Part I: How the central estimate of global warming was exaggerated
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In this new series, I propose to explore the sequence of errors, large and small, through which the climatological establishment has – until now – gotten away with greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity.
The errors have an unholy, cumulative effect, conspiring to bring about an exaggeration that is grievous.
The focus in this series will be on describing each error clearly, so that the commenters who have so vigorously had their say on my earlier descriptions of the current method of determining climate sensitivity can examine them and say whether they think the climatological establishment has come to the right conclusion.
I shall do my best to make it clear when I am describing the official position and when I am describing a proposed alternative view.
By all means criticize me if you think I am wrong about the errors I have identified, or if you think my description of the official position is wrong. But do not hold my feet to the fire for the official position itself: address your criticisms of it to the IPCC secretariat. I am here not to argue for the official position, but rather to raise certain very specific questions about it.
And please read these head posting carefully before you rush to comment. In my last posting, for instance, a commenter wrote that only at a late stage in the follow-up conversation had I introduced the notion that the emission temperature formed part of the basis for determining the reference sensitivity parameter λ0 (see Fig. 2 for an illustration of how the official equation uses this parameter). In fact, the emission temperature had been explicitly determined in the head posting. There is a lot of detail in these postings. Read them carefully.
I shall not be considering the vexed question whether any or all of the errors the climatological establishment have insouciantly perpetrated and then sullenly perpetuated are deliberate, nor the related question of the extent to which certain leading members of that establishment know about the errors but find it socially convenient, politically expedient and, above all, financially profitable to look the other way. I shall merely report the errors as I find them, and invite your comments.
This is Part I of the series. In this first article, I shall describe a rather small error that arises from a consideration that will eventually be seen to have a very large influence on official exaggerations of predicted global warming. You may not think, at this stage, that it is really an error at all. Be patient. As this series unfolds, the full horror of what the climatological establishment has done will be exposed, step by ineluctable step.
Here and throughout the series, temperatures on the absolute or Kelvin scale will be given and anomalies stated in Celsius degrees will be presented as anomalies in Kelvin. Also, for simplicity, the IPCC’s Assessment Reports of 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2013 will be labeled AR1-5. The series will concern itself chiefly with equilibrium sensitivity.
Let us begin at the beginning. Almost 40 years ago, Charney (1979, p.2), in a report for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, concluded: “We estimate the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3 [K], with a probable error of ± 1.5 [K].”
AR1 (p. xxv) concluded that “the models[’] results do not justify altering the previously accepted range of 1.5 to 4.5 [K]”, but added that, “Although scientists are reluctant to give a single best estimate in this range, … a value of climate sensitivity of 2.5 [K] has been chosen as the best estimate.”
AR2 (p. 34) and AR5 (p. 16) concurred, though AR5 declined to provide a central estimate.
Later in this series I shall address the remarkable fact that, after almost 40 years and tens of billions in taxpayers’ dollars, the climatological establishment has been unable (or unwilling) to narrow the interval of official global-warming predictions. So broad is the interval of those predictions that the “settled science” of how much global warming our sins of emission may cause is no more “settled” now than it was in 1979.
For now, however, let us focus on central estimates of climate sensitivity. Since there is now broad agreement among official circles that the radiative forcing in response to a CO2 doubling is 3.7 Watts per square meter (an agreement that we shall in due course find unjustifiable, but that is not for today, so we shall accept it for now ad argumentum), the major reason for the large differences between models’ global-warming predictions is the great variation in estimates of temperature feedbacks – the additional forcing that are thought to arise as a result of the direct warming of the atmosphere caused by the original forcing and are expressed in Watts per square meter of the reference warming that triggered them.
Fig. 1 shows that indeed it is differences in feedbacks that are the cause of the broad interval of “settled-science” climate sensitivities. For climate sensitivities on 3.0 [1.5, 4.5] K imply unitless temperature-feedback factors f on 0.60 [0.23, 0.73] – an interval that is egregiously inconsistent with the remarkable near-thermostasis of the climate evidenced by the ice-cores over the past 810,000 years (see e.g. Jouzel et al., 2007).
The central feature of Fig. 1, for present purposes, is that the climate-sensitivity response ΔT to various values for the feedback factor f is very far from linear. This non-linearity will crop up again and again as this series unfolds, for the modelers, as will be seen in due course, understand it poorly.
Anyone who has ever built an operational-amplifier circuit intended to operate stably will know that a designed-in maximum feedback factor of not more than 0.1 (or 0.01 if possible) is desirable to ensure that anomalies in componentry, assembly, operation and ambient conditions do not induce unwanted runaway responses. The climate is remarkably stable: global temperatures have varied by little more than 3.3 K either side of the period mean for 810,000 years.
Given this near-perfect thermostasis, it is improbable a priori, and will later in this series be demonstrated to be impossible a posteriori, that true feedback values can fall anywhere in the zone marked “unstable” on the graph. The shaded zone, equivalent to an interval [1.5, 4.5] K for final or equilibrium climate sensitivity ΔT, is thus squarely in forbidden territory. But more of that another day.
Fig. 1 The response curve of equilibrium post-feedback climate sensitivity ΔT for feedback factors f on [–0.5, +2.0], showing the singularity at f = 1.0 and the design maximum at f = 0.1 generally adopted by process engineers for electronic circuits intended to perform stably. The shaded region covers the interval 0.60 [0.23, 0.73] of feedback factors f for AR5’s climate sensitivity ΔT on [1.5, 4.5] K, with the central estimate 3.0 K given in Charney (1979).
Back to today, when I am approaching the first little error toe-in-the-water [in passing, you will be delighted to know that the charming Latin adverb for “toe-in-the-water” is pedetemptim].
At present, official climatology tends to take the inter-model mean climate sensitivity as the central estimate of ΔT. However, as Fig. 1 shows, this approach implies a central estimate for the feedback factor f that is a great deal closer to the upper than to the lower bound of the interval of feedback factors f; and it is f that chiefly determines final sensitivity ΔT.
The correct approach, therefore, is to determine the inter-model mean feedback factor f and then to plug that value into the official climate-sensitivity equation (1), illuminated in Fig. 2, to determine the central estimate of final or equilibrium sensitivity.
In the current understanding, the pre-feedback or reference sensitivity determined from the left-hand or feedback part of (1), encompassed by the pale green brace, is 1.16 K. This, too, will turn out to be an exaggeration, but we shall deal with that in future articles.
Fig. 2 Illumination of the official climate-sensitivity equation (1)
From that value and from the predicted upper and lower bounds [1.5, 4.5] K of final or equilibrium climate sensitivity ΔT, it is a simple matter to rearrange the official equation to determine via (2) the feedback factors f corresponding with those bounds:
Thus, for ΔT on [1.5, 4.5] K, the feedback factor f falls on [0.23, 0.73]. The multi-model mean value of f will generally be close to the mean of the upper and lower bounds: thus, the central estimate of f will be about 0.48, from which (1) can be used to approximate the proper central estimate of climate sensitivity corresponding to the interval [1.5, 4.5] K, as (3) shows:
Charney’s central estimate ΔT = 3.0 K is more than one-third greater than this. The central estimate ΔT = 2.5 K in AR1, AR2 came closer to the true central estimate, but is still overstated by 12.5%, or one-eighth. As we say in Scotland, mony a mickle mak’s a muckle, and this apparently insignificant exaggeration is the beginning of the sequence of excesses that compound into a very large exaggeration indeed.
What of the vaunted ensembles of expensive models with which the climatological establishment has attempted to overcome the Lorenz constraint (Lorenz, 1963) on the reliable long-term prediction of future climate states that arises from the extreme sensitivity of the evolutionary path of objects such as the climate to very small variations in the initial conditions (AR3, §14.2.2.2)?
For the CMIP3 and CMIP5 model ensembles, the feedback sums c = Σici, expressed in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, are illustrated graphically in AR5, fig. 9.43a, of which an enhanced detail is shown at Fig. 3.
Fig. 3 Feedback sums c = Σici for CMIP5/AR5 and CMIP3/AR4
The published CMIP3 climate sensitivities are 3.3 [2.1, 4.4] K (AR5, p. 820, §9.7.3, for the bounds; AR5, p. 83, box TFE.6, for the central estimate). As Fig. 3 shows, the interval of feedback sums c in the CMIP3 ensemble was 1.93 [1.53, 2.35] W m–2 K–1. The product of the reference sensitivity parameter λ0 = 0.312 K W–1 m2, determined as shown in Fig. 2, and these values of c is the interval 0.60 [0.48, 0.73] of feedback factors f. Then the final-gain factor G = (1 – f)–1, the ratio of final sensitivity ΔT to the reference sensitivity ΔT0, falls on 2.51 [1.91, 3.74], whereupon equilibrium post-feedback climate sensitivity ΔT = ΔT0 G obtained using (1) accordingly falls on 2.9 [2.2, 4.3] K. The bounds are near-coextensive with those of the published CMIP3 equilibrium-sensitivity interval (assuming just a 3% variance in ΔT0 they would be exact), but the published central estimate is shown to have been overstated by about one-eighth.
For the CMIP5 model ensemble for AR5, a similar analysis may be performed. The published CMIP5 equilibrium-sensitivity interval is 3.2 [2.1, 4.7] K (AR5, p. 83, box TFE.6). The interval of feedback sums c was 1.53 [1.00, 2.25] W m–2 K–1. The product of the reference sensitivity parameter λ0 and these values gives the interval 0.48 [0.31, 0.70] of feedback factors f. Then the final-gain factor G = (1 – f)–1 falls on 1.91 [1.45, 3.35]. Vial et al. (2013, fig. 5a), the official paper analysing the CMIP5 models’ output for AR5, somewhat arbitrarily raises reference or pre-feedback sensitivity ΔT0 from 1.16 to 1.42 K on the ground that some of the tropospheric changes caused by the CO2 forcing do not affect sea surface temperatures and should thus be counted as part of the reference sensitivity. On this basis, equilibrium post-feedback climate sensitivity ΔT = ΔT0 G obtained using (1) falls on 2.7 [2.1, 4.7] K. As with the CMIP3 models for AR3, the bounds determined from (1) are coextensive with the published CMIP5 equilibrium-sensitivity bounds, but the analysis shows the published central estimate to have been overstated by 18.5%.
Table 1 summarizes the overstatements of the central estimates of climate sensitivity:
| Table 1
Exaggerated central climate-sensitivity estimates |
||||
| Official source | Interval of ΔT | Erroneous | Corrected | Exaggeration |
| Charney (1979) | [1.5, 4.5] K | 3.0 K | 2.2 K | +35% |
| AR1, AR2 | [1.5, 4.5] K | 2.5 K | 2.2 K | +12.5% |
| CMIP3 for AR4 | [2.1, 4.4] K | 3.3 K | 2.9 K | +12.5% |
| CMIP5 for AR5 | [2.1, 4.7] K | 3.2 K | 2.7 K | +18.5% |
| AR5 | [1.5, 4.5] K | None | 2.2 K | n.a. |
The official central estimates are exaggerated because the modelers have failed to take proper account of the exaggerated non-linearity of the temperature responses to linearly-increasing feedback sums. They have allowed that non-linearity to drag the central climate-sensitivity estimates erroneously upward by 12.5-35%.
Ø Next: How reference climate sensitivity ΔT0 was exaggerated
References
Charney J (1979) Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment: Report of an Ad-Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, Climate Research Board, Assembly of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, National Research Council, Nat. Acad. Sci., Washington DC, July, pp. 22
IPCC (1990-2013) Assessment Reports AR1-5 are available from www.ipcc.ch
Lorenz EN (1963) Deterministic nonperiodic flow, J. Atmos. Sci. 20: 130-141.
Vial J, Dufresne J, Bony S (2013) On the interpretation of inter-model spread in CMIP5 climate sensitivity estimates, Clim Dyn 41: 3339, doi:10.1007/s00382-013-1725-9
Exponential, unsustainable. So, there’s hope.
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Doesn’t seem likely that a British Public School educated member of the British aristocracy would used an Americanism which grates on the ear of any Briton over the age of 50.
It grates on me, too, and I use it, I use it.
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Hey Sandy! What you said–YOU BETCHA!!!
But the best statement is this one: “Anyone who has ever built an operational-amplifier circuit …”: – it clearly demonstrates that the Lord is a very practical man and has hands-on experience, which is totally in contrast to the persons writing AR5, etc. As a boy, I sat watching my father making ‘operational-amplifier circuits’ with his soldering kit as a radio ham and enthusiast. I never got to that stage myself, as the Technology changed and was far from as exciting as when everything was analog and with glowing tubes, condensators and resistors, etc.
Sandy In Limousin, what grates on the ear is someone using “would used” in a sentence! Ouch!
To have and to halt.
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From this day forward, kim.
Some have forgotten where ‘gotten‘ comes from.
“That gotten is primarily used in North America has given rise to the mistaken belief that it is American in origin and hence new and inferior. But gotten is in fact an old form, predating the United States and Canada by several centuries. It fell out of favour in British English by the 18th century, but it was eventually picked up again on the other side of the Atlantic, perhaps by analogy with forgotten.”
“The vehemence of some Britons’ scorn for gotten likely has to do with the fact that it has gained ground in British English over the last couple of decades. Many English speakers from outside North America resist the encroachment of so-called Americanisms (many of which, like gotten, are not actually American in origin) on their versions of English, and, for mysterious reasons, some feel especially strongly about gotten.”
http://grammarist.com/usage/got-gotten/
PiperPaul: Yes, there are some words that people believe are ‘Americanisms’, which are, in fact, old English. The one that surprises everyone is ‘Fall’ for Autumn. ‘Fall’ is mentioned in Henry VIII’s time.
Full marks to Piper Paul for not having forgotten that the history of past participle forms in the strong verbs predates the founding of America, and that words such as “gotten” were begotten in the Old Country.
Well said, but “gotten” wasn’t eventually picked up here again. We never quit using it.
“Gotten” was still standard in 17th century English, when all the colonies except Georgia (1733) were founded (North and South Carolina separated in 1712, but the Province of Carolina was named in honor of Charles II).
Shakespeare uses “gotten”, as in Richard II, Act V, Scene V (c. 1595):
“Groom
“I was a poor groom of thy stable, king,
When thou wert king; who, travelling towards York,
With much ado at length have gotten leave
To look upon my sometimes royal master’s face.”
Received pronunciation lost “gotten” about the same time, in the 18th century, that it lost its rhoticism, ie sounding final “r”. Shakespeare would have pronounced “water” as it’s spelled. Modern Americans pronounce it “wadder”, where “dd” indicates “flapping”, while RP renders it “watuh”, keeping the crisp “t” but losing the “r”.
ill gotten as in ill-gotten gains has a sense of obtained in an illegal manner, so to me the associations of “gotten away” with “ill-gotten” gives an added twist of deceit.
There is also “only begotten” as in the Nicene Creed as used in the King James bible (is this the same gotten? before 1000; Middle English begeten, biyeten, Old English begetan, c. Old High German bigezzan, Gothic bigitan): “I believe…in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.”
And some people wonder why English is so difficult…sheesh. Y’all just need to start talkin’ ‘merican.
‘Lost Rhoticist’. Gotta remember that one.
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We Americans are indeed mostly rhoticists, although some Southern accents mimic what by the 18th century had become fancy, plummy speech in London (can’t say posh yet), ie dropping final “r”.
But also mostly not rotters.
Shakespeare may well have had a West Country accent, to boot, which he might have had to suppress for the stage.
I read a linguistic study on the prime accent of the Brits versus American. It turned out that the American accent (primarily New England) is actually the older, as is the Appalachian/Southern variation. It seems that the British affectation came about in the 18th century and was not adopted for the most part by America, Canada, and Australia. Only the smaller and richer colonies of New Zealand and South Africa adopted it, as their intercourse with Britain was much greater, per capita. And contrary to modern thinking, the Canadian accent is not a result of the large American media presence, we always spoke with the same accent.
I looked for late literary uses of “gotten” in English English, and found Pope’s Iliad, which translation he wrote c. 1715-20. He may have used “gotten” for its meter in this heroic couplet, but there’s still no compelling reason to think that the form was archaic at that time.
“Haste to the ships, the gotten spoils enjoy,
Nor tempt too far the hostile Gods of Troy.”
Pat Ch
August 27, 2016 at 1:33 pm
Also a great many English-speaking Canadians were American royalist refugees from the Revolutionary War.
Shades of Castilian v. Latin American “Spanish”. In Iberia, the court took to lisping so that Carlos V wouldn’t feel bad, which affectation spread to the middle classes, at least.
Meanwhile, in the Americas, colonists continued speaking “normally”, so that for them the word “civilización” is pronounced “see-bee-lee-sah-see-own” rather than “thee-bee-lee-thah-thee-own”. Also, a lot of the conquistadors and settlers came from Extremadura, where a dialect of Asturian-Leonese was spoken rather than closely related and largely mutually intelligible language Castilian.
Some Spanish-speakers insist on using “Castilian” because Spain has six languages: Basque and five Romance tongues, from Galician (ancestor of Portuguese) in the NW, to Asturian-Leonese, to Castilian, to Aragonese, to Catalan in the NE, the central three of which are very close. Aragonese also shades into Catalan, but the latter is generally considered in the Gallo-Romance group rather than Ibero-Romance, its closest kin being the endangered Occitan dialects of southern France.
Essayist Francis Bacon, c. 1601 wrote in “Of Envy”:
“This envy, being in the Latin word invidia, goeth in the modern language, by the name of discontentment; of which we shall speak, in handling sedition. It is a disease, in a state, like to infection. For as infection spreadeth upon that which is sound, and tainteth it; so when envy is *gotten* once into a state, it traduceth even the best actions thereof, and turneth them into an ill odor. And therefore there is little won, by intermingling of plausible actions. For that doth argue but a weakness, and fear of envy, which hurteth so much the more, as it is likewise usual in infections; which if you fear them, you call them upon you.”
In “Of Cunning”:
“And because it works better, when anything seemeth to be *gotten* from you by question, than if you offer it of yourself, you may lay a bait for a question, by showing another visage, and countenance, than you are wont; to the end to give occasion, for the party to ask, what the matter is of the change? As Nehemias did; And I had not before that time, been sad before the king.”
And in “Of Riches”:
“Meaning that riches *gotten* by good means, and just labor, pace slowly … Riches *gotten* by service, though it be of the best rise, yet when they are *gotten* by flattery, feeding humors, and other servile conditions, they may be placed amongst the worst.”
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/bacon/bacon_essays.html
English is anything but consistent.
We have beget and begotten, forget and forgotten, get and gotten and got, and regret but not regrotten or regrot.
Indeed:
c 1340 Cursor M. 4913 (Trin.) We haue wiþ vs trussed nouȝt But þing þat we truly bouȝt And so is oure trewe geten þing.
c 1380 Wyclif Sel. Wks. III. 302 Sathanas‥to whom þei maken sacrifice and omage for þis falsly geten lordischip.
1477 Earl Rivers (Caxton) Dictes 64 Pouertee is better than euyl goten richesse.
1548 Hall Chron., Edw. IV, 231 The gain of the nyne gotten battailes.
1580 Sidney Ps. x. iii, This gotten blisse, shall never part.
1603 Knolles Hist. Turks (1621) 59 Three or foure yeeres passed in great quietnesse, to the great strengthening of him in those new gotten kingdomes.
1665 Manley Grotius’ Low C. Warres 265 They should not endanger their gotten Honour.
1715–20 Pope Iliad x. 596 Haste to the ships, the gotten spoil enjoy.
1820 Chalmers Congreg. Serm. (1838) II. 54 He is apt to be satisfied with the triumphs of his gotten victory.
1894 Gladstone Horace’s Odes 36 On gotten goods to live Contented.
Gabro’s examples of “gotten” in Francis Bacon’s essays are interesting, though Bacon wrote the essays in Latin. They were splendidly translated by -if memory serves – a 17th-century schoolmaster. The point is well made either way.
And full marks to Alan Ranger for his fascinating list of “gottens” over three-quarters of a millennium.
Elizabeth the first quite famously said “My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.” If a Queen can use that as a past participle, its obviously The Way To Go, except we didn’t, We stuck with forgotten, but ditched gotten…
Actually it is still in use outside the USA. ‘I have gotten used to it’ scans slightly better than the stumbling ‘I have got used to it’. But once you start the elisions ‘I’ve got used to it’ seems to be beater.
Of course the US is famous for always preferring the longer form of any words, an intellectual inferiority complex one surmises…;-)
Nothing intellectually inferior about the USA dialect.
English is and should remain ever changing (much like climate)
I have become used to it.
(Now, what was this post about?)
Leo Smith
August 28, 2016 at 2:42 am
Our English is the language of William Shakespeare. Yours is that of Stephen Merchant.
If Shakespeare were alive today, he, like Merchant, would live in Los Angeles and have an American girlfriend.
She might not be a fashion model, however, as Will would have been lucky to reach 5’7″, while Steve is 6’7″.
It bothers me they say the past tense of go is “went”. Went is the past tense of wend. Go and gone are perfectly wonderful siblings. The English at some point decided to replace the black sheep of the family, goed. I happen to like the slightly celtic version gaed. I go, yesterday I gaed to work, and I have gone to work all week. But I don’t use it. Wish we did. What really burns me now is an Okie version: I go, i went, I had went. THAT one hurts. Others like “I had ran that program several times yesterday” are just as painful. The Okies among us are almost outdone by the Germans who say, “that’s how the data look like”. I’m afraid it’s spreading among non-Germans now. Ack!
Hoser August 31, 2016 at 12:51 pm
“It bothers me they say the past tense of go is “went”. Went is the past tense of wend. Go and gone are perfectly wonderful siblings. …”
Ah, another person who wishes that English were logical … not gonna happen. English is not now, nor has it ever been, logical. I also note people above bemoaning the changes in the language over time.
Here’s the deal. Languages evolve. That is why they work so well, because we get replace the words and constructions that don’t work or are clumsy with words that do work and are shorter and easier.
In general, the evolution is in two directions—towards greater simplicity, and towards greater certitude. When you want to tell someone that there is a snake behind him, you don’t use the word “ambulate” or the like, you say “run!!!”. It’s simpler, and there’s no mistaking the meaning.
This means that in general a shorter word will eventually supplant a longer word with the same meaning. For example, you say that in place of “I went to work all week” you’d say:
However, no matter how proper and right and correct it might be, it’s shorter to say “I went to work”, and so it has supplanted the more cumbersome phrase. Not only that, but that’s how it should be—if the language stops evolving it will no longer be relevant to the modern world.
However, it’s always fun to discuss.
w.
Sandy: Yes, and I’m English…and 57. It is actually getting worser!
bazzer, progressing, one thing about the English Language is that it will take words from any language and add them to the national vocabulary. That’s probably why there are more words in an English dictionary than in most other European languages. I still don’t like “gotten” as a word, there are more elegant sentence constructions. Despite my typo strewn writing I try and remember that my English teacher spent four years attempting to make me write in a way that was understood and flowed in a smooth fashion.
“…try and remember…”
Sandy, I hope that was a deliberate word choice? That one has caused dent formation in many an English teacher’s forehead.
Gotten does not grate near as much as the supposedly educated (teachers, professors, educators, journalists, etc.) using the word “bring” or “brought” when it is abundantly clear to the person that take or toke should be used. Worse yet is the fact that children’s shows, preschoolers shows, etc also are simply eliminating the use of take, taken, took, from the English language!
Example: ” When you go to the meeting next Friday, please bring your department’s current budget report.”
Like fingernails on a chalk board.
Yes, but I believe once a regionalism.
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Depends. I think the example should be “when you come to the meeting, bring your report”, since this seems to be from the organizer. Bring to our (really brmy) meeting. Take to theirs.
Hmmm, I was thinking of ‘carry’ for either ‘bring’ or ‘take’ and right now can’t remember which way was which.
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Ahhh, so, what we appear to have here is a group of over educated grammar SJW elitists. For “Pete’s Sake” just what the “frick” does it matter as long as the intent is understood. Or maybe prefer typical politician babble where the “run-on” can last hours without saying much of anything “concrete”. Yes the English language has been going “downhill” and “to pot” for a long time, but it’s futile to try and return to those olden “gay” days. I’m satisfied that there is still much clarity in articles like this one.
But all too often poor grammar obscures the message. My own pet peeves are (a) comma after subject clause, and (b) “would have” in the protasis (“if” clause) of conditionals.
The first makes me think that the subject clause is a subordinate clause, so that I am the left trying to parse a sentence without a subject. The second causes a bit of confusion between protasis and apodosis. Of course, I can usually resolve these problems, but with correct grammar they would never have arisen. And it is not difficult to learn correct grammar.
just what the “frick” does it matter as long as the intent is understood.
Well that is of course the point. Your cry echoes that of the generic Liberal tendency. “What do standards. moral or actual, or precisions actually matter’
Well, wait until someone starts driving in the wrong side if the road, because its ‘their culture and they are entitled to’ …
In Ernest K Gann’s ‘Fate is the hunter’ The author is berated by the senior pilot for failing to keep his altimeter exactly at a given level, he complains ‘but it doesn’t matter’ ‘One day it will, and you need to be in the habit of it’ A sentence that he finally understands flying at zero feet under a cloudbase of 50 feet over a wartime North Atlantic..
Standards are there for a reason. They allow a generic unified set of rules that, if everybody understands and follows them, make for lack of ambiguity and allow people to operate in harmony rather than in dissent.
It doesn’t matter so much what they are, and they may over time change, but they cannot be abandoned. Some countries drive on the left, others on the right. No country drives on both….
Ahhh, so, what we appear to have here is a group of over educated grammar SJW elitists. For “Pete’s Sake” just what the “frick” does it matter as long as the intent is understood.
It probably doesn’t matter – most of the time. However, if someone is putting their name to a piece of work which they clearly haven’t written then it may have implications.
PS Sorry – I posted the quote twice.
Well BFL, I have gotten a lot of knowledge about the English language from this blog.
Well I’m not exactly a “Briton”; not even sure what that means, but I use gotten freely and often.
I presume that the accepted alternative would be “got” ??
That grates on me even more.
So what then is the approved King’s English word to use where Americanismization uses gotten.
Much more egregious in MHO is the American usage of “momentarily” when they really mean “soon”.
So why are they saying in fact: ” I will be with you for a moment (and then I;m gonna split). ”
” Momentarily ” is the adverbial form of the adjective ” momentary ” meaning a very short period of time.
And why use five sillables instead of one (soon) ??
G
Actually, we’d probably say “I’lll be right with you.”
That same person probably agrees with you “at this point in time”. Lol! Maddening!
@ pochas, “I’ll be right with you” is my code for ” I won’t be there anytime soon” and is the most annoying phrase ever invented.
@ pochas : “I’ll be right with you” to me is code for ” go look for it yourself’ and ‘you will never see me again”, frankly that is the most irritating phrase anywhere!
On the matter of usage, I find myself constantly grinding my teeth at hearing people say that they refute a claim, when they are merely denying it.
However, this is common among politicians, and, as far as they are concerned, making and denying claims is all that matters. Proof is irrelevant.
Yeah and no one says ‘gone to meet (with) his Maker’…
‘Going forward’?
ITYM ‘in future….’
But its all part of the emancipation of the uneducated.
Those in the UK today can have the pleasure of hearing English spoken correctly, by the EX F1 drive Karun Chandhok: Like most foreigners who learn to speak English in formal schools, he has actually learnt English grammar, and probably knows what a past participle is.
Its a sad reflection of a generation of ‘socialist’ public education that none of his fellow commentators do.
I regularly hear even singular and plurals being arbitrarily mixed by supposedly educated people on TV and as for whoever writes the stuff for news papers…
Well, the Glaswegians (and maybe all the Scots for all I can remember) have a quaint way of saying when they will be ready to go:
‘Just got to do the dishes and then that’s me!’
Translation: ‘I’ll be ready to go when I’ve done the dishes’.
Broadly, they are too lazy to say ‘and then that’s me finished/ready to go!’
As an Englishman with Welsh ancestry in my maternal lineage, it was not for me to ask belligerent Glaswegians what the blazes they were talking about in my first weeks and months living north of the Border.
In the end, I came to understand Scottish dialectic, even when spoken with a guttural Glaswegian accent after 5 pints of Heavy (that’s bitter ale to the rest of us).
But it wasn’t exactly the Queen’s English and no doubt the locals still continue speaking that way…..
Dear Sandy In Limousin,
I think you’ll find that everything comes from somewhere else.
Regards,
WL
It was really a query as to whether someone educated at Harrow School would use that particular phraseology, as it is a boarding school I doubt it was learnt at home. As someone educated in a state High School in Scotland I know that it wasn’t part of my education.
I’m not really worried if the article was co-authored.
No, the head posting is not co-authored, though some crucial points at later stages of the argument will be attributed to their originators.
And yes, anyone educated at Harrow will be familiar with the strong verbs and their historical as well as current usages.
This linguistic argument, while very interesting, is distracting a lot of attention from the scientific point of the article.
What I find grating is that it is quite clearly not COB’s natural language but an attempt to sound more american which he presumably believes will somehow endear him to a majority of his target audience. There are also tortuous phrases like “sensitivities on 3.0” instead of sensitivities of 3.0 , this presumably being an extrapolation of the americain usage “on the order of” whereas british scientists/engineers would say ‘of the order of’.
In short it is affected and comes over as disingenuous play acting.
This kind of trick is pretty pointless in the context of numerous latin hurdles that constantly trip up the reader. He would do well to stick with his natural, rather eloquent English which has a certain charm and appeal, rather than making these silly gamits to americain English.
Clearly it has been a distraction so far, rather than an aid to communicating his arguments.
Greg is his usual sour, whining, negative self. His knowledge of English is as poor as his knowledge of mathematics. Let him read some of the fascinating and learned contributions on the word “gotten” that more learned and more positive commenters than he have contributed.
He also whines that I have talked of “equilibrium sensitivities on 3.0 [1.5, 4.5] K. Here I use the language of mathematicians in these islands, where we say “on” meaning “on the interval”. I am sorry if this usage is not instantly comprehensible.
… and another thing (please “think” of that famous popular song) …
“I’ve Gotten You – Under My Skin”
In North American English, there are two past participles of the verb “to get”, ie “have got” and “have gotten”. They’re used in different ways.
For instance, “I’ve got you under my skin” means I have you there (and have had for some time), while “I’ve gotten you under my skin” means you’ve recently arrived there.
“Gotten” has the sense of acquiring something, while “got” suggests already having it.
A teacher could ask a student, “Do you get this?” or “Have you gotten this?”, ie understood, to which the student might reply, “Yes, I get it” or “I’ve got it,” unless just now having “gotten it.”
Wow, dozens of comments in and we have yet to progress to talking about the article by Christopher Monckton…being stuck firmly in a discussion of the word “gotten”.
And the discussion was solden to us by someone who has broughten it up in a typo plague sentence yet.
This whole conversation has punchen me silly.
Irregardless of the origin or legitimacy thereof, count me on the side of those who classify such nit-picking as a pure waste of time, and she should never have brang it up!
Bring, brang, brung!
I had meant to make the entire comment a string of malapropisms, nonwords, errors of punctuation, typos and such, but the ironing was too much for me.
And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.
Well said, Menicholas. It’s a derailment of the thread, nothing more.
“irregardless” Menicholas.. Ugh.
No longer considered correct in English because the “ir” is an excessive negative.
But I DID read your comment (which is deliberately funny by the way) and I concur with your conclusion. Has the scientific discussion in this matter been vacated?
Thank you. Sixty something comments in and still separating English (the language) fly specs from pepper that has nothing to do with the article. A common troll-stall to disinterest casual readers who, about halfway through these in search of opinions, would already have moved on.
I’m a Brit (though a working class one by background), over the age of fifty, and I have gotten so completely used to “gotten” that I use it fairly frequently. I have actually gotten quite fond of it.
What fun! A linguistic discussion. And what a lot of interest it has generated.
I have a little English-Latin gripe.
“pedetemptim” is indeed a Latin adverb, meaning “gradually”, but in what English sentence could you possibly use “toe-in-the-water” as an adverb?
I agree with Mr Barraclough that the linguistic discussion has been entertaining, and that some commenters have contributed real and delightful knowledge.
Mr Barraclough asks in what English sentence one might use “toe-in-the-water” adverbially. See the use of “toe-in-the-water” in the head posting.
And I’d have lost half a mark at Cambridge for the pedestrian translation of “pedetemptim” as “gradually”. I might well have gained half a mark for translating it as “toe-in-the-water”, or for the Shakespearean “by little and little”.
”Seems that you would prefer the Cambridge dictionary, which does not “recognise” many American expressions and spelling.
The Oxford dictionary is much more permissive in “recognizing” most American spelling as optional.
We Canadians do “recognize” exclusively some spellings of our southern “neighbours”, but follow British standard spelling .for many words and British pronunciation for many words.
When we travel rural “routes” (roots) we never expect that the rural inhabitants have been “routed” by an approaching army.
No Canadian (or Brit either) seems to notice that their pronunciation of wireless “router” fits, not the definition of “dispatcher” (rooter), but rather maintains the American military connotation by implying that the data is fleeing in disarray.
I wonder how many Canadians possess three spelling checkers?
”Seems you would prefer the Cambridge dictionary, which does not “recognise” many American expressions and spelling.
The Oxford dictionary is much more permissive in “recognizing” most American spelling as optional or even preferred.
Canadians do “recognize” exclusively some spellings of their southern “neighbours”, but follow British standard spelling for many words (colour, catalogue). Some words are still pronounced the British way by some elderly Canadians (adult, either, neither), but both the young and semi-literate tend to follow American pronunciation.
When Canadians travel rural “routes” (roots) they never expect that the rural dwellers have been “routed” by an approaching army.
No Canadian (or Brit either) seems to notice that their pronunciation of wireless “router” fits, not the definition of “dispatcher” (rooter), but rather has the American connotation which implies that the data is fleeing in disarray.
I hope my reply is roughly in the right place. You go away for a couple of days and hundreds of new comments appear.
Christopher Monckton – I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to differ on that one, unless we can find an English major to adjudicate?
I’m sure your Latin tutor was fluent in Latin, but I think your extra half-mark would have been swept away by my old English master. He would have had a fit at the idea of hyphenating noun-preposition-article-noun, and calling it an adverb, just because there’s a verb nearby.
Admittedly, I could understand what the author was getting at, but it was expressed as eloquently as your normal style.
There was no actual science behind Charney’s “report”, which chose 3 degrees C as the central estimate of ECS for a doubling of CO2. It just averaged two guesses.
There was arguably some science behind Manabe’s guess of 2 degrees C and maybe even some support for Hansen’s guess of 4 degrees C. But there was no real basis for the Charney report simply to average these two estimates to come up with 3 degrees C, with a range of 2-4 degrees C.
Correct me if wrong, but then the range was widened by assuming, again without valid justification, that 1.5 degrees C above and below the now “canonical” central figure of 3 degrees C.
Yet even today, decades later, IPCC’s equilibrium climate sensitivity estimate of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C remains an average of guesses, with another guess at the high and low ends. But the more actual observations are made and real data collected, the range looks closer to 0 to 2 degrees C, with a central value around the nominal 1.2 degrees C, without feedbacks, which are IMO more likely to be net negative and positive. Anything above 3 degrees C can effectively be ignored, but “climate science” would then not be scary.
“,,,that 1.5 degrees C above and below the now “canonical” central figure of 3 degrees C” was the way to go.
Sorry about the incomplete sentence and phrase.
Also, ‘net negative THAN positive’ in the last paragraph.
========
Thanks. Between my brain and fingers falls the Shadow.
You see more of the light than the shadow.
============
Hope so, and that I made the point that there is effectively no science behind the IPCC’s estimated ECS range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C. Most likely, if it exists, it’s around 0 degrees C to 2.4 degrees C, ie 1.2 degrees plus or minus the nominal 1.2 degrees C.
The “canonical” 3 degrees C is basically just made up.
Don’t have a link to Hansen’s WAG of four degrees C per doubling, but here’s Manabe’s 1975 paper, including ECS estimate of two degrees C per doubling of CO2:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469%281975%29032%3C0003%3ATEODTC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Abstract
An attempt is made to estimate the temperature changes resulting from doubling the present CO2 concentration by the use of a simplified three-dimensional general circulation model. This model contains the following simplications: a limited computational domain, an idealized topography, no beat transport by ocean currents, and fixed cloudiness. Despite these limitations, the results from this computation yield some indication of how the increase of CO2 concentration may affect the distribution of temperature in the atmosphere. It is shown that the CO2 increase raises the temperature of the model troposphere, whereas it lowers that of the model stratosphere. The tropospheric warming is somewhat larger than that expected from a radiative-convective equilibrium model. In particular, the increase of surface temperature in higher latitudes is magnified due to the recession of the snow boundary and the thermal stability of the lower troposphere which limits convective beating to the lowest layer. It is also shown that the doubling of carbon dioxide significantly increases the intensity of the hydrologic cycle of the model.
Gabro, if you’d be so kind and happen back here –
What is “limited computational domain” from abstract as I assume you have the paper and I must watch my downloads. I realize that it was 1975 and then I was running a whopper IBM 360 with punch cards and I can’t remember how little RAM. Is that the “limited computational domain” ?? Curious expression.
(I have bookmarked the link for a time when I can use the town’s bandwidth.)
Thanks.
It means that the cell grid would be coarse rather than fine.
Dunno what the dimensions of the cells were, but clearly gross, not tiny.
Bubba Cow
If it was 1975 it was probably at least a megabyte. Maybe 4. Anyone want to advance on 4? Back in the day, IBM was in the habit of installing cables to upgrade the RAM. The memory was already there, with a connecting cable removed. They were changing $250,000 to put the cable back and double the RAM on a 360 from, for example, 512k to 1024k. That (and other such behaviour) is how they got rich..
Crispin in Waterloo but really in Bishkek
Everyone has a portable ‘console’ access reporting back to a ‘main frame’.
The whole point of open architecture is the freedom of personal interconnectivity.
There is a bigger failure taken place!
So on what basis; if there is no science involved does one choose the arithmetic mean of two guesses rather than the geometric mean of those two guesses ??
I believe the geometric mean results in the two end point guesses being in error by equal percentages. In my view, that is a better ; well assuming the mean is in fact the correct answer.
But since one is doing stat maths and not science, one may choose any algorithm one likes.
G
Of course you’ve answered your own question. It was not justified, but considered close enough for government work and scarier.
As I said, I doubt there was much actual science behind Hansen’s “estimate” of four degrees C, but now you find alarmists who consider it insufficient.
IMO, the range of ~1.0 to ~2.0 degrees C is in the ballpark, with Bill Illis’ derived under ~1.5 at the center. I think that given net negative feedbacks, the real number, if such there be, could well lie between 0.0 and 1.5 degrees.
Choose the geometric mean when the variables are multiplicative. The geometric mean is always less than or equal to the arithmetic mean.
Gabbro,
Arrhenius would agree with you:
Arrhenius, S., 1906, Die vermutliche Ursache der Klimaschwankungen. Meddelanden från K. Vetenskapsakademiens Nobelinstitut 1: 2, 1ff.
“Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 °C or +1.6° C respectively.”
Ghost,
Yup, he got it in the right ball park on his second try.
But dunno to what extent he figured in feedbacks in the climate system.
Gabro,
1. Apologies for the rocky spelling of your name;
2. You’re correct regarding feedbacks. When Arrhenius took water vapour into account it lifted his estimate to 2.1C° per doubling.
See here at the bottom of page 7:
“If one uses this correction, one finds that with a change in the quantity of CO2 in the ratio of 1:2, the temperature of the Earth’s surface would be altered by 2.1 degrees. It is assumed that the radiation that is absorbed by the water vapour is not influenced by the CO2.*”
https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Arrhenius%201906,%20final.pdf
Now, 2.1 C° is far too high given that the IPCC asserts the warming in the period 1906-2006 was 0. 74 C° ± 0.18 C°. Using Arrhenius’ figure it should have been approx. 0.9 C°, assuming 280 ppm CO2 in 1906 and 400 ppm in 2006, viz:
120/280 = 0.43
0.43 x 2.1 C° = 0.90 C°
Also, Arrhenius, Callendar and other proponents of man-made global warming prior to c. 1980 thought that more CO2 would be beneficial.
Interesting start for a review article. The controlling issues seem to be in the feedback,though.
In response to Mr Halla, just about every element in the official climate sensitivity equation is erroneous. And all the errors lead to exaggeration of the warming rate, as I shall show.
I was wondering about that… So, you’re going to go over each error, one by one, and then at the end tie them all together. The final post of the series, then, will have “the real” ECS estimate (according to MoB). Would that be correct?
(gotta luv it…)
Once the series is complete, it will be evident that the models cannot be relied upon to determine climate sensitivity correctly, and that it is likely to be well below the values they now parade before us.
[??? .mod]
One mistake the IPCC made is also to consider and treat the radiative forcing of greenhouse gasses the the same way like like incoming solar radiation. Which means all of it will reach the surface again.
But this is not true, because e.g. through collision of greenhouse gasses with other atmospheric gasses and convecton some heat can escape through other channels directly into space, without reaching the surface again.
So the greenhouse effect in reality is much lower. Dr David Evans wrote a lot of it at joannenova.
Lord Monckton, first, let me thank you for your persistence, perseverance, and tenacity. Although we may disagree at times, overall I’m very glad that you continue to be a thorn in the side of the establishment.
In that regard, I was happy to see this quote:
I look forward to your further thoughts on this particular issue, as I have long held that the remarkable stability of the climate system, which as you point out is approximately ± 1% over 800,000 years, precludes any kind of high “climate sensitivity”.
My very best to you in your endeavors,
w.
In unison here.
==========
How very kind of Willis Eschenbach to support this new project. He will be fascinated when I demonstrate the impossibility of the feedback factors now used in climate sensitivity studies.
Well I’m happy to see the two of you agree, because I have firmly believed for quite a few years since I started following this wasteful self flagellation business (climate change) that the strong negative feedback from primarily cloud modulation of the albedo (YES ! only by small amounts) has kept this planet in the Goldilocks zone through thick and thin, of often drastic planet conditions.
The whole cool sun thing; the TSI change with orbit eccentricity and other effects seem to have been largely neutralized by slight attenuations or accentuations of surface sunlight. Dr. Roy Spencer has often cited the effect of cloud changes and I have often thought that Roy was biting his tongue and trying to not oversell it. It’s alright to let it all hang out Roy.
No I don’t disagree with the effects of GHS on outgoing LWIR radiation. I do have reservations about just how much heating of the surface really results from heating of the upper atmosphere. but I’m convinced it is all for naught.
So I’m trying to follow LMofB’s dissertation here with interest.
G
Christopher and I agree on many more things than we disagree on. And although our exchanges are in diplomatic language often “full and frank discussions” (translation: down and dirty dogfights), I have a great respect for him and the work that he continues to do. Yes, I often think he’s wrong … but then, as is pointed out here, often I’m wrong as well.
But on my planet, being wrong is no crime. Being boring, on the other, hand is a crime in my eyes … but to my knowledge it is a crime of which Lord Monckton has never been accused, much less convicted …
w.
ditto, thorns are necessary.
Willis it is even more egregious when you take into account that 4/5ths of any surface warming is immediately radiated out the IR window direct from surface to space, so to get a NET gain of say 3, the positive feedbacks have to overcome a degradadion of 0.2 then reach a final net value of 3 implying a gain of at least 3/0.2 = 15 among the positive feedbacks.
The loop gain to do that is close to unity (Around 0.95) which for a climate that has varied no more than about 3 degrees in 288 is in all practicality – impossible. It would imply that runaway global warming would occur pretty much anywhere that surface radiation to space was impeded, say a cloudy day. The equator over water would have a much higher maximum temp than a desert over land. Sorry last I looked that doesn’t happen. Suppressing radiation does not in general lead to warming, if anything it leads to evaporation, humidity and rain.
Also the climate equations ignore the path the climate takes from state A – B, it is only valid if the climate were linear, invariant over all temperatures which as you have clearly shown for cloud formation over water in the tropics is NOT true, Feedbacks are decidedly NON LINEAR with feedback being inversely proportional to temperature – at least while there is liquid water on the planet. In fact feedbacks are at least a function of Temperature, time and Humidity, and probably also a function of air pressure, insolation, period and any number of other parameters. Water feedback is at least a log law just like CO2 there are points of diminishing returns. The feedbacks are certainly not scalar numbers and therefore you can’t ignore the path from state A-B. The equation itself is invalid for anything but tiny deviations in F ! eg dF/dtThpi not F
This is an interesting argument not encountered before in this ire form. I will have to noodle it some for potential flaws. The stability per se versus runaway snoball or boiling oceans stuff are obviously silly. We are talking about ‘minor’ changes between slightly varying ‘strange attractors’. Else life could not persist on Earth.
Prezactly Willis. I have often in my life been fascinated by peole to home on on an exact answer that I – or others – have been struggling with simply because they have a particular perspective on a subject that makes it so abundantly clear as to be a no-brainer, what the answer actually is.
I leave you with some salutary and true examples.
“How can you tell me that that beam will be strong enough to lift that engine out of the car if we string a hoist to it?” “Cos we done hoiked a bigger ‘un than that out last week”
“How many tables of name value pairs do we need to represent these transformations to e-mail addresses when being relayed?” “You have three variables, so its a 3×2 matrix and if the table rows present the row variables you need three tables to present the three columns”
“I’ve spent two weeks calculating the noise levels in your circuit, and it seems likely that the noise is coming from the unit in front of it” “I could have told you that!” “How?” “By removing the unit in front of it: The noise goes away.”.
Similarly Its abundantly clear that there cannot be any major positive temperature feedback in climate, especially feedback that is based on temperature, because it would lead to an unstable climate of epic proportions. Any engineer asked that question could state categorically that it’s nonsense, which is what I said years ago. I don’t have to plough through the tedious mathematics that Christopher uses as his hair shirt. I did it once for the general case as a student, and never again., The result is the point. Positive feedback is inherently unstable. Ergo a stable climate implies some over all fairly monumental negative feedback.
Ergo climate sensitivity has to be overall less than the raw ‘radiative imbalance’ of CO2 implies.
My geologist brother in law arrived at the same conclusion by different means ‘its clear that huge variations in atmospheric CO2 have happened and its equally clear that they have not been well correlated with temperature change’.
As to why climate varies, once again the engineering perspective supplies an instant answer, Multiple time delayed negative feedback loops, especially with a bit of non linearity thrown in, can cause chaotic pseudoperiodic oscillations about strange attractor means. That is what chaos mathematics describes, and any engineer who has strayed outside the bounds of linear behaviour designing anything will be familiar with these sorts of effects. And that goes back to the three body problem first described in 1687, the first description of what we now know as ‘chaos mathematics’
And we dont need to look further than water, to realise that the oceans, and the clouds, the latent heat of melting and evaporation, and ocean currents and the huge thermal capacity of the oceans themselves are more than enough basic circuit elements to get a beautifully chaotic system working.
I keep meaning to create a computer model where you could mess with various delays and non liner effects to create systems that could be demonstrated to be ‘climate like’…
I think this is in conclusion a generic problem the world has today. Not only has the fundamental understanding of how science works been educated out of at least half the public, along with any respect for it, but even amongst those with supposedly adequate scientific backgrounds, they are so deep and so specialised that they never see things from other perspectives at all.
The number of people who say ‘just because wind energy is rubbish today, doesn’t mean that technological progress wont make it work tomorrow’ is depressing. You pint out that technological progress operates within the laws of physics, and these are against renewable energy from the start. ‘But the laws change’ they reply, ‘look at Einstein and Newton’ And then when you say that ‘Einstein improved on Newton, he didn’t invalidate him’ comes the ultimate rejoinder ‘well that’s your OPINION, and you are obviously paid by the Koch Brothers’.
Perhaps such people may be impressed by pages of mathematics that they dont understand making the basic point ‘systems with overall positive feedback are inherently unstable, and dont persist in time for very long’
But I fear that actually they are more likley to say ‘well that shows how really dangerous Global warming is,’
I am afraid that CAGW is simply another symptom of the real prime cause of modern problems: we have and live in and depend on a society that has been designed so well by so few people that the great unwashed not only don’t understand how it works, but dont care either. To them it simply exist as some kind of natural force. They ignore the positive effects of man’s technological intervention in the ecosphere to allow him to prosper, and concentrate solely on scare scenarios because, frankly we have built such a protected environment that they are bored with it. And seek excitement.
This is not a sustainable state of affairs.
Leo Smith’s posting is one of the most interesting here. He confirms my simple point that a climate subject to strongly net-positive feedbacks would not be as startlingly stable as ours, but he flinches a little at the mathematics.
The point of the mathematics is to show exactly where the major errors of method rather than of data or of interpretation are, to quantify the effect of those errors, and to leave as little wriggle-room as possible for the canting defenders of the official position.
That they will wriggle like stuck pigs is already evident. See how many in this thread have sworn blind that to dare to suggest that net-positive feedback might be expected to lead to instability is to perpetrate a terrible error, when all one is doing is to state the obvious.
However, my argument on feedbacks, when I get to it, will not depend upon the process engineers’ limit on positive feedback in systems intended to function stably. It will show that feedbacks in the climate do not in reality subsist in the interval marked as unstable in Fig. 1.
Leo Smith August 28, 2016 at 3:54 am
Amen:
In particular, the U.S. Constitution and its Constitutional Capitalism has in effect created a gigantic Ecological Niche in which Idle Hands do the Devil’s Work. Now they even want to elect the First Lucyfer.
Please see my back-to-back pair of posts below about op-amp circuits. I have built lots of them on my own, and I worked with a friend who built more than I did. The reason positive feedback more than .1 or .01 is hardly ever used is because op-amps have so much gain that negative feedback alone is normally used. And in some specific circuits where positive feedback is used (Sallen Key and multiple feedback filters for example), I have not seen the feedback figure as shown in Fig. 1 being expressed, but it somewhat often is designed to exceed .1, especially in the multiple feedback bandpass filter. Only if the cheapest components are used then feedback factor exceeding merely .1 causes performance from one unit to another to often vary unacceptably – but the circuit is usually still reliably stable with a design feedback factor of .5 even with cheap tolerance components.
As for stability of the climate – isn’t it sometimes unstable at times during comings or goings of ice age glaciations? I see that as a sign that the global climate’s feedback factor is not constant but greater when the surface albedo is more variable.
You may have local positive feedback but you always have overall negative feedback. Otherwise its at best an oscillator or at worst simply drives up to rail voltage
Regarding Leo Smith’s comment that I see as saying that a stable op-amp circuit requires net negative feedback: This is generally true because the open-loop gain of an op-amp is very large, generally at least in the hundreds and often in the thousands. As Leo Smith said elsewhere, the feedback factor is the loop gain – which is the combined gain of the op-amp (its open loop gain, that is), and its feedback circuit(s). If this is designed to exceed 1.0, then the reason is usually for latching to maximum low/high (such as for a comparator circuit with hysteresis) or for oscillating. This feedback factor can easily be as high as 2/3 in a stable op-amp circuit mentioned elsewhere here, and whose mention I cited. It also sometimes exceeds .1 in stable non-oscillating op-amp circuits that I have built and named previously here, namely the Sallen Key filter and the multiple feedback filter.
“Part I: How the central estimate of global warming was exaggerated By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley…”
————————
editors note: That’s how the article’s description appears on the homepage.
global warming was exaggerated By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley>
See what happens when you miss out punctuation.
Years ago I was roundly ridiculed @cllimateaudit.org for stating that not only do we not know the magnitude of feedback to the nominal 1.2 deg C., but we also don’t know the sign of it.
It’s been so long I don’t remember whether I specified water vapour feedback or clouds or both.
Nonetheless, at that time the idea was anathema even to the extremely well informed.
============
Heh, I also suspect some of the ridicule was from naive posing of the argument.
==========
Kim,
Was not me doing thet at CA. I agree, but my agreement means nought.
Geoff
“The climate is remarkably stable: global temperatures have varied by little more than 3.3 K either side of the period mean for 810,000 years.
Given this near-perfect thermostasis, it is improbable a priori, and will later in this series be demonstrated to be impossible a posteriori, that true feedback values can fall anywhere in the zone marked “unstable” on the graph.”
Not if climate parameters no longer fall within those of the last 810,000 years.
Top, blue curve …. now ~400ppm
……. And the climate is yet to reach equilibrium.
http://cdn.antarcticglaciers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation_to_2004.jpg
Toneb: “Not if climate parameters no longer fall within those of the last 810,000 years.
Top, blue curve …. now ~400ppm”
You don’t understand the point. The remarkable stability indicates that there is not a large amount of positive feedback in the climate system. CO2 causes some warming in the climate system. Increases in CO2 can only cause Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) or Catastrophic Anthropogenic global Warming (CAGW) if there is a relatively large amount of feedback. CO2 is not some “magical” gas which if it is in the atmosphere will change the existing feedback to warming or cooling influences.
“You don’t understand the point. The remarkable stability indicates that there is not a large amount of positive feedback in the climate system. ”
I understand the point perfectly ta.
As I show CO2 levels lie well beyond those of the last 800,000 years and we don’t know where the blue curve is going to end up at.
Feed-backs turned -ve for the downs on the graph as the Earth’s orbital characteristics changed to induce cooling in the NH.
That is what produced the “thermostasis” of the Earth’s GMT to a range of ~6C.
Feed-backs have yet to kick in regarding future CO2 levels.
Toneb – And what of the periods when CO2 was a thousand times higher? e.g.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/09/plants-encouraged-as-co2-levels-reach-400-ppm/
Usurbrain,
I don’t think atmospheric CO2 concentration has been a thousand times higher than now, ie 400,000 ppm or 40%, except possibly during the Hadean or Archean Eons (4.5 to 2.5 billion years ago). But as recently as the Cambrian Period (543 million years ago), it was around 7000 ppm.
The last time (actually ~4x more even that dodgy graph only goes up to 7000ppm 500 mya) CO2 was really high it was ~50-30 mya.
https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/Beerling_Royer_Cenozoic_CO2_Nature_Geoscience.pdf
And the Earth had a tad different tectonic configuration/activity then.
With interesting consequences or climate…
https://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/deconto_tectonics&climate.pdf
PS: yes Gabro
That’s a tendentious study, but even it shows that the correlation between CO2 and temperature isn’t good.
High CO2 and high T apparently coincided around the PETM, but CO2 went up and T down at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, when ice sheets first formed on Antarctica, thanks to the opening of deep oceanic channels between that continent and South America and Australia.
Within the last 600 MY the atmosphere has never seen CO2 levels 1,000 times the present. RCO2 has a maximum estimate near the beginning of the Phanerozoic of about 26 times the present. During the Mesozoic it peaked around 10 times the present (both figures are based on Geocarb III). In fact, if you were to designate “climatological” periods, there have be two during the Phanerozoic. Based on the similarity between the present and the late Permian, we might be near the inception of a third. There’s an idea for a sci-fi novel.
You understand nothing. You have done a typical non scientific “trick” of mixing data from different sources and presenting it as the same thing. Though you don’t even manage to state the source of your data, it looks like you have grafted MLO onto the Vostok ice core. GARBAGE.
The ice core records do NOT have daily or even annual resolution neither in its sampling nor in the physical resolution of the individual samples. The interval between two samples in the Vostok ice core is large enough to miss the entire christian era !!
There different data are incompatible. Your modified graph is misleading and just shows your ignorance. Typical alarmism.
Toneb, your last resort: climate equilibrium. And your point is
Feed-backs have yet to kick in regarding future CO2 levels.
______________________________________
Since that planet hosts an atmosphere climate feedbacks are IN OPERATION MODE.
That’s how we got here.
Equally, there is no evidence that the climate has leftequilibrium.
As well, the paleo-values represent time-averaged figures, and have relatively huge error-bars, so let’s not panic yet, OK? Our “spikes” may not be unique in any way.
“Feed-backs have yet to kick in regarding future CO2 levels.”
So how much longer do we need to wait until the feed-backs kick in?
Another 10 years? Another 20 years? After the last 20 featured a slow down in the warming, one might be led to believe that feed-backs may already be starting to kick in………..negative feed-backs.
I’m guessing that you meant positive feed-backs. As time passes, we will know more and feed-backs, being a lagging indicator can only be measured “after” some period of time. After 400 ppm CO2 and “after” 420 ppm of CO2, for instance. However, should we not, have already seen some feed-backs since CO2 was at 350 ppm?
With the response to warming just from CO2. Being logarithmic and the greatest response during the first 120 ppm increase vs the next 120 ppm increase in CO2(if we ever get that high), since the contribution from increasing CO2 to future warming will be fighting a physical law that causes each 1ppm to warm less than the previous 1ppm, the future warming will be increasingly dependent on increasing positive feed-backs.
From my point of view, using observations, the window of time, for justification of using the higher end positive feed-back estimates and climate sensitivity guesses has been shrinking. Even the average guess by mainstream sources looks too high.
Time affords climate science (with regards to computer climate models) a luxury that very few sciences are given. Time in this field is measured in decades, projections go out to the end of the century. In almost any other realm, the difference between projections previously made and observations would have had to be reconciled much sooner. As you stated well with your justification(excuse).
“Feed-backs have yet to kick in regarding future CO2 levels.”…………..as we wait for another decade, still using model equations that reflect greater positive feedback than what is actually occurring.
Absorbed radiation will heat the absorber INSTANTLY. Any feedbacks will start to happen INSTANTLY.
Thanks,
Alexander Carpenter on August 27, 2016 at 12:26 pm
Equally, there is no evidence that the climate has left equilibrium.
____________________________________
As with bipedal motion – when is the wanderer ‘in equilibrium’.
Every step on the way.
There is no evidence that such a concept as climate equilibrium has any meaning whatsoever.
To eb should understand that CO2 enrichment is a forcing. Feedbacks follow a different rule, and at present climate science is at odds with mainstream science, as I shall show in due course.
Yes, indeed they do and the current CO2 forcing has yet to drive Earth temps to equ temp …. where upon feed-backs may …. or may not follow.
After all we have only departed from the carbon cycle CO2 stasis this last ~150 yrs out of those “810,000 yrs”.
My object was just to show that your “thermostasis” over the last ~800,000 years may well bear no correlation to the current *climate*.
Time will tell.
Time will tell, and it seems an Earth recovering from near CO2 starvation is marking the time with festivity from the cornucopia.
===================
“Time will tell, and it seems an Earth recovering from near CO2 starvation is marking the time with festivity from the cornucopia.”
Yep, that’s life.
Nothing really is all bad there is nearly always some pros.
However the biosphere seems to have managed quite well with CO2 at or below 280ppm.
Toneb August 27, 2016 at 12:35 pm
That is true. And it is also true that it’s possible that next year we’ll drop to ice age low temperatures. Finally, it’s true that it’s possible that next year we’ll be roasting in the Thermageddon promised by true believers.
SO WHAT? Yes, your hypothesis is possible. But without a scrap of actual evidence showing that CO2 is pushing the earth out of its historical temperature band, my hypothesis is just as likely as yours.
As far as I know, such speculation is best eschewed by scientists left to fools and climatastrophists …
w.
Toneb
August 27, 2016 at 1:40 pm
Actually, both the biosphere in general and humanity in particular struggled under LIA levels of CO2. Deserts and glaciers spread, famine and plague haunted the land.
And forests were cut down and soils exhausted, while warfare was almost constant.
Warmer is better. More plant food in the air, better yet.
“However the biosphere seems to have managed quite well with CO2 at or below 280ppm.”
Or quite poorly . . we don’t have a control biosphere to compare it to, Toneb.
As far as I know, such speculation is best eschewed by scientists left to fools and climatastrophists
The more correct term is climatologers (climate+astrologers).
Toneb should be made aware that the climate-relevant feedbacks act -according to IPCC – at timescales of days to years. Most have already acted.
After all we have only departed from the carbon cycle CO2 stasis …
No such thing. No evidence that such a state has ever existed. There was certainly no such “stasis” prior to 150 years ago. Cooling oceans had drawn CO2 down from Medieval levels, just as warming oceans following the LIA have been pushing atmospheric levels upward. IF all things remained “equal” – no even slight variation in albedo, no potential for solar influences to tweak in a minor fashion, in short in a laboratory, no tiny tremors from sea floor volcanes, no butterflies flapping their wings in Brazil, no climate theorists arguing, then you might achieve a “stasis.” Outside the lab in this solar system – not gonna happen.
More GARBAGE.
Feedbacks start as soon as there is a change in conditions. They do hold back until the system reaches equilibrium and then pop up to throw it out of equilibrium again.
If you are that ignorant, you would do well the shut up and read. You may learn something about climate, natural processes and science.
Toneb
“However the biosphere seems to have managed quite well with CO2 at or below 280ppm.”
Hmm,
At around 200 PPM photosynthesis roughly stops, at 400PPM it reaches current levels, we can conclude that on average for each 2PPM we increase photosynthesis by around 1% of present levels. So at 280PPM we can estimate that photosynthesis was 80/200 or around 40% of current levels – then there was an estimated world population of 1.8Billion now there is 7 Billion. So yes, we can conclude that we MIGHT be able to eat at 280PPM at a population of 1.8Billion but with a population of 7 Billion with 60% less food production than today?
Are you willing to take that risk, how many people must die?
Monckton of Brenchley on August 27, 2016 at 8:26 pm
Toneb should be made aware that the climate-relevant feedbacks act -according to IPCC – at timescales of days to years.
Most have already acted -> ALL are on duty.
Regarding photosynthesis stopping as CO2 decreases below 200 PPM: Make that 60-145 PPM for C3 plants and 10 PPM for C4 plants according to
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2010.03441.x/pdf
Except on that ice core chart CO2 lags temp by an average 800 years. Not causative, so not actually showing much about sensitivity except it cannot be high, else yhe lag would disappear and then invert.
The Beerling Royer graphic shows a lag as well. The climate fundamentalists cannot get their heads around the reality that the paleo data relationship between temperature and CO2 shows only two conditions. During the Neogene abject dependence of CO2 on temperature. Before that no correlation at all.
CO2 is following temperature in that diagram so from the point of view of CO2 as a forcing agent the addition of dotted line to the current concentration level is irrelevant — and misleading because of the much greater resolution.
From the point of view of CO2 as a forcing agent, as BobG (11:57 am) points out, CO2 is only one climate forcing factor of many, most being unknown at this stage.
Toneb like all alarmists seems to be trapped in a cognitive quagmire of circular reasoning.
How will we know equilibrium when we see it? When was it at equilibrium in the past? Please tell us! Or do we need to spend tens of billions more on research to be sure?
Tonyb
Even at that scale I can see that CO2 follows temperature by a significant time delay. Your point is well taken, but is the CO2 rise driven by the sustained temperature? Yes/No…how can we tell?
Oh darn, we’re all going to die.
Regarding the official position;
1. A worst case scenario is not a promise. IF they don’t happen, we should be glad, not mad.
2. Saying, “Everything will be rosy if we do the ‘courageous’ thing and do nothing,” is a promise. If things do not turn out to be rosy, I hope that we would be more civilized than to riot on the streets, but, let’s say that I can make no promises.
Typical fearmongering, ending with a threat.
At present understanding of sensitivity from observations rather than models, and from understanding our potential to use fossil fuels, we cannot warm the earth enough for the effects to become net detrimental. There will be mild warming, with winners exceeding losers, but we’ll all be recipients of a more diverse and expanded biome.
You do know that the greening alone is feeding an extra billion people today? And tomorrow?
============
OK! Kim.
Let’s tell the police, firefighters, ambulance attendants and the military to go home. We pay them because of scary scenarios that might happen without them.
“At present understanding of sensitivity from observations rather than models, and from understanding our potential to use fossil fuels, we cannot warm the earth enough for the effects to become net detrimental. There will be mild warming, with winners exceeding losers, but we’ll all be recipients of a more diverse and expanded biome.
“You do know that the greening alone is feeding an extra billion people today? And tomorrow?”
Promise? Can you keep such a promise.
Jim,
No, we pay them because the threats against which they serve to protect actually happen on a regular basis.
Catastrophic man-made global warming, not so much.
It’s simple, Anthropogenic Global Warming and Greening is a great good. There is no climate Catastrophe now or looming. The only catastrophe is now and it is the lost opportunity costs associated with the destructiveness of this extraordinary popular delusion of the dangerous consequences of our enriching the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, AKA plant food.
I know this is radically different than your beliefs, but look at the accumulating evidence that no catastrophe looms, on the contrary, only net benefit.
=====================
G, I’d rate him good sophistry, handicapped at times by regrettable rhetoric.
==============
Kim
“It’s simple, Anthropogenic Global Warming and Greening is a great good.”
People much smarter than you and I do not share your opinion.
Besides, if you live in the Northern hemisphere and like warmer climates, move South. You will get all the “benefits” of global warming. Unless you live in someplace like Florida.
Correction;
Even if you do live in Florida. Global warming melts ice.
In Florida the only ice that melts is in your cocktail glass (or pitcher depending on the time of day).
When the sea level stops rising, it will be a time of very great concern.
=============
Jim Yushchyshyn: “We pay them because of scary scenarios that might happen without them.”
No Jimbo, we pay them because scary scenarios happen all the time, and someone has to clean up afterwards.
Perhaps, sitting in your mummy’s basement, that has escaped your attention.
Jim Yushchyshyn August 27, 2016 at 12:26 pm
People much smarter than you and I do not share your opinion.
Since we don’t know how smart you or Kim are, and we don’t even know who the people are you claim are smarter, this is nothing but an awkward appeal to authority which relies in part on the stated lack of intelligence of the author. I’ll reserve judgment on Kim, but I shall take your self assessment at face value.
Nay, worse than an appeal to authority, it is an appeal to an anonymous authority.
“People much smarter than you and I do not share your opinion.”
One can deconstruct this sentence word by word and find out everything one needs to know about warmista CAGW enthusiasts like our friend Jimmy-boy here.
Oh the horror!
Such ignominy!
Oh, the depths of my despair!
Wait, is that a rebuttal?
You imply that sceptics, (and many apparently senile alarmists), who invested to Man’s benefit and glory and therefore made money on their, often risky, fossil fuel investments are somehow equal to the losers who depend on frequently frightening mankind for their salaries?
Civilization is built on fossil fuels.
Science advancement is built with fossil fuels.
Science debasement is the result of the CAGW CO2 cultism.
For shame Jim.
Now about your diversionary attack.
• You did not address the hysterical antics new releases, without proof.
• You did not address the alarmist imaginary paths of CO2 to doom.
• You did not Address the lack of proofs supporting any alarmist arguments.
• You have not even addressed Lord Monckton’s formula.
• You have not presented a logical argument, counterpoint or discussion…
Instead you pronounce that some of your preferred people consensus is allegedly smarter; though Dr. Lindzen certainly disagrees.
argumentum ad populum
argumentum ad verecundiam
Sophistry through fallacious arguments.
ATheoK
“Civilization is built on fossil fuels.
“Science advancement is built with fossil fuels.”
Civilization is built on energy.
“Science advancement is built with energy.
Energy =/= fossil fuels.
“Science debasement is the result of” people who reject the discoveries made by honest scientists.
For the industrial strengths of modern civilization Energy = fossil fuels, is true.
The unreliability of wind and solar, both in consistency and quality, means that large industrial processes can not risk depending on such weak and variable sources.
While nuclear energy is able to supply both quality and consistent quantity, that is only for in place machinery and foundries.
While the ignorant eco-movement has sought the demise of nuclear movement and reactors for ‘decades’; i.e. real decades, not imaginary ones.
Leaving nuclear generating facilities in quite a lurch with the Western world preventing modern nuclear facilities and de-commissioning existing facilities.
In the ignorant eco-world, everything revolves around their quite religious belief that wind and solar energy generation is ‘renewable’.
What is renewable about those bird/bat choppers and fryers are the frequent replacement/maintenance required for anything larger than backyard generators.
Fossil fuels run the trucks, trains, smelters, refineries, rolling mills, industrial plants, production lines, farming machines, mining equipment, etc. etc.; that keep people fed, warm, clothed, housed and industrially productive.
Fossil fuels are relied upon to build and construct wind turbines and solar collectors. Those same fuels are used to run the maintenance equipment and teams that support the wildlife destroying installations of wind and solar.
Intelligence has never been a marker for common sense or an innate insistence on viewing evidence first hand.
Ask any of the CAGW alarmists who not only benefit financially and personally, but then use some of their CAGW gains to purchase large oceanfront properties?
Or those so addicted to news bite hysterical antics, yet they wear hydrocarbon sourced clothing and shoes while jet setting to various tropical or sub-tropical hot spot conferences?
Perhaps you’ve noticed how many researchers prefer to stuff their research full of waffle words with great leaps in assumptions?
Have you ever wondered where they get all of their doom scenarios from?
Just where did they test or verify CAGW paths to doom? If you guessed nowhere not at any time, you win!
Instead those CAGW losers just took ordinary human disasters, then claimed CO2 would cause them. No operative mechanism needed or proven.
As if there were no “skeptics” who benefit financially. There is a lot more money to be made in hydrocarbons than in solar panels.
Jim,
“Regarding the official position;
1. A worst case scenario is not a promise. IF they don’t happen, we should be glad, not mad.”
Unless of course the officials in question are power/wealth hungry A-holes, exploiting that non-promise, right? Don’t want to forget that power/wealth hungry A-holes crop up now and then on this planet, do we? That would be very stupid, historically speaking, huh?
A good way to get a quick estimate of climate sensitivity is to compare the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the air when PDO was the same as now. That would have been 1967.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1950/to:2015/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1967/to:2015/trend
The temperature increase since then seems to be about 0.8C.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/trend
The best estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 1967 was 322ppm.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Current carbon dioxide concentration is 403ppm
http://co2now.org/
The number of doublings of carbon dioxide since 1967 was 0.324.
http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2008/08/log-calculator.html
That would make the estimated climate sensitivity as 2.5C. The actual climate sensitivity may be higher or lower, as this estimate doesn’t take into account any trend in atmospheric aerosols or the Sun, since 1967.
Solar activity has clearly been falling;
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/trend
And aerosols have also shown a cooling trend since the 1960’s
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/meetings/pollution2002/figs/d2_luo_1.gif
However, there are greenhouse gases, other than carbon dioxide, that would have been increasing since 1967.
And most Western women wore dresses everyday in 1967.
Now most of those same women only wear dresses for formal occasions.
How horrible is that women, lovely, beautiful women have helped caused all of this Global Warming you are so afraid of!
What will happen when all of these same women start wearing the latest women in power fashions?
The Mao look!
Will the Mao look exacerbate the modeled way back in 2002, estimates of aerosols?
Why, Look at the temperatures since 2002!!
Two women in power are wearing the dreaded Mao look, and Temperatures have spiked!! Yes, Spiked!
Sophistry, spun from fanciful correlations by the CAGW religious faithful! They’ve stated it, so it must be true…
Not!
PS Jim, you apparently didn’t get the memo. Those ‘modeled’ imaginary effects were part of an incredibly long parade of excuses Hansen and his followers have trotted out to ‘explain’ the pause in rising temperatures.
A pause that might very well continue in another year or so.
Don’t forget to tell us all about why a ‘modeled’ graph of China’s aerosols has any effect on global temperatures…
I’ve known about the “memo” for decades.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Memo?
From the WWII German puppeteers website?
Where ‘post’ editing threads and even comments to correct mistakes to make it seem that the faithful CAGW are winning arguments.
And you’ve known about it for ‘decades’?
One of the original costume climate falsehood kid’s, i.e. adolescents, club.
And there you go again; all diversion, distraction and fallacious arguments.
Cloud, smoke and mirrors Jim; zero substance!
And the fanciful model of China’s aerosols are still way out of date and as bogus as that skuzzy website.
The “best” of the models (equilibrium climate sensitivity only 1.7 K/doubling of CO2) was CCSM4 from NCAR in Boulder, Colorado.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2011JCLI4083.1
Was there a hidden message in the fact that it was made available to the science community on April Fools Day, 2010, and published in final form on April Fools Day, 2011?
Was the “best” of the models based on projections of solar activity and PDO that turned out to be accurate?
Did it accurately predict cloud behavior?
If not, perhaps an underestimation of climate sensitivity compensated for other errors.
It is articles like this that keep me reading this blog. His Lordship is without peer in breaking down the math and science into understandable and entertaining prose. I look forward to the thrashing he will give to the advocates of the exagerated feedbacks used in the models.
Mr King is very kind. Watch this space.
A good way to get a quick estimate of climate sensitivity is to compare the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the air when PDO was the same as now. That would have been 1967.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1950/to:2015/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1967/to:2015/trend
The temperature increase since then seems to be about 0.8C.
The best estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 1967 was 322ppm.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Current carbon dioxide concentration is 403ppm
http://co2now.org/
The number of doublings of carbon dioxide since 1967 was 0.324.
http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2008/08/log-calculator.html
That would make the estimated climate sensitivity as 2.5C. The actual climate sensitivity may be higher or lower, as this estimate doesn’t take into account any trend in atmospheric aerosols or solar activity since 1967.
Solar activity has decreased since 1967.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/scale:200/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/trend/scale:200/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1967/to:2015/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1967/to:2015/trend
Aerosols have also had a cooing effect since the 1960’s.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/meetings/pollution2002/figs/d2_luo_1.gif
Although, carbon dioxide may have recieved an assist from other greenhouse gases.
The temperature increase since then seems to be about 0.8C.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/trend
The best estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 1967 was 322ppm.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Current carbon dioxide concentration is 403ppm
http://co2now.org/
The number of doublings of carbon dioxide since 1967 was 0.324.
http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2008/08/log-calculator.html
That would make the estimated climate sensitivity as 2.5C. The actual climate sensitivity may be higher or lower, as this estimate doesn’t take into account any trend in atmospheric aerosols or the Sun, since 1967.
Solar activity has clearly been falling;
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/trend
And aerosols have also shown a cooling trend since the 1960’s
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/meetings/pollution2002/figs/d2_luo_1.gif
However, there are greenhouse gases, other than carbon dioxide, that would have been increasing since 1967.
A good way to get a quick estimate of climate sensitivity is to compare the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the air when PDO was the same as now. That would have been 1967.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1950/to:2015/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1967/to:2015/trend
The temperature increase since then seems to be about 0.8C.
The best estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 1967 was 322ppm.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Current carbon dioxide concentration is 403ppm
http://co2now.org/
A good way to get a quick estimate of climate sensitivity is to compare the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the air when PDO was the same as now. That would have been 1967.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1950/to:2015/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1967/to:2015/trend
The temperature increase since then seems to be about 0.8C.
The best estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 1967 was 322ppm.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Current carbon dioxide concentration is 403ppm
http://co2now.org/
A good way to get a quick estimate of climate sensitivity is to compare the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the air when PDO was the same as now. That would have been 1967.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1950/to:2015/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1967/to:2015/trend
The temperature increase since then seems to be about 0.8C.
The best estimate for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 1967 was 322ppm.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Current carbon dioxide concentration is 403ppm
http://co2now.org/
The number of doublings of carbon dioxide since 1967 was 0.324.
http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2008/08/log-calculator.html
That would make the estimated climate sensitivity as 2.5C. The actual climate sensitivity may be higher or lower, as this estimate doesn’t take into account any trend in atmospheric aerosols or solar activity since 1967.
Solar activity has decreased since 1967.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/scale:200/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/trend/scale:200/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1967/to:2015/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1967/to:2015/trend
Aerosols have also had a cooing effect since the 1960’s.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/meetings/pollution2002/figs/d2_luo_1.gif
Although, carbon dioxide may have recieved an assist from other greenhouse gases.
I apologize for the repetition. A glitch in my computer kept posting what had already been posted.
You really need to stop talking to yourself.
And really? Cherry-picking a year at the bottom of the last cooling cycle?
the problem with using the pdo example alone is the different methods/areas of heat release between the atlantic and pacific. have you noted where the amo was during the same period ? another 5 years and i think even you may be surprised.
Jim Yushchyshyn: “The number of doublings of carbon dioxide since 1967 was 0.324.”
Says the scientific illiterate who constantly castigates other posters for cherry-picking!
That would make the estimated climate sensitivity as 2.5C.
Well that would be true if the relationship was linear and there were no other factors. But the relationship is a natural log function (hence the reference to doubling) which is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding. Further, there are other factors.
But you already told us upthread that you’re not as smart as the authorities you appeal to. If you did your homework you would find that the natural log function and other factors are well accepted by the people you claim are smarter than you.
Drives me nuts that alarmists have to have their own side of the argument explained to them before they are educated enough to argue their side!
Jim, why did you pick 1967? If the PDO is a 60+ year cycle as is generally accepted then you have to go back to 1955 to get the same timing. And, you appear be comparing the value now during a super El Nino to a year with mostly negative ENSO months. One might call that cherry picking to an extreme.
So, how about comparing 1940 to 2002 which is 62 years. And, since we haven’t seen any warming in the satellite data (outside of ENSO noise) since 2002 it seems like a pretty good choice.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1940/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1940/to:2002
You end up with less than .6 C / century of warming. See how much your analysis is affected by the choice of dates? This would fall right into the warming that MoB has accepted as reasonable for quite awhile. FInally, since we don’t know how much of the warming is recovery from the LIA, land changes, etc., it is questionable to assign all of that to human emissions.
Re: Cherry Picking
Growing tips: cherries need a cold climate and well-drained soil.
The best time to plant them is in winter, when they are bare-rooted.
http://www.burkesbackyard.com.au/fact-sheets/food-and-recipes/food-health-nutrition/cherry-growing-tips-and-recipes/#.V8I9-mW9_jU
Now you’re an expert on when AGW started? 1960’s? I live in Western Canada and I’m not moving South or North! Bumper crops this year, lots of moisture, last significant drought was in the 80’s, record high was in 1937, many other record highs from the 1890’s. I grew up in the 60’s. Cold winters, hot summers, we called it weather and played outside at +40C and -30C and colder ,I walked to school and delivered papers and grew up strong and healthy. My kids did the same. 1995 was a very tough winter and they skated on outdoor ice and shovelled snow. We had wind chill of -83C one morning and I worked on a roof and the kids rode the bus to school. 2012/13 was the toughest winter I’ve ever experienced. It’s all just weather! We’re humans! Not porcelain dolls! Just do it!
Climate Otter
I did not cherry pick. I chose a time frame to eliminate the effects of PDO from my calculation. Unlike actual cherry pickers, I did not choose it to supposedly prove that PDO does not change.
davidmhoffer
“Well that would be true if the relationship was linear and there were no other factors. But the relationship is a natural log function (hence the reference to doubling) which is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding.”
If you followed my links you would know that I used the binary logarithm of the ratio of carbon dioxide in 1973 to that in 1975.
Further, there are other factors.
As I stated in my post. Like PDO
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1950/to:2015/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1967/to:2015/trend
Like the Sun
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/scale:200/plot/gistemp/from:1967/to:2015/trend/scale:200/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1967/to:2015/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1967/to:2015/trend
Like aerosols
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/meetings/pollution2002/figs/d2_luo_1.gif
But you already told us upthread that you’re not as smart as the authorities you appeal to.
I believe that it would be arogant to claim to know as much about climate as James Hansen of Gavin Schmidt. The same applies to the rest of you.
davidmhoffer
“Well that would be true if the relationship was linear and there were no other factors. But the relationship is a natural log function (hence the reference to doubling) which is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding.”
If you followed my links you would know that I used the binary logarithm of the ratio of carbon dioxide in 1973 to that in 1975.
Further, there are other factors.
As I stated in my post. Like PDO, the Sun and aerosols
But you already told us upthread that you’re not as smart as the authorities you appeal to.
I believe that it would be arogant to claim to know as much about climate as James Hansen of Gavin Schmidt. The same applies to the rest of you.
“Drives me nuts that alarmists have to have their own side of the argument explained to them.”
It looks like I’m the one who has been doing the explaining.
davidmhoffer
“Well that would be true if the relationship was linear and there were no other factors. But the relationship is a natural log function (hence the reference to doubling) which is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding.”
If you followed my links you would know that I used the binary logarithm of the ratio of carbon dioxide in 1973 to that in 1975.
“Further, there are other factors.”
As I stated in my post like PDO, the Sun and aerosols.
Jim Yushchyshyn August 27, 2016 at 7:27 pm
If you followed my links you would know that I used the binary logarithm of the ratio of carbon dioxide in 1973 to that in 1975.
LOL. You used data starting in 1967:
The number of doublings of carbon dioxide since 1967 was 0.324.
And then used a number calculated from 1973 to 1975. Your words. They don’t even require rebuttal.
As I stated in my post. Like PDO, the Sun and aerosols
The elephant in the room would be natural variability which your cherry picked data carefully ignores. If we choose our months wisely from 1998 to 2015 we get a trend of nothing.
I believe that it would be arogant to claim to know as much about climate as James Hansen of Gavin Schmidt.
Ah! So now he names the authorities to which he appeals. None other than Hansen and Schmidt. The guys who claimed the warming signal was too large to be swamped by natural variation before 1998, and that it WAS actually swamped by natural variation after 1998. That authority? The guys who keep building models that get it wrong, and keep on coming up with excuses why, to the point that even IPCC AR5 set them aside for running too hot? What higher authority can one appeal to than the collective wisdom of the United Nations IPCC to which Hansen and Schmidt both contributed and both swear fealty to? Which authority shall I believe Jim?
“Ah! So now he names the authorities to which he appeals. None other than Hansen and Schmidt.”
Names which global warming deniers can never mention without resorting to personal attacks.
<Names which global warming deniers can never mention without resorting to personal attacks.
Well Jim, can you point out a single personal attack in ANYTHING I said? Can you answer the questions I asked of you?
Not to mention JIM that calling someone a DENI*R is precisely a personal attack. Come back when you have some actual facts and logic with which to comment, you are just looking silly now.
Jim Yushchyshyn (JY) doesn’t understand the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperature, but we can’t blame him 100% because he just got out of .edu indoctrination camp. But most folks here understand that ‘climate sensitivity’ is nothing more than a guesstimate.
Currently there is no way to know how much global temperatures are affected by CO2 emissions. Numbers for temperature (T) sensitivity to 2xCO2 are all over the map, ranging from 6+ºC, to 5ºC, to 4+ºC, and so on, down to less than 0.5ºC. Some scientists (Miskolczi et. al) even say that 2xCO2 causes zero global warming. They may or may not be right, but it’s certain they’re far more knowledgeable than JY, who asserts that he can “get a quick estimate of climate sensitivity”. Umm-m… no.
Here’s a chart showing different peer reviewed, published scientists, along with their guesstimates of ‘climate sensitivity’:
http://jo.nova.s3.amazonaws.com/graph/models/climate-sensitivity/climate_sensitivity5.png
They don’t agree with each other on the climate’s sensitivity to 2xCO2. When no one is in agreement, the science is hardly settled—and the sensitivity number goes to the heart of the “dangerous AGW” debate. So naturally some of them want the number to be ridiculously high.
Next, JY points out something everyone here has known since they were in high school: atmospheric CO2 levels. However, JY believes that rising CO2 is the cause of the rise in global T. But without credible observations showing that cause and effect, he’s just passing on his belief.
Apparently JY was never taught that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature:
Effect cannot precede cause, and credible evidence is lacking that CO2 is the claimed ‘control knob’ of global T. That cause and effect relationship is evident on time scales from years to hundreds of millennia:
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/vostok_temperature_co2.png
Empirical evidence confirms that ∆CO2 is caused by ∆T. But there is no comparable evidence showing that ∆CO2 causes ∆temperature. (Charts that simply overlay CO2 and T do not show causation: which one leads, and which one follows. At best, overlay charts show a coincidental rise.)
The alarmist crowd has reversed cause and effect, so it’s no wonder they can’t make accurate predictions; they don’t understand causation.
If scientists knew what the actual 2xCO2 number was, they would be able to accurately predict future global T based on the known rise of CO2. But as we know, before global warming unexpectedly paused for almost a twenty years, the alarmist crowd was telling everyone that rising CO2 would cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe…
…OOPS.
Hi Jim! So you’re saying (time after time) that CO2 is a thermostat? Is that so?
Mr Yushchyshyn invites us to defer to the supposed authority of Hansen and Schmidt. However, since WUWT is not a totalitarian state, we defer to no authority. As I shall show, in a crucial respect Hansen, for one, is in error.
Monckton of Benchley
You are one of the authorities that many people on this site defer to.
JY You have just shown how little you understand the people and the process here. Lord Monckton of Brenchley is presenting his work publicly, for review by any and all who care to participate. His work will be examined, dissected, questioned, attacked, defended, criticized, rebutted and or corroborated in an open process to determine the truth, for all to see, in fact in full view of the entire world. A process that it appears other researchers could have benefitted from. I think it likely that he will be proved correct, but I have no doubt whatsoever that if he is proved wrong he will show the same degree of integrity that Willis and Anthony have so recently displayed.
I will not speak for others here as to deferring to experts, but I will admit that there are some to whom I defer. Richard Feynman for example, who said “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Happily, most of the contributors here seem to agree.
“Jim Yushchyshyn
August 27, 2016 at 7:31 pm
I believe that it would be arogant to claim to know as much about climate as James Hansen of Gavin Schmidt.”
It’s not at all arrogant. Neither Hansen nor Schmidt have ever demonstrated any kind of actual expertise pertaining to the Earth’s climate. No climate scientist has. That would require a proven track record of quantitatively accurate predictions about what is going to happen in the future. All climate scientists do is talk about what they think they know, write about what they talk about, then talk some more about what they write about in some exotic place somewhere around the world, but never has any climate scientist shown that they are actually good at climate science.
The only objective measure of our understanding of a physical system is the demonstrable use to which we put that knowledge. How well do we understand gravity? Well enough to build ballistic missiles that land on target, and well enough to predict the movement of planets. How well do we understand electromagnetics? Well enough to build microcircuits and to build transmission grids that span many hundreds of miles. How well do we understand the interaction of gravity and electromagnetic fields? Not well enough to reliably predict the strength of upcoming solar cycles.
The point is that until climate scientists start applying what they think they know about the climate system to either build something based on that knowledge, which actually works, or start predicting things in advance of those things happening, climate “science” will always remain firmly within the realm of conjecture.
“Neither Hansen nor Schmidt have ever demonstrated any kind of actual expertise pertaining to the Earth’s climate. No climate scientist has.”
So say the authorities to whom you defer.
“Neither Hansen nor Schmidt have ever demonstrated any kind of actual expertise pertaining to the Earth’s climate.”
So say the authorities to whom you defer.
Chris, speaking as one who has done the theory and practice of building an amplifier, and as much as I think you are the Bernard Levin of AGW opinion (but he still holds the record for long sentences!), I really think you need to put your lovely prose to better use and show up the socialist undercurrent that is the Green dream. People will vote for redistribution of wealth – as long as it is not theirs; they will want everyone to have green power – as long as it’s not their blackout; and they will want to have a clean green world – as long as they can still fly to Ibiza on the cheap.
Mr Passfield asks me to point out the obvious: that the totalitarian extreme Left are backing the climate scam.
However, I shall in these articles put to good use my knowledge of logic, which allows laymen to pierce the veils of mumbo-jumbo spun by unprofessional scientists.
I shall show that mainstream climate science is not mainstream science.
“Totalitarian extreme left”
“Climate scam”
If those aren’t personal attacks, I don’t know what is.
My reply to this comment hasn’t yet posted. Could it be that I am being censored by someone who has problems with alternative viewpoints to his own?
[could it be that our moderation staff that approves comments just doesn’t operate on your preferred schedule? but go ahead, act like a conspiracy theorist /mod]
JY says:
“Totalitarian extreme left”
“Climate scam”
If those aren’t personal attacks, I don’t know what is.
Were you personally labeled with those examples? I couldn’t find where, but maybe I just overlooked it. You make lots of comments; too bad you won’t answer questions. But as I’ve pointed out many times, ducking questions is a hallmark of the climate alarmist crowd.
For example, I posted a comment to you a little way upthread (the one with the charts). But you never responded to it, or to any of my other questions or comments to you. Since you made comments before and after, you must have seen it. But ignoring facts doesn’t make them go away.
The reason that your side avoids or deflects skeptics’ questions is because they lead to conclusions the alarmist crowd does not want discussed. Refusing to acknowledge valid points and ignoring questions lets them avoid having to finally admit that their case is weak to non-existent. If you had a solid, evidence- and data-based argument, you would be happy to engage with it. Instead, you ignore questions, or you deflect, or you pound the table.
Next, moderators sometimes have to make a choice between what you may consider a pejorative, and free speech. Aside from extreme cases, they come down on the side of free speech. IMHO, that policy goes a long way toward explaining the very high site traffic here, and the million-plus reader comments. If readers want a censored blog, there are plenty of them on your side of the aisle. You could even start your own blog, and censor anyone you disagree with.
Free speech on the internet is becoming increasingly scarce. The more scare something is, the more valuable it is. Draw your own conclusions.
And please, read the site Policy. It’s not hard to find. It begins with this:
• Postings are moderated, I and the volunteer moderators try to keep up, but on occasion there may be delays of a few hours.
(Also, note the “deniers” pejorative, which you apply repeatedly to folks you disagree with.)
The comment you complained about appeared shortly afterward. It’s reasonable to wait at least an hour to see if your comment is published. Fifteen minutes is hardly long enough to start making accusations of censorship:
“Could it be that I am being censored by someone who has problems with alternative viewpoints to his own?”
Wait, what?! There are no mirrors in your house?
Start answering questions when they’re asked, and most of your “alternative viewpoints” will quickly be exposed as baseless assertions.
“Were you personally labeled with those examples? I couldn’t find where, but maybe I just overlooked it. You make lots of comments; too bad you won’t answer questions.”
Can you name who was. I doubt that you can name a single climatologist, at least not one of the 97%, who holds extremist views.
And I do answer questions.
“I posted a comment to you a little way upthread (the one with the charts). But you never responded to it, or to any of my other questions or comments to you.”
“• Postings are moderated, I and the volunteer moderators try to keep up, but on occasion there may be delays of a few hours.”
OK! I will wait for the moderators to do their job. I suggest you do the same.
JY says:
Can you name who was.
More deflection. You whine about labels appended to someone else, as if you were the target. They’re grown men, they can take care of themselves. They don’t need a 20-something four years out of high school to defend them.
Next:
I doubt that you can name a single climatologist, at least not one of the 97%, who holds extremist views.
Let me put your doubts to rest: Michael Mann. James Hansen. Kevin Trenberth. Steven Schneider (“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest”). I can name dozens more, but why bother? I’ve falsified your assertion with one name.
Before you ratchet up that 97% foolishness even more, put “97%” into the search box here. That ridiculous claim has been so thoroughly debunked that there are even peer reviewed, published papers, which have never been refuted or corrected (like Mann’s hokey stick paper was), showing that it’s nonsense. Your ‘97%’ propaganda has been demolished by plenty of reputable scientists. Set aside some reading time, you will learn some things they didn’t teach you in your .edu factory. And you might be surprised at what the search shows you.
Also, if you put stock in the climate peer review process, you can’t just cherry-pick the papers you like. If 75 respondents out of thousands were enough to convince you, then you were a true believer before John Cook cooked up his 97% crapola. His fake poll fed your confirmation bias, that’s all.
Next:
And I do answer questions.
Just not here.
But if you’d like to start, here’s a question: were you aware that on time scales from years, to hundreds of thousands of years, changes in CO2 always follow changes in temperature?
I suspect you didn’t know that, since you avoided responding to it.
Here’s another question:
Since real world observations always trump conjectures and hypotheses, how do you explain the clear disconnect between CO2 and global temperatures? Maybe this will help you understand the question:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/de/temp-emissions-1850-web.jpg
There is no corellation between ∆CO2 and subsequent ∆temperature.
The only corellation between CO2 and global T shows that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature:
Question #3: can you produce a similar cause-and-effect chart showing that rising CO2 is the cause of rising global temperatures? If so, please post it. That will be a first (and remember that an overlay chart does not show cause and effect).
There. Three simple, CO2-related questions. Take your best shot.
Jim Y says:
I do answer questions.
When?
I will wait for the moderators to do their job. I suggest you do the same.
That’s no longer an issue, and it’s been three days now.
Remember: ‘Silence is concurrence’.
Mr Yushchyshyn has not understood the head posting. I shall be exposing, one after another, a series of scientific errors each of which has played a part in exaggerating Man’s supposed warming influence.
There is nothing in the recent temperature record that demonstrates the relative magnitudes of anthropogenic and natural influences. Various opinions are possible. But this series is not about opinions. It is about scientific errors, which will be explained and demonstrated one by one until all will be able to see that the scientific basis for the official high-sensitivity storyline has been destroyed as manifestly false.
Monckton of Brenchley. Thank you for the great post. Will you, in future posts, also describe the errors resulting from fudging the historical temperature data to make false warming apparent?
Mr Lane invites me to deconstruct the tamperature record. However, for the sake of brevity this series will concentrate on mathematical errors that are undeniable.
As a Control Systems Engineer, that has tuned many power plants to operate smoothly, efficiently and reliably, I have never seen a Bode diagram or Nyquist curve of loop transfer function supporting the arguments predicting the so called “feedback.” Why?
My analysis is that to do so would destroy their argument.
Usurbrain is right about the curious absence of Bode diagrams. I shall be rectifying that omission later in this series.
“I have never seen a Bode diagram or Nyquist curve of loop transfer function supporting the arguments predicting the so called “feedback.” Why?”
The first question is, where do you find those arguments? They are far less common than people think. GCMs are not based on feedback notions. Feedback is a way of thinking about climate interactions. You first have to create an appropriate circuit in your mind.
But the reason you won’t see Bode diagrams is that the thinking related to the “official equation” relates to DC gain. There is no frequency response involved.
Nick, *ANY* change with respect to time is not “DC,” but is dynamic and therefore has meaningful characteristics that can be shown in the frequency domain on a Bode plot.
“therefore has meaningful characteristics that can be shown in the frequency domain on a Bode plot”
Only if you have time-dependent information. There is none in the “official equation”. DC is the low frequency limit. It would be a single point (f=0) on a Bode plot. And since Bode plots are done with log(f), it won’t even appear.
So explain to me why you think I plotted process loop gain and phase lag angle vs angular frequency (rads/sec), And with these plots determined if the loop was stable.
I was also involved with the modeling of control systems used for power pant simulators and development of accident analysis for these power plants. The computer models I developed mimicked the plant to within 1/10 of a percent accuracy. This was only achievable by accurately modeling the feedback of each control loop. One of the computer models I developed provided the information needed for design changes to prevent boiler implosions caused by the larger stack fans on the balanced draft boilers after the regulatory mandated emissions reduction modifications.
So how do GCMs work without modeling the feedback or “are not based on feedback notions”
Mr Stokes is trying, unsuccessfully, to anticipate parts of the argument that will not be presented till later in the series.
And if the models did not allow for feedbacks they would predict no more than the reference warming of just 1 K.
The climate record is a time series: not time dependant? IPCC projections are for the FUTURE: not time dependent information?
I have a lot of respect for you capabilities but you seem badly off the rails with this comment.
Even if we reduce the whole climate system to a trivial RC circuit and hit is with a step change 2xCO2 input, we can analyse the frequency response. As soon as something changes over time it is not “DC”.
“but you seem badly off the rails with this comment.”
It’s very simple. The head post describes an equilibrium model. There is no time or frequency dependence. There are no reactances.
“Even if we reduce the whole climate system to a trivial RC circuit”
The system is reduced to a R circuit. There is no C. Now you may say that there is data which could be used to construct a time dependent model. OK, let’s see it done. We don’t have it. So you can’t do frequency analysis.
Which is why they are no good at predicting the dynamics of climate.
usJim,
No that its wrong – You can have a dc gain, X In Y out, so that in the path from X to Y there is a change in DC level after an infinite time, but this says nothing about the undulations that happens in the output while the output was changing from X to Y that is the dynamics. The official equation is the same, it gives an input, then predicts and output given a gain with the Potentiometer being CO2 it IS equivalent to the DC gain of an amplifier with a controlled variable DC feedback.
For example I could have a climate that oscilates periodically between -273 K and 303K and the average would still be 15 deg C would it be livable – well no.
As any EE knows as you feed output back to the input the stability of the amplifier falls, not because of the feedback persay, but because of the inevitable time delays in the feedback signal. The DC analysis does not tell you what happens over time the AC analysis does. Every feedback in the climate has a DIFFERENT DELAY, and it changes dynamically.
Bobs @ 1:53 +10 –
Exactly!
An increase in CO2 concentrations has been described as
322 ppm up to 403 ppm. Impressive figures, and quite alarming.
However, let’s put it another way: the ratio of CO2 to other
gases in the atmosphere has increased from 3:9997 to
4:9996. The End Is Nigh.
I don’t understand your numbers, can you please explain?
In my simple world CO2 has increase from 0.03% to 0.04% in some 250 years. This means CO2 concentrations have increased by 0.01%, both natural and man-made.
Thanks
Terrence M, when I want to illustrate how much of the atmosphere is co2 I use an illustration from a presentation by Burt Rutan, still available for download as a pdf from his website. On page 12 above the illustration he sais to think of the atmosphere as 300 gallons of water, say in 6 50 gallon drums. Into this water add one tablespoon of warm water- about 360 drops (co2 was at about 360 ppm then) one drop at a time, one a day for a year. In this case make that 322 drops and 403 drops, roughly. Sorry, I’m not sure how to post images or I would.
http://burtrutan.com/downloads/EngrCritiqueCAGW-v4o3.pdf
Terence M, Jeff Hayes:
The apparent insignificance of a relatively small concentration of CO2 in not a valid argument.
Pour a litre of water into a glass jug. You will be able to see the bottom of the jug clearly. Now add a teaspoonful of milk and stir. The milk concentration will be about 500 ppm – yet you will no longer be able to see the bottom of the jug. The liquid becomes much less transparent to visible light. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere has a similar effect on LW energy.
CO2 is likely to cause warming – just not as much as some climate scientists predict.
I think you need to check your figures:
1 liter/(1000000*500)=0.0005 liter, or 0.5 ml
One teaspoon is approximately 5 ml (4.92) so you have actually added 5,000 ppm in your example. Adding 1/10 of a teaspoon (a few drops) would be correct, if I have not made a mistake- I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet.
As to whether this is a “valid argument” that depends on what you are trying to say. I thought you were asking for an explanation of Rex’s numbers or a different way of understanding them. Most people, ie; laymen, including myself have a difficult time understanding actual relationships of the amounts of the gases in the atmosphere. It’s just not in human-scale. It doesn’t help when fear-mongers scream that we are “dumping billions of tons” of co2 into the atmosphere. If I say to someone who wants to know (or misunderstands) how much that is- “if the atmosphere were a one-liter bottle of water the co2 already present is a few drops, we add one drop per year and plants take back out 5/6 of that drop”, they have a perspective that they can understand. The absorbance characteristics of “greenhouse” gases is a different conversation.
Note- I haven’t worked out the actual relationship of co2 added and removed by plants as it scales to a one liter bottle of water, or used that example before now, I just used one drop and 5/6 to illustrate the point.
You are right. It is just a “few drops” to produce a noticeable effect. My recollection of the example was a bit hazy and I didn’t think the numbers through properly. That said the example does demonstrate the effect.
According to the web post below, China in the last three years used more cement than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century. I wonder if the climate alarmists who calculated that this year is the hottest on record factored in the effect of all that cement, not only in China but in all the developing countries. I bet not.
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/red-ponzi-ticking-china-and-the-dark-side-of-the-global-bubble-part-3/
It is important to remember that the value of the feedback has a sign. You can have as much negative feedback as you want. An application for that would be a voltage regulator. In the schematic note the comparator. It is in the feedback loop and has an open circuit gain in the order of 100k.
So when would we want positive feedback? Back in the day when all we had were vacuum valves (also called tubes in North America), the number of active devices was small because valves were expensive and gobbled electricity. It was possible to build a radio with a single valve by using positive feedback to increase the gain of that valve. These were called regenerative receivers. They were inexpensive and that was their only advantage. 🙂 They also tended to be unstable.
Getting catastrophic temperatures from increased CO2 requires positive feedback. Most people who have designed feedback circuits will doubt CAGW on that basis alone. Positive feedback (as you point out) tends to be unstable and the planet has never exhibited that kind of instability except when it bangs into and out of glaciation.
“Getting catastrophic temperatures from increased CO2 requires positive feedback. Most people who have designed feedback circuits will doubt CAGW on that basis alone. Positive feedback (as you point out) tends to be unstable and the planet has never exhibited that kind of instability except when it bangs into and out of glaciation.”
I would suggest that is because of the remarkable stability of our Sun’s output.
It needs the Earth’s path around it to wobble/wander further away relative to the NH for there to be any great variation.
So the Sun’s output is stable and CO2 has varied from 180ppm to 7000 ppm while the only generally hazardous climactic conditions the world has seen have been major glaciations. Unless you’re going to turn around and claim that CO2 causes glaciation, just what the heck is the problem?
“It was possible to build a radio with a single valve by using positive feedback to increase the gain of that valve.”
The point of regenerative receivers was not just to increase the gain of the valve. It was to increase the frequency selectivity. There is an L and a C that you tune in the feedback loop. And these are tuned so the loop gain (and positive feedback) is very high at the desired frequency. There is no real analogue to the DC gain being spoken of here.
And besides, regenerative receivers actually worked very well. They were only replaced by superhet because that offered better frequency selectivity.
Yes, correct Nick – there is no analogy at all between a tuned circuit and climate. None at all.
Toneb: “there is no analogy at all between a tuned circuit and climate. None at all.”
Really? Are you sure of that?
If so, why?
Toneb seems to be becoming desperate in hoping that there is nothing in common between an electronic circuit and the climate. In fact, the mathematics of feedbacks in dynamical systems was first developed for electronic circuits, but the principles of feedback are applicable to dynamical systems in general, including the climate. See e.g. Hansen, 1984; Schlesinger, 1985; Roe, 2009. However, all of these papers contain errors.
“desperate in hoping that there is nothing in common between an electronic circuit and the climate”
He said there is no analogue between a tuned circuit and climate. A tuned circuit is tuned to oscillate (usually sinusoidally) at a fixed frequency. Climate is not.
Mr Stokes is wrong, as usual. The head posting made no reference to tuned circuits, wherefore, even if Toneb was talking of the particular type of tuned circuit mentioned by Mr Stokes, his attempt to criticise the head posting on this ground must fail.
“The head posting made no reference to tuned circuits”
Toneb was responding (through me) to commiebob’s analogue of regenerative receivers.
Toneb: You obviously never built a super-regenerative receiver…
Nick
You have totally gone off the rails, your argument over the last month has all amounted to “hold your breath you’ll see I am right”
Me neither. 🙂
The only reason I mentioned regenerative receivers was as an example of positive feedback.
In my experience they were cheap AM radios that people used in the kitchen or workshop. Because of their cheapness they weren’t replaced by super het radios. By 1970, they had been replaced by even cheaper transistor radios. I remember them going unstable. I also remember them as being susceptible to interference and thus being a problem for any radio amateurs in the immediate vicinity. Under no circumstances would they have been described as ‘fine radios’.
Imagine my surprise when I found this link. It seems that at least one person likes them.
“there is no analogy at all between a tuned circuit and climate. None at all.”
Then why are my ears ringing with climate propaganda?
In texts of a certain vintage, there would be a picture of a water tower. Voltage, current, and resistance would be explained in terms of pressure, flow, and friction. By 1940 my father’s first year electrical text had the following wording which still alluded to the hydraulic analogy:
By the 1970s fluid systems were taught using the concepts the students had already applied in their electrical course. example
Let’s estimate empirically what the feedbacks really are.
Let’s assume there is an increase of +0.8C in temperatures to date and let’s use the forcing numbers provided by the IPCC in AR5 and correctly use the Stefan Boltzmann equations instead of shortcut numbers. W/m2 and temperatures in C and no fudging is then allowed.
AND … this is an important assumption … let’s move all the calculations and BS down to the surface and forget about the fake tropopause modelling theory. Why? because the troposphere is warming less fast than the surface (which means the theory is broken when based on the tropopause) and the numbers don’t go far enough back in the troposphere and one of the feedbacks gets thrown out then – the lapse rate – which just takes away another one of the fudge factors … and … we live at the surface, we don’t live 6 kms up.
So, 0.8C temperature increase (from let’s say 1850). That means the surface emission rate has increased from 386.8 W/m2 (or 14.2C) to 391.2 W/m2 (or 15.0C).
The GHG/and all other forcing according to IPCC AR5 is +2.3 W/m2. According to Stefan Boltzmann, that should have lead to an increase in temperatures of +0.39C (or from 386.8 W/m2 to 389.1 W/m2).
The feedbacks then add another 0.41C so that we get to 0.80C. The feedback values as calculated at the surface that work in Stefan Boltzmann are then 2.56 W/m2/K.
This is equivalent to:
–> +2.0 W/m2/K in water vapor feedback (basically the same as the assumption used by the IPCC);
–> +0.46 W/m2/K in net cloud forcing (a positive number and close to the IPCC assumption); and,
–> +0.1 W/m2/K in ice/surface albedo (again very close the IPCC value, certainly ice albedo has changed).
So there you have it. No fooling around. The empirical numbers to date and the IPCC is right on the assumptions (except now I am at the surface and using the real Stefan Boltzmann equation). i don’t care about the deep ocean lag anymore because it is warming so slowly, it cannot have any impact on surface temperatures. By 2080 it will be barely up to +0.2C and that has no impact once the surface has warmed by 4 to 8 times the ocean.
Charted here.
Now we can use the same idea to see what happens at doubled CO2/GHG forcing of +4.2 W/m2 (I’m counting all the GHGs including methane etc. and not just CO2).
Viola +1.46C (or just +0.68C more to go).
The math always seems to work out to this value no matter which different way i do it. Always.
Voilà!
And you’re being generous to Alarmists with your assumptions and “observations”.
heh, either right or horribly, invisibly, biased.
===========
Your estimate is close to Lewis 2015 (1.5) using Bjorn Stevens newly constrained lower by about half aerosol estimate. And to the extent this validates Stevens, it knocks out climate models, because most of them used extra aerosols to cool the hindcasts to better match observation.
Now if you run that through a computer and set it on fire, you can get published! Just put “climate change and stuff” at the end and double your result (or lie about the past)! Also, remove all reference to anything sensible (except temperature which is fundamentally sensible to most people). Also, please run for office!
I’ve done something different here than global warming theory is based on.
I have moved all the calculations to the surface.
Global warming theory bases all their estimates in the troposphere and then assumes that this magically translates into a similar impact at the surface.
But 2 W/m2 of forcing at the tropopause does NOT have the same temperature impact as 2 W/m2 at the surface. In addition, the troposphere is warming at about 60% as much as the surface while it supposed to be warming at 130% of the surface in the theory. The theory at the troposphere is broken.
If you look at how the numbers are evolving at the surface, we only 1.46C per doubling of warming and we are already at 0.80C of that. Nothing much has happened. if we get another 0.66C in the next 65 years, nothing much else is going to happen either.
At the surface, all the forcing and feedback impacts are dampened because we are already at higher energy levels at the surface. The Stefan Boltzmann equations are logarithmic with respect to energy levels and temperature.
Nothing much has happened…nothing much else is going to happen either.
Say it again…
Bill Illis
“So, 0.8C temperature increase (from let’s say 1850). ”
Hang about…up page there is a comment that from the PDO condition of 1967 to now, it is the same 0.8 C. You are saying (pointing out) that it is 0.8 C from 1850. That rather drives a logical wooden stake through the heart of the CO2 Dracula.
Good work Bill, but what you find with this method is the Transient Climate Response (TCR), not the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), and the value 1.5 K for TCR is similar to what IPCC says in AR5.
The TCS is likely in the range 1 K to 2.5 K, and the ECS is likely in the range 1.5K to 4.5K. See
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_TS_FINAL.pdf
/Jan
Sorry, but 4.5 K seems physically impossible. What highly positive net feedbacks could possibly boost ECS from 1.2 K without feedbacks to 4.5 K with them?
Jan Kjetil Andersen August 28, 2016 at 1:39 pm
What makes the ECS higher and longer than the TCS. Ocean heat accumulation? You know I do not see anyway that a 0.2C warmer ocean is going to translate into a warmer surface when the surface is already 1.46C warmer. It is unphysical. It means nothing even if you think in the next 500 years, the ocean warms another 1.0C. It is an energy sink, not an energy source. it does not make the surface warmer
Ice-albedo? Well that was going to happen regardless of any increased CO2/GHG. As long as the interglacial continues, Greenland was always going to continue melting out until some day when all the ice is gone. 25,000 years, 50,000 years, it was already going to happen because Greenland is too far south to maintain glaciers. Antarctica is not going to do anything because it is too cold and right over the south pole. If you run the numbers on Greenland melting out in 20,000 years, it does basically nothing to Earth albedo because it is small and gets little of the global solar insolation. Ice-albedo impact runs out of steam once you get to today’s situation. There is nothing there.
Climate science like to use the misdirection of ECS versus TCS but, in real physical terms, they have not shown a real physical mathematical explanation for why they should be different. It is just a scam to keep people in line. There is no lag time beyond 6 or 7 years that is worth talking about.
See if you can do the ice-albedo or ocean heat accumulation math to prove a different situation. You cannot. It doesn’t work. It is just part of “climate science communication”. ie “marketing”.
Yes, the main reason for the difference between TCR and ECS is the slow ocean warming. You are right that the ocean is a net energy sink now, and will continue to be that in a long time, more than 500 years. Nevertheless, equilibrium will be reached in the end and.
In equilibrium, both land and ocean are net sources due to the energy flow from the Earth interior.
However, let us look at the situation, before equilibrium is reached, for instance 200 years from now. For simplicity imagine that the greenhouse gas concentration stops at the current level, so we have the same forcing as now.
The oceans will continue to be a sink for these two centuries and because it is a sink, it will become warmer.
Because it will be warmer than it is now, it will be a smaller heat sink than it is now. That means that more heat will stay in the atmosphere and give a temperature rise.
This is the main mechanism behind the TCR – ECS difference.
Jan
I’m curious as to how you could even calculate feedbacks…without knowing temperature
..and knowing the temperature history has been so jiggered
Ristvan sorry no.
The feedback in the auditorium occurs if the sound at the microphone from the speakers exceeds the initial signal at the microphone that was being replicated at the speaker, the pitch of the squeel depends on the frequency at which this first happens, which is usually high because of the way microphones are equalised.
This is the condition where the loop gain exceeds unity in the acoustic system.
Long before you hear the squeal you hear “Echos” or Reverberation, otherwise known as ringing, which causes a gross distortion of the signal you are trying to amplify ie “Instability”.
The operational electronic amplifier design example is inapt, a misdefinition of instability in the climate context and in the Bode feedback amplification context. A concrete laymans example:
It is self evident from experience that auditorium microphone/amplifier loudspeaker sound systems are usually well behaved despite the existance of substantial feedback (the mike obviously ‘hears’ the speaker and the loudspeakers and feeds both back to the amp). Auditorium sound systems do not screech until the system f present in the venue gets too high. That certainly is not f=0.1 and a measly amplification of ~1.1x as figure one ‘max stable’ asserts. The figure as labeled implies all auditorium sound systems are essentially useless. Untrue.
Screech happens if the speakers are placed too close to the mike (too high f) or the amplification for the venue specifics is turned up too high (too high f). As the red curve of figure one suggests, this is about f=0.8-0.85 and 6-7x amplification. Thats real loud. Evidence: Outdoor rock concerts set up their stage sets with speakers high and/or at the ends of the stage, amplified to just below this threshold (by testing up to screech then backing off some) and wearing earplugs to keep from going deaf. (Despite which about 30 peecent or rockers are hearing impaired.) They leave that to the mosh pit. Data: normal speaking voice is ~60 db at 1 meter. Loud outdoor rock concert ~115-120db at 2 meters in the mosh pit. ~6x on the db (log) scale.
Figure one clearly shows that the Bode net feedback f provides a perfectly well behaved ECS up to f=0.73=>ECS = 4.5. Observational energy budget models (EBMs) suggest an actual ECS of ~1.65 (AR5 inputs, Lewis and Curry 2014) or perhaps 1.5 (Bjorn Smith aerosols, Lewis 2015). So F~0.25, very well behaved. Those papers use time intervals attempting to wash out underlying natural variation as much as possible.
You cannot argue observational EBMs wrong just based on inapt amplifier electronic circuit analogies about instability. The sound system example shows that. You can possibly argue EBMs wrong some based on not fully washing out natural variation in their interval selections, or based on sketchy deltaQ (ocean heat pre ARGO).
I look forward to the rest of your posts on sensitivity.
Mr Istvan will find, when I get to the feedbacks, that scientific errors are present in the existing analysis. I’m not basing the argument on hand-waving about process engineers’ design limits. Those limits are merely indicative: the errors are substantive.
That may well be true. But you now have also attempted to overcome my rock concert objection to your instability argument. Have at it. We have jousted this before. You would be well advised to review again. Your instability Bode argument is just wrong on the interval 0.1-~0.7. Obvious from your own curves. Please make only killer winning skeptic arguments, not garbage stuff easily refuted by warmunists. Especially when this has all been gone over in factual detail before, here.
Mr Istvan is making the mistake of anticipating – inappositely – a stage in the argument that I have not yet presented. I shall be offering a demonstration – not mere hand-waving – that the region of Fig. 1 that is marked as unstable is inapplicable to the climate.
Hopefully you will have taken on-board ristvan’s previous criticisms in your new presentation. This arbitrary 0.1 stability limit is one thing that stands out as an obvious weakness in this article and is a valid point to question in that context.
You provide no concrete references as to where you find this figure nor whether there are engineering situations which are designed to operate stably above that value. Ristcan’s auditorium seems to be one such case. It would not be hard to find others.
This is a very good point. In fact it could be argued that it is the median rather than the mean which is most useful. Most work I’ve seen on sensitivities uses median, or most common, as the average. This prevents outliers ( like stupidly over sensitive models ) from having too much influence.
The median also goes someway to addressing the distortion produced by the non-linearity of using CS rather than f and I think you will find that IPCC use median when “averaging”.
I suggest you check out how that affects this part of your criticism, perhaps with some concrete examples. Nic Lewis could probably give you some solid advice of that if you are in communication with him.
I suspect that taking the median in f and transposing to CS would still give a lower value than median in CS but I suggest checking this before making a possibly easily refutable criticism. The effect may be less than you currently think.
It is a point well worth looking at though.
There is some trickery here, even in the latest AR5 where they explicitly refrain from giving ‘best estimation’. The problem is that if you present a range of 1.5 to 4.5 without pointing out the non-linearity, everyone will automatically take the mean and end up with a mental “central value” of 3.0
What needs to be shown is the skewed , ‘long tailed’ , distribution of CS values where most are bunched up at the lower end : the median is significantly below the mean.
This is precisely a result of the non linearity. Hopefully your detailed presentation will make that clear.
Greg begins by making the same mistake as Mr Istvan – presuming unscientifically to criticise a part of the argument that has not yet been reached. They may or may not agree with me that, a priori, feedback sums in the region marked as unstable in Fig. 1 are implausible, though not all commenters here would agree with them, for at least two have pointed out that any net-positive feedback factor at all, however small, leads to instability in some electronic circuits. However, the head posting says that I shall be demonstrating a posteriori, i.e. proving definitively on the basis of evidence – that feedback sums do not fall on the interval that is marked as unstable.
Greg goes on to make the interesting and constructive suggestion that I should investigate using the median rather than the mean of the models’ estimates of the feedback factor f. Certainly that would assist with evaluation of the outputs of the CMIP5 ensemble, which are distorted at present by the inclusion of a single extreme outlier model at the upper bound of the feedback-sum interval. However, this series focuses only on outright errors made by the climatological establishment, and I cannot say that establishment is wrong to take the mean rather than the median value of the feedback sum as its central estimate of that sum.
Once you invoke Bode, you have two criteria that describe the system: gain and phase shift which change depending on frequency. A system will oscillate if it meets the Barkhausen Stability Criterion. If the closed loop gain of the system is one at a given frequency, the system will oscillate at that frequency. Remember that we have to consider phase. If a system, designed with negative feedback, picks up a 180° phase change at some frequency it effectively has positive feedback at that frequency.
CM’s formula is a reasonable first approximation. The op amp analogy is also a good first approximation because it corresponds with CM’s formula. Consider the formula on page 7 of this link.
It’s pretty standard.
Both A and F change with frequency and they are complex, that is, they are vectors with magnitude (gain) and phase. As you point out with your PA example, it is easy to produce values of A and F at some frequency that meet the Barkhausen Stability Criterion. ie. The system will oscillate. I fail to see how that invalidates CM’s op amp analogy. The normal course of events is that we can produce feedback circuits that are always stable just as the planet’s climate has been remarkably stable for the last ten thousand years.
Trie. I did. So show the consequencea.
“Both A and F change with frequency and they are complex,”
They are in circuits that you deal with. But there is no dependence on phase, or phase shift, in anything in the head post, and specifically in Fig 2. That’s why I emphasise that it is an equilibrium relation. In circuit terms, a DC relation. That’s why the talk of Bode plots is such a nonsense. There is no frequency information to put into such a plot.
And it’s why I talk about Q – damping. It is very likely that the climate system will heavily damp response to oscillations beyond a very limited frequency range. Not certain – but how can you do Bode analysis with no knowledge of the damping.
Ah, I see your point now. This is not even an RC circuit. There is not even any thermal inertia.
Commiebob has put his finger on the right equation for feedback amplification. I shall have much more to say about that in due course.
“The operational electronic amplifier design example is inapt, a misdefinition of instability in the climate context and in the Bode feedback amplification context.”
Indeed it is. The reason that designers are conservative with feedback is that they have to worry about the whole range of frequency response. It takes just one frequency with a loop gain of one to create an oscillation. A theoretically stable audio amplifier may function as a good RF oscillator. And that may be due to what you thought was negative feedback, which becomes strong positive feedback with a phase shift. You have to be careful with all feedback.
The reason why that is a problem is that the design aims of an amplifier tends, without due care, to create high-Q oscillator circuits. The climate feedback considerations mentioned here refer to equilibrium (DC, or zero frequency) conditions. There is no reason to expect that they would create an efficient (high Q) oscillator at high frequencies.
re: Nick and ” the design aims of an amplifier tends, without due care, to create high-Q oscillator circuits.”
Low Q. There really aren’t any combo L and C elements ‘coupled together’ to achieve said high Q.
More likely, however, is your ‘phase margin’ through you amplifying device and negative feedback path has exceeded 180 degrees AND if gain still exceeds one the amplifier will oscillate.
Extend: exceeded 180 degrees nigh onto 360 degrees …
Mr Stokes is foolishly persisting in his futile attempts to criticise a part of the argument that has not yet been presented.
“There really aren’t any combo L and C elements ‘coupled together’ to achieve said high Q.”
In the system described by the head post, there are no such elements anywhere. Which means no oscillation criterion can be established.
Ristvan said in part ” …Screech happens if the speakers are placed too close to the mike (too high f) or the amplification for the venue specifics is turned up too high (too high f). ….”
Actually, you need to take room resonances into account, The strongest resonance usually determines the onset of screech. Knock that one down with a graphic equalizer and you can turn the rest of the spectrum up – at least a significant amount.
BH, completely agree. But was trying to simplify for the WUWT readers here. Your resonance is why acoustic systems are tested. Cause no venue or hall has the same acoustics. My MC reply remains.
Rud – I kind of figured you knew that. It was for completeness. Rest assured – I’ve kind of found it unfruitful to begin assuming I know something you haven’t figured out already !
One thing that is quite unstable here is the “official equation”, now in Fig 2, and said to be Roe’s Eq 5. When
first introduced on Aug 3rd, it was said to signify “Equilibrium climate sensi.” and it began ΔTeq=…
I pointed out that, yes, that was an OK equation, but it applied to equilibrium temperatures, and was being used for temperatures far from equilibrium. That was fixed in the next version , Aug 9, by a revised header “Climate sensitivity”, and the Teq problem solved by simply removing the eq.
Now in Fig 2 I see that it is said to characterise “Equilibrium sensitivity”, although Teq still remains truncated to T.
You quibble. ECS is an equilibrium condition; themequatiin describes how to calculate it. It can be fit using data that not yet in equilibrium, because those are just inputs defined by the equation. Your arguement is tantamount to saying only equilibrium data can be used in a properly defined and developed equation. Nope. There is nothing wrong with the equation or the data.
“It can be fit using data that not yet in equilibrium”
Not if you don’t include heat entering the oceans (~93% of it) it cant.
BTW: I said heat not temp.
“There is nothing wrong with the equation or the data.”
There most certainly is.
Mr Stokes is indeed quibbling. The head posting clearly states that the series will be chiefly concerned with equilibrium sensitivity. The equation can of course model sub-equilibrium sensitivities by a suitable choice of the feedback sum c, but equilibrium sensitivity is the present focus, so, even if Mr Stokes’ quibble had any scientific substance, which it does not, it would be off the point – a mere attempt at misdirection.
Toneb should read the head posting more carefully. He will then see that the official sensitivity equation is meticulously and successfully calibrated against both the CMIP3 and 5 ensembles.
The equation thus correctly reflects how climate sensitivity is currently determined. But it is riddled with errors that this series will expose and correct.
” the equation describes how to calculate it”
No, it defines it. You then have to work out how to calculate it. There are good ways and bad. But first you have to recognise what it is.
Nick, not even a good try at a factual response. Quit obfuscating a simple intuitive math issue.
Many recognize the simple ecs equation, and do know how to calculate it from first principles, as CM has done. You just don’t like the resulting calculation. Tough beans.
” do know how to calculate it from first principles, as CM has done”
He did not calculate it from first principles. The ECS equation defines a constant (ECS) which relates a change in equilibrium temperature to a sustained and steady increase in flux. He took a highly non-equilibrium temperature response to an continuously increasing flux (using the endpoint value) and substituted in the equation that defines ECS. That isn’t first principles. It’s plain wrong.
Mr Stokes continues to be in error. The official climate sensitivity equation, if informed with the models’ published values for forcings and feedbacks, generates their published values for equilibrium sensitivity. Those published values for equilibrium sensitivity are arrived at in the models by taking into account the highly non-linear response to linear increases in the chosen feedback sum that is shown in Fig. 1, which he will find, for instance, in Schkesinger (1985) and in Roe (2009).
“Those published values for equilibrium sensitivity are arrived at in the models by taking into account the highly non-linear response to linear increases in the chosen feedback sum that is shown in Fig. 1, which he will find, for instance, in Schkesinger (1985) and in Roe (2009).”
That isn’t first principles. I assume ristvan is talking about your calculation in this post, which is what I described.
The sun started out about 70% as luminous as it is now Considering that earth has had liquid oceans and life for about 4 billion years, feedbacks must be large and negative.
With the current 10/7 of original luminosity, clouds must have just about exactly counterbalanced the increase in the sun’s luminosity.
While Mr McIntire may or may not be right, the evidence from the paleoclumate is subject to too many uncertainties to allow definitive determination of climate sensitivity. This series focuses on a series of scientific errors in the official determination of climate sensitivity.
Mr Christopher Monckton of Brenchley,
Happy to see you again. I was scared that you were at home locked in your room crying all alone when you realized how stupid were your previous posts.
Few weeks ago, you “demonstrated” that ECS was at most 1.6 K. It was an awesome result.
And now, you are just talking bullshit on WUWT, instead of keep going with that and publishing your result in a scientific review… What are you doing, man ???
Great idea!
/sarc
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/27/feds-go-after-science-journals-for-deceptive-practices/
Grow up Benben.
http://bitsocialmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Internet-Troll.jpg
Ad hominem ‘arguments’ from cowards do tend to lower the tone.
Toncul, whoever you are, come with facts not garbage. You show your ignorance when CM’s ~1.6 ECS previously theoretically derived agrees with observational EBMs. He is published–here, for all to critique, not just those with a uninpaywall subscription. And in peer review several times, like the irreducible equation paper from which this flows.
Got something substantive to contribute, do so. Else please take your nonsensical poison and just go away. Far away. Very far away.
The best response to “toncul” is : mon cul !!
Look it up. ( clue it’s french ).
Greg
No the best solution for Toncul is for him to be removed from the sight he is a name changing troll
One important thing to understand about the association between a variation in temperature and a variation in CO2, is that there are multiple relations of causality that could create this correlation and they are all completely different phenomenons. The 2 most important are the variation in temperature caused by a variation in CO2 and the variation in CO2 caused by a variation in temperature. And then, in theory, you could have a large number of phenomenons that would cause both a variation in CO2 and in temperature.
If the climate has any stability, the ratio of K per CO2:doubling must be higher when the variation of CO2 is caused by a variation in temperature than the other way. So it is important to make sure that you use data where the right direction of causality is dominant.
If we lived on a planet where doubling the CO2 caused a warming of 1K and increasing the temperature by 10K caused a doubling of CO2. On that planet, historical data would give us an estimate of sensitivity anywhere between 1K to 10K per doubling of CO2. And we could ask ourselves what is most likely to change naturally, temperature or CO2 level.
It seems that every discussion on climate brings people who show you that historical data associates a high variation in temperature to a low variation in CO2. And these same people have climate models that are highly unstable. Is it possible that these people use the same ration of K per CO2:doubling independently of the direction of causation. And they use data when the variation in CO2 was caused by a variation in temperature to evaluate sensitivity.
The satellite measurements over oceans do not have a spurious trend when compared to sea surface temperatures, there is no reason to believe a spurious trend should exist only over land. It shows us that weather stations have a spurious trend compared to satellite data. Radiosondes do not have a spurious trend in relation to satellite measurements so they can be used. So if we take satellite and radiosondes measurements and consider ocean cycle, we can see that climate sensitivity probably falls outside of the range from the IPCC and is lower than 1K/CO2:doubling.
How hard is that?
I’ve tried to follow the alleged exaggeration here. As far as I can see, it goes like this. People publish a range of sensitivity, say 1.5 to 4.5, with a mean of 3. Lord M says that if you do the feedback algebra, you perform a kind of inversion and get a range [0.23, 0.73], of which the mean is 0.48, and if you invert the mean back again, you get 2.2, not 3.
Well, you can do that with anything. It’s like saying that the harmonic mean is different from the arithmetic mean. It doesn’t mean the arithmetic mean is wrong.
In fact, they don’t generally calculate the central value as the mean of the endpoints. They calculate the best estimate and give a error range about that. The range is generally assumed symmetric (faute de mieux), but nothing much hangs on that. If you know otherwise, the limits could be unsymmetric. Lord M’s argument hangs on the argument that the central value for feedback must be the mean of the extremes, and so the central value for ECS must not. No reason is given.
But ECS is generally not calculated from feedbacks at all. It is simply the observed (or estimated) change of temperature with flux. The feedback calc is an optional layer of diagnosis. It does not overrule the result.
Mr. Stokes,
“Lord M’s argument hangs on the argument that the central value for feedback must be the mean of the extremes …”
Not as I read his presentation. He’s essentially claiming that habitual exaggeration is evident in his eyes, with the handling of these matters. At no point did he say it was impossible that this particular potential example could not have some justification he is unaware of.
If you are aware of some such justification, in your opinion, make your case, I suggest. At this point, it looks to me like you’re reminding us he’s not all-knowing, which seems kinda pointless among adults . . One can say that this or that example of Ms. Clinton saying things that appear to many to be untruths, might have a good explanation, but that wouldn’t do much to persuade many to believe she’s an honest person after all, nor should it, it seems to me.
Rather ~ *At no point did he say it was impossible that this particular potential example could have some justification he is unaware of.*
“He’s essentially claiming that habitual exaggeration is evident in his eyes”
No, he’s claiming a specific “exaggeration”. He says:
“This is Part I of the series. In this first article, I shall describe a rather small error that arises from a consideration that will eventually be seen to have a very large influence on official exaggerations of predicted global warming “
And that is my understanding of what it is. Do you have a better idea?
So, you got nothing, right? You are bitching because the author didn’t somehow prove the negative that there was no reason lurking in someone’s mind for not going with the “generally assumed symmetric” range, right? You have no evidence they did have some reason, you just figure it’s up to Mr. Monckton to somehow prove there was no good reason?
Just out of curiosity, are you with her? ; )
NS, you start out with a very severe fact disability. Yes, Charney said ECS 3. Yes, IPCC thru AR4 said 3, even though their own detailed analysis said it must be less. Climate chapter of published The Arts of Truth goes into those tedious details. But all EBMs since 2013 are much less, sort of 1.5-1.8.
“NS, you start out with a very severe fact disability.”
I introduce no new facts. The examples I quoted are direct from the head post.
Mr Stokes imprudently argues against me for having made a point I had not in fact made in the head posting. I did not say that the central value for the feedback sum must be the mean of the extremes. I said it would be likely to be close to it. And I gave two worked examples: the CMIP 3 & 5 ensembles. Take 3. The bounds of the interval of feedback sums are 1.53 and 2.35, and the published intermodel mean is 1.93, which is indeed close to the mean of the extremes,
And Mr Stokes is disingenuous in saying the models reach their results without accounting for feedbacks. They do not always provide explicit contributions from individual feedbacks, but they certainly take account of overall feedback amplification. Otherwise they would find climate sensitivity to be 1 K per CO2 doubling. And the differences between their predictions of climate sensitivity arise near-exclusively from differences in their assessments of the feedback sum.
“I did not say that the central value for the feedback sum must be the mean of the extremes. I said it would be likely to be close to it. “
Well, that seems to be a very small difference. And it hs the same effect. For the feedback sum, the central must be close to the mean, so the use of the mean for ECS must be wrong. But why? It is a trivial statement; you have no independent knowledge of the distribution of feedback sums. You just take a range, transform it, say the mean has changed (which is just a matter of arithmetic), and then say something is wrong.
As an aside, the IPCC does not generally assert that the central value of ECS is the mean of the range. As you note, in AR1 and AR2 they gave (diffidently) 2.5 as central in a range 1.5 to 4.5. In AR4 SPM (below fig SPM4) they gave 3, with a range 2 to 4.5. In AR5 SPM they gave a range with no central estimate.
” but they certainly take account of overall feedback amplification”
GCMs do not do that. They do not deal with feedbacks at all. Feedbacks are a diagnostic construct, taken after the fact by those who find it helpful.
Mr Stokes continues to dig himself in deeper into error. The distribution of feedback sums in the models, together with their means, which are close to the means of the extremes, are shown in the head posting, in a detail from AR5, fig. 9.43a. And if he will read the references provided, he will learn – e.g. from Vial et al., 2013 – that the principal differences between models’ estimates of climate sensitivity are accounted for by feedbacks, of which, therefore, the models inevitably take account, for otherwise they would be constrained to find climate sensitivity equal to the reference sensitivity 1 K per CO2 doubling.
Vial et al., by studying each of the models, even go so far as to identify ineachis mispdel the individual contributions from each of the climate-relevant feedbacks.
Furthermore, the head posting demonstrates that the use of the published feedback sums in the official climate sensitivity equation generates the published climate sensitivity estimates.
To take a specific example of how models account for feedbacks, Lee et al. (2007), following Santer (2003), shows that models are programmed to expect that, owing to the water vapor feedback, the rate of warming in the tropical mid-troposphere will be about twice or in some model thrice that of the tropical surface.
This circumstance, as Soden & Held (2005) points out, leads to a diminution in the tropical temperature lapse rate with altitude, which acts as a negative feedback countervailing to some extent against the water vapor feedback.
It is by the representation or oarameterization of processes such as these that the models take account of temperature feedbacks, and it is foolish of Mr Stokes to attempt to confuse the issue by saying thy do not take account of feedbacks.
“It is by the representation or oarameterization of processes such as these that the models take account of temperature feedbacks, and it is foolish of Mr Stokes to attempt to confuse the issue by saying thy do not take account of feedbacks.”
No, what you have described are the ways in which model users diagnose feedbacks from model outputs. But the ECS values are not deduced from feedbacks. Just above Fig 9.42 they explain how it is done:
No mention of prior calculation of sum of feedbacks in either case. ECS is estimated directly. They do also describe the method of estimating via feedbacks, and even note the discrepancy that you describe (without justification) as an error, in Sec 9.7.2.4:
There are important caveats.
Mr Stokes continues to miss the point. The models are constructed in such a way as to predict non-linear temperature responses to linear changes in feedback. The difference between models’ sensitivities arises from differences in their treatment of the phenomena that cause those non-linear responses.
And in one sense it matters not by what methods the models reach their exaggerations. The reference sensitivity of order 1 K is simply enough determined. One can then deduce that the difference between any published final sensitivity and the reference sensitivity is attributable to feedbacks. And, once I have demonstrated that very high feedback factors are impossible and arise from a large error, the models will have to be adjusted to take account of that error.
Sure, because the equations that govern temperature are non-linear. If you linearly change the inputs to a non-linear equation, you get a non-linear response.
That comes from the physics of climate change, all the way down to the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. It’s not some arbitrary design choice by climate scientists; it’s physics. The physics is non-linear.
Nick, I think much of the 2.2 vs 3 argument is incorrect because it is the median of model CS which is usually taken not the mean. This goes at least some way to addressing this effect. I posted about median above.
If there is an averaging to be done ( median or mean ) it would be preferable that this was done in a linear domain if possible. So I think there is a sound argument in doing this in f rather than CS. Though if the median is used the difference will be less.
“Though if the median is used the difference will be less.”
If the median is used (as you say it is), there will be no difference at all.
From Nir Shaviv:
the IPCC AR5, first impressions
“One of the statements which wonderfully exemplifies the absurdity of the new report is this paragraph discussing the climate sensitivity in the summary for policy makers. They write:
“The equilibrium climate sensitivity quantifies the response of the climate system to constant radiative forcing on multi-century time scales. It is defined as the change in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium that is caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence) 16. The lower temperature limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2°C in the AR4, but the upper limit is the same. This assessment reflects improved understanding, the extended temperature record in the atmosphere and ocean, and new estimates of radiative forcing.”
Now, have you noticed something strange? According to the AR4 report, the “likely equilibrium range of sensitivity” was 2.0 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling. According to the newer AR5 report, it is 1.5 to 4.5°C, i.e., the likely equilibrium sensitivity is now known less accurately. But they write: “This assessment reflects improved understanding”. How ridiculous can you be?..,,
One reason for the lack of improved understanding could be incompetence of the people in the field. That is, all the billions of dollars invested in climate research were not or could not be used to answer the most important question in climate, one which will allow predicting the 21st century climate change. I doubt however that this is the real reason. Among the thousands working in climate research, surely there are at least a few who are competent, if not more.
I think the real reason why there is no improvement in the understanding of climate sensitivity is the following. If you have a theory which is correct, then as progressively more data comes in, the agreement becomes better. Sure, occasionally some tweaks have to be made, but overall there is an improved agreement. However, if the basic premises of a theory are wrong, then there is no improved agreement as more data is collected. In fact, it is usually the opposite that takes place, the disagreement increases. In other words, the above behavior reflects the fact that the IPCC and alike are captives of a wrong conception.
This divergence between theory and data exactly describes the the situation over the past several years with the lack of temperature increase (e.g., as I described here some time ago). It is also the reason why the IPCC had to lower the lower bound. The discrepancy is large enough now that a climate sensitivity of 2°C is inconsistent with the observations. However, under legitimate scientific behavior, the upper bound would have been decreased in parallel, but not in this case. This is because it would require abandoning the basic premise of a large sensitivity. Since the data requires a low climate sensitivity and since alarmism requires a large climate sensitivity, the “likely range” of climate sensitivity will remain large until the global warming scare will abate.
Incidentally, if one is not a captive of the high sensitivity idea, then things do converge, but they converge towards a climate sensitivity of about 1 to 1.5°C per CO2 doubling.
A second important aspect of the present report is that the IPCC is still doing its best to avoid the evidence that the sun has a large effect on climate. They of course will never admit this quantifiable effect because it would completely tear down the line of argumentation for a mostly manmade global warming of a very sensitive climate…”
Dr Shaviv is right. IPCC has made some basic errors. Watch this space.
This is why the target was changed from 2 to 1.5 in the Paris accord. It is clear that we will come in under 2 on a “business as usual” level of output; so the perceived need (power) to control was gone unless the “safe” target was reduced to 1.5.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, thank you for the essay.
It’s a pleasure! Keep watching.
Here Lord Monckton says in part:
‘…..Anyone who has ever built an operational-amplifier circuit intended to operate stably will know that a designed-in maximum feedback factor of not more than 0.1 (or 0.01 if possible) is desirable…”
THIS STATEMENT IS QUITE WRONG. I don’t know how many op-amp circuits he has designed and tested, but I would guess none.
For an op-amp by itself, no amount to positive feedback (let alone as much as 0.1, or even 0.01) can be tolerated IF one wants a linear circuit (such as, typically, an amplifier).
Positive feedback around a finite gain amplifier, (the amplifier realized with an op-amp with negative feedback), results in gain, and feedback factors greater than 0.1 are common. (100 years ago, that’s how they made “regenerative” radios.) I wrote up some tutorial notes on this in Nov. of 2013:
http://electronotes.netfirms.com/EN219.pdf
This has some 24 pages total. One circuit, for example, where f=2/3 (greater than 0, greater than 0.1, but less than 1) is shown here:
http://electronotes.netfirms.com/EN219Fig6.bmp
I think I asked about where he got that value of 0.1 before, and he never replied.
BH, Yes, I made the same arguement above using common microphone/amp/ loudspeakers as the example. IMO, and younprovide more data, is any Bode f below ~0.8 is ‘safe and well behaved’.We had this same go around last year concrning the irreducible equation paper, which as I Showed at CE is further reducible and then equivalent to CM figure 2. And then showed that with observationally reasonable inputs, calculates to 1,5-1.8 mode ~1.6. Spot on observational EBMs.
Thanks Rud – the old brain cells called back into action – we did have this go around before.
If I am recalling correctly, CM had an expert with multiple PhDs, whom he never disclosed. And someone (probably you!) pointed out that CM was not good at grasping the lifelines some folks were tossing his way.
plus ca change …….
BH, mine age also. But thanks for remembering the last go round on the same issues.
Messrs. Istvan and Hutchings, instead of loftily dismissing an argument I have not yet made, would be wiser to wait until I have made it.
Lordy, you have the small problem of having just asserted in your argument that you deny having made those in your previous texts here. Except you provably did.
Let me be even clearer. i am ‘on your side’. BUT only iff honest and scientific. Because anything less opens skeptics to the same criticisms we level against others like Mann. That is not a winning strategy. And we must win.
Second that. Like Bernie says, he seems to think he has to defend his work as it stands against all criticism, rather than benefiting from the breadth of technical experience available here which he could benefit from to improve it.
Most here are ‘on his side’ if he is about improving the science of climatology.
Mr Istvan has only to read the head posting to appreciate that I have not yet made any argument to the effect that the process engineers’ design limit for circuits designed to operate stably is a real limit that operates in the climate. I have, however, here as elsewhere, suggested that, a priori, the existence of the process engineers’ limit is suggestive, and no more than that, that there may be something wrong with the large feedback factors that climatologists use.
I have plainly and fairly stated in the head posting that I shall demonstrate a posteriori, i.e. with evidence and logical argument, that feedback factors in the climate do not fall within the interval marked as unstable in the head posting. It would be best, therefore, if Mr Istvan will read what I write a little more closely, and not continue to attack a straw man of his own making,
Let him take the same open-minded approach as an IPCC lead author did when I showed Fig. 1 of the head posting during a presentation to lead authors at the University of Tasmania some years ago. He looked at the graph, thought for a moment and said, “Have you published this?” I said No. “But you must,” he said. “This changes everything.” As will be revealed in due course, it is he and not Mr Istvan who is correct on this point,
But you ignore that the feedbacks around the climate system are many and varied, analogous to multiple parallel feedback paths with different gains and delays. The Microphone analogy is probably quite close, but if you deliberately introduced 0.95 forward feedback then you would almost certainly hear a screech at some frequency or another. There is almost no chance of such a system being randomly stable.
Bobl continues futilely to attempt criticism of an argument about feedbacks that I have not yet presented. This is the worst kind of argumentum ad ignorationem elenchi.
The tendentious Greg pompously says I should avail myself of the expertise available here. So let me make it plain that all who have attempted inexpertly and unscientifically to attack my argument about feedbacks when I have not yet presented that argument have disqualified themselves as unfit to participate in this or any serious argument. I shall regard the future interventions of such bloviators with suspicion.
I have noted with interest the names of those who have knowledge of feedback systems but have resisted the temptation to attack my argument before I have presented it. It is those, and those alone, whom I shall heed when the time comes, for they understand the scientific method, and that is worth more than all the supposed expertise of the pompous preachers.
No Lord Monckton, I do not critique your argument, I introduce my own!
I have yet to see your slant on this so how can I comment on it.
Bernie,
“For an op-amp by itself, no amount to positive feedback (let alone as much as 0.1, or even 0.01) can be tolerated”
Yes. This is not the positive feedback normally spoken of. That is the feedback applied after application of Planck, which takes it to the finite gain case that you describe. The Planck feedback adds stability; adding positive feedback removes some of that stability. There is no rule that says that small reductions in stability can’t be tolerated.
In your notes, you give the following example:
The two inverting amps in black together give a stable negative feedback amplifier with unit gain. The extra red positive feedback increases the gain to 3. It does not render the circuit unstable.
Add multiple paths and series inductors to each feedback resistor then tell me what happens. Climate feedbacks are not instantaneous like this amplifier, they are randomly delayed by changing delay amounts, they are also non linear, for example water vapour is logarithmic.
The climate/CO2 is also energy limited, analogous to the amplifier output reaching the power rail as is nears that saturation, the gain falls dramatically. There is only so much energy available in the CO2 stop band once exhausted gain falls to zero.
Oh dear. The BBB brigade are out again. That is because the overall negative feedback still exists.
Of course an amplifier with a gain of a hundred whose output is attentuated by one thousand and then fed back in positive phase is not unstable.
Overall loop gain is less than unity.
IN climate the IPCC style models assume presumably that the T^4 radiation is the final negative feedback that renders the overall gain less than unity.
Of course climate sensitivity is not related to temperature is it? So they have forgotten to include that non linear component in their calcs!
I.e. the hotter it gets the less impact CO2 should have, on account of the radiation being so much higher at higher temperatures.
But alas AGW alarmists are sloppy like that. They cherry pick bits of formulae, apply linear calculations to non linear curves and generally make a pigs ear of the whole thing.
For what it’s worth:
Lord Monckton has now labeled the greater-than-unity-loop-gain portion of the closed-loop-gain function’s domain “Climate-unphysical” rather than just “Unphysical response,” as he previously did.
As background, note that a physically realizable equilibrium state exhibiting a closed-loop gain of -3 would result if Mr. Stokes’ feedback resistance equaled 3R/4, i.e., even if the loop gain exceeded unity. Of course, that equilibrium would be unstable: any slight change in the input would cause the system to drive itself away from equilibrium rather seek it, as it would if the loop gain were less than unity. And no one thinks that the climate’s parameters place it in this regime any more than one would expect to find an electrical circuit at rest in the unstable equilibrium state I described.
Strictly speaking, though, that doesn’t make that state any more unphysical than that of a broom temporarily balanced on its handle. So “unstable” describes the states corresponding to the domain’s greater-than-unity portion more correctly than “unphysical.” does.
I mention this rather minor nomenclature point merely as background to the observation that the “Climate-unphysical” label does not seem entirely consistent with Lord Monckton’s subsequent comment, which I agree with, that “the principles of feedback are applicable to dynamical systems in general, including the climate.”
That had in essence been my response when he and his co-authors said a year and a half ago that one of the many complex-climate-model errors their “Irreducibly Simple” paper exposed was that the “Bode system-gain equation” is the “wrong equation” for complex climate models to apply to the climate. Independently of whether those models explicitly use that equation, I said, I agree they have to use it implicitly if they implement feedback, but it is definitely not the wrong equation.
Although the above-quoted comment may suggest he learned something since that paper, his drawing leaves that unclear.
Mr Born is, as ever, sneeringly confused. Perhaps he would like to meditate upon what mechanisms n the climate could act as strongly positive feedbacks and yet could drive temperatures down. In electronic circuits the feedback factor often exceeds unity, attenuating the gain for the sake of overcoming variabilities in component Ray, operating conditions, etc. In the climate, not so.
But he, like others, is commenting on the feedback portion of this series before it has been published.
re: Bernie Hutchins August 27, 2016 at 5:13 pm
Bernie, reference your Figure 6, this is what simulation calculates the voltages as being at the outputs of the two op amps using Tina-TI (ver 9) and using ideal op amps for the circuit in Figure 6: Note the values derived do not agree with what is in Figure 6.
op amp 1) -2.99 V
op amp 2) +2.99 V
http://i64.tinypic.com/9gy2pg.jpg
usJim –
Of course they do not “agree” – are you unfamiliar with experimental discrepancies? My numbers (in green) are EXPERIMENTAL measurements (AKA “the right answer”). Yours are a calculations assuming zero tolerance components. I used 5% resistors. Did you by chance try putting the input to 1.000 in which case you should get out -3.000 and +3.000 in your simulation, the exact theoretical values. You in fact VERIFIED my results, and have my appreciation.
Bernie
Bernie,
I made some variations to your circuit which I think do represent the feedbacks in the “official equation”; I wrote about it here. Thanks – your circuit was very helpful.
I spent far too much time as a student in late ’60s tinkering with multivibrators etc trying to make music. Moog was our shining light, and we read whatever he wrote that we could find. Unfortunately on student hobby budgets the step into voltage control that he pioneered was beyond our technology, but we had fun and learnt a bit.
Nick –
(1) Thanks for that. I generally prefer a visual version of an equation. And that includes using a flow-graph whenever possible. The flow-graphs here are realized with op-amp arithmetic as demos. So they look strange (at least inefficient). So mine is an “amplifier” with gain 1 with a positive feedback of +2/3 in the loop. You know all this – I’m glad it seems to have been clear enough for most of the real engineers here.
(2) Misunderstanding of the limits of feedback aside, next (again thinking as an EE), it strikes me that the equation is really a DIFFERENTIAL equation (note the delta-T and delta-F) and is related to our “Classical Sensitivity” that is so extremely useful (and much better defined/used) with analog filters:
http://electronotes.netfirms.com/Sensitivity.jpg
This I suggest just for perspective. BUT – what would the classical value be (relative to 1).
(3) If you are interested in Moog stuff – here are six of my Moog stories (lesser known) and a long interview I did with him. Fun stuff.
http://electronotes.netfirms.com/ENWN14.pdf
Regards,
Bernie
Thanks for the notes, Bernie. I used to try to imagine the Moog environment, back in 60s and from the other side of the world. Didn’t really get it right, but very interesting to read it now.
Yes, the equation has to be a differential equation, over an operating range. However, the claim of the equation is that the derivative dX/dY is constant in that range. It seems to me that it fits with a z_21 (or y_12 focussing on the denominator) of a two port network.
Nick –
I think the use of the “Classical Sensitivity” illustrates the point you are making about whether a sensitivity is constant or not. The calculation more or less instantly tells you the situation. Here are three hand-written examples:
http://electronotes.netfirms.com/SensExamp.PDF
In the first, the S value is an agreeable constant value of 1 (break even – a 5% change of resistor gives a 5% change of Q, for all nominal attempts at Q). For the second, a frequency parameter (like cutoff), the S value is -1/2, an even more agreeable value (less sensitive because of the square root). The third is the Q of the famous (but flawed) “Sallen-Key” filter where the Q depends on a finite gain K as Q = 1/(3-K). In this case, the S values is 3Q-1; not only NOT constant but depends on the nominal design value, and gets worse with increasing Q. That is, when Q is being designed at 10, say, S=29! Sometimes a S value is 0 – for example, an asymptotic cutoff rate.
So doing those derivatives is pretty simple and gives a full picture JUST based on what you get for S. The sensitivity values also provide a “tweak” formula (tuning equation) if you need a nearly exact correction to a particular instance of a circuit.
Oh – I probably should have done the feedback gain equation G = A/(1-f) where A is the gain before feedback and f is the feedback factor (as usual). Here S = f/(1-f), not a constant. Note that when f=0 we of course have S=0, and when f goes to +1 S blows up (as expected).
These calculations are fun – watching so many factors cancel top and bottom.
Bernie
“Anyone who has ever built an operational-amplifier circuit intended to operate stably will know that a designed-in maximum feedback factor of not more than 0.1 (or 0.01 if possible) is desirable to ensure that anomalies in componentry, assembly, operation and ambient conditions do not induce unwanted runaway responses.”
The gain ratio is determined by a negative feedback resistor from the output to an inverted input, and second resistor from that input to ground, creating a potential divider. With both resistors equal, gain will be unity, with the feedback resistor ten times larger than the ground resistor, the gain will be ten. Any positive feedback would cause runaway gain and clipping.
ulriclyons – exactly right.
It’s good to point out that we do (also) use op-amps open loop (comparators) or with a small amount of positive feedback (so that the comparator “snaps”) or with a significant amount of positive feedback (Schmitt triggers) creating a range of hysteresis. These things we do intentionally, and they are quite distinct applications as compared to amplifiers.
My application used positive feedback in an amplifier, and f could approach 1. This positive feedback was partially cancelling the original negative feedback. As is noted in the text.
Thanks
Mr Hutchins makes my point for me a fortiori.
Bernie thanks. The comparator and Schmitt trigger op-amp applications have effectively a digital output, hardly an analogue of any climatic feedback function.
A Schmitt trigger or comparator still has overall loop gain of less than one in its stable states. Since the amplifier internal gain drops to about zero as the output stages clip.
Anyone can prove anything by talking BS out of context.
The point is that in their linear regions these circuit types are radically unstable, due to intentional loop gains of more than unity.
The point at issue here is that IPCC style feedback levels have to create a loop gain of greater than unity for CO2 to have the effect it allegedly does, at least at lower temperatures than now.
And if those sorts of feedbacks were present, response to things like volcano aerosols and so on would be far far greater than they observably are, and the past temperature record could not have been what it demonstrably was, and indeed its hard to see how an ice age could actually happen.
Remember that the ‘amplification’ is not of CO2 directly, oh no, its of temperature ITSELF. Anything that causes a temperature change should cause more temperature change!.
And that’s why its so easy to see from examining responses to step changes in albedo, like a volcanic eruption, you can see clearly that there is no amplification whatsoever.
The most dominant negative feedback is of course T^4 radiation, which says the hotter it is the vastly more radiation we will see to space from night-time surfaces. The second factor is overall albedo. Which will limit radiation falling on the surface. And that is dominated by sea and clouds. Especially in the tropics, and of course by ice in the polar regions.
Leo Smith August 28, 2016 at 10:26 am: “A Schmitt trigger or comparator still has overall loop gain of less than one in its stable states. Since the amplifier internal gain drops to about zero as the output stages clip.”
Emphatically not true, Leo.
The difference (or delta) input to the comparator may be as little as 1 millivolt or it may be 0.1 volt, with the output driven to one supply rail or the other, or perhaps to ground (as some devices have a TTL compatible logic level output.)
The POINT being, THERE is gain, gain which is sufficient to drive the output to maximum and in the proper direction, and to ‘full scale’ to use a euphemism. One might be tempted to use the term ‘saturated gain’ which will still be much greater than one except in most all but a very few select cases.
usJim.
Leo Smith is correct. In its stable states the schmitt trigger has a gain less than 1 because the energy input has been limited. It cannot drive higher because the output transistor is at minimum (close to zero ohms) and the output current is a maximum. Iin this condition a rise in input causes no change in the output which can never exceed the supply voltage, and the gain of the amplifier is effectively zero, therefore the loop gain is similarly impaired. A delta change in input causes a zero feedback response from the output. Gain is Zero.
In this climate similar conditions arise when warming generates a saturation response, resulting in a thunderstorm which then removes the solar input, the system IS saturated and the only energy available is that stored within the system. That’s why storms are self limiting. During a storm the climate sensitivity (gain) is effectively zero. This is one reason why I say that the feedbacks can’t be treated as scalars.
And that main neg. f/b loop is the planck feedback in climate.
This is why I said from the outset when CoB started all this analysis that it was simply adopting the IPCC misdirection about feedbacks being “positive” not to explicitly include the planck feedback.
Net f/b is always negative, the debate is about whether it is a little more negative or a little less negative. The latter is what the IPCC calls “positive” feedback and leads to erroneous ideas that we could have run-away warming etc.
The Planck “feedback” is not a true feedback, as the form of eq, (1) in the head posting makes quite clear. And it would really be best if commenters waited for the future article in which I address the vexed question of temperature feedbacks before attempting to criticise it.
“The Planck “feedback” is not a true feedback, as the form of eq, (1) in the head posting makes quite clear”
Eq (1) makes the opposite clear. You can write it as:
ΔTeq = ΔF/( 1/λ0 – Σc_i)
The denominator is just the sum of the Planck coef inverted, which gives it the same units as the other feedbacks c_i. Then you see that (with a neg sign convention) the denominator is just the sum of feedback terms, including Planck.
AR5 refers to it as Planck feedback, as in 9.7.2:
“There is high confidence that the sum of all feedbacks (excluding the Planck feedback) is positive.”
““There is high confidence that the sum of all feedbacks”
Confidence amongst those PAID to be confident.
Are you one of those, Nick?
Mr Stokes persists in trying to argue against an argument that I have not yet presented. When he finally sees that argument, he will see the futility and irrelevance of trying to maintain that the reciprocal of lambda-zero is a “feedback”. And I know IPCC likes to call it a “feedback” when it is no such thing, and it was this among other things that showed me where to look to find the truth. Just wait and see.
Well the ONLY way the earth can LOSE heat is of course by Planck radiation so obviously its the dominant ‘negative feedback’ system. And its highly non linear too.
A black body at 300K (27C) loses ~50% more energy than one at 0C (273k). THis is probably not a bad model for night time cloudless skies, or night time warm cloud tops.
However the BS about incoming radiation is just that. BS. The earth is absolutely NOT a black body by day, it has a massive and sparkling and hugely variable albedo.
Which is why Svensmark has to be at least partially right: Cloud cover (and ice cover) is the key to how much radiation is received at ground level.
Satellites can establish how albedo is varying, and satellites can also measure night time radiation loss. And response to step changes in albedo like volcanic aerosols. And so on.
Which of course is why the IPCC concentrates on ground based thermometers in towns, and sea thermometers in engine intakes instead. Hard to fudge satellite data. But they do.
“The gain ratio is determined by a negative feedback resistor from the output to an inverted input, and second resistor from that input to ground, creating a potential divider. With both resistors equal, gain will be unity, with the feedback resistor ten times larger than the ground resistor, the gain will be ten.”
Since you have grounded the second resistor I assume you are talking about a non-inverting op amp circuit? In that case the closed loop gain is ideally 1+Rf/Rg where Rf is the feedback resistor and Rg is the ground resistor. So if Rf=Rg the closed-loop gain is 2, not 1. And is if Rf=10Rg the closed-loop gain is 11, not 10.
A better metaphor than the op-amp is a servo, a servo exhibiting strong motor-boating at an ENSO scale, integrated with a bi-stable operation in the form of the AMO. Both acting as powerful feedbacks to indirect solar forcing.
powerful *negative* feedbacks
Why not wait until I have made my argument about feedbacks before attempting to criticise it?
Maybe because in figure 2 you have already made it , it does invite comment. It will be interesting to see a later post with more detail but if you present feedback equations, expect comments.
Greg is being wilfully obtuse. The head posting contains an explicit warning that commenters should not hold my feet to the fire for the official method of determining climate sensitivity. Fig. 2 is a representation of the official climate sensitivity equation; and, as the calibrations of it against both the CMIP3 and 5 model ensembles demonstrate, it does indeed determine the officially published climate sensitivity intervals.
However, as the head posting makes explicit, I do not defend that official equation. Indeed, in just about every material particular, it is in error, which is why the published climate sensitivity estimates are exaggerated.
And would it not be more sensible to wait until I have presented the argument about feedbacks before attempting to comment on it? Would that not be the scientific way?
I disagree Lord Monckton. Many of us have our own opinions on this equation and we are just airing those, possibly learning from each other – This is just a natural discourse. For example I believe the equilibrium equations completely miss the point because they ignore the transition between states, Since the integral of a chaotic system is a chaotic system, one can conclude that it’s quite possible that the trajectory will be captured by an attractor.
Also there is no evidence that the feedbacks (if physical terms are constants). If we want to discuss that why shouldn’t we.
In reply to bobl, people will of course want to introduce their own ideas to these discussions, and I learn from that. But it is intellectually dishonest to attempt, over and over again, to hold my feet to the fire for the official methodology when criticisms of that methodology should be directed to the IPCC secretariat, and it is also intellectually dishonest to try to attack me for arguments that I have not yet made. So I am giving short shrift to commenters who thus behave badly.
Lord Monckton, I get that but I’m totally not sure that what was happening. I don’t think they are blaming you for errors in the official equation at all. I do agree that asserting 0.1 positive feedback is stable isn’t really defensible, any positive feedback distorts the output which defines UNSTABLE particularly where there are large delays, however in climate terms I agree that 0,1 is likely to be sufficiently stable that a control system can function without unacceptable instability albeit not linearly.
As far as it goes your observations are good, this does appear to be improper. I look forward to any other revelations with the caveat that I think the dynamic / AC characteristic and energy saturation behaviour will be much more relevant than the equilibrium (DC) characteristic. There is no guarantee of what this equilibrium looks like. A square wave has an AVERAGE
I think it would be handier to introduce the term ‘overall loop gain’ instead of ‘positive feedback’ .
Overall loop gain of anything more than zero is unstable.
And doesn’t involve pointless clashed from peole who argue that *internal* loop gains of more than unity are fine, provided that the (not mentioned) *overall* loop gain is less than unity.
In the end, one can express all this in a much clearer form:
The ‘amplification’ of TEMPERATURE change necessary to cause catastrophic climate change is such that it will cause catastrophic climate change caused by any temperature change, not just that induced by CO2.
And that includes stuff like volcanic eruptions and so on.
That this is patently NOT the case, disproves utterly the thesis that positive feedback exists at sufficiently large levels to cause catastrophic climate change.
QED
Leo Smith August 28, 2016 at 10:50 am: “I think it would be handier to introduce the term ‘overall loop gain’ instead of ‘positive feedback’ .
Overall loop gain of anything more than zero is unstable”
A very brief outline on operational amplifiers is called for; I strongly think you may need it. Check out just the first two circuits and the corresponding ‘math’ at the link below:
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/bobpease/assets/AN-31.pdf
@_Jim. I cut my teeth on designs with op amps.
Try understanding what I actually said, in particular what ‘loop gain’ actually *means*. before posting irrelevant information.
Loop gain is not the same as gain.
In answer to Bobl, it is blindingly obvious that Greg was attacking me on the ground that he did not like the official climate-sensitivity equation, for he expressly referred to that equation in his posting attacking me for it. Yet I had made it plain in the head posting, and make it plain again now, that I shall not accept attacks on me because I present the official position. In order for me to critique the official position, it is self-evidently necessary for me to describe it. The fact that I describe it does not, however, indicate that I support it.
“Why not wait until I have made my argument about feedbacks before attempting to criticise it?”
Because homeostasis would have to function like a servo rather than an op-amp, and that means negative feedbacks.
That is no excuse for demonstrating prejudice by attacking an argument that has not yet been presented. Feedbacks will be discussed later n the series.
Monckton of Brenchley August 28, 2016 at 3:06 pm
Be at ease you are among friends. People are just impatient. They tend to have a extrapolate on the information they have when you leave them in anticipation of the next chapter.
You must take heart, you have their complete attention.
http://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb48472752/_2.jpg
michael
Oh the cartoon is ww2 Dr Seuss, and I find it applicable to numerous situations. As your present predicament
michael;-)
I have simply challenged the lack of suitability and irrationality of an op-amp with positive feedback that you have presented somehow as an analogue for thermostasis and climatic stability.
Mr Lyons, if he knew anything of the scientific method, would know the unwisdom of attacking an argument on feedbacks that has not yet been presented. All that has been presented so far is an indication – no more than that – that the feedback factors in the climate fall on an interval well above that which would be regarded by process engineers as safe if one wanted to be reasonably sure that a circuit would perform stably.
As it turns out, there is something seriously wrong with the method by which official climatology now determines feedbacks. In fact, there are several things wrong with it. Once those errors have been explained, and only then, will it be possible for anyone to form a view on whether it was appropriate for me to flag the temperature feedback problem by the indication of the process engineers’ design limit for feedback factors in systems intended to be stable that appears in Fig. 1 of the head posting.
Science is not done by reciting half-understood pietisms from long-forgotten textbooks: it is done by noting apparent anomalies, wondering why the anomalies exist, and then investigating. That is what Mr Lyons seems constitutionally unable or unwilling either to do or to contemplate. Like it or not, though, that is how true science is done.
Let him and others wait and see, and desist from their futile attacks on the argument about feedbacks until that argument has actually been presented.
Christopher Monkton writes:
“Mr Lyons, if he knew anything of the scientific method, would know the unwisdom of attacking an argument on feedbacks that has not yet been presented.”
What I was in fact attacking, to repeat, was your irrational op-amp analogy, which does not produce stability with positive feedback. You’ll be finding out the ‘unwisdom’ of implying that I know nothing of the scientific method.
“Science is not done by reciting half-understood pietisms from long-forgotten textbooks:”
I built audio op-amp circuits, you are the one who did not even half understand them.
“..it is done by noting apparent anomalies, wondering why the anomalies exist, and then investigating. That is what Mr Lyons seems constitutionally unable or unwilling either to do or to contemplate. Like it or not, though, that is how true science is done.”
No flies on me, I’ve been forecasting NAO/AO anomalies and UK weekly weather patterns since 2008 from the heliocentric planetary ordering of solar indirect forcings. And I have a self evident heliocentric model of sunspot cycle and solar minima that readily renders all other postulates, e.g. Scafetta etc, redundant. I do though suspect levels of projection in your baseless criticism.
” that the feedback factors in the climate fall on an interval well above that which would be regarded by process engineers as safe if one wanted to be reasonably sure that a circuit would perform stably. ”
Baseless pontificated drivel. There is no stability with a positive feedback in an op-amp circuit, unless it is configured in a digital mode, e.g. a comparator or Schmidt trigger.
My education in op-amp circuit design principles were from my late father in law Ashtyn Smith, he worked on the Minute Man guidance system. I can still remember it almost word for word he was such a good teacher.The RF rejection frequency determined by the RC pair in the negative feedback loop, the DC rejection frequency with the earth RC pair. His father was Ralph Smith, chairman of the British Interplanetary Society.
It’s an interesting discussion. The planet’s heat engine is very complex. Such a complex system must have multiple feedbacks, both positive and negative. The fact that we are reduced to contemplation of a simple electronic feedback system says everything about how little we know about the climate. I look forward to Lord M o B’s further revelations.
SIMPLE electronic feedback? You jest surely. Real world electronics of the analogue variety are anything but simple, and most are not amenable to formal analysis at all.
WE stabilise them by being careful to stabilise each stage at at time before overall feedback – if any – is applied.
We never use multiple time delayed feedback paths unless we want to build an oscillator…
Leo Smith August 28, 2016 at 10:54 am: “SIMPLE electronic feedback? You jest surely. Real world electronics of the analogue variety are anything but simple, and most are not amenable to formal analysis at all.”
You have been caught out making what appear to be erroneous statements up to this point, I would be very careful about making more …
The truth is, the first-pass step in a design w/feedback (e.g. a simple linear DC power supply) is to assure closed loop gain is less than 1 (WITH sufficient safety margin for manufacturing variation) at the point where feedback phase ‘angle’ reaches 360 degrees (phase shift) and then one can be reasonably assured of stable product operation.
Something a little more complex like a hydraulicly driven ‘motor’ controlling a RADAR antenna is a little more complicated, now involving several dynamical parameters BUT it is all calcu-able and doable in terms of achieving stability.
@_Jim. You have been caught out before making erroneous statements up to this point. Perhaps you have never had to design with anything other than an op amp whose phase response has already been optimised for stability, and whose non linearities have been carefully hidden by very careful design.
Now try designing that operational amplifier yourself. Remember you have to cater for Miller effect, non linear modulation of collector to base capacitance by collector to base voltage, you have to design for non linear transfer functions particularly at low collector to emitter voltage, and of course if you are voltage driving the base, there is a massive non-linearity in the V/I curve of the base emitter junction. And that’s all before you examine the effects of temperature, which at low frequencies may change within one cycle of a input or output waveform.
And no two transistors are identical. What works with one batch, may fail to work with the next.
Then of course there is circuit layout. Stay magnetic and capacitive couplings.
Your claim that it is all calcu-able and doable in terms of achieving stability is so far from the truth, as to be risible to anyone who has, as I did, spent 20 years of their life as an analogue design engineer.
The truth is that the calculations are but a starting point, since they deal with idealised models of the actual semiconductors, not the real life actual ones that come in boxes from the manufacturers.
In the end, it is faster to use iterative techniques (suck it and see) and a scope to see what effect changing critical stability components has, than pretend that the models will actually tell you how the circuit will behave.
I have an honours degree in electrical engineering, and spent many years doing designs: And what strikes me most is how little use the theory actually was. IN general the theory helps you work out what ought to be possible, but actually achieving it, especially at higher frequencies, becomes almost a black art.
Modelling analogue circuits is massively analogous to modelling climate, since one of the key things I discovered right from the start is that linear models pretending to approximate parts of non linear curves are almost completely useless if the signal in play covers enough of the non linearity to really make a difference.
You have no option when in that domain but to deploy massive amounts of computational power and do the thing in discrete steps: we simply do not have mathematics that can tackle complex non linear partial differential equations. That’s why we still build circuitry instead of designing from a book, and why we still have wind tunnels, instead of large computers.
You can see that issue right here: I make a statement about as Schmitt trigger, saying that in a stable sate, it has zero loop gain. I am immediately challenged by someone who says that it clearly has immense positive feedback and loop gain. He simply doesn’t understand that the *gain changes according to the output voltage*.
IT is a highly non linear circuit. And all he understands is linear algebra. And I am afraid that seems to be the case here as well.
My time as an analogue engineer was, because average techs are – or were – two a penny, tackling nasty problems involving issues of non linear components. Because the easy stuff is already in the manuals. There are no calculations that help, because the actual simulations require computers certainly an order or three better than we had then and even today, I am not sure that ‘build it and see’ is not still how what little analogue design is still being done, is done.
People look at all these beautiful equations that appear so impressive, without a hint of understanding that half of them are approximations that break down beyond the small signal case, and the rest are accurate enough, but wholly incalculable, because the short cuts that you can apply to linear differential equations are simply inapplicable in the non linear case.
I remember an O level physics question. IT displayed a rising graph with a very sharp ‘hockey stick’ shooting of the top at the end,. This was marked point ‘C’ (A and B were on the linear part). It was allegedly the path of extension against force of an elastic band. The last of several questions dealing with its elastic modulus, was ‘What do you think happened at point ‘C’ ?’
Of course the answer was, the ‘elastic broke’.
Non linear behaviour. A reminder at ‘O’ level that elastic moduli only work if the spring ain’t broked.
IN general I have found that when people disagree over technical subjects, its because they have radically different levels of understanding. Sadly, to the person with a little knowledge, the person with infinitely more, looks as mistaken as the person with none.
Being the devils advocate, one may be able to show they have used dubious assumptions about ‘exaggerated non-linearity of the temperature responses to linearly-increasing feedback sums’, but can one actually prove that these assumptions are invalid? That is more difficult.
A bit like proving a negative, it is harder to prove (maybe even impossible) that there is no flying spaghetti monster, than to assume or assert that there could be one.
If the jury is still out about linearity in various aspects of climate sensitivity, then at the very least mathematical calculations should state very clearly where such assumptions are being made.
The head posting states very clearly what assumptions are being made. The graph in Fig. 1 is obtained by simple calculation. Whether Thingodonta likes it or not, it is uncontroversial that at values approaching 1 a linear increase in the feedback factor will produce a non-linear temperature response. Do the math. On that point, the jury is not out.
Feet of Clay…
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream wherein he envisions the collapse of his empire. Head of gold and feet of iron and clay.
A great idiom…
Monckton of Brenchley,
The entire calculation is non-scientific. The entire calculation seems to be based on an assumption that the rise in temperature from sometime in the 19th Century is entirely due to CO2. This is non-scientific, nothing more than curve-fitting. The assumption, that all of the increase in temperature, based on these dubious records from the NOAA and others, is due to the increase in CO2 concentration, has no foundation.
Physics, my good Count!
If there were any Physical basis for this calculation, which is not based on Physics but on a very dubious history of temperature records and an equally dubious assumption that the cause is CO2 concentration, we would see some sort of correlation between the temps and the CO2 concentration.
Do not try to beat them at their own game. This is a huge forum. Point out that the basis of their “Calculation” is based on an unproven assumption that the entire increase is due to CO2, scientifically meaningless, and require that the calculation is based on Physics with ZERO Assumptions!
The Physics of temperature in the atmosphere involve three variables: Solar Insolation, apparently close to a constant, Albedo, far from a constant, and TOA flux to space, varies as the temperature at the altitude where CO2 at all its different frequencies radiating to space is no longer bounded by an opaque layer above.
First Principles, my good Count.
Is this clear?
Mr Moon is off beam. The head posting makes no assumptions at all about how much of recent global warming is manmade.
From the TAR:
“Since climate sensitivity of the real climate system cannot be measured directly, new methods have been used since the TAR to establish a relationship between sensitivity and some observable quantity (either directly or through a model), and to estimate a range or probability density function (PDF) of climate sensitivity consistent with observations.”
I guarantee, IPCC assumes that all temperature increases are due to CO2. This is their raison d’etre.
I agree with the thrust of the observation made by Mr Moon. I have made a similar observation below.
The claim that there is climate sensitivity to CO2 (whether this be low, modest or high) is an assumption based claim because the evidence does not support the clam. The data is poor but it does not support the claim that there is climate sensitivity to CO2, but because of the uncertainty in the data much of which is proxy based, one cannot rule out the possibility that there may be some relatively modest sensitivity to CO2.
Whilst the data is poor and uncertain, I do not consider that the claim for high sensitivity survives the data (even with the inherent uncertainty within these data sets). Further the fact that we are here after some 4.5 billion years of a violent and tumultuous past suggest that climate sensitivity cannot be high.
Of course, at the end of the day, the author of this article is merely pointing out errors made by the IPCC. he does not necessarily accept any of their premise.
Mr moon has falsely assumed, on no evidence, that the calculations in the head posting were based on the assumption that all warming since the 19th century is driven by CO2. No such assumption is evident in the head posting. I am at a loss, therefore, to discern why Mr Verney finds Mr Moon’s lecture meritorious.
That there is some sensitivity to CO2 is self-evident from the vibrational modes of the CO2 molecule. The question, therefore, is not whether the climate is sensitive to CO2 enrichment, for it is, but rather how sensitive it is. The answer will turn out to be “not very sensitive”.
Monckton said in the top post:
“….By all means criticize me if you think I am wrong about the errors I have identified, or if you think my description of the official position is wrong. …”
GOOD.
Then he presumes to tell EEs and control theory professionals THEIR business:
“…Anyone who has ever built an operational-amplifier circuit intended to operate stably will know that a designed-in maximum feedback factor of not more than 0.1 (or 0.01 if possible) is desirable…”
And when I (and others) tell him he is totally wrong, and say specifically why, he objects:
“Monckton of Brenchley August 27, 2016 at 9:14 pm
Why not wait until I have made my argument about feedbacks before attempting to criticise it?”
Well – he ALREADY spoke of feedback, in a specific context, and got that wrong. (Has he intended all along to begin Part 2 (etc.) with a retraction?) Is it best for us to let it go and possibly make Parts 2 and 3 more of a mess. The real engineers I work with prefer to kick ideas about (coffee cups and chalk in hand) and take no offense at being doubted, and likely all getting to the right answer. Perhaps I have been lucky.
And by the way – what the H is a “process engineer”. In my career I’ve encountered EEs, MEs, CHemEs, CivEs, AeroEs, OR folks, and Engineering Physicists (officially, that what I am) etc., but never a Process Engineer (so I guess I don’t know know WHAT a process might do!!!). So where did that f=0.1 come from? Simple question.
No good trying to correct a member of the British aristocracy apparently Bernie. Who do you think you are? No lifelines please , where British.
I fear this whole effort will be a waste of time since poorly founded by someone who has little knowledge and experience in the matter and will not take advice and corrections.
Mr Hutchins is entitled to his view, but it is only one view. Others here have stated that no positive feedback at all should be allowed in a circuit intended to operate stably.
And he is not much of an expert, for he is not aware of the discipline of process engineering.
And he has not managed to follow the suggestion in the head posting that he should reserve his criticism for those errors that I have identified.
Any halfway competent scientist would know that it is foolish in the extreme to attempt to criticise my argument about an error in the official sensitivity equation before that argument has actually been presented.
The head posting makes it explicitly plain that I have indicated a priori – in other words, without proof – that I suspect that the very high feedback factors in use among the climatological establishment seem to me to be implausible. Mr Hutchins may or may not agree with the reasons for my suspicion in this regard. But he unwisely, and incorrectly, assumes on no evidence that the reasons for my suspicion form part of the argument that I am about to make.
However, I have also stated that I propose to demonstrate a posteriori – I,e. with evidence – that such high feedback sums are impossible. But I have not presented that argument yet, so there is nothing to attack. Keep your powder dry until I have presented the argument and the evidence.
Any true scientist would know that to attack an argument before it has been presented is feeble-minded. Wait and see.
He is alleging that you have made an error in the sentence that he cites.
However, his comment is merely a bare assertion in that he puts forward no evidence supporting his view that you are in error.
Further, he puts forward no evidence that feedbacks larger than 0.1 can still result in stability, and he offers no theoretical reason(s) why feedbacks greater than 0.1 can still yield stability in an <quote. operational amplifier circuit
His comment is a drive by (albeit the general point he makes could be right but without further detail and evidence advanced by him, no one can reasonably assess the merit of the point behind his comment)
“And he is not much of an expert”
He seems expert to me. He has posted an excellent set of notes. If he worked with feedback at Moog, that is a good sign.
When I made the above comment, I had not seen the detailed comment made by Mr Hutchins at (Bernie Hutchins August 27, 2016 at 5:13 pm). my apologies to him.
Mr Hutchins is plainly no expert, or he would have not have been ignorant of process engineering, nor would he have attempted to criticise an argument I have not yet made. He and others who have attempted to criticise an argument I have not yet presented -for the errors in relation to feedbacks come later in the series – disqualify themselves from being taken seriously.
I am more impressed by the quality of a person’s argument than by the assertion of his supposed qualifications.
Nick Stokes said August 28, 2016 at 3:05 am:
“ . . . If he worked with feedback at Moog, that is a good sign. . . .”
Nick, thanks – perhaps your reference to Moog is more apt to this discussion than you suppose. Bob’s “Moog Sound” (wwwwoooowwww) was due to a filter that had a Positive Feedback loop around it, which sharpened the corner of the response. He ran the feedback up to almost +1. (Actually, he ran it ALL the way TOO +1 to reach instability – never one to ignore a free spare oscillator option!). He did it on engineering intuition, and inventive genius.
Monckton of Brenchley said in part August 28, 2016 at 8:30 am:
“. . . I am more impressed by the quality of a person’s argument than by the assertion of his supposed qualifications. . . .”
Fair enough. Then read what I posted AND/OR give a single (or many) citation to the 0.1 limit of your conjured “process engineer”.
Mr Hutchins continues to whine inexpertly and unscientifically about an argument I have not yet presented. If that is the depth to which his “expertise” has sunk, then I shall not be paying any attention to his responses when I do present the argument, for in trying to attack it when I have not yet presented it he demonstrates incorrigible prejudice.
process engineer is MonkSpeak for systems engineer. IN particular control systems engineer.
Leo – thanks, that helps.
Control theory of course is an EE derivative (along with ME and physics). The theory is rather exact. Applied beyond that – not so much.
As a Chem. Eng. professor fondly remarked about control theory calculations as applied to chemistry:
(1) Dump in a full bucket.
(2) Run like Hell!
(3) Look back to see if anything remains.
(4) Rinse and repeat.
I am curious to know why Fig. 2 is refereed to as the “official climate-sensitivity equation”. The reference
is Roe 2009 which is a general discussion paper trying to explain feedback to non-experts. It also states
that the equation is only valid for linear systems with feedback and goes on to state the obvious that
the climate response is nonlinear and presents the next order feedback equation (Eq. 25 ) in Roe 2009.
Furthermore no case is presented for the claim that one should average the forcing rather than then
increase in temperatures from climate models. As far as I know global climate models output a climate
state with associated temperature rather than a set of values for the forcings. The forcings are then calculated from the models and used to compare the different models. Thus averaging the output temperatures of different models is the valid approach (especially as the official equation is wrong).
Germinio asks why I have not accounted for non-linearity in feedbacks. I repeat that I have not yet reached the feedback portion of the argument, it will then become apparent that the large error in climatologists’ handling of feedbacks applies, mutatis mutandis, as much to non-linear as to linear feedbacks. At that time, my argument, presented in the head posting, that one should determine the central estimate of climate sensitivity from the central estimate of the feedback sum will become easier to understand.
“Gabro’s examples of “gotten” in Francis Bacon’s essays are interesting, though Bacon wrote the essays in Latin. They were splendidly translated by -if memory serves – a 17th-century schoolmaster. The point is well made either way.”
It is a rare honour to catch you in an error, Lord Monckton, but Francis Bacon’s Essays were originally written and published in English. His later philosophical works were written in Latin, but not the Essays.
It is no surprise to observe that both he and Shakespeare used the word “gotten”, as both were the same man. Francis Bacon wrote the works of William Shakespeare.
The Essays were translated from the Latin in 1720 by Dr Willymott, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and schoolmaster at a private school in Isleworth, Middlesex.
The later in Early Modern English the essays were translated is yet more evidence that “gotten” survived longer into Modern British English than is often thought.
But since Bacon mentions “invidia in Latin” in “Of Envy”, I supposed that the Essays were written in English.
FWIW, title page of the 1696 edition of the collected essays:
Milord,
It appears that Bacon first wrote his Essays in English, then translated them into Latin, in order to reach a wider readership:
http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/essays/intro.html
Also apparently unclear how much of the translation was Bacon’s and how much by someone else. He might have been too busy to do all of them himself.
Baconian,
Sorry, but the two men could scarcely have been more different.
As his friend and colleague Ben Jonson noted, Will of Stratford had “little Latin and less Greek”.
Can’t pretend I understand much of what our noble Lord expounds upon, but in the light of such erudition, surely petty fault finding is, well…..petty!
“Can’t pretend I understand much of what our noble Lord expounds upon”
Don’t worry Karl, neither does he.
Don’t whine.
But the point is, if these faults are truly faults, then the consequences are far from petty.
If these faults are cumulative, and do not cancel each other out, then even if each individual fault be modest the consequence of the entirety of these faults could well be large.
The financial implication of climate change whether real or imaginary is huge and therefore ought to be held accountable to the greatest degree of scrutiny.
The point that after so many years and so much money spent on research that the IPCC have been unable (or perhaps that is unwilling) to narrow climate sensitivity should be of utmost concern to any impartial viewer with an inquiring mind.
What other areas of science can you point to where so much money and time has been spent but so little progress made.
Mr Verney is right. The errors I shall present are non-overlapping, they magnify one another, and they are the reason why the interval of climate sensitivities is so absurdly wide.
BBB combatted with more BBB.
A sign that no one really understands the overall picture.
Unfortunately, all the necessary data sets are suspect and, noisy and have very wide error margins.
The long term evidence, ice cores, is proxy evidence, so too the stomatal type evidence and all proxy evidence is little more than an indicator and should be considered to have wide margins of error.
The short term evidence, the temperature data sets, are either of short duration and/or have been so horribly bastardised by station drop out, homogenization adjustments, different approaches to the taking of measurements, lack of spatial coverage, pollution by UHI, that they are not fit for purpose and are not capable of serious scientific inquiry.
These matters means that we have no valid observational evidence from which to judge the issue of climate sensitivity to CO2, and therefore it follows that any estimate is only a guess and nothing more and should always be noted as that.
There are 4 factors that one must take into account.
First, The ice core evidence suggests that changes in CO2 lags temperature change by about 600 to 1000 years. From this it appears that CO2 changes is a response to temperature, and not a driver of temperature change. This data set does not support the claim that there is any climate sensitivity to CO2.
Second, there is no first order correlation and temperature change in the temperature data sets 9whether these be land, ocean, mixture of the two, or satellite). Of particular note is (i) the fact that there is no statistical difference in the rate of warming trends between 1860 to 1880, between 1910 and 1940, and the late 2oth century warming between 1975 to 1998 and there were was no significant CO2 change during the two early warming periods but significant CO2 change during the last period but with no difference in the trend rate these. (ii) just when CO2 changes started becoming material, ie., post 1940, temperatures cooled between 1940 to early 1970s, (iii) until the present EL Nino (which cycle has yet to complete with the following La Nina) there was the pause going back nearly 19 years during which about 30% of all manmade CO2 emissions took place. This temperature data set does not support the claim that CO” is a driver and that there is any climate sensitivity to CO2.
Third, there is the paleo record and again there is no correlation with CO2 and CO2 cannot explain the changes into and out of ice ages.
Fourth, there is the fact that the temperature of this planet has been constrained between narrow bounds of +/- 1.5% and is very stable. If there was even modest climate sensitivity to CO2, we would have seen a run away climate from which the planet would not have recovered. We are not Venus but no doubt would have been similar had the climate had even a modest sensitivity to CO2.
Personally, I find the claims of high sensitivity farcical. If nothing else, the pause ought to have busted that claim. I also find it a disgrace that after countless billions of dollars being thrown at the matter and after so many years, the ‘science’ and the IPCC have been unable to narrow the range for sensitivity. Talk about money wasted, no achievement and careers failed.
Personally, I see no hard evidence that there is climate sensitivity to CO2 and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is none. But the evidence is litter with errors, uncertainty and is suspect such that one cannot rule out the possibility that there may be some sensitivity to CO2, but low sensitivity. Had the sensitivity been high, not withstanding the uncertainty, errors etc that beset the data sets, the signal would have been seen over and above the noise.
My best guestimate for Climate Sensitivity, if there is such a thing, in the late Holocene, is that it is 0.5 degC +/- 0.7degC. It would not surprise me, when we have better measurements and better data, if it turned out to be zero or very close thereto
It is because we are unable to see the signal to CO2 sensitivity, that I do not like seeing CO2 referred to as a GHG. It may be but that has yet to be determined. It is a radiative gas, the laboratory characteristics of which we know, but how all of this works and pans out in the non laboratory conditions of planet Earth’s atmosphere has yet to be properly observed and assessed.
People claiming that CO2 is a GHG or that there is climate sensitivity are working under a priori bias since presently when the evidence that we have is put to the jury is reviewed by the jury, the jury is still out
I have much sympathy with Mr Verney’s points, but the usual suspects will pretend that their interpretation of the data is preferable to our interpretation. That is why this series concentrates on outright errors in the official methodology. That approach leaves much less wriggle-room.
Assuming that Lord Monkton’s corrected ECS values are right (Table 1), then the averaged value for ECS is ~2.4C. This is well within the stated range in all the IPCC reports to date.
If CS actually is 2.4C then as far as I can see ~500 ppm CO2 would be sufficient to commit surface temperatures to progressing >2C above pre-industrial. At current emission rates we should hit that level by the early 2060s (with ECS following some time after that).
This is hardly cause for celebration.
DWR24 has perhaps not read the head posting with due care and attention. This is the first article in a series which will expose a number of outright errors whose cumulative effect is greatly to exaggerate climate sensitivity. I deliberately started small. Watch this space.
I am afraid that the Giss model from 1980 has set the premises for much of the debate Then Hansen and his friends found the “scientific” argument for climate disaster, and set themselves up as authorities.
Hansen, J., G. Russell, D. Rind, P. Stone, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, and L. Travis, 1983: Efficient three-dimensional global models for climate studies: Models I and II. M. Weather Rev., 111, 609-662, doi:10.1175/1520-0493(1983)111.
I think Clive Best has done an exellent job on climate models, including Giss model II.
“The following conclusions can be drawn.
1. The climate sensitivity of Model II is ~4.4 deg.C to a doubling of CO2
2. The inertia of the Earth’s climate system to a sudden change in forcing is predicted to be about 50 years in Model II
In the 2001 IPCC report the range of climate sensitivities of a range of models was between 2.2 and 5.6 deg.C. MGIS model II is therefore at the upper end of this range.
CAGW is already dead for the following reasons:
1) it’s not possible for CO2’s weak and logarithmic forcing effect to generate and exponential warming response.
2) To get around CO2’s tiny logarithmic forcing effect, CAGW warmunistas hilariously projected (past tense) a “runway positive feedback loop involving water vapor”, however, NASA’s Water Vapor Project (NVAP-M) and NOAA’s relative humidity dataset clearly show water vapor concentrations are not increasing at any altitude:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL052094/full
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20ESRL%20AtmospericRelativeHumidity%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1948%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
Without this water-vapor fix, CAGW is dead.
3) There is already sufficient disparity and duration between CAGW’s global warming projections vs. reality to officially disconfirm the CAGW hypothesis with high confidence.
4) The Warmunistas have been relegated to manipulating raw-temp data (HADCRUT4 & GISTEMP), to keep their disconfirmed hypothesis alive.
NOAA is already under Contempt of Congress for its failure to comply with Congress’ FOIA request for all internal e-mails regarding their blatant raw-data manipulation. Accordingly, additional data tampering is problematic:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
http://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-climate-data/
As more time passes, the level of disparity and duration simply increases.
CAGW is dead.
Thanks, Samurai.
Do you have a link for that water vapour graph?
R
This is exactly the same things I’ve been saying on my site https://logiclogiclogic.wordpress.com/category/climate-policy
As Monckton and you show the climate community keeps exaggerating climate change by the methods outlined because they believe they are justified because fundamentally we “know” that paleologic records show an 8C change from a move of 100ppm in CO2. Of course, this is like if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail logic. They only have data on a few variables in those paleologic time periods hundreds of thousands of years ago including CO2 and oxygen isotopes etc. Nonetheless without an alternate explanation even if the climate change is small so far ultimately they believe the delta T has to be 3-4K from a doubling or more. Therefore, it’s quite a drop for them to give up 1 or even 1.5K and say that sensitivity is 2.5 instead.
I think that to really reduce their argument to tatters requires also an explanation for the ice age variations. I believe there is one main one that I have that is believable, i.e. at least has the potential to explain the periodicity and co-incidence with orbital mechanics. This is the newly discovered ocean fissures and connection made in 3 recent studies between the ocean fissure eruptions and gravitational effects of the moon and changes in Earth orbit. This combined with the movement of ice from polar regions to the oceans and back produces an amplification of heat release from the mantle as the Earth experiences tidal forces from its orbit and surrounding objects. The magnitude of this heat release could be huge because we have evidence that the iceball Earth was ended 600 million years ago by these effects.
If the mantle is able to periodically release heat to the oceans and heat the Earth periodically it puts less pressure on CO2 to have a high sensitivity to explain the temperature variation. There may be other explanations or contributions including unknown solar radiation contributions that we don’t understand. The climate scientists poo-poo such explanations from unknown causes because they argue you can only use what we know but not knowing is a legitimate state of being. The fact that they have a theory that could explain things has been shown many time to be insufficient to say they have a valid theory. They should at least acknowledge that their theory is merely a theory but instead, they say the science is settled when the constant surprises in the “settled” science that challenges everything they said is ignored. Nonetheless, it is hard to argue that we have an answer without having an alternate theory of everything.
They can always argue that things will eventually get to their state and they can argue there are tipping points because the effect of CO2 cannot possibly account for the full temperature variation in paleologic times. However, if we can reduce the effect of CO2 by showing that other contributions dominate the CO2 contribution by physical known mechanisms then the logic for high co2 sensitivity disappears and also with it the likelihood of tipping points because we can explain the variations of the past without need for extraordinary tipping points. Since we have records of millions of years that can be explained without tipping points it makes the tipping point logic disappear as well.
Seems the discussion here is about another planet – all climate models on that other planet where right and thus said planet has gone long bevore any human memorance.
I have considerable contact with what in the USA are called ‘liberals’, with what is everywhere called ‘greens’ and what is also termed the chattering classes: That is the sort of not so bright over educated urban hipsters who think, because they read it in the Guardian or the NY times, that they know what is actually going on, and I can assure you, to say they live on a different planet is an understatement.
The gaps in their knowledge of any life experience outside their own unbelievably narrow urban one, is only matched by the depth of their ignorance in matters scientific, even the ones that should know better, having had some sort of scientific education. But the terrible truth is that a first in maths doesn’t mean that you know anything about control theory, and a 20 years study of climate doesn’t mean you have any understanding of chaos maths.
Science is such a wide field that it encourages narrow specialisation and this breeds utter ignorance of any subject outside one’s own, a fact that the alarmists are cynically aware of, and why only the few people who are in command of the disciplines used in climate change, can actually say ‘hang on, that’s wrong’
The rest just accept that someone with an equivalent degree in a subject they dont understand, are being honest and are not mistaken.
And this means they can be befuddled very easily but what is frankly bovine excrement. Divide and rule.
Leo Smith –
a fact that the alarmists are cynically aware of, and
can rely on.
_________________________________
Yop. Somethings going wrong.
I thank Lord M for continuously exposing the IPCC’s absurd position on sensitivity. It’s the climate bulls eye alright and to have ‘the worlds gold standard of climate science’ advocating a range for sensitivity that is as wide as the Grand Canyon reveals their wilful mendacity and the hopeless credibility vacuum for so-called ‘settled science’.
I admire Chris for standing up, but he does talk a load of **** himself too.
Silly, non-specific yah-boo comments like that of Mr Smith have no place in this discussion,.
Thanks, I’m stealing ‘yah-boo’.
==========
“… a range for sensitivity that is as wide as the Grand Canyon reveals their wilful mendacity …”.
=============================================
And that “Grand Canyon” has not been significantly narrowed after over a quarter of a century and $Bs of national and global wealth wasted.
This all very fine and there is some great “science” in this post and comment thread. However, treating data that has been recorded across a dimensional “manifold” (The Earth) as a signal; is intellectually dishonest.
As “scientists”, we are so enamoured with our analytical techniques that we are often afraid to admit their limitations. I know this goes against the stream for sceptics and believers alike but as far as I am concerned it is a fundamental error; perpetrated by both camps.
To clarify, you can not determine the state (Future or otherwise) of a chaotic or complex system by treating its output as a one dimensional signal. If you could, you’d be the worlds next Newton or Einstein!
Mr Wilmott Bennett has not discerned the method on which this series is predicated. I propose to expose a series of errors in the official method of determining climate sensitivity. These errors are not a matter of opinion: they are unjustifiable and misconceived departures from mainstream science. Once all are aware of these errors, the exaggeration of climate sensitivity by the models will no longer be a matter of opinion but of fact.
I do not need to attempt to determine climate sensitivity. I need only demonstrate that, correcting by mainstream science the official errors leaves the official calculations claiming high climate sensitivity in tatters.
Well I agree with what you are saying, but in this case the output is supposed to be a one dimensional signal. Temperature. That the internals are multidimensional does not alter that particular fact.
And here we go again, Scott Wilmot Bennett –
what you think of, what the climate modelers claim to present is
https://www.google.at/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=SnPDV-PgLMK0UbLTpfgJ&q=Laplace+demon+thought+experiment+&oq=Laplace+demon+thought+experiment+&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.3
___________________________________
But as Leo Smith says the only signal is temperature.
So
pandemic (temperature) = { disease ( climate ( AND / OR ( cause; cure ); carbon; () ) ) }
___________________________________
That’s all that people know to say:
temperature, climate, CO2.
Wittgenstein:
What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence –
1st define the terms. Then there’s a discussion.
____________________________________
Filter that thread – has been going on for 40 years. Hang on another 40 years or stop that n o w.
I have built a large number of op-amp circuits and helped a friend build hundreds of others throughout my life. The reason he and I never had feedback factor exceeding .1 is because op-amps have gain so great that we always used negative feedback.
As for circuits using positive feedback in a loop around an amplifier section with limited gain, or with mixed feedback: I have not seen the feedback factor as shown above in Figure 1 being stated in such circuits, but it often obviously exceeds .1 in some of these, such as many implementations of the multiple feedback filter.
Even if the design limit was .1, That would be to keep performance being reliably repeatable in quantitative terms from one unit to another while dealing with tolerances of cheap components – much higher design feedback factor would still allow a circuit to be reliably stable.
I mispoke about my friend and I never used feedback factor exceeding .1 due to always using negative feedback, since he and I made multiple feedback filters where in some way the feedback factor is often more than .1, in which case these filters obviously resonate even though they use resistors and capacitors but no inductors. Another mixed-feedback op-amp RC filter that is sometimes designed to resonate, that he and I built, where the positive feedback sometimes is designed to effectively cause a feedback factor exceeding .1, is the Sallen Key.
and any time you want to square up a slow signal.
but positive feedback is all about slamming the output to the rails – if that can be called stability…
Regarding “positive feedback is all about slamming the output to the rails” – have a look at the op-amp circuit posted by Nick Stokes above, captioned “Positive Feedback Increases Gain to 3”. The feedback factor there is 2/3.
Donald/Gnomish Stop confusing each other with BS. Overall loop gain is the measure of overall positive feedback. Not what may or may not be happening in between input and output in terms of positive feedback.
Regarding Leo Smith’s comment that the positive feedback is the loop gain: In the above op-amp circuit, the positive feedback factor is 2/3, because the loop gain is 2/3. The output is 2/3 of itself plus the input, changed from being equal to the input alone without the feedback.
gnomish
August 28, 2016 at 9:17 am
It is stable because the postiive f/b is over-ridden by a dominant negative f/b : the inability to supply infinite power and the gain disappears once you get near the supply rail voltages.
This could be compared to way the Earth system seems to snap from glacial to interglacial and back again. There appears to be a positive f/b at play which makes the transitions geologically fast. ( Alley found large swings in a matter of decades in the GISP2 core IIRC. ).
The system is, however, always constrained by the Planck feedback , which is the strong NEGATIVE f/b which dominates the whole system.
This is why net f/b will always be -ve and all talk of run away climate change is nonsense.
This is my main complaint with CoB’s presentation since it playing into the IPCC’s hands by not EXPLICITLY talking of Planck as a feedback when it is the most important one in the whole game.
Greg persists in waffling about the Planck “feedback”. Yet I have not yet presented the argument about feedbacks.
Donald L. Klipstein August 28, 2016 at 7:20 am: “As for circuits using positive feedback in a loop around an amplifier section with limited gain, or with mixed feedback: I have not seen the feedback factor as shown above in Figure 1 being stated in such circuits,”
Perhaps, Donald, you have never designed using an op amp (or a special part called ‘a compactor’ like an LM111) into a comparator circuit which included a minor amount of *positive* feedback FOR the purpose of introducing a manageable amount of hysteresis. The hysteresis prevents ‘chatter’ at the threshold point of the comparator.
More details, equations, waveforms and sample circuits and the like here:
https://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/archives/b/thesignal/archive/2013/01/28/comparators-what-s-all-the-chatter
In a comparator circuit, a small amount of positive feedback is in a loop around an amplifier whose gain is in the hundreds or thousands.
I meant to say adding hysteresis is a reason for adding a small amount of positive feedback around an amplifier with large gain like hundreds or thousands.
As I see this matter, there are some theoretical reasons as to why one might reasonably expect the climate to have some sensitivity to CO2 (albeit I consider that temperature is only one of many factors, which are under constant flux, that govern climate).
However, and this is a big but, we are not talking about theory but rather about practicalities and real world response. The question is: How does planet Earth’s climate respond to changes in CO2? That question can only be answered by direct observation.
Unless and until absolutely everything there is to know is completely known and fully understood as to the workings and behavoir of the planet’s atmosphere and its climate, that question is incapable of answer by theoretical assessment and calculation.
Many people, when discussing climate sensitivity and the properties of CO2, place caveats such as “all other matters remaining equal”. Often caveats are necessary and meaningful, especially when there is an underlying lack of knowledge, facts and/or data etc.
However, in this case, whilst it is appropriate to include a caveat regarding uncertainties in the evidence and our understanding, we know as fact that when we burn carbon all other matters do not remain equal. For example, we know as fact that:
(i) when fossil fuels are burned we replace oxygen with CO2 (and carbon monoxide etc).
(ii) when fossil fuels are burnt (other than pure carbon) we produce water vapour, and water in all its forms plays a significant role in this water world on which we live.
(iii) CO2 is plant fertilizer. This causes a greening of the planet which in turn leads to changes (at least locally) with respect to the water cycle and a change to albedo.
(iv) there is oceanic take up of CO2, and this can lead to changes in oceanic life such as algae etc again altering albedo and perhaps other matters as well.
This is not an exhaustive list but demonstrates that matters do not remain equal.
What we need to know is how the planet responds to changes in CO2 and this is a practical issue only capable of answer by direct observation and the obtaining of good quality data which is capable of scientific interpretation.
I am looking forward to reading and considering the other posts in this series. It seems to me that it is well past time that there is a re-examination of where matters stand with respect to what I will term the IPCC science, its assumptions and conclusions.
At the time when AR5 was in its draft form and being finalised, and from which it was apparent that the IPCC were ducking the Climate Sensitivity issue, and the problems with the models running hot, I speculated that AR6 would be more interesting, and postulated that it might not even be written should the ‘pause’ continue into 2018/early 2019.
Whilst I do not wish to predict the future, it appears to me that the 2015/16 El Nino whilst strong was not as strong as the 1998 El Nino, and I doubt that there will be a long lasting step change in the satellite temperature data set coincident with the 2015/16. there was such a step change coincident with the Super El Nino of 1997/98. If that is the case, 2015/16 will show up as a short lived spike in temperatures much like 2010 (which was also a strong El Nino year), and the ‘pause’ will reappear in the data set within about the next 6 months. It seems to me that there is every prospect that the satellite temperature anomaly data sets will by late 2018/early 2019 be showing a ‘pause’ of more than 20 years duration.
The longer the ‘pause’ (if it makes a reappearance), the lower climate sensitivity must be. If the ‘pause’ has reappeared when AR6 falls to be written this will therefore become a fundamental issue. Claims of high sensitivity cannot reasonably be maintained should there be a ‘pause’ of 20 to 22 years duration and circa 40% of all manmade emissions having taken place. One may reasonably expect that, in these circumstances, in late 2017, through 2018, there will be more and more papers written regarding Climate Sensitivity and these papers will put forward ever lowering figures for Climate Sensitivity.
Further, in these circumstances, all the models will by then by outside there 95% confidence bounds. No doubt papers will also be written on that!
AR6 could well be very difficult to convincingly convey that there is a case for alarm, and that the science has and is understood. This is why the 2015 Paris climate talks were quite possibly the last saloon, and why Ob*ma*is in such a rush to adopt/firm up on the Paris agreement and agenda. China is taking the developed West for fools, and who can blame China for that.
Mods
I have a comment (well 2 versions of the same comment) that has gone into moderation. I can see no reason for that. My initial impression was that it was because I had named the POTUS, and his name was a mod issue. I then added to the points being made and changed the spelling of his name.
Once you have reviewed matter, please post my second comment (not the first version) and please correct the name of the POTUS (in the 2nd version) to the correct spelling of his name.
Thanks
[Noted, but the requested changes are still not clear. Nothing in the queue. .mod]
Christopher.
Further to our last peer-review paper on ice ages, we are in the process of devising a new paper on the topic of future ice ages. And there is a need to explore the effects (or probably non-effects) of modern CO2 contribution for the future glaciations. If you care to be involved, we would be delighted to receive a contribution.
Sincerely,
Ralph Ellis
ralf dot ellis at me dot com.
An interesting idea. Since the mean atmospheric residence time of CO2 is about 40 years according to Dick Lindzen, sub specie aeternitatis our intervention will make little difference either way.
The carbon biogeochemical cycle element of the AGW/IPCC meme has a similar scientific status to the radiation physics slash climate sensitivity element. Careful scrutiny yields better understanding of the IPCC failure to simulate reality.
Adding CO2 to the current atmosphere has negligible effect on the measured radiative energy balance of Earth. Burning fossil fuels adds about 3 percent to the global biogeochemical carbon cycle, and that 3 percent does not accumulate in the atmosphere any more than the remaining 97 percent. Of all the CO2 that existed in the atmosphere in 1976, only 1/16 remains. That’s based on the direct observation of 14CO2 tracer behaviour after the 1963 atmospheric test ban treaty.
The short atmospheric lifetime of CO2 indicated by 14C tracers is the atmospheric lifetime of an individual CO2 molecule. When the ocean absorbs CO2 while in equilibrium, it also releases an equal amount of CO2. A disturbance of atmospheric CO2 from equilibrium takes a more time to settle than the atmospheric lifetime of CO2 molecules. Willis Eschenbach came up with a time constant (tau) of a pulse of CO2 of 59 years corresponding to a half-life of 41 years (similar to Lindzen’s 40 years mentioned above), and explains the difference from the time constant tau of an individual CO2 molecule according to bomb tests (8.6 years), in https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/19/the-secret-life-of-half-life/
Thus only ~1/128 of the CO2 humans added in 1947 remains, ~1/64 of that from 1956 and exactly 1/32 of that from 1973. So, what’s to worry?
It won’t take hundreds of years for the effects (whatever those might be, but so far positive) of fossil fuel burning after WWII to fade into history. Especially if the world like the US switches from coal and oil to gas to meet our fossil fuel needs.
Lord Monckton, I fear you have misspoken. Forty years is the “e-folding” time, the time it takes for a pulse of CO2 injected into the atmosphere to decay to 1/e of its initial value.
The mean atmospheric residence time of a given CO2 molecule, on the other hand, is much shorter. The e-folding time for that is only about fourteen years or so (or a half-life of about ten years).
w.
Dear Willis Eschenbach,
Why are you now saying the “e-folding” time, the time it takes for a pulse of CO2 injected into the atmosphere to decay to 1/e of its initial value is 40 years, when you said 59 years in https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/19/the-secret-life-of-half-life/ ? This amount of time is the time constant tau.
Mr Eschenbach may be right about Dick Lindzen’s estimate being an e-folding time rather than a mean atmospheric residence time, but I understood the latter from him. He was certainly critical of IPCC’s then 50-200-year mean residence time, and told me it was 40 years. We had quite a long discussion about it in Bogota some years ago.
He explained that, though the literature from Revelle and Suess onwards assigned a 7-year mean residence time to an individual CO2 molecule, multiple exchanges between the atmosphere and other -spheres lengthened the true residence time to about 40 years.
Either way, the point does not form part of the argument in the present series.
The oceans will absorb it.
I’m always amazed at the use of ΔF.λ0 – (1 – λ0.c)-1 instead of something more like λ0(ΔF) – (1 – λ0(c))-1
Are we to actually believe that this type of transfer function is really a 1st order equation ?
Even worse, it implies that this has a ‘finite impulse response’ function when paper after paper, especially on the alarmist side of things, push the idea that this is really an ‘infinite impulse response’ function in order to get that “tipping point” that they love to harp about.
Good science covered by the BBC!
(Sorry to to post it here off-topic, but T&N keeps crashing on me.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37210085 – re. mapping the surface impact of the Italian earthquake.
It appears the greatest source of ‘positive feedback’ in climatology arises from the concatenation of errors.
At the risk of turning a climatological post into even more of a linguistic commentary than there already is, Gabro wrote: “Shades of Castilian v. Latin American “Spanish”. In Iberia, the court took to lisping so that Carlos V wouldn’t feel bad, which affectation spread to the middle classes, at least.” Myth. The so-called “lisped” sound (an interdental fricative, similar to the initial sound in English “thick”) has nothing to do with anyone’s lisp. This sound is always spelled in Spanish with a ‘c’ (before ‘e’ and ‘i’) or with a ‘z’ (elsewhere). In many cases this can be traced back to Latin words spelled with a ‘c’. (Not that Latin had that exact sound, but the Latin sound turned into this interdental fricative over the millenia.) Crucially, the words spelled with ‘s’ in Spanish are in these same dialect pronounce like the ‘s’ in English “sick”, and come from Latin words with the letter ‘s’. If this had been a result of someone’s lisp, all three letters–‘c’, ‘z’ and also ‘s’–would now be pronounced as interdental fricatives.
A similar change happened to Latin ‘g’, now pronounced something like the ‘ch’ in Scottish “loch” or German “Bach”, in the same place–before ‘i’ and ‘e’. But since that doesn’t result in a lisped sound, no one blames that change on the King of Spain.
The letters ‘c’ (before ‘e’ and ‘i’) and ‘z’ are pronounced like the ‘s’ in “sick” in other dialects. This is what linguists call a phoneme merger; originally distinct sounds came to be pronounced in these dialects as a single sound.
All you have to do to check calculations claiming to be regarding atmospheric temperature for gas density. If you don’t see the compression warming of the atmosphere included, it’s faked ‘GhE’ physics and mathematical fraud.
It’s been known adding CO2 to Standard Atmospheric mix doesn’t change the temperature of the mix since the law for solving temperature in atmospheric/gas chemistry was written.
Calculations for a mostly pure CO2 mix make that mix have lower temperature not higher, as well.
At every turn the fakes who claim to be discussing atmospheric/gas chemistry but aren’t, are stymied in trying to have their fake pseudo – science viewed AS – science.
All that gibberish about feedbacks is as useless as having one of it’s ‘practitioners’ – mathematical, as well as physics frauds – predict something with it.
It’s worthless. When you can’t predict you are proven to be in error and the followers of this gutter fraud are repeatedly stymied by THAT as WELL.
Statistics frauds,
ARE the Anthropogenic Warming movement.
Nothing they say can be trusted to be anything but shortly: wrong.
End of story which is why the scientists are all so far from this ‘science’ that what you see here, is the finest their movement can dredge up to represent them.
Take anyone who ever claimed ”the basic science” of this preposterous fraud was possibly real and show them a thermometer. They’ll drizzle their lunch down their trousers leg in fear.
REAL science draws scientists.
GhE garbage draws frauds fakes and thugs who like that kind of atmosphere.
Loving the post – and the title, bearing out my own opinion of the whole thing years ago – https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/the-hockey-stick-a-flawed-icon/ (Origin: The elevation of the hockey stick and the whole global warming thing to iconic status makes it a giant with feet of clay – poorly founded and ready to crumble. Time to do some digging…) …even if I do not have quite the erudition or the staying power of Lord Monckton.
VJ, staying power is not the same as being right. My simple sound system example far above,, plus much more erudite engineering comments simce, say probably CoB is staying but still wrong. Now he says we are anticipating what has not yet been said. When what has been said is wrong (fig 1) does not bode well for what will follow.
There is nothing wrong with Fig. 1. You will find something similar in Schlesinger (1985), and in just about any presentation by Dick Lindzen. No small part of the value of this series will be in providing a basic education in elementary climatological physics to those unfamiliar with the origins and modalities of the climate sensitivity equation.
“There is nothing wrong with Fig. 1. You will find something similar in Schlesinger (1985), and in just about any presentation by Dick Lindzen.”
But here we read:
‘as an IPCC lead author did when I showed Fig. 1 of the head posting during a presentation to lead authors at the University of Tasmania some years ago. He looked at the graph, thought for a moment and said, “Have you published this?” I said No. “But you must,” he said. “This changes everything.”’
It is not clear what point Mr Stokes is making when he cites the IPCC lead author who asked whether I had published the analysis behind the graph that is here at Fig. 1.
Like it or not, there is nothing wrong with Fig. 1, and the IPCC lead author was intrigued by the argument I had presented in showing it.
Mr Istvan persists, vexatiously, in attacking me for an argument about temperature feedbacks that I have not yet made. That is anti-scientific and indicative of prejudice. Wait and see, and your comments here will be less lofty and bossy, and you may even learn something.
Hi Christopher,
Congrats on starting this series, which will be well followed instalment by instalment, like successive events of Olympians medaling.
The following comments are not meant to be a diversion. They do bear upon the types of calculations you are addressing. You are seeking possible errors, so am I.
My apologies for not knowing the answers to these. Can readers please help?
The concentration of CO2 in the air column decreases in terms of the number of CO2 molecules per cubic metre.
Consequently, the ability of a cubic metre of air to emit a number of watts per square metre also lessens with altitude. Power, not energy is at play.
In the terminology above,
1. Considering a cubic metre near the tropopause, does the square metre part refer to the area of the earth surface impacted at ‘zero’ height above sea level, or to a sq m high up in the sky?
2. At what stage in the creation of the fundamental formulae is this power dilution-with-altitude effect captured?
3. At what height above sea level does the CO2 concentration become so small that it can be considered for approximate calculation to converge on zero power emitted?
4. Apart from a dilute gas not being able to emit as much power, the photon emissions from a dilute gas mixture are also more easily able to escape to space, so the potential exists for this factor to be considered, as it probably is. But where?
I can’t help feeling that there are some potential errors if units of measurement of this dilution are not used with care. As you know, ppm by volume can be rather different to ppm by weight or by molecular count proportion. Standard gas laws, Avogadro constant and all that are well known, but are they used correctly in modelling?
Thanks in advance Geoff.
Thanks, Geoff. While the effect you speak of does exist, it is so small that it is typically ignored. Here are the numbers.
The radius of the earth is on the order of 6,380 kilometers. As for the troposphere, call it a 12 km global average. So the sides of the 1 square metre increase in length by (6392 / 6380 – 1) * 100 = .0002%. That’s two ten-thousandths of one percent … you can see why, although your “dilution” is real, it’s never considered in first-order calculations.
w.
Willis, I would have thought that the primary diluiton is due to pressure not area changes. The pressure at the tropopause is about 200hPa. That means a lot less gas molecules.
But to answer Geoff, absorption falls in a similar way to emission and mean free path increases with height. This kind of thing is not captured by the trivial model presented here where a single scalar number for each feedback is used as a ‘parameter’ to represent the sum of everything.
It should be remembered that these CS values are quantities derived from studying the BEHAVIOUR of complex models by fitting a trivial mathematical model to them, they are not part of how the models are programmed.
I just tried (6392 / 6380 – 1) * 100 on a calculator: Far from .0002%, more like .2% – still fairly small.
My bad, Donald, you are right, it is 0.2% … however, the point remains. It’s small enough to ignore in all but the most precise and detailed calculations.
w.
Greg is wrong. The Party Line is that feedbacks and, therefore, climate sensitivity are not represented in the models at all. But they are, in the very construction of the models.
Besides, the simple official sensitivity equation has been demonstrated faithfully and with remarkable precision to reproduce the CMIP3 and CMIP5 models’ output using the officially-determined inputs.
And furthermore, when this series is complete, it will be clear to all that the models’ published output must be wrong. It will then be for the modellers to reconcile their output with reality.
Here we go again, Christopher, complaining about the dickering with climate sensitivity values that mean nothing. They have no influence on climate one way or another and exist only in the make-believe world of politics. I thought I made this point clear in my previous comment but it does not seem to stick. Climate sensitivity has no scientific meaning and makes non-sensical predictions that mean nothing. It serves only political purposes of those who are pushing for the existence of a climate Armageddon. As I pointed out, it is necessarily zero at all times when a hiatus exists. I even pointed out that this included the twenty-first century until the year 2012 as well as the eighties and nineties from 1979 to to 1997. The temperature does not change during a hiatus but atmospheric carbon dioxide does. This is against the requirements of the Arrhenius greenhouse theory that is still used by the IPCCC. Arrhenius predicts that atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature must always change together because we are dealing with a cause and effect relationship. That cause and effect relationship is the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. It did not happen which makes this a false prediction. With that, Arrhenius at once disqualifies itself from the climate prediction business, including such things as global warming by the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. And now that your attention is on that, compare the Keeling curve with the global temperature curve. Is there any section of the global warming curve that can be said to be controlled by values of the Keeling curve, the supposed source of CO2 for anthropogenic global warming? I simply don’t see any and have to conclude that observed warming, such as it is, cannot possibly be greenhouse warming. These are the facts about climate in the real world. With your access to publication you should be throwing these facts into the face of the global warming establishment instead of whining about climate sensitivity. Most likely they have been expecting this and are wondering what took you so long.
AA, declaiming that ECS has no physical meaning is a losing argument. Flat earth and all that. Conceptually it must be true, and some value exists. The issue i, what can we infer about that value?
Ristvan if there was something intelligent believers in CO2 sensitivity could add, they’d point to it in classical atmospheric physics, and mathematics.
There’s not. The law for calculating temperature specifically forbids temperature changing due to a change in CO2.
Any so-called ‘mathematics’ claiming it exists aren’t going to be real gas/atmospheric chemistry.
The very people who invented then drummed all the scientists out of atmospheric pseudo science, proclaim proudly that ”this ain’t reg’lur math, ya’ll, this is climate math!
But it’s all fake See ristvan * * *all those of us not practicing and preaching fake math* * *
are still able to predict what is going to be happening * * * just fine * * *
Those of you who BELIEVED in the fake math are the ones who are reputationally and competency challenged.
You’ve NEVER been right. Not when Hansen was running his Venus scams in the late ’60s and ’70s,
not when Hansen and Hockey Stick were lying to the Congress,
not ever.
Those of us who tell you and your church that you’re practicing pseudo science tell you repeatedly – how you FEEL and what you THINK are IRRELEVANT politically:
if you were not wrong,
you could predict.
You can’t.
Just like all of you believe in a GhE on Venus: you can’t predict. We check with Standard gas equations and it’s not there, you’re wrong.
You believe in a GhE on Earth: yet the most CASUAL reference to the * * *Standard Equations that establish global atmospheric composition, density and temperature prove – they calculate the temperature of Earth right on the money. And your claimed 30+ degrees warming is F R A U D U L E N T.
If your pseudo scientific quackery weren’t wrong you could predict with it.
The real scientific world uses equations to establish the Standard Atmosphere
with it’s internationally referenced reliability – both in the physical engineering using the Standard Atmosphere and equations that derive it’s characteristics,
and the legal system that relies on the Standard Atmospheric calculations to govern everything from ovens and kilns and motors to air conditioners and furnaces, to welding to space travel.
* * *WE ALL AGREE THESE ARE THE WORKING ATMOSPHERIC MATHEMATICS* * *
except the * * *humiliated believers in CO2/GhG/GhE climate sensitivity.
Your church alone holding science back for at least 25 years, has spread the falsehood there is a GHE on Venus. There is none.
It has spread the falsehood there is a GHE on Earth. There is none. *Standard school equations prove it.*
Fraud is the hallmark of the CO2/GHG falsehod field.
Incompetency to the point it’s believers almost FOUNDED the concept of scientific censorship because they can’t even tolerate students coming to their websites.
The CO2/GHE people are the ones who teach the world that the atmosphere warms the planet. The atmosphere is a thermally conductive colder, additional mass coupled or appended to the earth’s own, warmer mass.
Everywhere we who are real scientists look we see you believers in GHG climate mediation teaching purest scientific falsehood as truth.
The CO2 religion is actually the one that USES a ”flat earth” model. That is just another element of how the entire CO2/GHG mediation concept is: the people who use it must
(a) project their own perpetually idiotic tenets and techniques onto real science
(b)continually lie about there even being any CO2/GHG ‘effect’ in gas mathematics and chemistry
(c)censor and issue declaratory ”belief” statements – explaining why they drive the entire scientific world away from them, when the real scientific world shows up asking questions
about the apparent fraudulence not just of specific scientific aspects or of individual peoples’ behaviors, but the fundamental premise: GHG warming
The entire CO2/GHG temperature mediation/warm atmosphere movement is filled with the throwaways no other scientific field would tolerate two weeks much less two generations.
In real science being wrong EVER – is a legal liability that can break an entire movement.
In CO2/flat earth/fake gas chemistry mathematics being wrong is what the believers deal with
every
single moment
they’re awake.
It’s a movement of fraud started by frauds, perpetuated by government employees whose bosses were caught perpetrating those several, even many, frauds.
Which is why there aren’t respectable scientists anywhere near this field.
It’s atrocious and it’s due to non scientist blogger types treating chemistry like it’s a school yard popularity argument and driving all the real scientifically competent professionals away from quashing the fraud.
You might or might not believe in it but it’s evident many people do so I wanted to remind you, if you believe in it, and everyone else who’s watching,
why the real scientific fields spit at mention of the world ‘climatologist.’
It’s equivalent to ”fake physics and mathematics fraud.”
i consider there to be a significant misunderstanding.
Whilst there may be good theoretical reasons to consider that there would be climate sensitivity to CO2, the reality is that this is not a theoretical issue but a practical one.
How does planet Earth respond to changes in CO2. This can only be answered by observation and the obtaining of good quality data. Without us knowing absolutely everything there is to know about the system and fully understanding such system, it cannot be answered by theoretical calculation. the fact is that we do not know and understand absolutely everything there is to know, and it unlikely that we will ever do so, well not within the next 100 years.
Many people use a caveat such as “all other matters remaining constant/equal”. However we know as fact that all other matters do not remain constant so that caveat is not useful since it does nothing to assist our understanding of how things pan out in Earth’s atmosphere and climate.
To give just a few examples of matters that do not remain constant when we burn fossil fuels and add CO2 to the atmosphere:
(i) we replace Oxygen with CO2 and CO.
(ii) other than burning pure carbon, we produce water vapour (and water in its various forms is material in this water world on which we live).
(iii) we produce aerosol emissions.
(iv) CO2 is plant food resulting in a greening of the biosphere. this changes albedo. it also changes (at least locally) the water cycle. If large areas are involved consider the greening of the Sahel, this could have more than just a local impact.
(v) there is oceanic take up of the CO2 again impacting upon oceanic life and albedo.
Since we know as fact that all other matters do not remain equal, one cannot approach the matter from a theoretical standpoint. The question of climate sensitivity can only be answered by observation. That is the only way we will know what effect changes in CO2 have on Earth’s climate and whether CO2 drives temperature.
The observational data that we have is riddled with uncertainty but no one can detect a signal to CO2 above the noise and this is why the IPCC does not seek to show a plot of CO2 driving temperature signal from the various data sets.
I do not know whether CO2 drives temperature, but there is no sound scientific observational data that it does, and the data (which is poor and not fit for purpose) if anything suggests that CO2 does not drive temperature in our system but is a response to temperature change.
We will know a lot more in the course of the next 5 years should the ‘pause’ reappear.
Mr Verney is incorrect in assuming that a theoretical approach cannot be taken. Official sources make various claims, based on various theoretical arguments. If those arguments are found to be materially and serially in error, then the claims of high climate sensitivity made by official sources must fall.
Mr Arrak ius out of his depth here.
Well, Richard argues about the theoretical approach to the correct answer and you argue about the theoretical approach to disprove an incorrect answer.
I admire the understanding of both of you. What is all this ‘mis’?
============
I have read the comment made by his L0rdship and stand by my comment.
Unless one knows absolutely everything and understands absolutely everything, any application of theory is doomed to error. Depending upon the missing knowledge and missing understanding that error may be significant or trivial. Perhaps his L0rdship might like to cite examples where one obtains the correct answer whilst not knowing everything about the system under review and not understanding the various compent parts of that system, how they work and how they inter-act etc.
This is why, of course, even in the early days of school math, pupils are required to show their workings not merely the answer. If one does not know and understand everything about the subject matter of inquiry, it is only by chance that one may come up with the correct answer.
The climate system on planet Earth is so complex, with so many uncertainties and unknowns, that the question as to how it responds to the increase in CO2 during the late Holocene can only be answered by observation. In fact some would argue that due to its chaotic behavoir, the problem is unsolvable from a theoretical standpoint.
Man makes a fundamental error if he considers that it can be answered merely upon a theoretical approach to the issue. indeed, in some way, the very wide range given for Climate Sensitivity (which some would argue is zero or close thereto, and others would argue is over 5 degC) illustrates the point. There is simply too little understanding and too many unknowns to be able to apply a theoretical approach and expect the right answer.
As I understand this series of articles, his L0rdship is examining the IPCC position/science and then arguing where that approach is in error. From that perspective one can look at how the IPCC have assessed Climate Sensitivity and what, if any, errors there may be in there approach. Since the IPCC approach Climate Sensitivity on a theoretical basis one can point out errors, if any, in their theoretical approach to the subject.
However, I stand by my more fundamental point, that this is simply an issue (presently) incapable of determination from a theoretical standpoint. It is an error to take such an approach to its determination.determination
Monckton of Brenchley
August 27, 2016 at 2:06 pm
One of the main reasons for the absence of “Bode plots” is that this is not a Bode plot. The point Nick Stokes was trying to make. Does not bode well for the rest of the series relying on them.
Bode plots are frequency characteristics and have frequency ( typicaly log scaled ) on the abscissa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bode_plot
I did not say “Bode plots”. I said “Bode diagrams”. Greg continues, pompously, tendentiously and with an unbecomingly mean streak, to criticise my argument about feedbacks for this series – an argument that I have not yet presented. That is foolish.
Nick Stokes
August 28, 2016 at 2:20 am
On reflection you are correct. If all CS values derived from different models are placed in numerical order and the middle of the list is chosen ( ie the median value ) this will have a one to one relationship with a value on either scale.
So to make the criticism valid CoB needs to provide direct references to how the central values are being chosen. If it is the arithmetic mean of all CS values, it will lead to an erroneously high “central estimation”. If it is median will largely take account of the skewed distribution caused by the non linear mapping.
This is probably something which has changed since the early work 40y ago where it was just a mean of two ballpark upper and lower limits.
Nic Lewis works with median and the other studies I’ve see him cite from IPCC authors also do that. There may be others who do not.
So to substantiate the criticism CoB needs to provide quotations and refs.
See fig. 3 of the head posting, where the inter-model mean feedback sums as well as the individual models’ estimates are graphically – and quite clearly – illustrated and sourced.
Leo Smith:
In this trivial representation it is not. In the GCMs they do use T^4. This is probably the main reason why CS is found not to be constant in models but curves down slightly as warming increases.
This was discussed in some detail by PaulK on Lucia’s Blackboard some years back and is recognised in the literature as being a property of models. Sorry, I don’t have a link to hand but PaulK’s article should not be hard to find at Lucia’s if anyone wants to follow it up. He provided links to papers.
When arguing huge uncertainties like 1.5; 3.0; 4.5 , the non linearity can be left to one side.
Greg is right that the official climate-sensitivity equation is a trivial representation, but seems unaware that in that equation the fourth-power relationship is represented in the determination of lambda-zero.
And, as will be seen, the non-linearity that the models fail to take into account in determining the central estimates of climate sensitivity is not something that can be airily dismissed. It is part of the pattern of errors that lead to a substantial overstatement of climate sensitivity.
One hopes that the common response to ‘ your not a climate scientist’ becomes ‘your not a control engineer’!
how about your not able to spell ;?
..The simple fact that CO2 in the atmosphere has been at least 15X higher (then today’s level of 400 PPM) in the past, while, at the same time, the Earth’s temperature was in a global Ice Age, shows that CO2 has nothing to do with Glo.Bull Warming……” It’s the Sun Stupid”….
Also, without prejudice or preview, it is possible to be wrong in detail and right in general.
=============
It is also possible to be right in detail and right in general. But the numerous commenters here who have presumed to lecture me, often in the most high-handed style, about an argument that I have not yet even presented are wrong in detail and wrong in general. They will have to wait until the parts of this series on feedbacks are presented, at which point, no doubt, some of them will continue to shriek like small children even if every word I write is correct. But I shall simply discount all comments from those who have persistently acted in bad faith by criticizing – some of them over and over again – the argument on feedbacks that has not yet been presented here.
They have sneered – for that is what these creatures do best – to the effect that my suggestion that process engineers often design electronic circuits with small or no positive feedback so as to avoid inadvertent instability has no bearing on the climate.
Yet it does have a bearing on the climate. For several process engineers to whom I have spoken have raised the same question that I have raised: how can it be that the climate has behaved with such near-perfectly thermostatic stability for the best part of a million years if feedback factors are anything like as great as IPCC and other official sources imagine?
The know-it-alls would do well to reflect that the best science is done by those who have the courage to ask often naive-souinding questions – “I wonder why it did that?”, “I wonder how that result can be possible?”, while the sneerers are so secure in their presumed knowledge that they never question anything and, therefore, never make any useful contribution to science.
It is not wrong to ask questions in science. It is wrong to say, as so many sneerers here have said, that one should not even ask questions. And I shall pay no attention to these insignificant wretches. I shall continue to ask questions. I shall not always reach the right answers. But at least, unlike them, I shall have tried.
We know as fact that:
(i) It was warmer during the Holocene Optimum.
(ii) It was warmer, at least in the Northern hemisphere which is a large tract of our planet, during the Roman Warm Period. We know that Hannibal crossed the Alps (circa 200BC) with elephants but could not make such a journey today. We know that vines were grown with success at the boarder with Scotland, but could not be done so today.
(iii) It was warmer, at least in the Northern hemisphere which is a large tract of our planet, during the Viking Warm Period/Medieval Warm Period. We know where the Vikings settled and that they farmed the land with success notwithstanding primitive tools and reduced crop variety (not genetically engineered hardy varieties) at their disposal, but this could not be done so today.
(iv) We know from the Greenland ice cores that it was significantly warmer in the past, and there is every reason to envisage that these cores are representative of condition in Northern Europe.
(v) It has warmed since the LIA.
Even if all of these are only NH events (and we lack data on the SH to form a proper position with respect to the SH), Climate is actually a local matter not a global one and that is why the planet is divided into Climate Zones as per Koppen (or equivalent) and no one has adequately explained how a well mixed gas such as CO2 (it being relatively well mixed at medium to high altitude, but poorly mixed at low altitude) can warm one hemisphere but not the other.
If the IPCC are correct that CO2 levels have remained constant during the Holocene, none of these events can be explained by CO2, nor an application of a theoretical approach to Climate Sensitivity to CO2.
Further, global warming is anything but global. Different tracts of the globe are warming at different rates some may not be warming at all such as Antarctica, perhaps even very slightly cooling such as the USA, some warming extremely modestly eg the equatorial/tropical tract, whilst others are undergoing more noticeable warming. This pattern of behavoir cannot be answered by applying some theoretical approach to Climate Sensitivity. The Climate is not responding to change uniformly.
Above, I made the point that there is no significant change in the rate of warming trend between 3 periods of warming (1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1975-1998). A theoretical approach to the assessment of Climate Sensitivity cannot explain that. Nor the post 1940 cooling, or the recent. ‘pause’
When the present El Nino/La Nina cycle completes probably in 2017, the ‘pause’ may once again reappear, and if so, it will be more than 20 years in duration. It is quite conceivable that by 2019, there will be 40 years of satellite data showing no (or almost no significant warming) as from inception in 1979 through to 1996 (up to the run up to the 1997/8 Super El Nino) and then once again no statistically significant warming post that event, ie between 1998 and 2019. It is quite conceivable that the satellite data will show simply responses to El Ninos (short term blips) and volcanoes (short term falls) and the only significant warming event will be co-incident upon the Super El Nino of 1997/8.
Now I do not know whether that will or will not be the event, but it is not without prospect. Anyone who claims that a theoretical approach can be taken to the assessment to Climate Sensitivity, unless their assessment is close to zero, needs to carefully reflect upon that.
richard verney August 30, 2016 at 1:33 am
We know as fact that:
You are overstating some of these ‘facts’
(ii) It was warmer, at least in the Northern hemisphere which is a large tract of our planet, during the Roman Warm Period. We know that Hannibal crossed the Alps (circa 200BC) with elephants but could not make such a journey today. We know that vines were grown with success at the boarder with Scotland, but could not be done so today.
As far as I am aware there is no reliable evidence of vineyards north of Leeds, certainly not near Scotland. There are several commercial vineyards in Yorkshire to the north of Leeds today.
On what evidence do base your assertion that Hannibal could not make the crossing ‘today’?
(iv) We know from the Greenland ice cores that it was significantly warmer in the past, and there is every reason to envisage that these cores are representative of condition in Northern Europe.
These data are frequently misrepresented on here, the most recent dating from over 150 years ago.
There is archaeological evidence that vines were planted close to Hadrian’s Wall by Roman soldiers, and, until the global warming storyline was invented, the commonsense view was taken that the grapes were then harvestable because the weather was warmer than it has been until the past few decades. When the global warming storyline began to be peddled, the account of the vines planted close to Hadrian’s Wall was amended, so that now we are told the soldiers planted the vines to remind them of home, even though the weather was too cold for them to harvest any grapse.
At present, thanks to the warmer weather that began early in the 20th century, there are some 500 vineyards in Britain, of which (if my information is up to date) the most northerly is at Accomb, within a few miles of Hadrian’s Wall.
From this circumstance, most sensible people would draw the conclusion that warmer weather is better than colder, and that it is good news that the climate in these islands is now as kindly as it was in Roman times.
Monckton of Brenchley September 1, 2016 at 3:57 am
There is archaeological evidence that vines were planted close to Hadrian’s Wall by Roman soldiers,
Can you substantiate that statement since I have not seen any such evidence? There is, however, plenty of evidence of the importation of wine from Gaul and Italy to Vindolanda but I’ve only seen unsupported claims from Plimer and yourself regarding grapes being grown near Hadrian’s wall.
At present, thanks to the warmer weather that began early in the 20th century, there are some 500 vineyards in Britain, of which (if my information is up to date) the most northerly is at Accomb, within a few miles of Hadrian’s Wall.
The wrong Acomb (sic.), that is the one in Northumbria, the one with the vineyard is in Yorkshire near York. The most northerly commercial vineyard in England is at Ryedale, north of Leeds.
Mr Verney errs in assuming that a theoretical approach to climate sensitivity cannot be taken. Official sources make various claims, based on various theoretical arguments. If those arguments are found to be materially and serially in error, then the claims of high climate sensitivity made by those official sources must fall, for the theoretical arguments for high sensitivity can be – and, in this series, are being – shown to be in error.
We may beg to differ, although the point I make ought not to be contentious. Indeed, I am rather surprised that you so forcefully join issue with it.
Over the years, you have made the point (i) that we do not know and understand all that there is to know and understand about the workings of Climate (often having pointed to unknowns, and then there are the unknowns that we do not even know that we do not know about) (ii) that we do not know all the feedbacks, (iii) we do not know the magnitude of all the feedbacks (iv) heck, we do not even know the sign (whether positive or negative) of some of the feedbacks.
That being the case, presently given the above lacuna in our knowledge and understanding (something to which you have alluded to in previous articles posted on this site and speeches made by you), it follows that we are not in a position to correctly assess Climate Sensitivity on a theoretical basis. If some element of the climate is chaotic, that throws a further spanner in the works.
I do not doubt for one moment that you will present a cogent and convincing case that the
The observational data (with all its shortcomings) shows that to be the case. Indeed, this observational data (with all its short comings) makes it very difficult to cogently argue for a modest sensitivity (by which I mean about 1.7 to 2degC). the observational data (with all its shortcomings) suggests that Climate Sensitivity cannot realistically exceed 1.7degC, and I would suggest that that figure is way way to high (but the data sets are not fit for purpose in that they do not permit or withstand serious scientific scrutiny such that we are merely groping in the dark).
richard verney: “heck, we do not even know the sign (whether positive or negative) of some of the feedbacks.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the sign of some feedbacks changes twice twice in 24 hours. In fact, some may – probably do – change annually too. Others…
Perhaps I should give an example of one of the problems that goes to illustrate my point.
Prior to the 2015/16 strong EL Nino, when the ‘pause’ was causing concern, one explanation proffered for the lack of warming was that the warming was going into the mid/deep ocean. It was in effect not heating the atmosphere and was by passing the top ocean layer. I make no comment upon whether that was a crackpot explanation, but it was advanced as a serious explanation by many well known scientists on the warmist front.
Now then if at a certain level of CO2, the Climatic response to CO2 in the Earth system is that it warms the atmosphere, but at higher levels the Climatic response is that it no longer heats the atmosphere but instead miraculously goes to heat the mid to deep ocean (by passing the surface on its way to the depths) where either the energy is diluted and dissipated by volume, alternatively will not re-emerge for perhaps a 1000 years, then Climate Sensitivity is materially changed at around this flip point and the theoretical calculation will not pick this up.
It is obvious and ought not to be contentious that how the planet responds to changing concentrations to CO2 can only be answered by observation. It is a dynamic and complex system and only observation will reveal the nuance of this.
It ought to be obvious that telling the world it must wait and see what influence CO2 is having or will have on global temperature is not an answer that governments are likely to accept, now that they have been worn down by relentless propaganda from komsomol.edu and from lavishly-funded profiteering pressure groups.
It ought to be equally obvious that, if there are downright errors in the manner of determining climate sensitivity, and if those errors are sufficient to indicate that corrections to the official methodology make the supposed problem a rather small one, and if despite the work of some of the propagandists here it becomes impossible to conceal the fact that downright errors have been made, that is perhaps the one possible way to persuade governments that they have been misled.
i have at no time suggested that
We should however be honest with ourselves and accept and acknowledge our limitations. One of the problems with this science is that there is a failure to accept and acknowledge our limitations, and the limitations with the quality of the data that impinges upon our ability to understand matters and to reasonably assess what is happening, or may in the future happen. In fact the very opposite takes place, the science (driven to a large part by the political masters) are over egging certainty and claiming the science to be settled when just considering that there are more than 100 climate models each one projecting a different outcome, and the wide range given for Climate Sensitivity establishes anything but certainty and the science settled and that the science is riddled with a lack of knowledge and understanding.
All I am saying is that we should be honest about our ability to shed light on Climate Sensitivity and make it clear that unfortunately given our present state of knowledge and understanding this is not an issue that can be accurately and properly assessed by taking a theoretical approach to matters, It brings in mind the unascribed quote.
For sure, it is apt to point out errors being made in a theoretical assessment to Climate Sensitivity, and applaud you in your efforts in demonstrating that
That is a worthy and useful cause indeed, and one that should be revealed not only on these pages but to the wider population in general.
When this edifice falls, and it surely will, and in the UK we have already had the Blair dodgy dossier on WMD, the Cameron/Osbourne dodgy project fear, the IPCC reports and in particular the Summary for Policy Makers will be seen to be another example of the political class and ruling elite producing a dodgy dossier in which evidence is fabricated/overblown and uncertainty concealed, and presenting a misleading impression of the evidence and the state of expert knowledge, to further a cause for their own ends to the prejudice of the people.
When this edifice falls there will be a re-examination of its core fundamentals, and one will be left a gasp that sentient beings could have accepted many of these fundamentals as correct. Once of these will be Climate Sensitivity and the claims that this could be large, when even a cursory review of the observational data of past climate (notwithstanding the limitations of this data given that it is riddled with errors and uncertainty) strongly suggests that Climate Sensitivity, if there is such a thing in the real world in which we live, must be low.
Keep up the good work.
Forgive me if this point has been made earlier… The general point about the instability of positive-feedback systems that are subjected to relatively large forcings is well taken, but any mention of process engineering (e.g., prudent limits on feedbacks in circuit design) is a silly non-sequitur! As the article implies, engineers (generally) seek to limit expected feedback so as to allow for the possibility of unexpected ones that would magnify the effective overall feedback. Characterizing an existing system, on the other hand, is a matter of determining this overall feedback (both it form and its coefficients, hence its overall response/”shape”). Depending on the relative size of a forcing/”stress,” any positive feedback (f > 0) can become unstable (“explode” or “spiral out of control”) — the process engineer’s f <= .1, therefore, has no place in the diagram. The question is not whether the climate system is "prudently designed," rather, what the shape of its feedback curve is, and whether the simple, linear shape presumed by climate alarmists ("warm-mongers") is correct, or even plausible, given the multiplicity of component factors and (as you point out) the evident stability of the climate under known stresses.
(My moribund but informative climate page is at http://johngorno.tripod.com/dontpanic/)
Mr Fashena, like so many others, presumes to issue a lecture on the treatment of temperature feedbacks in this series before I have presented the argument about it. It ought to be obvious to anyone familiar with the norms of scientific discussion that it is not possible to know whether or not the process engineers’ working limit on feedback factors in circuits intended to operate stably is a relevant consideration affecting the argument about feedbacks until that argument has actually been made.
I detect in these often loftily or sneeringly expressed attacks on an argument that has not yet been presented a rising desperation on the part of those who wish to maintain that the official high-sensitivity case is unanswerable. Those who have presumed to preach on the alleged inapplicability of the process engineers’ limit in discussions about feedbacks will perhaps have to eat their words once the presentation of the argument on feedbacks – which has not yet been begun – is complete.
Wait and see before issuing any further lectures.
I was merely suggesting an improvement in removing what appears to be a needless vulnerability in your presentation, not questioning your argument. Your prior articles mentioned this f <= .1 business and it seems to me that the sooner it's pruned, the better for your case. If the gist of your response is, "Ahh, keep reading this series and you'll see that process design is relevant!" then that would have been a quicker, and rather less haughtily hostile, response. I look forward to seeing whether you can make a convincing case that this point is applicable.
As for "issuing a lecture," I was merely being thorough, not lofty or pedantic. This is the comment section, a place for discussion, not your personal lecture hall, where worshipful students wordlessly await your next pronouncement. If you don't want to hear the chatter in it, don't hang around here! You're doing (generally) good work, but it's you who have just issued a lofty lecture to me.
Mr Fashena should not whine when he is justly called out as loftily having sneered that my mention of the process engineers’ design limit of order 0.1 on feedback factors in circuits intended to operate stably was “silly”.
When a distinguished former process engineer with many degrees first told me of this rule of thumb, for he saw its relevance as Me Fashena did not. When I learned the elementary mathematics of feedback analysis, I grew still more concerned that there seemed to be much that was wrong with the feedback analysis used by climatologists, who were treating the climate, mathematically speaking, as far more sensitive to feedback than the near-thermostatic temperature record of the past 800,000 years suggested.
I discussed the temperature feedback problem with the editor of a leading academic journal two years ago and, last year, published a paper highlighting the difficulty. I did not at that time have an answer to the problem, but the reviewers agreed that it was a problem that should be flagged for attention, and one of them was even kind enough to add a contribution to the argument.
As a result of that paper, another electronics engineer contacted me and pointed out a minor error in the official method of determining temperature feedbacks.
I examined the question afresh in the light of the fact that mainstream climate science and mainstream science were at odds, and recently discovered a large error in rhe climatological establishment’s methodology – an error inbuilt into the models.
I went back through the key papers and found some early instances in which the error had been perpetrated. I sweated through the circuit diagrams to find out how much difference the large error made to final climate sensitivity.
And that is how this series came to be.
Unlike Mr Fashena and certain other commenters here, I do not do science by reciting with glazed eyes some half-understood pietism from a textbook. I begin, as all true men of science begin, by noting the existence of an apparent anomaly and wondering why the anomaly exists.
Science begins with the words “I wonder … “‘, not with the words “I believe …”.
I’m merely offering friendly advice. Your logic is sound but the labeling on the climate feedback diagram is flawed and weakens your argument.
Mr Fashena was not offering friendly advice: he was trolling by calling my mention of the process engineers’ design limit “silly” when, in the absence of the argument about feedbacks to which the point relates, he was and is in no position to know whether it is “silly” or not. Since I have not yet deployed the feedback argument, it should by now be obvious to Mr Fashena that he cannot and does not know whether it “weakens the argument”.
True science is done precisely by thinking about anomalies such as this and trying to find an explanation, and not by making and then tediously repeating – the unfailing mark of the troll – the naive assumption that the anomaly is “silly” and should, therefore, have been ignored and omitted.
As for the contemptible Mr Hutchins, whose sour, petulant tone marks him out as another troll, he will find all the references to each document material to the feedback portion of the argument in the parts of this series that concern themselves with official climatology’s errors in relation to temperature feedbacks. Until then, his rebarbatively repetitious whining impresses none but himself,
The argument that is being presented here is very detailed. That is why it is being presented slowly. And that is why one or two elements in the argument are briefly mentioned or illustrated a little in advance. If the trolls can’t bear to wait, that is too bad.
Mr Fashena ought to know when to stop digging. He does not know what my argument about feedbacks will be. He makes various straw-man assumptions about it and then attacks the straw-man assumptions he has made.
He will have to wait and see what my argument actually is. But if he or anyone else would like to go on demonstrating troll-like behavior here by continuing to attack an argument that I have not yet made, they will be demonstrating two things: first, that they are prejudiced, for no rational and dispassionate being would attack an argument before having heard it; and secondly, that they are perpetrating the ancient logical fallacy of the argumentum ad ignorationem elenchi – the most fundamental of all fallacies, the fallacy of fallacies, by which they presume to introduce matter extraneous to the validity of their interlocutor’s argument and then to attempt to base their own argument on that extraneous matter.
With such people, no rational discussion can be had, for they have adopted their positions a priori and are unwilling either to listen or to exercise the faculty of reason.
Okay. We will start with “I wonder”. I wonder why Monckton can’t give a proper citation.
“a distinguished former process engineer with many degrees first told me of this rule of thumb” (design limit of order 0.1) WHO?
“the editor of a leading academic journal” WHO?
“another electronics engineer contacted me” WHO?
“I went back through the key papers?” WHICH ONES?
Okay – I remember – we are supposed to WAIT till he brings up feedback. Oh – but he DID, about a bogus 0.1 limit on positive feedback (and does again repeatedly), supposedly (presumptively) speaking for a community: “Anyone who has ever built an operational-amplifier circuit”.
Another hallmark of a good scientist is, perhaps, the ability to say: “I was wrong”.
Mr Hutchins, not being any sort of a scientist, will no doubt refuse in his characteristically graceless fashion to apologise once he has read the full argument on feedbacks and has realised beyond doubt that, as usual, he was wrong. But by then it will be too late. The science of high climate sensitivity will have been exposed as irremediably and irredeemably erroneous, and those of the trolls here who are paid to disrupt the world’s most popular climate-related website will be out of a job.
Monckton’s poor terminology/labelling suggests that *no* system with a feedback value above .1 can be “stable” (which is itself a poor usage), which, insofar as one can give it meaning, is incorrect (as I assume he knows). Strictly speaking, only feedback values f >= 1 are unstable: lesser values differ only in their *relative* stability…
I have no problem with this arbitrary .1 rule of thumb for the prudent *design* of electrical circuits, but it has no context in the *analysis* of a *natural* system, where there is only an actual feedback value, not a theoretical one that needs extra padding to prevent overloads. Clearly, Monckton intends to demonstrate that no climate sensitivity greater than that corresponding to f = .1 is consistent with the climate record, but that occurrence of .1 can not (and should not) be associated with any design guideline, or any other arbitrary cultural artifact, however prudent.
Mr Fashena ought to know when to stop digging. He does not know what my argument about feedbacks will be. He makes various straw-man assumptions about it and then attacks the straw-man assumptions he has himself made. As my professor of logic used to say, “Any fool can do that, but only a fool does it.”
Let him look up the fallacy of “argumentum ad ignorationem elenchi”.
Monckton of Brenchley said in part September 1, 2016 at 7:58 pm:
”. . . As for the contemptible Mr Hutchins . . .”
At last, I have earned a proper Moncktonian invective!
and September 1, 2016 at 8:04 pm he also said in part:
“ …beyond doubt that, as usual, he was wrong. . . .”
What’s this “as usual” bit? TWO times in the past few years he and I have interacted. The first time I pointed out some error of his and he thanked me (good that). The second time was when I was disputing his pal David Evan’s “Non-causal notch”. David, a real engineer and stand-up guy, finally admitted I was right, and thanked me. Beyond that – what? Complete strangers I believe.
Monckton also said:
“The science of high climate sensitivity will have been exposed as irremediably and irredeemably erroneous, and those of the trolls here who are paid to disrupt the world’s most popular climate-related website will be out of a job.”
This is truly a foolish and uncalled-for thing to say, and I expect an apology. Yes – I am out of a job. Retired after teaching at a top-10 engineering school (including a lot on op-amps) for 35 years. Monckton said “Anyone who has ever built an operational-amplifier circuit…” and followed that with erroneous statements about a bogus design limit of 0.1. I even showed circuits with corroborating experimental data (Nick posted above). Then he dodges and evades. As for getting paid to disrupt WUWT (what a lame comment), to the contrary, I recently (May 2016) made a substantial financial contribution ($1000) to WUWT.
As for “The science of high climate sensitivity” being debunked, I agree with Monckton. I think it has already been debunked by Nature herself. If it is definitively disproven in the scientific arena it is unlikely it will be by some irritating person who doesn’t even listen to his friends, and alienates them each in turn.
Mr Hutchins has been wrong on a dozen occasions in this thread, in that he pretends not to be aware of any limit on the designed feedback factors in a circuit intended to perform stably, even though he had at one point been compelled to admit that such a limit did in fact exist under certain relevant circumstances and that it was even lower than I had indicated.
He has been wrong in attempting to imply that no such limit is relevant, for its relevance will only be demonstrated when I reach the detailed consideration of feedbacks. No true scientist would thus repeatedly attempt to criticise an argument that has not been made. At that point it will become apparent that feedbacks do not, in practice, subsist in the climate on the interval that is shown in Fig. 1 as unstable.
And, whether he likes it or not, I was indeed told of the process engineers’ limit by a process engineer with several degrees in the subject. He is in no position to say that that process engineer is wrong, since he had been constrained to admit earlier that he did not even know what a process engineer was.
He should understand that merely because it is possible to design circuits with feedbacks in the range I had marked as unstable the validity of my process engineer’s point about very strict limits on the design of circuits intended to remain stable in the face of uncertainties as to componentry and ambient operating conditions is not compromised.
That eminent engineer, like the IPCC lead author during a talk I gave three years ago at the University of Tasmania, took one look at the curve shown in Fig. 1 and realised in an instant that with feedback factors in that region in the highly variable operating conditions of the climate the near-perfect thermostasis of the past 800,000 years would have been most unlikely, to say the least.
It is these experts’ reactions, less incurious than those of Mr Hutchins, that led me to dig deeper and to find what I have found. Mr Hutchins is of course entitled to be supinely incurious when faced with Fig. 1. There is no compulsion on any man to exhibit that alert and informed curiosity without which science makes no progress. But my curiosity was aroused, I investigated, and I descovered some serious errors, which will be presented in due course, and I might not have found those errors had it not been for the shock on the faces of the process engineer and the IPCC lead author. Mr Hutchins has his view. They have theirs. I found theirs more instructive than his, and the are certainly more expert than he.
The time to criticise me for declaring the official errors about feedbacks to be errors will be when I have described them, and not before then. Mr Hutchins, like others here who display none of the curiosity visible on the faces of the process engineer and the IPCC lead author, will no doubt be sharpening his knives.
I am glad that Mr Hutchins is not paid to be wrong and that his persistence in criticizing an argument that has not been made is attibutable to some other unscientific reason.
” Mr Hutchins is of course entitled to be supinely incurious when faced with Fig. 1″
This is absurd. Fig 1 is simply a hyperbola as I sketched with pencil for school exams, a graphic representation of the ancient feedback equation, which has been around as long as feedback has been discussed, and of which Eq (1) here is a derivative. It is in fact (without the ridiculous annotations) Fig 4 in his excellent notes that he posted above:
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/08/hyperb.png
You may also notice that those are Electronotes 219. Bernie Hutchins began publishing the series nearly fifty years ago, in the pioneering days of development of the Moog synthesiser. He has both practical and teaching knowledge of feedback and electronic circuits.
More here on Bernie’s Electronotes.
Mr Stokes is off the point, as usual. The “Fig. 4” he reproduces from Mr Hutchins’ musings of half a century ago does not appear to present any indications of where official climatology’s currently-imagined interval of temperature feedbacks falls on the graph. That was the point of my Fig. 1, as Mr Stokes knows perfectly well. Mr Hutchins, Mr Stokes and all manner of other paid or unpaid trolling bossyboots have presumed to lecture me about my argument on the official overstatement of temperature feedbacks before my argument on that subject has even been presented. That is not just unscientific behavior: it is anti-scientific behavior.
Mr Stokes, whom I have not yet seen ever to question any aspect of the Party Line on climate, is by political instinct incurious once he has been told what the Party Line is. Mr Hutchins, who in Mr Stokes’ opinion possesses expertise in the matter of feedbacks because he once knew a person who invented an electronic “wah-wah-wah” sound, seems likewise constitutionally incurious. But it is not the incurious slaves to the Party Line reciting textbook mantras who advance the boundaries of science: they are the forgettable and forgotten drones.
It is the likes of the IPCC lead author and the holder of four doctorates in process engineering who, taking one look at my Fig. 1, saw at once what Mr Stokes and Mr Hutchins, and a good few other preachers or indulgers of the Party Line here, will never see in a million years. They saw an anomaly. They were not concerned that the anomaly was inconsistent with the Party Line and must therefore be wrong. They were concerned that it was an anomaly, raising the question – legitimate in science though not in the Party – that the Party line might, horribile dictu, be wrong.
As it will out, the Party Line that Mr Stokes has so uncritically defended for so long is materially in error. And he will have to wait till I am ready to present the argument on feedbacks that he and others have foolishly attempted to attack aprioristically before they have even seen it. Even a child realizes that to attack someone for an argument he has not yet presented is – well – childish.
Monckton of Brenchley said September 2, 2016 at 1:58 AM in part (his first paragraph):
“Mr Hutchins has been wrong on a dozen occasions in this thread, in that he pretends not to be aware of any limit on the designed feedback factors in a circuit intended to perform stably, even though he had at one point been compelled to admit that such a limit did in fact exist under certain relevant circumstances and that it was even lower than I had indicated. . . . .”
It is obvious from this that Monckton does NOT even understand the difference between an operational amplifier and a finite-gain amplifier (usually REALIZED using an op-amp with negative feedback) subjected to a gain of 1/(1-f) from positive feedback f. No wonder he is so confused. He hasn’t even tried.
I am ONLY talking about EE stuff – not climate. (I have said nothing about climate, except to agree that Monckton is likely right about models being overly sensitive.) If Monckton wants to talk about only climate, go for it. But he presumes to talk about circuitry, and about this, he seems basically clueless.
Monckton also said: “. . . will only be demonstrated when I reach the detailed consideration of feedbacks. . . . ”
Detailed! When he does get there, let’s hope he has learned, personally, something ABOUT feedback.
And he never gets around to telling us who this “imaginary friend” (in the sense of childhood esteem bolstering); prominent with multiple degrees (3 PhD’s, then several degrees, now 4 PhD’s?) is. Of course we can’t evaluate this person’s opinion until Monckton tells us who it is.
Mr Hutchins is finally reduced to stuttering about the semantics of what is and is not covered by the phrase “operational amplifier”, just as he previously stuttered about the semantics of process engineering. Let him wait until I deal with the temperature feedback question, and reserve his petty sniping till then.
” prominent with multiple degrees”
David Evans?
Nick –
I very much doubt it is David. David is quite brilliant and would have instantly understood the issues (that still evade Monckton), and tried to explain. Possibly he did, so I wonder if he could have earned his own invective title in consequence. As I see it, you are the “Quibbling“ Mr. Stokes and I am the “Contemptible” Mr. Hutchins, and we earned these titles honestly! These would be much better if he achieved alliteration. Perhaps you get stuttering and I get horrific? I wonder if Monckton ever repeats. (Actually I thought “stuttering” was not PC – but I guess if a British Lord uses it (twice), so can the common folks?)
Now Monckton is supposing we circuit types are semantically confused about operational amplifiers. I bet he wouldn’t know an op-amp if he sat on one. Ever done that?
Bernie
Messrs. Hitchens and Stokes continue to display a petulant mean-spiritedness that is unbecoming, and they continue to presume to lecture me about the feedback portion of my argument – a portion that is yet to come. That is anti-scientific.
Bernie,
“Ever done that?”
They do generate a “wah-wah-wah” sound.
I guess we are classed as the old contemptibles.
Hitchens?
Wow. I am flattered to have had my name misspelled as that of the most brilliant British writer/orator of the last 50 years.
One of the themes in this contribution is that global change may be over-estimated. There is a reference to only low percentage change in the historic record. One of the ways I argue against warmists is to point out that in mid latitudes, the estimated change in temperature from glacial to interglacial periods in 10 degrees C.
http://www.eolss.net/Eolss-sampleAllChapter.aspx
In tropical areas the change may be less – around 5 degrees C. However there are a range of estimates higher than 5 for tropical and sub-tropical zones (Anderson, D., Goudie, A., Parker, A. 2013. Global environments through the Quaternary – exploring environmental change; Bell, M. and Walker, M.J.C, 2005, Late Quaternary Environmental Change: Physical and Human Perspectives, (2nd edition).
Pearson/Prentice Hall.). Also these books (and references therein) show that in certain areas of Europe Asia and North America, the change may have been 15 degrees C from glacial to interglacial.
We can contrast that with estimates of transient climate response and equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2. Around the year 2000, estimates were around 3 – 5 degrees C, whereas latest estimates are down around 1,4 – 1.7 degrees C. https://judithcurry.com/2013/09/25/nic-lewis-vs-the-uk-met-office/
https://climateaudit.org/2015/04/09/pitfalls-in-climate-sensitivity-estimation-part-1/
So if temperature change from glacial to interglacial periods ranges from 5 degrees at the tropics to 10 and even 15 degrees C in temperate and continental areas, whereas estimates of ECS and TRC are reducing to around 1.5 degrees C, surely natural variability, as best we know at present, is almost an order of magnitude greater than CO2 sensitivity.
So the idea that climate chnage is naturally at a low percentage change seems to me to be a less useful argument than pointing out that natural variability is proven to be greater than latest estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2 by an order of magnitude.
ps change for chnage is 3rd last line.
pps, always enjoy Lord Monckton and WUWT
And to clarify further, the references above suggest that natural variability over the last 810,000 years from glacial to interglacial period has been greater than 3.3 degrees K. However, they are for certain areas rather than global averages. The range of figures given (5 – 15 degrees C) suggest a global average change of greater than 3.3 degres K
In due course the cryostratigraphic evidence for the 3.3 K variability of global mean surface temperatures either side of the 810,000-year period mean will be presented.
Keith,
I agree that the LGM must have been more than 3.3 degrees C colder than now, but this study found that global average temperature possible, near the bottom of a range around 4 degrees C (+/- 0.8).
http://www.clim-past.net/9/367/2013/cp-9-367-2013.pdf
From Climate of the Past, 13 February 2013:
A new global reconstruction of temperature changes
at the Last Glacial Maximum
J. D. Annan and J. C. Hargreaves
Research Institute for Global Change, Yokohama, Japan
Abstract.
Some recent compilations of proxy data both on land and ocean (MARGO Project Members, 2009; Bartlein et al., 2011; Shakun et al., 2012), have provided a new opportunity for an improved assessment of the overall climatic
state of the Last Glacial Maximum. In this paper, we combine these proxy data with the ensemble of structurally diverse state of the art climate models which participated in the PMIP2 project (Braconnot et al., 2007) to generate a spatially
complete reconstruction of surface air (and sea surface) temperatures. We test a variety of approaches, and show that multiple linear regression performs well for this application. Our reconstruction is significantly different to and more accurate than previous approaches and we obtain an estimated global mean cooling of 4.0±0.8 C (95% CI).
Polar Zones: 8.24% of Earth’s surface
Temperate Zones: 51.98%
Tropics: 39.78%
Assuming about the same distribution during the LGM (despite small differences in axial tilt), then a global average of 3.3 degrees C cooler might imply some distribution like this: two degrees C cooler in the Tropics, four degrees in the Temperate Zones and six degrees in the Polar Zones.
Note well that the cryostratigraphic record shows variances of 3.3 K either side of the 801,000-year period mean, not 3.3 K in all.
Monckton of Brenchley
September 2, 2016 at 3:16 pm
Point well taken. Most of the past 801 millennia have been colder than the past eleven millennia.
Mr. Monckton, please indulge me with an answer to resolve my confusion: does Figure 1 aim to diagram the temperature feedback of a *model* of the Earth’s climate system, or does it instead aim to diagram the Earth’s *actual*, physical, temperature feedback behavior, or to do both at once? This is not a snare: I am trying to help you perfect your phrasing, which will be critical in the later article where you discuss the diagram in detail.
In answer to Mr Fashena, the curve at Fig. 1 plots equilibrium climate sensitivity in Kelvin against the unitless feedback factor f. Since the language to describe feedbacks, feedback factors, open-loop gain factors, closed-loop gain factors, mu and beta transmission characteristics etc. is bewilderingly non-standard even within electronics and is still more eccentric in climatology, I shall be less concerned with the notatio, as Gauss used to put it, than with the notio.
I shall be defining various variables by reference to the feedback mathematics in a standard text on feedback analysis in electronic systems – a textbook to which the climatologists who introduced the errors that I shall expose frequently refer (though IPCC, interestingly, does not). All will be very clearly explained, with diagrams and labels and equations. The error is a lulu, but it appears to have no effect until one realizes the importance of the rectangular hyperbolic response function shown in Fig. 1. All will be revealed.
As a preface, I want to declare that I am deeply skeptical of “climate change” and its supposed science… my previous question (which you didn’t actually answer) was preliminary to this one: are you sure that the establishment’s net thermal feedback sensitivity value is calculated using a detailed feedback model? It’s my understanding that it is a result of directly correlating (calculated) heat-retention from emissions to (allegedly) measured global warming: if so, it is a constraint on the models, and no model can constrain it.
Gabbro and M of Brenchley – thank you for the responses. 6.6 degree K total seems to me reasonable given the ranges of estimates given in the references I mentioned.
To me, too.
Lord Monckton’s reply about the mean of the past 801,000 years implies a change from the depths of the LGM of this magnitude is possible.
Y’all being right silly about da grammar on dis here sight… but the way I be seein’ it….
Observations supported ~1.3 deg sensitivity
Models, corrected for their errors, support ~ 1.3 deg sensitivity.
There are some error bars around that figure… but it is really hard to justify 3