything the Viscount writes.He is very disliked by the AGW crowd.I know since I have posted a couple of his papers at certain AGW dominated forums.
Below is an example of reactions AGW believers gave to a paper the Viscount wrote.It is a sad testament to critical thinking.
I posted a paper that Lord Monkton wrote in september 2007.At a forum known to have a lot of AGW believers in it.The replies were insulting,irrational and plain stupid.
I created a thread at my forum.For the purpose of exposing vapid AGW argumentation.
Here is the beginning of the first post.It is actually next to the last post in the thread at my forum.Post #3 is at the top.Sorry for the mix up.
The first post:
Science and Public Policy Institute
Greenhouse Warming? What Greenhouse Warming?
Written by Christopher Monkton, 3rd Viscount Monkton of Brenchley
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
(The rest of the post was NOT posted here to save space)
Post # 2 :
“It’s warming up because I’m getting hotter. I just keep adding more muscle and flowing hair to my already steamy bod. Don’t look now.. I’m meltin’ all the ice. And I’m not stoppin’ cuz ur jealous. ^_^.
Live wif it.”
http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=78
The link goes to my forum.There you can read the absurd replies to the Viscounts paper.I posted at the forum I visited..The really sad part is that at least two of them are ….. SCIENTISTS!
I have seen many similar replies on a paper I posted at the very same forum.It was over a paper Dr. Glassman wrote titled: The Aquittal Of Carbon Dioxide
I would think reasonable counterpoints is a better idea than ad homeniums and personal attacks with name calling.

Jeff,
Bistable can be cyclical. There are nonlinear systems, for example with a delayed feedback, that show linear behavior with low feedback, switching to bistable, periodic behavior when feedback increases (or delay), and eventually purely chaotic behavior. A very simple experimental setup to demonstrate this uses a light source, going through a Fabry-Perot interferometer (two paralel mirrors of equal reflectivity), followed by a photodector, which then drives the spacing between the mirrors of the interferometer, via an electrical delay line. Since the transmission through the interferometer is a nonlinear function of their spacing, you have a nice little nonlinear system that can show the transition from linear to chaos, through different stages, one of them being periodical bistability.
Final comment about ice ages: there is no consensus on the mechanism, even though there is a quasi-consensus on the source of their periodicity (ie. Milankovitch). There is also no consensus, and in fact no satisfactory explanation, for the large variation in atmospheric CO2 between glacial and interglacial. Much remains to be learned about the carbon cycle, and its interaction with climate.

Evan Jones,
Your example of albedo causing a positive feedback during the ice age is a correct observation. We do not have a quantitative analysis of the causes and dynamics of the Ice Ages, so it is hard at this point to put a number at the contribution of the ice albedo caused positive feedback. Our understanding of the causes of the onset of ice ages – and interglacials for that matter – at this point is somewhat skimpy. The standard argument that it is triggered by the Milankovich cycle and then re-inforced by ice albedo positive feedback has a first order plausability, but needs a lot more quantitative work to be accepted as a solid explanation.
This however has nothing to do with the plausability of CO2 causing a net positive feedback through increased evaporation leading to runaway global warming.
Ice cover is very stable for centuries and the effect of changed albedo
could take many years to accumulate. Water vapor on the other hand is very transient, can move geographically, can convert into precipitation, or clouds and could become a factor for negative rather than positive feedback. If higher temperatures and higher water vapor content in the atmosphere do not cause a positive feedback rather quickly, then it probably do not cause a positive feedback at all.
Fortunately Nature provided a rather forceful experiment to demonstrate that temperature increase and the resulting water vapor evaporation does not lead to runaway heating. In 1998 the strong El Nino effect caused a spike in global temperatures. I also remember that 1998 was an unusually wet year. This was a perfect time for water vapor caused positive feedback to assert itself, if indeed it existed at all. This, as you all know, did not happen. When El Nino ended, global temperatures quickly returned to their pre El Nino values and – as many of the readers of this blog know – have – on average -not increased since.

Final comment about ice ages: there is no consensus on the mechanism, even though there is a quasi-consensus on the source of their periodicity (ie. Milankovitch). There is also no consensus, and in fact no satisfactory explanation, for the large variation in atmospheric CO2 between glacial and interglacial. Much remains to be learned about the carbon cycle, and its interaction with climate.

As an educated guess, I’d say it’s because animal life bounces back more quickly than plant life as ice recedes. So more exhaled CO2 from insects, mammals, etc.

snip, no personal attacks please~charles the moderator

Sorry, but I can’t take Timmy’s blog seriously either, because it begins its long and venomous rant by demonizing those who disagree with him as “right wing blogs.”

We didn’t think you’d let the facts get in the way of any of your rants, seriously. Someone interested in the science would read around politics on blogs, as we do on this blog and most others that are more bent on denigrating Al Gore than talking science. [personal attack snipped]
Both sides BACK IT DOWN ON THE PERSONAL ATTACKS~Charles the moderator

Ed Darrell (14:46:22) :
That’s called academic fraud. In the UK, it may not be a big deal. Among deniers of warming, it may be cute. Under U.S. law, were it federally funded, it would be a crime.
So when is Al Gore and James Hansen going to get prosecuted? As I understand it, being a VP and NASA are both Federally funded.
I’m not a Denier of Warming, I use my observation skills to see perfectly that we are definately not warming. I’m not a scientist, but ovservation is one of the key skills a scientist should portray, no?

The Viscount is correct in that his ‘paper’ will certainly be ‘torn to shreds’, and deservedly so. Indeed the process has already begun in the blogoshpere. In a cursory reading I spotted that he has repeated an earlier error – assuming one can derive climate sensitivity by considering forcings and delta-t over a fixed period, forgetting that climate sensitivity is an equilibrium concept, and you must also consider the delta-t ‘in the pipeline’ due to slow-acting feedbacks – estimated at c0.5C. Monckton shrugs this off thus: ‘We assume that Chylek (2008) is right to find transient and equilibrium climate sensitivity near-identical’
So a single paper has overturned all the textbooks? The paper cited does not support Monckton’s assumption and in fact flatly contradicts his conclusion of climate sensitivity < 1C. From Chylek’s conclusion: ‘All these results together with our work presented in this paper support the lower end of the climate sensitivity range of 2 to 4.5 K suggested by the IPCC 2007 report ‘
Also, he halves the delta-t based on Mckitrick (2007), but this paper, not exactly uncontroversial itself, only asserted the anthropogenic warming should be reduced by 50% over land, whereas the delta-t under consideration is, of course, global.
I endorse the Viscounts call to confine the argument to the scientific substance, so I look forward to his defence of these apparent flaws, perhaps he could also deal with the points raised here…
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/moncktons_triple_counting.php
and here
http://duoquartuncia.blogspot.com/2008/07/aps-and-global-warming-what-were-they.html
and just possibly explain the value of a review by an academic who by his own admission does not understand the difference between a forcing and a feedback ?
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/monckton/monkton_letter_pys.pdf (Page 2).
kind regards.
CyC

Joel Shore writes:
sunsettommy says: “I would think reasonable counterpoints is a better idea than ad homeniums and personal attacks with name calling.”
True…but it gets a little tiresome to respond to all of the garbage that appears on the internet or in a non-peer-reviewed newsletter or whatever. Scientists already have their hands full responding to the garbage that actually gets through the peer review process without trying to focus on this other stuff.
But scientists does not have to answer the average public joe at all!
Instead of whining about alleged “garbage”.Why not influence those who deliberately distort the science to stop it and get back to being a science researcher.
Plus if the few scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt stop politicising the science.Right along with the dishonest Media and the Environmentalsist who keep posting one sided science research and news.
It would be a lot quieter on the net and forums such as mine would not exist.
I am really dissappointed with the whole mess.Dissappointed with the scientists who should have known better to keep out of the media and political propaganda drives.
I wish James Hansen who is relentlessly political and calling for criminal investigations and trying to stop coal power plant construction based on what he believes as the Director of GISS.Among other political activities that ties in with his capacity as Director. The very same man who has been exposed of poor statistical analysis…… Several times.
He is a compromised scientist and that is sad.
His behavior is disgracefull.
In the end my statement:
“I would think reasonable counterpoints is a better idea than ad homeniums and personal attacks with name calling.”
Is still valid.Garbage claims or not.The relentless use of namecalling and ad homeniums on Monkton and anyone else is useless.

Joel,
I looked in your link and was turned off by the overt hostility.Especially in the comment section.
I will pass on Deltoid’s explanation since I do not have confidence that they will provide a reasonable counterpoint to Viscount Monkton.
Not with the overtly implied mocking of Monkton’s writings.
Just as with RealClimate.I do not like the underlying ugly undertone that is obviously all over in the two BLOGS.

Chrome (16:32:36)
“forgetting that climate sensitivity is an equilibrium concept,”
What is the reason for why the equilibrium concept being needed in the formula?

randomengineer,
If indeed the climate is balanced on the knife’s edge, as you seem to believe, why is that the many pertubations of the past have not led us to ruin?
CO2 has, in the past, been way, way higher than even the worst case scenario put into the many models (3000-5000ppm, not the puny 300-500ppm that is causing such vapors today), yet disaster did not descend.

I said of Monckton’s noted exaggerations and fantasies:

That’s called academic fraud. In the UK, it may not be a big deal. Among deniers of warming, it may be cute. Under U.S. law, were it federally funded, it would be a crime.

So when is Al Gore and James Hansen going to get prosecuted? As I understand it, being a VP and NASA are both Federally funded.

If you have evidence of academic fraud in either case, bring it forward. In Gore’s case, he’s privately funded — assumptions of what is not in evidence is a problem of deniers, I find — and in Hansen’s case, his work undergoes serious reviews constantly. The GAO investigations of Hansen’s work found it solid. GAO has a very long record of hard non-partisanship and great accuracy.
Paul Clark, the closest I could come to sourcing that $50 billion claim was a blog out of Sen. James Inhofe’s office, citing the Heartland Institute. Inhofe is a bit of a crank on science issues, a bitter partisan at the least, and he offers no serious documentation. Heartland Institute’s figures suggest no serious research or methodology. It’s a SWAG figure, and in this case, very wild, I think.

Frankly, it seems like people here are good at coming up with excuses not to read scientifically-based critiques of Monckton’s paper.

The P&S published both Pro and Con AGW papers, the conclusion of the Pro paper is :
Conclusion: Earth is getting warmer. Basic atmospheric models clearly predict that additional greenhouse gasses will raise the temperature of Earth. To argue otherwise, one must prove a physical mechanism that gives a reasonable alternative cause of warming. This has not been done. Sunspot and temperature correlations do not prove causality.
Watts up with that? (assuming) it’s getting warmer, if you can’t prove it’s being caused by something else, that’s proof it’s AGW? Apparently this is the position that the Council of the American Physical Society agrees with.
Meanwhile Monchton’s conclusion (rightly) questions the IPCCs stance, then each of logical steps that flows from there to the drastic actions being demanded. If you compare each of the papers then, at least as far as this issue of P&S is concerned, it’s GAME, SET, MATCH to Monchton.

Re: Joel Shore
I think that the Viscount’s paper points out pretty well that the high sensitivity figures result is run away warming, which would have occured based on the known paleoclimate data (CO2 much higher in the last 600 million years). Didn’t happen.
Meanwhile I have read some of the responses to the paper. I read about things like changes in the pipeline not accounted for, disagreements in how Monchton gets to his assessment of sensitivity. But Monchton is saying that none of these things is really measureable, however the conclusions based on high sensitivity aren’t being born out in the real world. That’s the bottom line, the real world is falsifying the IPCC projections, therefore the climate must be not as sensitive as thought. If you want to defend the IPCC’s sensitivity, you’ll have to convince us it’s quite a bit warmer than it is.
Meanwhile, suggested followup reading for you. Dr. Roy Spencer has recently written a paper called “the holy grail of climate sensitivity”. It dovetails very nicely with Monchtons paper. In it, he explains the actual source of the errors that have resulted in high estimates, I think that he may be on to something, check it out.

Good heavens! Further tracking takes the $50 billion figure to Fox News and — can you write a script like this? — Steven Milloy!
I don’t trust Milloy. I’ve spent a good portion of the past year tracking down the man’s footnotes on one project. More than 100 notes, not one has checked out so far. Milloy’s a lobbyist. I don’t trust him, I don’t think he has a methodology.

Ed Darrell — (Good heavens! Further tracking takes the $50 billion figure to Fox News and — can you write a script like this? — Steven Milloy!)
This number looks to be an estimate, so why you would bother with going after Milloy seems to be pointless. The estimate would have to include greenpeace and similar group funding, the value of airtime wasted on CNN etc promoting what amounts to greenpeace press releases and calling it “news”, the efforts of governments to fund climate studies, satellite time that is used to study the alleged problem, climate conferences, and essentially, the entire ball of wax.
Assuming it’s Milloy’s estimate, it looks like he’s lowballing it. I’d put the number closer to 10x to 20x of that.
My guess is that this estimate is also a reaction/answer to the rather silly and otherwise idiotic allegations that some people make regarding “paid denialists” and so on as propagated by exxonsecrets and other such whistle blowing “public services.”
Assuming the peak oil crowd is correct, the allegations paint a picture of a world corporation chock full of some of the world’s brightest business minds plotting to quickly waste resources so as to go out of business as soon as possible and simultaneously be castigated by politicians and excorciated by the public at large. So, that’s how conspiracy theorists at places like exxonsecrets seem to assume highly trained and ultra-intelligent Ivy League business people think? The allegations are obviously absurd, mendacious rubbish and ludicrous even in the abstract.
Heavens, I would have thought it apparent that this number was that type of estimate just on the face of it.
MarkW — (If indeed the climate is balanced on the knife’s edge, as you seem to believe…)
I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said merely that humans naturally think in terms of balance and any argument to the contrary will be difficult for the majority to believe. Maybe this is because most of us are bipeds, for whom balance seems to be an important notion.
I have made no comment on what *I* think whatsoever.

Cyc said something quite odd to me and i dont understand it
and just possibly explain the value of a review by an academic who by his own admission does not understand the difference between a forcing and a feedback ?
I read the peer review by Saperstein, there is nothing in it which says that he does not understand the difference

Hi peer reviewer…
Saperstein’s review states plainly: I don’t know the difference between “forcing” and “feedback”.
I guess most folks here are aware that there is actually a difference between formal peer review and a set of helpful comments where something is unclear or could be improved. The P&S forum newsletter is not peer reviewed, and Saperstein’s comments clearly do not constitute a peer review. His lack of familiarity with the technical terms does not prevent him from singling out where the paper might be unclear or improved in format and wording, and this was no doubt helpful in cleaning up the article. But there’s no real consideration of the technical details as would be expected in formal peer review from someone familiar with the subject matter.
As I see it, the reason reason there was a need to put an explicit disclaimer on the article was simply because so many people were so badly misrepresenting things. If there had not been such a large number of news and internet comments hailing this article as having some kind of formal endorsement, indicating a position of the APS itself or a level of technical recognition of validity of the arguments, then there would have been no need, in my opinion, for the disclaimer. There have been other occasions when the newsletter has published idiosyncratic opinion pieces going against the conventional view without adding disclaimers; but in this case the distortions were so widespread that it was only responsible to add a clarification of what should be obvious and uncontroversial — and totally uninsulting.
Cheers — Duae Quartunciae

Duae Quartunciae
It might help to review the APS statement added in red bold to Monckton’s paper:

While not “thorough scientific peer review”, stating that there was not “any scientific peer review” when there was a physics professor/editor giving review/feedback appears to be overstating it.
How helpful is it to science to state: “Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community”? The same could have been said about quantum physics, plate tectonics etc. That gives the appearance of stifling the essence of the scientific endeavor.
Similarly, what basis is there for stating: “The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”
Is that a carefully considered evaluation of the technical merits of the paper and comparing it with other possibly corroborating evidence compared to the ruling paradigm?
OR is it a weathervane statement as to which way the political wind is blowing, and where the major research funding is coming from?

Given the above, a hopefully helpful suggestion..
The APS to be renamed the AMS.
ie,
The American Physical Society,
to become forthwith,
The American Modeling Society.

to CYC
its amazing how you can interpret the review much differently than i do
the actual phrase is:
“I don’t know the difference between “forcing” and “feedback”. If “forcing” is not just external energy flux, than I
would assume it includes “feedback”. What do you mean? Definitions now amplified and clarified in the text”
feedback and forcing as used by IPCC are peculiar meanings, and I thought the reviewer wanted Monckton to answer: What do you mean? to clarify the information in his paper.
The reviewer Saperstein is hardly ignorant. He is an editor of the APS quarterly itself. The APS decided to have the paper reviewed by its own editor! Why would the APS use its own editor to review the paper, and presumbably also review the other papers and then declare that the paper was un reviewed? Sounds like an old book written by a mathematician about rabbits and their lives

Who else has the temerity to claim the paper was peer-reviewed, other than Lord Monckton? Why should everyone else suffer for his hubris?

To peer reviewer, 00:17:51…
Implicitly, all the articles do have that disclaimer, in my opinion. It would be rather precious to put an explicit rider of the bleeding obvious over every article in what is plainly a informal newsletter with lots of freely contributed opinion pieces.
What makes Monckton’s article stand out as needing this disclaimer to be explicit is not that it is any less reviewed or less of an opinion piece. It is rather that half the internet immediately fell over themselves to misrepresent the status of the paper. It appears to have started, as far as I can tell, with a press release from the SPPI, on July 15. which described the newsletter as “mathematical proof” in a “major, peer-reviewed paper” within a “learned journal”. This is simply false on all counts, for an informal apropriate argument (with errors), in a minor opinion piece within a newsletter. From there it exploded across the internet.
In my view, the whole thing shows a lot of naiviety. It would have been sensible to recognize in advance that this was going to spill over beyond the P&S newsletter; and announce right from the start that these were opinion pieces by individuals wanting to contribute a viewpoint. But they obviously did not anticipate the sheer scale and speed of the distortions. Not only was it being spoken of as “peer reviewed” and in an APS journal; it was almost immediately inflated into an indication that the whole 50,000 strong APS was shifting position. A straightforward clarification of the obvious was entirely in order; and there is nothing in the disclaimer which is inappropriate, or insulting. It was a necessary clarification to help stem a rapidly spreading distortion of this one specific paper’s status.

As a layman I was lazy and tended to believe the MMGW alarmists, however when Gore’s movie was released I smelt a rat and did what Richard Dawkins asks his readers to do in God Delusion: ‘raise their conciousness’.
I’ve done a lot of desktop research and read up as much as I can on the subject, including reading a number of books sceptical of MMGW. My opinion is now firmly one of being extremely sceptical of the MMGW alarmists.
We need sites like this and the people that use them to keep questioning the science behind the MMGW claims and push for a much more more open non- politicised debate.
This recent article is extremely good at questioning the basis of the MMGW protaganists claims: http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/10/stories/2008071055521000.htm

should be july 15th

I’d have no objection to the APS disclaimer above Monckton’s article explicitly indicating that all newsletter articles are in the same boat as far as review is concerned. However, only Monckton’s article should be identified as the one with which there is widespread disagreement. And that is only needed because of the contrary implication in many blogs and news outlets that the publication reflected some kind of change in the APS position.
On the other hand: given that Monckton himself precipitated the distortions as soon as the newsletter came out, there’s no cause to beat around the bush in deference to his finer feelings. He egregiously misrepresented the matter in the SPPI press release. I think the APS is entirely correct to give a short, firm, accurate and civil response. Further careful rewordings to imply some kind of equal standing of all parties would be misleading.
As for the matter of errors… full peer review intended to pick up all the technical errors is a very time consuming and onerous task, usually taking months. Monckton got a bit of a once over, but no assurance that all his errors would be found. Same for other articles in the paper … and generally this is well understood. Newsletter articles represent the author’s views.
I’m not a professional physicist; but even so, it is not that surprising to me that I was able to see errors in Monckton’s paper that were missed by a professional. It was pretty much sheer happenstance that I had been studying the very topic of feedbacks at this time. That’s really all there is to it, I think. I was lucky.
I had read in just the last couple of weeks many of the references that Monckton was using, and had been explaining on my own behalf the nature of forcing and feedback in another online discussion. I do have an undergraduate degree that helps, as well as a long standing interest in physics and maths. So I was primed to pick up the problems. An expert in that specific field would have picked them up at once as well. A competent physicist from another field? Not necessarily.
The other paper, by Hafemeister and Schwartz, is attempting something very different from what Monckton was attempting. Monckton was attempting a high level refutation of modern climate science, to refute it. Hafemeister and Schwartz, on the other hand, were attempting a basic introductory tutorial on the nature of radiative transfers. They certainly don’t say that the atmosphere absorbs all IR. They rather work through a series of successively more detailed simple cases to help show how energy balance works out.
For a sincerely interested onlooker, unsure of who to trust and where to go for good information, it’s as well to keep in mind the drastically different underlying presumptions of the two papers. One treats the matter as correcting incompetent errors made by experts. The other treats the matter as educating novices to have a better grasp of the underlying principles.
Frankly, even if you are inclined to think that pretty much the whole field of modern climatology is riddled with errors and incompetent physical analysis, it would still be a good idea to learn more about the technical details of that analysis from tutorial style articles that give a simplified introduction. It takes time, but struggling through the examples in the tutorial article puts you in a better position to evaluate more advanced treatments (and go on to more advanced tutorials!). There’s much not covered in the tutorial paper; before I started reading the papers on feedback and forcings I spent a month or so on a general undergraduate level textbook on atmospheric physics and radiative transfers to be sure I could follow the papers. This was all before Monckton’s paper came out… it was very serendipitous timing for me.

Another email reply to Dr. Bienenstock:
————————

Dear Dr. Bienenstock:
I must reiterate my previous question: Are we therefore to assume that Hafemeister and Schwartz’ unprefaced article has been subjected to peer review, its conclusions are in agreement with the opinion of the community and that the Council does agree with them? If so, why is there no bright green prefratory statement saying as much in front of their article? And if their article has not been subjected to peer review, in the same way that Monckton’s has not, why is that not also noted in bright red lettering? And are all and only “Con” articles to carry your Scarlet Letters?
Sir, you can cite your supposed “consensus” until you run out of ink; I am looking for facts. Measurements. Physics. And those seem strangely absent on the side of your “consensus”, a group which has expressed the desire to radically remake the planetary economy, based on the output of highly parameterized computer models and very fuzzy physical assumptions. It was the “opinion of the community” at the end of the Ninteenth Century that Physics was almost “done”. You owe your existence at SLAC to those few who ignored that Consensus. But now you cite an ever more obviously political consensus in a rather clumsy attempt to stop scientific inquiry. As such, you have moved into the realm of proclaiming a religious dogma.
You are no longer advancing the cause of Science, nor the reputation of the APS, Dr. Bienenstock. Perhaps your talents could be properly used by a marketing firm or a presidential campaign.
Yours,
Michael S. Talcott

Duae Quartunciae

On the other hand: given that Monckton himself precipitated the distortions as soon as the newsletter came out, there’s no cause to beat around the bush in deference to his finer feelings. He egregiously misrepresented the matter in the SPPI press release.

You might clarify which statements came from Lord Monckton, which from Robert Ferguson and which by “Staff”.
As ’tis said: “There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip”.

Duae Quartunciae
I do agree that: He egregiously misrepresented the matter in the SPPI press release.
Still I think the APS should not mislead the public by pointing out only his paper was not “scientifically” peer reviewed. Its not a matter of finer feelings; its a matter of confusion for the world. Clearly the paper was reviewed ( and frankly whether it was or not doesn’t matter, because people would argue after the fact), and for the APS to declare that their own editor was not doing a scientific review is a bit confusing to all, and at the same time state that the paper was incorrect if it hadn’t been scientifically reviewed is also a bit confusing.
Let me ask a science question: “They certainly don’t say that the atmosphere absorbs all IR.” actually this was one of their limit values to determine a temperature( I think) and they make this assumption in a derivation.
my question is: what did I read wrongly? I freely admit I could have missed this point but I did think it was a limit term
Some more elementary questions and confusion I have as an outsider:
why doesn’t hoffmeister include heat capacity terms in their extra added wattts/meter sq . The atmosphere is being treated like its an adiabatic system: it isnt.
whenever we burn fuel or make electricity , terrawatts of heat are given off and this heat is never a parameter in any model which contributes a c02 like term to temperature change. I dont know enough to know where it would enter: it could be additive to a co2 effect or it could simply be a reason for increased warmth: a global heat island effect.
Further more the heat capacity of the oceans and the land and dirt in the air are never used to determine the temperature effects of the calculated forcing.
Lets say you have an extra 4 watts per meter sq insolation equivalent. but also lets say that that 4 watts is going into a body that has an infinite heat capacity like a section through the crust or a section into the ocean. What does that do to the temperature? if its infinite, the answer is that the forcing doesn’t affect the temperature. So you need a heat capacity term
Please also consider that if a “global heat island effect” doesn’t contribute to a warmer earth as has been suggested by reviews of some papers, why? where does all that heat go? Could the lack of a global heat island effect be an actual measure of the useful heat capacity of the earth and water and could be used to calculate the temp change from a co2 forcing?

Duae Quartunciae
I do agree that: He egregiously misrepresented the matter in the SPPI press release.
Still I think the APS should not mislead the public by pointing out only his paper was not “scientifically” peer reviewed. Its not a matter of finer feelings; its a matter of confusion for the world. Clearly the paper was reviewed ( and frankly whether it was or not doesn’t matter, because people would argue after the fact), and for the APS to declare that their own editor was not doing a scientific review is a bit confusing to all, and at the same time state that the paper was incorrect if it hadn’t been scientifically reviewed is also a bit confusing. If they didnt review it how could they tell?
Let me ask a science question: “They certainly don’t say that the atmosphere absorbs all IR.” actually this was one of their limit values to determine a temperature( I think) and they make this assumption in a derivation.
my question is: what did I read wrongly? I freely admit I could have missed this point but I did think it was a limit term
Some more elementary questions and confusion I have as an outsider:
why doesn’t hoffmeister include heat capacity terms in their extra added wattts/meter sq forcing equations?. The atmosphere is being treated like its an adiabatic system: it isnt. It may be that they are only trying to calculate an energy effect purely for c02 and not calculate the effect of the extra energy on temp.
whenever we burn fuel or make electricity , terrawatts of heat are given off and this heat is never a parameter in any model which contributes a c02 like term to temperature change. I dont know enough to know where it would enter: it could be additive to a co2 effect on temp or it could simply be a reason for the increased warmth that is not from c02: a global heat island effect. whatever effect this terrawatts of energy term has on temp, it would subtract the observed co2 effect on temp
Further more the heat capacity of the oceans and the land and dirt in the air are never used to determine the temperature effects of the calculated forcing by co2.
Lets say you have an extra 4 watts per meter sq insolation equivalent. but also lets say that that 4 watts is going into a body that has an infinite heat capacity like a section through the crust or a section into the ocean. What does that do to the temperature? if its infinite, the answer is that the forcing doesn’t affect the temperature. So you need a heat capacity term for consideration of a non infinite heat capacity
Please also consider that if a “global heat island effect” doesn’t contribute to a warmer earth as has been suggested by reviews of some papers, why? where does all that heat go? Could the lack of a global heat island effect be an actual measure of the useful heat capacity of the earth and water and could be used to calculate the temp change from a co2 forcing?

I would like to say once more that this “forcing” definition used by climatologists is unfortunate. It is almost true that a heavenly body receives and sends energy through electromagnetic radiation. ( almost because gravitational energy is also exchanged between heavenly bodies). At the level of the outer surface of the earth radiation balance and energy balance are almost the same.
The unfortunate thing is that people using this “forcing” business forget that radiation is not conserved. It is energy that is the conserved quantity, and energy takes many forms, from heat to convection , to evaporation and precipitation. Of course heat capacities are very important. This is a a complex, chaotic, thermodynamic system one has under study, from coupled differential equations.
These “forcings”are like making a budget, using only cash flow and ignoring credit and debt, or at best “estimating” by a computer model the average credit and debt for a business.