by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.
1. BASED ON PRELIMINARY DATA TO NOVEMBER 30, SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES AROUND AUSTRALIA WERE THE WARMEST ON RECORD LAST YEAR, AS WERE THOSE FOR THE PAST DECADE.
The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate-extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate-extremist groups maintain.
2. THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANISATION SAYS THE YEAR TO THE END OF OCTOBER WAS THE WARMEST SINCE INSTRUMENTAL CLIMATE RECORDS STARTED IN 1850 – 0.55 C° ABOVE THE 1961-90 AVERAGE OF 14 C°.
It is easy to cherry-pick periods of less than a calendar year and say they establish a new record. The cherry-picking of the first nine months of 2010 is particularly unacceptable, since that period was dominated by a substantial El Niño Southern Oscillation, a sudden alteration in the pattern of ocean currents worldwide that leads to warmer weather for several months all round the world. The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, which tends largely to reverse the effect of its preceding El Niño and make the world cooler. Indeed, the calendar year from January to December 2010, according to the reliable RSS and UAH satellite records, was not the warmest on record. Besides, what is important is how fast the world is warming. In fact, the rate of warming from 1975-2001, at 0.16 C° per decade, was the fastest rate to be sustained for more than a decade in the 160-year record, but exactly the same rate occurred from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, when we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.
3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.
After 300 years of global warming, during nearly all of which we could not on any view have influenced the climate to a measurable degree, it is scarcely surprising that recent decades will be warmer than earlier decades. That is what one would expect. If one has been climbing up a steep hill for a long time, one should not be surprised to find oneself higher up at the end of the climb than at the beginning.
4. THE WORLD IS NOT COOLER COMPARED TO 1998.
Actually, it is cooler. There was a remarkable spike in global temperatures in 1998, caused not by manmade “global warming” but by a Great El Niño event – an alteration in the pattern of ocean currents that begins in the equatorial eastern Pacific and spreads around the globe, lasting a few months. In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.
5. THE TRENDS HAPPEN TO FOLLOW CLOSELY THE PREDICTIONS OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS OF TEMPERATURE RISES RESULTING FROM INCREASED GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
In the 40 years since 1970, global temperatures have risen at a linear rate equivalent to around 1.3 C°/century. CO2 concentration is rising in a straight line at just 2 ppmv/year at present and, even if it were to accelerate to an exponential rate of increase, the corresponding temperature increase would be expected to rise merely in a straight line. On any view, 1.3 C° of further “global warming” this century would be harmless. The IPCC is predicting 3.4 C°, but since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001 global temperature has risen (taking the average of the two satellite datasets) at a rate equivalent to just 0.6 C°/century, rather less than the warming rate of the entire 20th century. In these numbers, there is nothing whatever to worry about – except the tendency of some journalists to conceal them.
6. MOST SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT DOUBLING THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS LIKELY TO LEAD TO WARMING OF 2-3 C°.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling. The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft,
or satellites. Also, the models predict that every Celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1-3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes.
7. WARMING OF 2-3 C° RISKS SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC DAMAGE.
Actually, the IPCC’s current thinking is that up to 2° of warming compared with the present would be harmless and even beneficial. Since far greater temperatures than this have been the rule on Earth for most of the past 600 million years, there is no sound scientific basis for the assumption that “significant environmental and economic damage” would result from so small an additional warming. However, significant economic damage is already resulting from the costly but pointlessly Canute-like attempts governments to try to make “global warming” go away.
8. GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS ROSE BY 27.5% FROM 1990-2009.
Since anthropogenic effects on the climate are net-zero except for CO2, we need only consider CO2 concentration, which was 353 parts per million by volume in 1990 and is 390 ppmv now, an increase not of 27.5% but of just 10.5%.
9. ARCTIC SEA ICE SHRANK TO ITS THIRD-LOWEST AREA IN THE SATELLITE RECORDS, OFFSET ONLY SLIGHTLY BY GROWTH IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE.
In fact, the global sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, because the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice. Indeed, when the summer extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high. The record low was widely reported; the corresponding record high was almost entirely unreported.
10. GLOBAL SNOW COVER IS FALLING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, a new record high for snow cover was set in the winter of 2008/2009, and there is some chance that a further record high will be set this year.
11. GLOBAL SEA LEVELS ARE RISING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, the rate of increase in sea level has not changed since satellites first began measuring it reliably in 1993. It is a dizzying 1 ft/century – not vastly greater than the 8 inches/century that had previously been inferred from tide-gauges. A recent paper has confirmed what marine biologists had long suspected: coral atolls simply grow to meet the light as the sea rises, and some of them have even gained land mass recently according to a
just-published scientific paper. Professor Niklas Mörner, who has been studying sea level for a third of a century, says it is physically impossible for sea level to rise at much above its present rate, and he expects 4-8 inches of sea level rise this century, if anything rather below the rate of increase in the last century. In the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age, sea level has risen at an average of 4 feet/century, though it is now rising much more slowly because very nearly all of the land-based ice that is at low enough latitudes and altitudes to melt has long since gone.
12. MUNICH RE SAYS 2010 SAW THE SECOND-HIGHEST NUMBER OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES SINCE 1980, 90% OF THEM WEATHER-RELATED.
There are really only three categories of insurable natural catastrophe – meteorological, epidemiological, and seismic (volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). Except during years when major seismic disasters occur (such as the tsunami caused by an earthquake in 2000), or when major pandemics kill large numbers at an unexpected rate (and that did not happen in 2010), weather-related natural disasters always account for getting on for 90% of all such disasters. Because the climate is a mathematically-chaotic object, the incidence of weather-related disasters is highly variable from year to year, and there is no good reason to attribute the major events of 2010 to manmade “global warming”.
13. THE TEMPERATURE OF 46.4 C° IN MELBOURNE ONE SATURDAY IN 2010 WAS MORE THAN 3 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS HIGHEST FOR FEBRUARY.
February is the height of summer in Melbourne. Since the planet has been warming for 300 years, it is not surprising to find high-temperature records being broken from time to time. However, some very spectacular cold-weather records were also broken both in early 2010, when all 49 contiguous United States were covered in snow for the first time since satellite monitoring began 30 years ago, and in December, which was the coldest final month of the year in central England since records began 352 years ago. However, neither the hot-weather nor the cold-weather extremes of 2010 have much to do with manmade “global warming”; like the heatwave of 2003 in Europe that is said to have killed 35,000 people, they are known to have been caused by an unusual pattern of what meteorologists call “blocking highs” – comparatively rare areas of stable high pressure that dislodge the jet-streams from their usual path and lock weather systems in place for days or sometimes even months at a time. No link has been established between the frequency, intensity, or duration of blocking highs and manmade “global warming”.
14. IN MOSCOW, JULY 2010 WAS MORE THAN 2 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS TEMPERATURE RECORD, AND TEMPERATURE ON 29 JULY WAS 38.2 C°.
And the lowest-ever temperatures have been measured in several British and US locations in the past 12 months. Cherry-picking individual extreme-weather events that point in one direction only, when there are thousands of such events that also point in another direction, is neither sound science nor sound journalism.
15. THE HEATWAVE AND FOREST FIRES IN CENTRAL RUSSIA KILLED AT LEAST 56,000, MAKING IT THE WORST NATURAL DISASTER IN RUSSIA’S HISTORY.
More cherry-picking, and the notion that the forest fires were the worst natural disaster in Russia’s history is questionable. Intense cold – such as when General January and General February defeated Corporal Hitler at the gates of Stalingrad in 1941 – has many times killed hundreds of thousands in Russia.
16. IN PAKISTAN, 1769 WERE KILLED IN THE COUNTRY’S WORST-EVER FLOODS.
In fact, the floods were not the worst ever: merely the worst since 1980. The region has long been prone to flooding, and has flooded catastrophically at infrequent intervals when a blocking high combined with unusually strong runoff of snow from the Himalayas swells the numerous rivers of the region (Punjab, or panj-aub, means “five rivers”). The flooding was not caused by manmade “global warming” but by a blocking high.
17. THE HURRICANE SEASON IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC WAS ONE OF THE MOST SEVERE IN THE LAST CENTURY.
In fact, Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University, who maintains the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes round the world, says that the index is at its least value in the past 30 years, and close to its least value in 50 years. For 150 years the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has shown no trend at all: this is a long and reliable record, because one does not require complex instrumentation to know that one has been struck by a hurricane.
18. EVEN CAUTIOUS SCIENTISTS TEND TO SAY WE CAN BLAME MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE.
Cautious scientists say no such thing. Even the excitable and exaggeration-prone IPCC has repeatedly stated that individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to manmade “global warming”, and it would be particularly incautious of any scientist to blame the blocking highs that caused nearly all of the weather-related damage in 2010 on us when these are long-established, naturally-occurring phenomena.
19. CLIMATE CHANGE HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE 20% DECLINE IN RAINFALL IN PARTS OF SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS.
Climate change began 4,567 million years ago, on that Thursday when the Earth first formed (as Prof. Plimer puts it). The question is whether manmade climate change has contributed to the drought. Interestingly, there has been very heavy rainfall in previously drought-ridden parts of southern Australia in each of the last two years. Australia has a desert climate: it is no surprise, therefore, that periods of drought – sometimes prolonged – will occur. One of the longest records of drought and flood we have is the Nilometer, dating back 5000 years. Periods of drought far more savage than anything seen in modern times were frequent occurrences, and entire regions of Egypt became uninhabitable as a result. A 20% decline in rainfall in a single region, therefore, cannot be safely attributed to anything other than the natural variability of the climate.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
There is no such evidence. As the IPCC has repeatedly said, ascribing individual, local extreme-weather events to “global warming” is impermissible.
21. THERE HAS BEEN A SUCCESSION OF EXTRAORDINARY HEATWAVES, WITH BIG JUMPS IN RECORD TEMPERATURES, STARTING IN EUROPE IN 2003 AND CONTINUING ALL AROUND THE WORLD, CULMINATING IN RUSSIA LAST YEAR. MORE THAN 17 COUNTRIES BROKE THEIR MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE RECORDS IN 2010, AND “YOU REALLY HAVE TO STRAIN CREDIBILITY TO SAY IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE.”
The heatwave in Europe in 2003 is known to have been caused by a blocking high similar to those which gave Russia its record high temperatures in 2010 and kept the monsoon fixed over Pakistan for long enough to cause catastrophic flooding. You really have to stretch credibility to say it has anything to do with manmade “global warming”. Though that heatwave may have killed 35,000 right across Europe, a three-day cold snap in Britain the previous year had killed 21,000 just in one country. The net effect of warmer worldwide weather, therefore, is to reduce deaths, not to increase them. That is why periods such as the Holocene Climate Optimum, when temperatures were 3 C° warmer than the present for most of the time between 6000 and 8000 years ago, are called “optima”: warmer weather is better for most Earth species – including Man – than colder weather.
22. FOR 20 YEARS MORE HOT-WEATHER THAN COLD-WEATHER TEMPERATURE RECORDS HAVE BEEN SET.
This is merely another way of saying that temperatures today are generally higher than they were 20 years ago. Since there has been some warming, more hot-weather than cold-weather records have been set. Not exactly surprising, and not exactly alarming either: for the mere fact of warming tells us nothing about the cause of the warming, particularly when the rate of warming in recent decades has been no greater than what has been seen in two previous quarter-century periods over the past 160 years.
23. EVEN IF GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS WERE TO STABILIZE AT LITTLE MORE THAN TODAY’S LEVELS, 2 C° OF FURTHER WARMING WILL OCCUR – FOUR TIMES THE INCREASE OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.
This value of 2 C° – like too many others in this regrettably fictitious article – appears to have been plucked out of thin air. Let us do the math. We can ignore all Man’s influences on the climate except CO2 because, up to now, they have been self-canceling, as the table of “radiative forcings” in the IPCC’s most recent quinquennial Assessment Report shows. In 1750, before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 was 278 ppmv. Now it is 390 ppmv. Taking the multi-model mean central estimate from Box 10.2 on p.798 of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, plus or minus one standard deviation, we can derive the following simple equation for the total amount of warming to be expected in 1000 years’
time, when the climate has fully settled to equilibrium after the perturbation that our carbon emissions to date are thought to have caused:
ΔTequ = (4.7 ± 1) ln(390/278) F°
Let us generously go one standard deviation above the central estimate: thus, a high-end estimate of the total equilibrium warming the IPCC would expect as a result of our CO2 emissions since 1750 is 5.7 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration in the 260-year period: i.e. 1.9 C°. Even this total since 1750 to the present is below the 2 C° Mr. Setekee says is lurking in the pipeline.
Now, to pretend that manmade “global warming” is a problem as big as the IPCC says it is, and that there will be more warming in the pipeline even if we freeze our emissions at today’s levels, we have to pretend that all of the observed warming since 1750 – i.e. about 1.2 C° – was our fault. So we deduct that 1.2 C° from the 1.9 C° equilibrium warming. Just 0.7 C° of warmer weather is still to come, at equilibrium.
However, various climate extremists have published papers saying that equilibrium warming will not occur for 1000 years (or even, in a particularly fatuous recent paper, 3000 years). The IPCC itself only expects about 57% of equilibrium warming to occur by 2100: the rest will take so long to arrive that even our children’s children will not be around to notice, and the residual warming will happen so gradually that everyone and everything will have plenty of time to adjust.
Bottom line, then: by 2100 we can expect not 2 C° of further “global warming” as a result of our emissions so far, but 0.4 C° at most. The truth, as ever in the climate debate, is a great deal less thrilling than the lie.
24. ADAPTATION TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF “GLOBAL WARMING” WILL GET MORE DIFFICULT THE LONGER WE DELAY.
This assertion, too, has no scientific basis whatsoever. The costs of adaptation are chiefly an economic rather than a climatological question. Every serious economic analysis (I exclude the discredited propaganda exercise of Stern, with its absurd near-zero discount rate and its rate of “global warming” well in excess of the IPCC’s most extreme projections) has demonstrated that the costs of waiting and adapting to any adverse consequences that may arise from “global warming”, even if per impossibile that warming were to occur at the rapid rate imagined by the IPCC but not yet seen in the instrumental temperature record, would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective than any Canute-like attempt to prevent any further “global warming” by taxing and regulating CO2 emissions. It follows that adaptation to the consequences of “global warming” will get easier and cheaper the longer we wait: for then we will only have to adapt to the probably few and minor consequences that will eventually occur, and not until they occur, and only where and to the extent that they occur.
==================================================
A PDF version of this document is available here
izen says:
January 9, 2011 at 10:48 pm
@ur momisugly – savethesharks says:
“Nils-Axel Morner is one of the premier if not THE premier sea-level experts on the planet.”
This statement is almost the inverse of reality. He is a joke in the scientific community for his views ungrounded in any data,
But…, this is the argument he has with AGWScience, that it doesn’t use real data, but computer models. The reason the Met can’t get a grip on the weather, or the effect of the volcanic ash from Iceland and grounded all flights. AGWScience isn’t actually rooted in real science which still insists on looking at what’s actually happening.
The worst aspect of the AGWScience imagination fraud, is as he pointed out in his letter to the governor of the Maldives, that it creates a climate of fear for the people where none exists.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/20/maldives-president-all-wet-on-sea-level.aspx
This man has spent his working life actually measuring sea-levels, before all the hype from AGW began messing with it, if you’d rather rely on AGW science which chooses to ignore real information for which it substitutes skewed computer models that’s entirely up to you, but to force such an opinion on the people who are actually affected by this kind of misinformation is doing them a great disservice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
What I think particularly sad for those promoting such deliberate lies coming from selfish interests of others, is that the wealth of knowledge we do have about the way our world works, such as land rebounding at the start of the Holocene after the ice covering melted and raised sea levels c350 ft and the way coral atolls are formed and our links with our past through recorded history and archeology and so on, are still an unexplored territory. Massive sea-level rises have been part of man’s immediate and long term history and because we now understand this we can make sense of all kinds of things associated with it such as being able to answer questions like ‘why does Ireland have fewer animal species than England?’
Real science doesn’t need to keep re-adjusting ‘data’ to fit a theory.
@-Myrrh says:
“Geology is kind of record writ in stone,
Among those mentioned is India where archeology ongoing, but importantly where there are actual written records of great antiquity by which such great changes in sea level rise can be gleaned and compared”
Such local geology and written records only indicate local changes, NOT global sea level and represent shifts in land level rather than sea level.
The Page you link to from Watts about past sea level rise has a graph that shows quite clearly that after the rapid rise at the end of the glacial period there is little indication of sea level rise since around 6000 years before the present.
This is confirmed by early written records. Chinese and Summerian records report the time and location of solar and lunar eclipses. These constrain the rate at which tidal slowing of the Earths’ rotation has occurred. This slowing is closely related to the sea level, if sea level had been rising at a foot per century since 6000 BPE the difference in sea level would have altered the tidal slowing and the eclipse dates would not match.
The historical reports of flooding or inundation are local. The eclipse data indicate global sea level and are unequivical. There has been no significant change in sea level for around 6000 years until the last century.
Sou:
What ‘sweet Melbourne drizzle’? I lived there a total of 16 years plus quite a few more recent visits. I’ve never remembered ‘Sweet Melbourne drizzle’….just a highly variable climate interspersed with torrential downpours. The climate left me wishing to be back in England with ‘Sweet English drizzle’.
izen – land movements haven’t stopped since the last great melt, which was local to the local people of the time, happening on a global scale…
Southhampton is still sinking into the sea and Scotland is still rising, from this real global warming effect which had nothing to do with us or CO2.
http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/the-national-academy-of-sciences-forecasts-sea-level-rise-of-22-mmyr/
The reason this con has been so successful is because it is so huge. It’s difficult to believe that something promoted by so many people world-wide could possibly be a lie. My first delve into this argument brought out my first objection, that AGW kept going on and on and on about the last hundred years. Of course it’s got warmer since the little Ice Age. If you’re going to take your temperature measurements from the end of an extreme cold event that’s what you’ll get as we come into a warm cycle after it. That’s why they created the Hockey Stick, to hide the MWP and LIA. Since it has been shown conclusively that these same people fiddled data and even went so far as to go to places as New Zealand to manipulate their temperature records, why on earth would you trust them?
Real scientists do their best to put real data into their computers to analyse for possible outcomes. In the real world where the workings of real machines depend on such veracity it becomes obvious pretty quickly if the data are wrong. Yet somehow in AGWScience, people can put into their models whatever they want, and as long as the scare story is big enough their funding keeps coming.
Real data show that our Holocene is coming to an end if the same pattern of the last 600,000 years or so is anything to go by, there are rises into higher and dips into lower temperatures during the last 10,000 years, but the trend is downward. If you really want something to worry about, at least worry about something that could really be a real problem for us.
Monckton is as sloppy as his opponents in his research. I have no idea what his source is for saying the floods in Pakistan were only the worst since 1980, but I suspect that he is here misreporting the widely-disseminated media statement “worst flood in eighty years”, referring to the 1929 floods. But apparently even that info is wrong, at least a source i found at my first Google attempt (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/pakistan-denies-graft-worsened-floods/story-e6frg6so-1225903148901) says the following: “That 1929 flood discharged 250,000 cubic metres per second (cusec) [a cusec is one cubic foot per second you mean cumec surely . . mod] of water into the river systems. This month’s discharge exceeded 440,000 [cumecs].”
Some of the points made by Monkton have been refuted by Steketee in a recent post on the Australian’s web site.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
Monkton has a record of distortions and misrepresentations which should make anyone skeptical of anything he says.
Mike Steketee’s response to Christopher Monckton
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
Seems a fair reply.
On #20 what made the bush fires worse was that “environmentalists” ignorant of the fact that natural fires are part of the eco-system had, for many years, prevented the burning off or other removal of brushwood. Hence when the fire inevitably came it was far more irresistable than necessary & many people unnecessarily died.
So not only a lie but a cynical abuse of a tragedy caused by the se eco-fascists.
We must accept that that claim & so many others here represent the very highest standard of honesty to which Steketee & indeed any other “environmentalist” unwilling to openly dissociate themselves from it, aspires.
They remain lies which no remotely honest person or movement could maintain.
Now we have a La Nina and colder sea temperatures, will the seas start absorbing more CO2 and decrease the atmospheric CO2 concentrations?
.
There are so many errors in Monckton’s article that it is hard to know where to start. Here is one egregious example.
“6. MOST SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT DOUBLING THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS LIKELY TO LEAD TO WARMING OF 2-3 C°.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling.”
I wonder what other method Monckton can suggest to make predictions besides “mere modelling”.
” The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft,
or satellites.”
The tropical hot spot is predicted by basic physics of weather and climate, anytime the tropical oceans warm due to the lapse rate of warm moist air. It is not exclusively a property of warming created by Greenhouse gases. The past impression that the upper troposphere has not warmed is a result of equipment problems with the balloons and satellite data analysis problems. Both the satellite and balloon have been corrected and the warming of the upper atmosphere has been found. [ you need to provide proof rather than a simple declaration . . . mod]
“Also, the models predict that every Celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1-3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes.”
I am not familiar with the papers that say evaporation should increase by 1-3%.
In fact simple physics says that a 1C increase in temperature results in a 6% increase in moisture content, based on the water vapor pressure curve, which should increase the greenhouse effect according to the models. In fact this 6% has been observed by satellite measurements in agreement with the models.
If Monckton doesn’t know these basic well known items, he should not be listened to on the subject of climate at all.
Neil Craig says:
January 10, 2011 at 9:24 am
“On #20 what made the bush fires worse was that “environmentalists” ignorant of the fact that natural fires are part of the eco-system had, for many years, prevented the burning off or other removal of brushwood. Hence when the fire inevitably came it was far more irresistable than necessary & many people unnecessarily died.
So not only a lie but a cynical abuse of a tragedy caused by the se eco-fascists.
We must accept that that claim & so many others here represent the very highest standard of honesty to which Steketee & indeed any other “environmentalist” unwilling to openly dissociate themselves from it, aspires.
They remain lies which no remotely honest person or movement could maintain.”
I haven’t found any evidence that opposition to clearing of brush was implicated in the incidence of multiple bush fires in the neighborhood of Melbourne in Feb of 2009. There were multiple fires due to drought and arson, some in forested areas and some in grasslands. Here is an exhaustive account. No word of clearing of brush. Naturally occurring and human set brush fires are an old story in Australia, but with increasing drought and temperatures in recent times they are becoming more severe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of 7 February 2009, that date has since been referred to as Black Saturday
Steketee has replied to Monckton’s article:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
49 Contiguous States? Did he get his geography lesson from Obama? 😉
Myrrh says
“Real data show that our Holocene is coming to an end if the same pattern of the last 600,000 years or so is anything to go by, there are rises into higher and dips into lower temperatures during the last 10,000 years, but the trend is downward.”
Really: then how do you explain this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Nothing explains the current warming in such a short time frame except by the influence of man made actions.
“Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 8:04 pm”
It is rather unfortunate for you to use Wikipedia link for your science references.
[But if the Wikipedia data is accurate and adequate, then the Wikipedia data is acceptable and useful – but it must be checked as firmly as NASA’a/NSF/NSRDC/NOAA’s data … 8<) Robt]
Michael says:
“Nothing explains the current warming in such a short time frame except by the influence of man made actions.”
That, folks, is a classic example of an argumentum ad ignorantium: the fallacy that argues, “Because I can’t think of any other possible causes, then global warming must be due to human activity.”
Nonsense. There are other causes. The current temperature rise has happened repeatedly in the past, as this chart based on Phil Jones’ data clearly shows.
And current temperatures are right in the middle of normal for the Holocene.
Finally, there is no correlation between temeprature and CO2 – which follows temperature rises on millennium scale time frames.
Thus, Michael’s argument is simply baseless opinion; conjecture. Whatever effect CO2 has is minuscule and insignificant – except on agricultural production, which has risen substantially as a result of the addition to this essential trace gas.
Mike Steketee’s response to Christopher Monckton:
“That puts a bit of a dent in the argument that the world has been cooling since 1998.” In other words, warming did not end in 1998, as some argue.”
A closer look at Hadcrut3 reveals something interesting. (Although the year 2010 was very warm, the warmth was more due to the relatively strong El Nino at the start of the year rather than CO2.) But despite the warm 2010, according to Hadcrut3, the average anomaly for the last five years (2006 to 2010) was 0.42. However the average anomaly for the previous five years (2001 to 2005) was 0.46. This basically means it cooled off during the decade. An analysis of other data sets in a similar manner also shows this cooling trend.
The above is also totally consistent with Phil Jones comment in the February interview:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
C – Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.
“[But if the Wikipedia data is accurate and adequate, then the Wikipedia data is acceptable and useful – but it must be checked as firmly as NASA’a/NSF/NSRDC/NOAA’s data … 8<) Robt]"
Yes IF, and its a big IF. Wiki has been proven to be inaccurate plenty of times before, and not only in science. I will take any post with a link to Wikipedia with a pinch of salt.
““[But if the Wikipedia data is accurate and adequate, then the Wikipedia data is acceptable and useful- but it must be checked as firmly as …”
Thats funny, I don’t see anyone else providing a similar graph that plots data from multiple sources. You provide one cherry picked data set that vaguely fits your argument.
The Hadley data shows that the trend down was shorter and so the trend up at 1975 has begun at a higher point, so even though it is still .16/decade it is higher than the previous 2. Proof for climate change, thank you.
Similarly the co2 v temps data shows that as co2 has risen the downward trend has stopped at a higher point and the upward trend is longer, again suggestive of the effect of co2 on the temperature. Werner starts breaking up the decade to try to cherry pick a period like all climate denialists to fit their religious belief that man can do anything without consequence. You are not going to get smooth graphs their are seasonal, annual, decadel and longer natural variability cycles to contend with, such as the el nino which cannot excuse the longer trends as that happens cyclically.
Thanks for all the data the help proving climate change is appreciated.
Didn’t take long but the floods in Queensland, Australia, is being spun as proof of climate change. LMAO Trouble is, the floods were worse in 1974 and, at least in Brockhampton, higher in 1910.
“Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 10:13 pm”
Cheery picking huh? In the style of Mann, Hansen, Jones, Briffa etc etc etc…? Sorry, I like cherries, but I don’t pick them.
Hi Patrick
I think the point that is being missed is the amount of climate related disasters in such a short period of time. Obviously no one weather event is proof or disproof of climate change as you can often find worse in the historical record, the fact is that all these are happening in such a short space of time, and happening repeatedly in the case of those floods. Surely does it not make you pause and worry, just a bit?
Add to that 18 nations set record highs in 2010 and all the other records broken and talked about lately and I certainly get the uneasy feeling something is wrong. It makes sense when you look at the science, weather is just the movement of air dependent on many factors including the difference in temp between the land, ocean and atmosphere. As temp changes the weather shifts and becomes more extreme, add to that the increase of moisture in the atmosphere has by 4% due to the warming and you have a recipe for concern. Please think about this more critically as we need to do something.
“Michael says:
January 11, 2011 at 1:04 am”
Really? The problem with “historical records”, in terms of the modern, computer generated, era, is that thay are all “adjusted”, or “corrected”.
It appears there is nothing more extreme than what is in the minds of climate scientists, and more worrying, climate modellers.
Questions for you. Which century and year did more people die and did more hurricanes strike land in the US? Is that proof of “climate change (CC)” (As no-one “denies” CC), or more importantly, which it appears in this instance that you are missing the point, proof of AGW? Also, can you prove C02 is driving, unstoppable and catastrophic, climate change given the carboniferous period?
Michael says:
January 10 2011 at 8:04 pm
<Really: then how do you explain this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Nothing explains the current warming in such a short time frame except by the influence of man made actions.
What warming? The main graph shows the decline from the extremely steep and rapid rise out of the last ice age glacial into the Holocene. This is when gazillion tons of ice melted as temperatures soared. This is real warming. Sea levels rose c350 feet. Where there was dry land before now there was the North Sea. From the maximum it’s been downhill ever since. Look at the Vostok graph – the same pattern repeated for hundreds of thousands of years. Like a heartbeat reading.
The only data going against that shown in these studies is that marked in the little box, which it says wasn’t used in main map, the Recent Proxies which have conclusively been found to have been designed to show a trend which isn’t there.
It doesn’t make clear which lines belong to which study, but the Reconstructed Temperature shows which is out of phase with the general drift of the Holocene, the Hockey Stick. Shown to be fraudulently constructed and maintained by political control.
In the blurb it says that our Holocene appears relatively stable compared with the previous, this is not saying that our Holocene had stable temperatures until the Hockey Stick proved we’re AGWarming.
If you look at the Vostok you’ll see an interesting difference at the beginning between previous and our Holocene. What should have been an even steeper rise at the beginning of our Holocene was stopped and then continued up to the great melt. This is when the Younger Drayas came and hit us, bringing us back into the ice age for a thousand years – when practically all the animals associated with previous hundreds of thousands of years, like the mamoth and sabre tooth tiger, from large to small were caught out in a mass extinction event. To date this is thought to be from a comet which hit somewhere in Canada. After this set back the temperature began to rise again but with the momentum of these regular rises now somewhat curtailed, not quite reaching the height expected. The drop since our high is still according to the general pattern of 100,000 year beat, going down, down, down, but with more hiccups on the way down.
Some speculate that because of this set back at the beginning, it might extend our Holocene a tad longer than expected before the recurring pattern of rapid decent back into ice for another 100,000 years.
There have been many studies now which now show how rapid these changes have been, but what is important to remember, is that these really dramatic global warming and global cooling events had NOTHING to do with US.
Not in the last million or so years and not now. And, NOTHING to do with CO2.
The only anomaly here is the artificially constructed temperatures designed to put the blame us and CO2.
There is your explanation. You are quite right, nothing else explains it except man’s influence by his actions in fiddling with temperature records.
You can continue to dance to their tune and believe all their excuses against all the evidence which shows how they manipulated and lied about this, or you can see for yourself that if it was really as they were saying, they wouldn’t have needed to fiddle and lie. The New Zealand manipulation is now known and beyond dispute, the government has had to back down from using the CRU’s Salinger constructed temperatures. What that also shows is how long in the making this con has been, no wonder by now it’s so difficult to untangle all the threads which have gone into making this man-made blanket of conman warming.
A malignant influence.
The models need adjusting to take into account factors in position or measuring instruments or patchy data or to take out influencing factors that don’t apply now etc, that is the problem with historical, and it is what computers are good at. What proof would be good enough for you? I certainly think that the body of evidence is more than enough, see here for a pictorial summary http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-many-lines-of-evidence-for-global-warming-in-a-single-graphic.html .
Most of the graphs of trends are quite clear as I explained above, the weight of evidence is enough to justify action.
A response from Steketee.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
The term “weasel words” springs to mind when reading his ineffective attempt to counter Monckton.