From Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in Durban, South Africa
It. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen. This is the ghastly secret that almost all the delegates here in Durban are desperate to conceal. Paper after paper, result after result, shows that the “global warming” we can expect from a doubling of CO2 concentration this century is just one Celsius degree or perhaps 2 Fahrenheit degrees, not the 3-4 C° once predicted by the UN’s well-tarnished climate panel.
When a journalist with South Africa’s national broadcaster interviewed me in the conference center, I told him the climate scam was just that – a scam. He replied that that was a merely emotional argument. So I gave him the following scientific argument, and explained to him that – simple though the truth is – it is just complicated enough that the IPCC and the global-warming profiteers have thus far gotten away with confusing the general public, and the average scientifically-illiterate politician, and, with respect, the average journalist.
Take all the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and keep the Earth’s albedo magically the same as today’s. How much cooler would it be? All are agreed that it would be around 33 Celsius degrees cooler. This is climate theory 101. So, how much radiative forcing causes the 33 C° warming that arises from the presence – as opposed to total absence – of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The answer – again straight out of the usual suspects’ playbook – is around 100 Watts per square meter.
Accordingly, the equilibrium system climate sensitivity parameter is 33/100 = 0.33 Celsius per Watt per square meter, after just about all temperature feedbacks have acted. Multiply this key parameter by 3.7 Watts per square meter, which is the IPCC’s own value for the radiative forcing from a doubling of CO2 concentration, and you get a warming of just 1.2 C° per CO2 doubling. But that is just one-third of the 3.3 C° the IPCC predicts.
This theoretical value of 1.2 C° is remarkably robust: it uses the IPCC’s own data and methods, applied to the entire history of the atmosphere, to demonstrate just how low climate sensitivity really is. When I pointed out this simple but powerful result to scientists recently at the Santa Fe climate conference organized by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of them said, “Ah, yes, but what evidence do you have that today’s climate exhibits the same sensitivity as the total system sensitivity?”
The answer is that the world is now in a position to verify this theoretical result by measurement. In August this year, Dr. Blasing of the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center in the United States quietly published a bombshell. Few noticed. His detailed estimate is that all the manmade greenhouse gases added to the air by us since 1750 have caused as much as 3 Watts per square meter of radiative forcing between them.
From this 3 Watts per square meter, in line with IPCC data, we must be fair and deduct 1 Watt per square meter to allow for manmade climate influences that cause cooling, such as soot and other particulates that act as helpful little parasols shading us from the Sun and keeping us cooler than we should otherwise be.
How much warming did this manmade net 2 Watts per square meter of forcing cause? Around 0.8 Celsius of warming has occurred since 1750, of which – if the IPCC is right – 50-100% was attributable to us. So the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter since 1750 (again, most of the temperature feedbacks that the IPCC wrongly imagines will amplify warming hugely will have acted by now) is 0.2-0.4 Celsius per Watt per square meter.
Multiply that key parameter by 3.7 and the warming we can expect from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration is just 0.75-1.5 Celsius. Those estimates neatly bracket the equilibrium system sensitivity of 1.2 C° that we calculated earlier by well-established theory.
So the sensitivity of the climate over the most recent quarter of the millennium is very much the same as the sensitivity of the climate throughout the past 4.5 billion years – at around one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate. Frankly, one Celsius degree of warming this century will simply not be worth worrying about. It will do far more good than harm. Not a cent should be spent trying to prevent it.
As President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic pointed out at a recent climate conference in Cambridge, if we leave less wealth to our successors because we have wasted trillions on the non-problem of global warming, we harm future generations by denying them the full inheritance they would otherwise have received.
But don’t expect any of the delegates here to get the point. They are making far too much money out of the climate scam –at taxpayers’ expense – to want to do anything other than recite that The Science Is Settled. As the West goes bust, drowned under the sheer cost of the ever-expanding State, the UN, the IPCC, the UNFCCC, the UNEP and the WMO are luxuries we can no longer afford and will no longer pay for. Time to shut them all down and make their self-serving, rent-seeking bureaucrats go out into the real world and do a proper job.
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@KR you wrote “And don’t forget Monckton’s bad argument – 33C with forcings and feedbacks, 1.2C with a forcing from doubling CO2, and completely ignoring feedbacks on that.” and further “The 3.3C per doubling estimate is with feedbacks. Monckton acknowledges feedbacks in the 33C total greenhouse effect, but completely ignores them when claiming climate sensitivity is 1.2C/doubling – he’s claiming zero feedbacks.” Again, it seems to me you are missing the point: The climate is not directly sensitive to CO2 increases. It is directly sensitive to Watts/square meter increases. The argument is that an increase of CO2 concentration will cause an increase in the number of Watts/square meter which will be incident on the surface which will in turn cause an increase in the average temperature of the climate system. Monckton is arguing that since the 1.2C figure includes the water vapour feedback effect over the present range of 33C, it will also include the water vapour feedback effect over the additional 3.7 Watts/square meter which will be caused by a doubling of CO2. Its not the “doubling of CO2” which is important but the increase in downward flux of energy by the amount of 3.7 Watts/square meter which is important. Monckton is saying that regardless of the reason why there is an increase in wattage, the climate will respond to that increase by increasing its temperature by 1.2C for every additional 3.7 Watts/square meter of energy input. You could cause that increase with CO2 or with Methane or with mirrors out in space reflecting additional sunlight onto the earth – it doesn’t matter on Monckton’s argument because the feedback from water vapour is already incorporated into that 1.2C figure, if I understand his argument correctly.
At my comment at 2:56pm it seems my link to a chart titled wavelengths didn’t quite work.
the link is HERE
wavelengths
I did some ‘back of the envelope’ calculations a few days ago: Current CO2 is about 398 PPM. At 4%, humans contribut about 15.8 PPM of that total. Man made doubling of CO2 (and I haven’t seen any eco-type arguing that increasing CO2 is caused by anything other than humans) postulates that human kind go from emitting 15.8 PPM to 413.8 PPM. I think the bigger question might be: Is there enough fossil fuel around for humans to increase their usage by that much?
OUR children, yes, but not THEIR children. Who is more important, you or them? Why, them, of course! We must sacrifice our children’s future so that theirs will be a much richer future. We can’t have the families of well educated progressives actually having to work for a living, can we? That would be just horrible. They might get a blister or something at some point and have to go to a doctor.
I noted that idea a couple of weeks ago. If we have burned half the fossil fuel on earth, we can’t possibly add any more than we have already added. That would be the absolute limit.
Can’t be a problem with the hypothesis, must be a problem with the data. Satellite data can’t find it, radiosonde data can’t find it, nothing can find it. So it must be hiding.
Climate Theory 101 say that the Earth’s actual average surface temperature is about 288 K (14 °C). I always had a problem with that. Is that supposed to mean the actual surface or do we need to think of average surface temperature as that region of the earth’s surface whose temperatures are influenced by conditions at the actual surface. Don’t we need to take into account ground and water temperatures? If we do need to take into account deep ocean temperatures you can probably cut that average surface temperature down to 10°C because most of the ocean at depth is close to 0°C. Rock temperatures under continents at oceanic depths on the other hand are pretty hot due to the earth’s internal warmth. I think it’s understood that the extreme cold of the deep ocean comes from cold water in polar regions sinking from the surface. If this cold comes from the surface I would argue that deep ocean temperatures need to be taken into account when considering what the earth’s average surface temperature is.
Joel Shore says:
December 5, 2011 at 4:39 pm
“Just because Monckton claims that the calculations include the feedbacks, it doesn’t mean that it does so correctly. In particular, in terms of water vapor: He is considering water vapor to be a forcing, not a feedback. See my comment here for further detail: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/05/monckton-on-sensitivity-training-at-durban/#comment-819743”
Perhaps you can provide me a link to some evidence that suggests that even when the planet was at its coldest i.e. the “snowball Earth”, water vapor ever came close to disappearing from the atmosphere.
crosspatch says:
Take it up with Lindzen: He points out that the prediction of tropical tropospheric amplification comes from an extremely basic piece of physics (the fact that the temperatures in the tropics closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate) that he does not think is likely to be wrong.
Sorry, folks, can’t resist:
Could the FACT that temperatures are going DOWN (instead of UP), when OCO emissions are going UP somehow demonstrate that the notion of an “atmospheric greenhouse effect” is pure nonsense? Is it remotely possible, you consensus skeptics??
ps: there are other facts that suggest the same thing, not the least of which is that there is STILL no empirical evidence of some “radiation-induced greenhouse effect.”
Crosspatch – I remember now that someone else also brought up the issue. But it’s important enough to repeat. The idea that mankind can double the amount of CO2 in the air is absurd and it needs to be repeated.
JT – The issue (and misrepresentation by Monckton) is that the 33C he mentioned is defined as GHG forcings plus feedbacks. Not just forcings.
Forcings include non-precipitable gases such as CO2, methane, ozone, etc. Water vapor, which changes concentration over a period of maybe 8-10 days from changes in temperature, is a feedback. Albedo, glaciation, etc., are not considered here, as per Monckton.
Now if a forcing (CO2, for example) changes, then the total climate response will also include feedback. Which Monckton flatly does not include, making his argument nonsense. He doesn’t incorporate it at all, and from this mis-representation he tries to claim climate sensitivity is extremely low.
Bad rhetorician – no donut.
Tony B(another one) says:
December 5, 2011 at 4:32 pm
Do you really not understand the consequences of a system with positive feedbacks, whose effects outweigh negative feedbacks?
If things were so simple, the whole controversy would have gone the way of the dinosaur long ago. The key point is, as you say “whose effects outweigh negative feedbacks”. The primary negative feedback is the T^4 radiation which maintains the planet’s cool by radiation back into space. It is well nigh impossible to overcome such a large nonlinear feedback. Sooner or later, it’s going to dominate.
So, what is hypothesized is a positive feedback embedded within a more significant negative feedback loop. In such a case, the system does not go unstable, but there is amplification.
There is one hitch, however: such a positive feedback would not only amplify, but would also induce erratic behavior. I suspect such erratic behavior could be observed in the climate models, but they have arbitrarily fudged the parameters to a set which gives them the behavior they want. And, having no understanding of the concept of observability in feedback systems, they assume that if they can vaguely match actual performance with their models, their models must be correct. Which, of course, is nonsense to anyone who knows about the subject.
crosspatch says:
Rhoda Ramirez says:
Ah…You do realize, I hope, that scientists have done this calculation and do not agree with you. There is an awful lot of carbon stored in coal reserves, and quite a bit also available in tar sands and other less conventional sources.
Dave Wendt says:
I never claimed that all of it disappears from the atmosphere, but given the strong dependence of the vapor pressure on temperature, quite a bit of it does.
The IPCC cannot be right about this:
Most of the man-made CO2 was made after 1950.
Most or all of the warming since 1750 occurred well before 1950, in fact, much of it before 1900.
Therefore most of the warmth cannot have been caused by man-made CO2.
Unless it can be shown that most of the difference in temperature between now and 1750 occurred post 1950, than most of the rise in temperature between then and now must be caused by something other than man-made CO2.
Of course, I realize that you are talking to the usual Durban conference goer/journalist type. They claim to be on the side of science, while knowing almost nothing about it. Thus they are completely clueless in regards to past events such as the Little Ice Age, they don’t really even know much about radiative forcing. Thus, they may say they “believe” in climate change (and since when did belief have anything to do with it?) while knowing almost nothing about it. I realize that you are merely using what they have heard, and think they understand, and showing them that even if that is true, the rise in temperatures are now seen to be too small to worry about. However, after you use your argument, you might then use my argument, and show them that the 1C rise is also far to large, since something other than CO2 caused most of the rise in temperature between 1750 and 1950. Basically, you first use their own argument to tear down their argument, by showing that, using their own logic and figures, it cannot be true, and then show them real world data of the change in temperature between 1750 and 1950 to show them that even this is far to much, and thus prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that warming since 1750 cannot have been caused by man-made CO2. Basically, first tear down their belief, then replace it with another, otherwise they will simply bring the old belief back in to fill up the vacuum.
In other words, don’t just hit them with one punch, hit them with the ‘ol one-two.
Remember, they have been subjected to, and will continue to be subjected to, a ceaseless stream of warmist propaganda. You only get one shot, make it count. Otherwise, what you said will be lost and forgotten in the ceaseless chatter of continued propaganda from everyone around them.
A second thing is that you may believe that they believe in climate change intellectually, that is, they rationally decided that it was true. Wrong. They don’t think like that, they Buh-Leeeeve, they have faith, it is emotional. They hear The Great Leader tell them how they to can help “save the world” and this feels emotionally good to them, they feel that they are part of something good and useful, and they do not want to give up that feeling. You may not understand that because you decide whether something is true or false based on reason, they do not. They were not raised that way, they never grew up learning (by spanking) that actions have consequences, and that they need to control their passions and desires and subordinate them to reason (“I want to do it, but if I do it, I will get a spanking”). Thus, the way they think is almost alien to you. If you understand the way they think, it will be easier to convince them. You have taken from them their holy crusade to save the world, which feels good to them, they want that feeling back. You can give them another crusade to replace the one you took away from them, the crusade to help the poor of the world by saving the economy of the world from the collapse that must happen if we try to implement the controls that the climate crusaders demand. You can use their own words, and paint the climate dictators (which is what they are) as “the man” and use phrases like “fight the power”. All you need do is point out that they must use force on almost everyone if they are to achieve this draconian level of control, and those phrases instantly become the only appropriate ones. If they are a journalist, you can use the phrase “speak the truth to power”, painting the IPCC as “the power”, and it will hit home to them, as that is probably why they wanted to become a journalist in the first place. Now they have a new crusade, a new belief to feel good about, that heady feeling of “fight the power”, only this time, it is about something that is both true and actually useful.
Also, since these people are often not too much into logic or reason, which are verbal, take to carrying around some pictures, say, small reproductions of the many paintings made during the Little Ice Age which center on ice and snow. That will involve their right brain, the seat of their emotions, they may not remember (or understand) reason, but emotional pictures they will remember and understand.
If you don’t completely destroy, even crush, their old belief, and then replace it with a new belief, one that feels good, they will just return right back to their old belief the minute you are gone. They will hear the old propaganda, and it will stir the old good feelings in them again, and they will gravitate right back to it.
But, but, but he declares it as truth with such certainty and panache … it must be true.
Hahaha. A true showman … and charlatan, as always. This is so typically Monckton.
But is there as much as we have already burned going back 3000 years when we first started using it to smelt copper in China? Think about all the coal and oil that has been extracted and burned going back to at least the 1700’s. The Romans were mining coal in every major coal field in England (according to Wikipedia). China’s annual coal consumption is about 3.5 times that of the US and still climbing. I am not convinced that we will produce as much CO2 as we already have.
But now that I think about it, it doesn’t really matter because so far nobody has shown any adverse impact from atmospheric CO2 so even having the discussion and worrying about it is rather pointless.
There is an interesting powerpoint from a seminar I attended in 09 from James Murry at U Washington. It is updated and at this location: http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/faculty/jmurray/jmurray.html “Peak Oil Talk – Smith School Oct 2011”. I haven’t looked at the updates vs what was said in 09, but I recall the key elements were that none of the 40 or so CO2 emissions scenarios were supply limited and that the IPCC was using older and perhaps exaggerated resource estimates. Slide 54 in this ppt displays atmospheric CO2 concentration with time peaking at 460ppm in 2100 (MAGICC, Tom Wigley at NCAR) using updated fossil fuel estimates. Worth a look.
Jack Greer says:
“Hahaha. A true showman … and charlatan, as always. This is so typically Monckton.”
Lord Monckton wins all his debates with climate alarmists, using facts and reason. His recent win was at Oxford, and your insulting presumption that Oxford students and faculty are emotion driven fools suckered into siding with the Viscount denigrates Oxford.
Why not just admit to the obvious fact that Lord Monckton is a better man than you, and that he is right and you are wrong?
So, Smokey do you buy Monkton’s 1.2C number?
Joel Shore says:
December 5, 2011 at 7:01 pm
“I never claimed that all of it disappears from the atmosphere, but given the strong dependence of the vapor pressure on temperature, quite a bit of it does.”
In the comment of yours you referenced you wrote this
“To look at it another way: What the numerical modeling study of Lacis et al. ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.abstract? ) showed is that, in the climate models, if you remove all the non-condensable greenhouse gases from the atmosphere then the cooling causes most of the water vapor to be removed too and you get a temperature drop not much different from 33 K….perhaps even a bit more if I recall. (There is no reason why it has to be exactly 33 K because you aren’t necessarily keeping the albedo from clouds and ice the same in this simulation and you are not getting rid of the greenhouse effect due to clouds [or whatever greenhouse effect remains due to water vapor].) So, you just have to remove the non-condensable greenhouse gases and then you get approximately the full temperature drop due to losing the greenhouse effect as a consequence.”
It seems to me that we have a large but rather poorly constrained experiment to test this conjecture operating on the planet right now at the South Pole. The nonH2O GHGs haven’t been removed but the average winter temperatures there are at about 90 degrees below the value suggested for the GHG aided GAT, much colder than what would result from removing them, disregarding for the moment that removing the CO2 would make the question moot as there would no one or nothing here to ask the question or observe the result. Taking those gases out of the calculation might drop the GAT as much as 8-9K, although my guess would be more in 3-5K range. Winter temps at the Pole are 40-50 degrees below the S/B blackbody baseline and although the folks at wikipedia suggest the humidity is near zero, the folks who did this work suggest otherwise
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI3525.1
particularly this graph
http://tinyurl.com/PWV-at-The-Pole
If going to -60-(-80)C can’t chase all the water out of the atmosphere, why would you possibly suspect that taking the average from 15C to 10C or 7C would accomplish the task?
The above paper is based on spectral analysis of downwelling longwave radiation at the Pole and one interesting thing that they suggest is that CO2 is responsible for fully a third of the DLR signal there, H2O gets the other 2/3rds, but this very likely makes the South Pole the one spot on Earth where its contribution to the GHE is at its maximum. It’s particularly interesting if you are aware of what the temps have been doing there over the last 40 or 50 years.
I agree completely with your comment. Lord Monckton understands this perfectly well. We are fortunate to have such a man speaking the real inconvenient truth at Durban. Who else is there, at Durban, who will speak of realism, empirical science and the scientific method? Who else will bring up the leaked emails? Who else will expose the propaganda for what it is? We all owe LM, a debt of gratitude, for attending and voicing our concerns.
KR is just trying to confuse the issue, but it’s very simplicity shines through such argument. GK
Many thanks to the commenters here, as always. Just a few answers to scientific points.
First, it is not difficult to calculate that the Earth’s characteristic-emission temperature is 255 K. That is the temperature that would obtain at the surface in the absence of any greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Since today’s surface temperature is 288 K, the presence as opposed to absence of all the greenhouse gases causes a warming of 33 K.
Next, I stated my assumption that both insolation and albedo are held constant for the purpose of this calculation precisely so as to confine the temperature change to that for which the presence of greenhouse gases is responsible. This is not an error, as some have suggested, but a standard method that seems to me to be appropriate.
As for feedbacks, I have surely explained quite clearly that the system equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter I have derived takes full account of the fact that, in the 4.5 billion years since the atmosphere first began to form, very nearly all feedbacks will have acted. That is why the parameter is the “equilibrium” parameter.
The value 100 Watts per square meter for the radiative forcing arising from the presence as opposed to the absence of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is within the interval 86-125 Watts per square meter for the top five greenhouse gases given in table 3 of Kiehl & Trenberth (1997). Those correspondents who say a much larger value should have been used are implying that climate sensitivity is considerably lower than the equilibrium 1.2 K or thereby that I have calculated.
A correspondent asks why I have not taken account of natural variability. This is because we are concerned here with the impact of greenhouse gases. My prediction, on the basis of a 1.2 K sensitivity per CO2 doubling, is that manmade warming will be about 1 K this century – not worth worrying about. If you have views on how natural variability may increase or reduce this, feel free – but that was not the purpose of my study.
Some have suggested that even if we waste money unproductively on making small and harmless global warming go away we shall still leave the same wealth to our descendants. That is to commit the common (or Communist) logical fallacy of ignoring what economists call the “opportunity loss” from the diversion of capital from useful to useless purposes.
Finally, I understand that someone called “Potholer” has produced some sneering videos about me. I have looked at a few minutes of one of these, which seems rather intellectually dishonest. The pothead takes me to task, inappropriately, for having said (correctly) that I had given advice to Margaret Thatcher on various scientific matters, including climate change, on the ground that “my supporters” had in his view mischaracterized the position by referring to me as her “science advisor”.
The potboiler also said that I had claimed in 2009 that global cooling since 2001 had been statistically significant, but that I had rebutted myself the following year by saying the cooling since 2001 had been insignificant. To 2009 the cooling had indeed been significant, but the rapid warming of 2010 meant that the trend from 2001-2010 was insignificant: both my statements, therefore, were correct, and they were not incompatible with one another.
I was disinclined to look any further at that drivel. Given the amount of time the pinhead seems to devote to such nonsense, one wonders who is paying him. Perhaps he is convincing the usual suspects, but on the little I have seen he is unlikely to convince anyone else.