By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Responses to my post of December 28 about climate sensitivity have been particularly interesting. This further posting answers some of the feedback.
My earlier posting explained how the textbooks establish that if albedo and insolation were held constant but all greenhouse gases were removed from the air the Earth’s surface temperature would be 255 K. Since today’s temperature is 288 K, the presence as opposed to absence of all the greenhouse gases – including H2O, CO2, CH4, N2O and stratospheric O3 – causes 33 K warming.
Kiehl and Trenberth say that the interval of total forcing from the five main greenhouse gases is 101[86, 125] Watts per square meter. Since just about all temperature feedbacks since the dawn of the Earth have acted by now, the post-feedback or equilibrium system climate sensitivity parameter is 33 K divided by the forcing interval – namely 0.33[0.27, 0.39] Kelvin per Watt per square meter.
Multiplying the system sensitivity parameter interval by any given radiative forcing yields the corresponding equilibrium temperature change. The IPCC takes the forcing from a doubling of CO2 concentration as 3.7 Watts per square meter, so the corresponding warming – the system climate sensitivity – is 1.2[1.0, 1.4] K, or about one-third of the IPCC’s 3.3[2.0, 4.5] K.
I also demonstrated that the officially-estimated 2 Watts per square meter of radiative forcings and consequent manmade temperature changes of 0.4-0.8 K since 1750 indicated a transient industrial-era sensitivity of 1.1[0.7, 1.5] K, very much in line with the independently-determined system sensitivity.
Accordingly. transient and equilibrium sensitivities are so close to one another that temperature feedbacks – additional forcings that arise purely because temperature has changed in response to initial or base forcings – are very likely to be net-zero.
Indeed, with net-zero feedbacks the IPCC’s transient-sensitivity parameter is 0.31 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, close to the 0.33 that I had derived as the system equilibrium or post-feedback parameter.
I concluded that climate sensitivity to the doubling of CO2 concentration expected this century is low enough to be harmless.
One regular troll – one can tell he is a troll by his silly hate-speech about how I “continue to fool yourself and others” – attempted to say that Kiehl and Trenberth’s 86-125 Watts per square meter of total forcing from the presence of the top five greenhouse gases included the feedbacks consequent upon the forcing, asserting, without evidence, that I (and by implication the two authors) was confusing forcings and feedbacks.
No: Kiehl and Trenberth are quite specific in their paper: “We calculate the longwave radiative forcing of a given gas by sequentially removing atmospheric absorbers from the radiation model. We perform these calculations for clear and cloudy sky conditions to illustrate the role of clouds to a given absorber for the total radiative forcing. Table 3 lists the individual contribution of each absorber to the total clear-sky [and cloudy-sky] radiative forcing.” Forcing, not feedback. Indeed, the word “feedback” does not occur even once in Kiehl & Trenberth’s paper.
In particular, the troll thought we were treating the water-vapor feedback as though it were a forcing. We were not, of course, but let us pretend for a moment that we were. If we now add CO2 to the atmospheric mix and disturb what the IPCC assumes to have been a prior climatic equilibrium, then by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation the space occupied by the atmosphere is capable of holding near-exponentially more water vapor as it warms. This – to the extent that it occurred – would indeed be a feedback.
However, as Paltridge et al. (2009) have demonstrated, it is not clear that the water vapor feedback is anything like as strongly positive as the IPCC would like us to believe. Below the mid-troposphere, additional water vapor makes very little difference because its principal absorption bands are largely saturated. Above it, the additional water vapor tends to subside harmlessly to lower altitudes, again making very little difference to temperature. The authors conclude that feedbacks are somewhat net-negative, a conclusion supported by measurements given in papers such as Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2010), Spencer & Braswell (2010, 2011), and Shaviv (2011).
It is also worth recalling that Solomon et al. (2009) say equilibrium will not be reached for up to 3000 years after we perturb the climate. If so, it is only the transient climate change (one-third of the IPCC’s ’quilibrium estimate) that will occur in our lifetime and in that of our grandchildren. Whichever way you stack it, manmade warming in our own era will be small and, therefore, harmless.
A true-believer at the recent Los Alamos quinquennial climate conference at Santa Fe asked me, in a horrified voice, whether I was really willing to allow our grandchildren to pay for the consequences of our folly in emitting so much CO2. Since the warming we shall cause will be small and may well prove to be beneficial, one hopes future generations will be grateful to us.
Besides, as President Klaus of the Czech Republic has wisely pointed out, if we damage our grandchildren’s inheritance by blowing it on useless windmills, mercury-filled light-bulbs, solar panels, and a gallimaufry of suchlike costly, wasteful, environment-destroying fashion statements, our heirs will certainly not thank us.
Mr. Wingo and others wonder whether it is appropriate to assume that the sum of various different fourth powers of temperature over the entire surface of the Earth will be equal to the fourth power of the global temperature as determined by the fundamental equation of radiative transfer. By zonal calculation on several hundred zones of equal height and hence of equal spherical-surface area, making due allowance for the solar azimuth angle applicable to each zone, I have determined that the equation does indeed provide a very-nearly-accurate mean surface temperature, varying from the sum of the zonal means by just 0.5 K in total. In mathematical terms, the Holder inequality is in this instance near-vanishingly small.
Dr. Nikolov, however, considers that the textbooks and the literature are wrong in this respect: but I have deliberately confined my analysis to textbook methods and “mainstream-science” data precisely so as to minimize the scope for any disagreement on the part of those who – until now – have gone along with the IPCC’s assertion that climate sensitivity is high enough to be dangerous. Deploying their own methods and drawing proper conclusions from them is more likely to lead them to rethink their position than attempting to reinvent the wheel.
Mr. Martin asks whether I’d be willing to apply my calculations to Venus. However, I do not share the view of Al Gore, Dr. Nikolov, or Mr. Huffman that Venus is likely to give us the answers we need about climate sensitivity on Earth. A brief critique of Mr. Huffman’s analysis of the Venusian atmospheric soup and its implications for climate sensitivity is at Jo Nova’s ever-fragrant and always-eloquent website.
Brian H asks whether Dr. Nikolov is right in his finding that, for several astronomical bodies [including Venus] all that matters in the determination of surface temperature is the mass of the atmospheric overburden. Since I am not yet content that Dr. Nikolov is right in concluding that the Earth’s characteristic-emission temperature is 100 K less than the 255 K given in the textbooks, I am disinclined to enquire further into his theory until this rather large discrepancy is resolved.
Rosco is surprised by the notion of dividing the incoming solar irradiance by 4 to determine the Wattage per square meter of the Earth’s surface. I have taken this textbook step because the Earth intercepts a disk-sized area of insolation, which must be distributed over the rotating spherical surface, and the ratio of the surface area of a disk to that of a sphere of equal radius is 1:4.
Other commenters have asked whether the fact that the characteristic-emission sphere has a greater surface area than the Earth makes a difference. No, it doesn’t, because the ratio of the surface areas of disk and sphere is 1:4 regardless of the radius and hence surface area of the sphere.
Rosco also cites Kiehl and Trenberth’s notion that the radiation absorbed and emitted at the Earth’s surface is 390 Watts per square meter. The two authors indicate, in effect, that they derived that value by multiplying the fourth power of the Earth’s mean surface temperature of 288 K by the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (0.0000000567 Watts per square meter per Kelvin to the fourth power).
If Kiehl & Trenberth were right to assume that a strict Stefan-Boltzmann relation holds at the surface in this way, then we might legitimately point out that the pre-feedback climate-sensitivity parameter – the first differential of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer at the above values for surface radiative flux and temperature – would be just 288/(390 x 4) = 0.18 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. If so, even if we were to assume the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of strongly net-positive feedbacks at 2.1 Watts per square meter per Kelvin the equilibrium climate sensitivity to a CO2 doubling would be 3.7 x 0.18 / (1 – 2.1 x 0.18) = 1.1 K. And where have we seen that value before?
In all this, of course, I do not warrant any of the IPCC’s or Kiehl and Trenberth’s or the textbooks’ methods or data or results as correct: that would be well above my pay-grade. However, as Mr. Fernley-Jones has correctly noticed, I am quite happy to demonstrate that if their methods and values are correct then climate sensitivity – whichever way one does the calculation – is about one-third of what they would like us to believe it is.
All the contributors – even the trolls – have greatly helped me in clarifying what is in essence a simple but not simpliste argument. To those who have wanted to complicate the argument in various ways, I say that, as the splendid Willis Eschenbach has pointed out before in this column, one should keep firmly in mind the distinction between first-order effects that definitely change the outcome, second-order effects that may or may not change it but won’t change it much, and third-order effects that definitely won’t change it enough to make a difference. One should ruthlessly exclude third-order effects, however superficially interesting.
Given that the IPCC seems to be exaggerating climate sensitivity threefold, only the largest first-order influences are going to make a significant difference to the calculation. And it is the official or textbook treatment of these influences that I have used throughout.
My New Year’s resolution is to write a short book about the climate question, in which the outcome of the discussions here will be presented. The book will say that climate sensitivity is low; that, even if it were as high as the IPCC wants us to think, it would be at least an order of magnitude cheaper to adapt to the consequences of any warming that may occur than to try, Canute-like, to prevent it; that there are multiple lines of evidence for systematic and connected corruption and fraud on the part of the surprisingly small clique of politically-motivated “scientists” who have fabricated and driven the now-failing climate scare; and that too many who ought to know better have looked the other way as their academic, scientific, political, or journalistic colleagues have perpetrated and perpetuated their shoddy frauds, because silence in the face of official mendacity is socially convenient, politically expedient, and, above all, financially profitable.
The final chapter will add that there is a real danger that the UN, using advisors from the European Union, will succeed in exploiting the fraudulent science peddled by the climate/environment axis as a Trojan horse to extinguish democracy in those countries which, unlike the nations of Europe, are still fortunate enough to have it; that the world’s freedom is consequently at immediate and grave risk from the vaunting ambition of a grasping, talent-free, scientifically-illiterate ruling elite of world-government wannabes everywhere; but that – as the recent history of the bureaucratic-centralist and now-failed EU has demonstrated – the power-mad adidacts are doomed, and they will be brought low by the ineluctable futility of their attempts to tinker with the laws of physics and of economics.
The army of light and truth, however few we be, will quietly triumph over the forces of darkness in the end: for, whether they like it or not, the unalterable truth cannot indefinitely be confused, concealed, or contradicted. We did not make the laws of science: therefore, it is beyond our power to repeal them.
My wife thinks CFLs are a waste of space as they fail to adequately light her reading of many great works of literature, philosophy and political theory.
Her greatest complaints come in the winter months when the old tungsten bulbs used to supplement our central heating as well as provide adequate lighting. Coincidently that is when the evenings are dark and cold and artificial light and heating is needed. In fact when it is difficult to read by CFLs she has a tendancy to watch more TV which uses far more watts and so contributes even more to cutting our heating bills although I’m sure it is not good for her mental health or the total CO2 content of the atmosphere.
I personally tell her that none of the mumbo jumbo about CFLs really matters and I have wisely invested in a bulk purchase of 60w and 100w tungsten bulbs. The TV will last years longer now it gets less use, so reducing the need for a replacement at massive CO2 deficit by one of those plasma jobbies that use oodles of electricity, her mental health is not at risk, she is happy, I have brownie points but my heating bill has increased.
I did consider solar panels but the sun doesn’t shine very effectively in the winter and in the summer we don’t use much electricity although the shadow cast by the the solar panels would keep our loft cooler. That would be economically efficient if I were to use an air conditioning system to keep my loft cool in the summer months , but since I am not insane I don’t do that.
Even the UK government has realised that giving massive tarrifs to UK users of solar panels is a bit naff even though it does continue the process of filtering money to the wealthier among us.
They should stick to more traditional methods of trickle up like giving 125% mortgages to people who can’t afford them, so raising house prices so the benefits of such rises flow to those who don’t need the money.
Funny things feedbacks, and feedbacks of feedbacks, as the man in the other place says “keep your eye on the pea.”
hey richardM- nice that some practial engineering physics is allowed these days..
any cooling system is improved by a better conducting fluid, eh?
increasing the heat capacity of the working fluid in any way also improves efficiency of heat transport.
for serious refrigeration, though, a phase change is the ticket.
If a block of ice is placed in a warm room, will the room cool slower or quicker? The Trenberths of this world, who believe that back radiation from CO2 in the troposphere can create heat on the surface or at least ‘slow down’ heat loss from the surface, tell us that the radiating ice block will help keep the room warmer for longer. The idea really is that dumb.
Lord Monckton, or anyone else for that matter:
If the Earth were wrapped in a thermally low conductivity blanket, the loss of heat from the interior would create a cozy 18*C (or so, by my estimates) place to sleep on the bedrock. If it weren’t for the oceans drawing the heat away, the bottom of the oceans would be hotter than that, as the thin oceanic crust makes the seafloor closer to the mantle’s magma than the prairie grasses are above the continental crust.
As I sit here at my keyboard typing, 6 meters below my fingertips it is 14*C, increasing to 36*C at 1500m and the PreCambrian surface. The only reason the PreCambrian stays 36*C is because all the heat bleeding up through the sedimentary cover is being replaced from within the PreCambrian, and the only reason 6m below me it remains 14*C is that the surface keeps losing all the heat it gains from the rocks below.
In a time where Trenberth wrings his hands about a “missing” 0.85 W/m2, this portion of the planetary energy cycle seems important. I don’t know what the energy flux is, but it is enough to bring some subglacial surfaces to melting. It is enough to power a home heating unit with 100m of piping 16m deep. Perhaps I don’t see where it is included in the TOA/Surface/Atmosphere/Oceanic energy partitioning.
Is the planetary loss of heat a) significant, or b) hidden within other factors? What is the flux?
Anyone out there with thoughts on this?
Great post Monckton.
I’m no scientist, and claim no skill at maths, but I do have Excel..! Plugging in -19c at 0ppm CO2, +14c at 280ppm, and +14.7c at 390ppm plots a very nice log curve, with the formula:
Temp=2.11.ln(CO2)+2.09
So for a doubling of CO2, plugging in 580 ppm CO2, gives a temp of 15.5c: a rise of a 1.5c. Slightly more than M’lord, but substantially less than the IPCC’s “super”computer.
Do I win a prize?
Monckton of Brenchley says:
I have given not only evidence but analogies to help people understand. I will repeat the analogy for the benefit of the readers in a subsequent comment.
It is irrelevant what words appear in their paper. What is relevant is that you need to understand how whether something is considered a “forcing” or a “feedback” depends on context. By considering the 85-125 W/m^2, you are by your own admission including the radiative effects of water vapor. However, the question is what would happen to water vapor if one removed all of the non-condensable greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (and hence decreased the forcing only by an amount equal to that for the non-condensable greenhouse gases). The answer is that the resulting cooling would result in much of the water vapor condensing out…and as a result you would lose much, if not most, of the radiative effects due to water vapor. It is clear to see that your calculation of the climate sensitivity is now in error because you have assumed that one has to take out the water vapor from the atmosphere in order to lose its radiative effect, whereas the actual fact is that you lose most of the radiative effect just by taking the non-condensable greenhouse gases out.
So, your calculation that you claimed was giving a climate sensitivity that includes the water vapor feedback is clearly seen not to be…It is assuming there is no water vapor feedback.
You can cherrypick a few papers that support your point-of-view on the feedbacks while ignoring the mountain of other papers that do not. However, even if you think the water vapor feedback is not important, it does not mean that you are allowed to do a calculation that ASSUMES it doesn’t exist and then use this to demonstrate this assumption. That is a circular argument.
What a silly argument! The correct way to look at things is to ask what percentage of the equilibrium is reached in a given amount of time, not to create a false dichotomy between the equilibrium and transient responses. And, it is also worth noting that nearly all of the IPCC projections show what the temperature will be in 2100, so they already have essentially ignored the longer term effects: The fact that the approach to equilibrium is fairly slow does not reduce the IPCC projections for temperature change by 2100; it merely means that these projections underestimate the eventual temperature change that will occur (even if greenhouse gas levels have completely stabilized by 2100).
Here is the analogy that makes it very clear how Monckton’s calculation of climate sensitivity is in error:
Suppose that Bill Gates makes an offer that for every dollar the public contributes to fight hunger, he’ll throw in a certain amount of money that he does not disclose. Now, let’s suppose that this program operates for one year: The public contributes a certain amount, Bill Gates does his matching and the total amount of money that goes to fight hunger is $100 million. Suppose that with this $100 million, 1 million people can be fed.
How much would the public have to contribute in order to feed 5 million hungry people the next year? What Monckton would say is the following: Since we have found it takes $100 million to feed 1 million people, it costs $100 to feed one person. Therefore, you should multiply the 5 million by the $100 and the conclusion is that the public has to contribute $500 million.
What I am arguing is that Monckton is ignoring the “Bill Gates” feedback. For example, let’s imagine that the actual fact is that Bill Gates is matching public contributions at a 4-to-1 match. This means the first year, of the $100 million dollars that was spent, $20 million came from the public and $80 million from Bill Gates’s match.
So, in fact, to feed 5 million people, the public only has to contribute $100 million because Bill Gates will throw in $400 million for a total of $500 million and hence 5 million people will be fed.
What Monckton seems to be thinking is that his calculation included the Bill Gates feedback because he calculated the result that it costs $100 per person to feed the poor using both the amount that the public had contributed ($20 million) and the amount from the Bill Gates feedback ($80 million). [In fact, he was not even able to separate them because he did not know how much Gates contributed vs. how much the public had.] However, by including the “Bill Gates feedback” as a “forcing” rather than a “feedback”, we see that his calculation fails miserably: the amount that it predicts the public must contribute is correct only if the Bill Gates feedback were completely absent.
Really, this “forcing” vs “feedback” stuff is not that hard to understand. The terms may seem unfamiliar to people, which is why mistakes such as Monckton’s can be made so easily. (Willis Eschenbach has made the same error.) But, I think if one works with analogies it becomes possible for anyone to understand it.
Neil said @ur momisugly December 30, 2011 at 1:55 pm
“@ur momisuglyWarren in Minnesota
@ur momisuglythepompousgit
Thanks for your replies. You’re both right. But WUWT is about “puzzling things in life,” so here’s one for you.
….
How did it come about that the meaning of “didactic” has changed to almost its opposite in just 83 years?”
Popular usage changes the meanings of words over time. That’s not much of an explanation; it’s merely an observation. The OED is particularly useful for tracing such shifts.
“Climate (from OED):
[… The meaning passed in Greek through the senses of ‘slope of ground, e.g. of a mountain range’, the supposed ‘slope or inclination of the earth and sky from the equator to the poles’, ‘the zone or region of the earth occupying a particular elevation on this slope, i.e. lying in the same parallel of latitude’, ‘a clime’, in which sense it was adopted in late L.]
A region considered with reference to its atmospheric conditions, or to its weather.
Condition (of a region or country) in relation to prevailing atmospheric phenomena, as temperature, dryness or humidity, wind, clearness or dullness of sky, etc., esp. as these affect human, animal, or vegetable life.”
None of these meanings capture what the warmists, MSM etc mean by climate…
Bob Fernley-Jones said @ur momisugly December 30, 2011 at 2:24 pm
“I’m curious to know how meaningful any calculation of the so-called average temperature of the moon is…”
Temperature is the measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles of a substance in Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE). Or at least it was when I studied physics these many long years ago. It’s far more likely that the moon is made of green cheese than it being in LTE.
TBH, I find Lord Monckton’s arguments no more persuasive than I do the IPCC’s.
The Earth’s climate is so complex and poorly understood that I need real world measurements that unequivocably support any theoretical explanation before I find that explanation persuasive.
Although in fairness, LM’s point is to undermine the IPCC’s arguments rather than present a competing (theoretical) explanation.
“Rosco is surprised by the notion of dividing the incoming solar irradiance by 4 to determine the Wattage per square meter of the Earth’s surface. I have taken this textbook step because the Earth intercepts a disk-sized area of insolation, which must be distributed over the rotating spherical surface, and the ratio of the surface area of a disk to that of a sphere of equal radius is 1:4.”
I am not surprised in the slightest by this method of calculating the so-called “effective” temperature of the Earth – what I am surprised about is the use of an average outgoing IR over the sphere of the Earth to calculate the maximum temperature the Sun can heat the Earth to is accepted by anyone as reasonable.
In the radiative balance equations I see all the time – (Insolation) S(1-a)x pi r^2 = sigmaT^4 x 4 pi r^2 (outgoing IR) – which by removing pi and r reduces to
S(1-a) = sigmaT^4 X 4.
Surely this simply says:-
1. Radiative balance is achieved if the Earth radiates one quarter of the insolation. Incoming = outgoing x 4.
2. The temperature of 255 K is clearly associated with the outgoing radiation, not the insolation.
3. This construct does not justify this statement from Kiehl & Trenberth :-
“Here we assume a “solar constant” of 1367 W m-2 (Hartmann 1994), and because the incoming solar radiation is one-quarter of this, that is, 342 W m-2, a planetary albedo of 31% is implied.”
Clearly, if one uses S(1-a) to calculate the maximum temperature the Sun “could” heat the Earth to (minus all other considerations such as evaporation, convection etc etc) you arrive at 360 K or ~ 87 degrees C.
Is this reasonable ?
That this is so is easily verifiable – let’s use the moon with an albedo of 0.12. We have 1367 x 0.88 = sigma T^4 which gives T as about 381 K or about 107 degrees C.
Is this reasonable ? Especially as Wikipedia state a “If an ideal thermally conductive blackbody was the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is, it would have a temperature of about 5.3 °C.”
Well the moon is certainly less than “an ideal thermally conductive blackbody” therefore if this divide by four stuff is right it should be less than 5.3 degrees C.
In the spirit of “you can’t argue with verifiable facts” the moon does indeed reach temperatures in excess of 5.3 degrees C – 107 degrees C with a maximum of 123 degrees C quoted by NASA and numerous other sources.
So the paradox that climate “scientists” need to explain is why the Sun can heat the moon, sans magical greenhouse gases, to > 107 degrees C but can only manage a pitiful minus 18 degrees C on Earth.
If you really believe that when the temperature in places like Death Valley approaches 60 degrees C the Sun is responsible for minus 18 C while the remaining 70 plus degrees C is provided by greenhouse effect you have been completely conned.
There is evidence the theory of quartering the solar constant to determine the greenhouse effect is wrong (actually I believe it is a deliberate con dressed up as plausible).
If the radiation from the sun is capable of heating the Earth’s surface to temperatures approaching 87 degrees C then the anomaly that needs examination is why is it so cool ?
I think convective heat distribution and evaporation of water can help explain this.
So I do not buy the theory that Solar radiation is not responsible for heating Earth and that the cooling at night is moderated by warmed oceans, a warmed atmosphere and a fortunate coincidence that before it all goes to pieces and freezes the Earth spins and the warming begins again.
Call me simple but this seems far more likely than less than 2 % of the atmosphere – water vapour and CO2 et al creating energy to warm the Earth.
The whole thing becomes laughable when considering < 0.04% of the atmosphere for CO2 or even tinier fractions for other greenhouse gases.
And of course they ignore IR from Nitrogen and Oxygen which MUST emit IR unless they are not at an equilibrium temperature with the "GHG's". Can anyone prove Nitrogen and Oxygen in the atmosphere are not at equilibrium temperature are therefore emitting IR?
If they can I will recant and donate heavily to all NGO's in attendance at Durban.
Philip Foster says:
What is really dumb is your misinterpretation of what Trenberth et al. say. You seem not to understand the concept of having the correct comparison case.
If you have a block of ice there in place of something warmer, then it will not keep the room warmer for longer. If you put a block of ice in place of a vat filled with liquid nitrogen then it would indeed cause the room to stay warmer for longer.
All that the greenhouse effect says is this: If you have the Earth emitting all its radiation out to space (at ~3 K), it will cool faster than if some of that radiation is being absorbed by the atmosphere, which is then because of its temperature then emitting some radiation back to the Earth.
“So I do not buy the theory that Solar radiation is not responsible for heating Earth and that the cooling at night is moderated by warmed oceans, a warmed atmosphere and a fortunate coincidence that before it all goes to pieces and freezes the Earth spins and the warming begins again.” should be
So I do not buy the theory that Solar radiation is not responsible for heating the Earth more than climate “scientists” claim. The cooling at night is moderated by warmed oceans, to a lesser extent by a warmed atmosphere and a fortunate coincidence that before it all goes to pieces and freezes the Earth spins and the warming begins again.
Harriet Harridan says:
December 30, 2011 at 3:31 pm
“Do I win a prize?”
______________________
We shall avert our eyes when confronted with any implications of ill repute.
Here is the implied CO2 sensitivity over the last 50 million years. +/- 40C per doubling ?
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/8312/co2sensitivitylast50my.png
Obviously, there are a huge number of factors that must be taken into account. The global temperature is most likely influenced by:
– Albedo which has changed over this timeframe from 27.6% to 34.0% (based on the amount of the highly reflective ice that develops).
– GHGs which strongly absorb/slow down long-wave energy from escaping from the Earth surface through the atmosphere to space in certain specific wave-lengths.
– Water vapour which has varied considerably from about 20 mms per given area to 30 mms per given area over this timeframe. This will have a large impact in terms of precipitation, cloud cover and the GHG impact of water vapour.
– Changing continental positions. Greenland would not have glaciers if it was just 200 kms farther south – like it was 20 millionm years ago. Antarctica would have few glaciers if South America was still attached to it (or if the Drake Passage was shallow).
– Changing ocean currents which depend mostly on the continental positions which can alternatively move warmth from the equator to the poles, move sea ice rapidly away from the poles to melt at lower latitude and/or isolate a region in a polar/equatorial climate.
– Milankovitch Cycles which can drop the summer solar insolation at 75N/75S for short periods so that the winter snow does not melt in the summer (just a 30 W/m2 drop in summer insolation can build up glaciers that take 100,000 years to be broken up).
– Atmospheric pressure. The higher the pressure, the slower is the escape of energy from the surface to space. This is simple physics and noone should dispute it.
– Solar variation. The Sun would need to vary by more than it currently appears to but the fact that the Land lags behind the solar irradiance in the seasons (the solstices) by 35 days, the freshwater lakes by 40 days and the ocean surface by 70 days, means that solar energy accumulates in surface energy levels. Therefore any change in solar irradiance will be fully absorbed into surface temperatures within a short period of time. 4 W/m2 worth of variance in total solar irradiance would be required to make a measureable change.
GHGs make it to Number 2 on my list, but it is a very long list.
R. Gates said @ur momisugly December 30, 2011 at 1:00 pm
“I’ll trust the unncertainty and range of estimates from the supercomputer models and paleodata before I’ll trust the implausible and illogical cerainty of Lord Monckton.”
Here’s some paleodata to chew on:
http://www.biocab.org/Holocene_Delta_T_and_Delta_CO2_Full.jpg
It looks to me like CO2 has been increasing gradually over the last few thousand years yet temperature during that period has been falling. You say you “trust the… paleodata” yet the paleodata contradicts your previous statements. Also you have yet to substantiate your claim that the Good Lord is illogical. It’s not enough to state a proposition; logic demands that you provide evidence for your proposition. Something like:
The Good Lord says if X then Y; not Y therefore not X.
You do know what logic is, don’t you?
@jimbojinx from that link about Gingrich.
“Hayhoe, whose husband is an evangelical pastor, recently wrote a book about climate change from an evangelical perspective.”
I have often wondered how anyone who believes that God is in control, can side with the AGW bretheren.
If He created man, and the planet, then He also created the coal and the oil, and He made it so that it was available at just the right time for human kind to use it for their advancement. Therefore, without doubt, He intended us to be using it.
The fact that it is also highly beneficial for plant growth, thus making it easier for mankind to feed themselves, also backs up this arguement… (so long as we don’t go against his wishes and start using the increased cropping for fuel instead of using the oil and coal as intended.)
Harriet Harridan said @ur momisugly December 30, 2011 at 3:31 pm
“Do I win a prize?”
A silver star 🙂 The gold star when you do the same in R because you ate frustrated with Excel bugs.
Are you really “a decayed strumpet”? I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those before…
As regards climate sensitivity, we need observations to show us how it is expressed in nature as more carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere. We know, for example, that carbon dioxide has been increasing essentially linearly ever since the Mauna Loa observatory went on line in 1954. Theory would require that global temperature should follow suit, just like Al Gore told us. It is a fact, however, that temperature has behaved quite differently. The best and most accurate temperature records come from satellites and these data have been available since 1979. But NASA, NOAA and the Met Office have refused to use satellite data because they have their own ground-based data that can be manipulated. Let’s see how they differ. Starting with the eighties and nineties the satellite record shows a series of ENSO oscillations consisting of El Nino peaks and La Nina valleys. (1) Their average is a straight horizontal line, meaning no warming. The ground-based data, on the other hand, show a steady warming in this time slot which they call “late twentieth century warming.” But the only warming during the entire satellite era is a short spurt that began with the super El Nino of 1998, raised global temperature by a a third of a degree in four years, and then stopped. It was oceanic, not greenhouse in origin. This leaves us without any proof that greenhouse warming has even existed since 1979. Undoubtedly greenhouse fans will now point to the existence of Arctic warming as proof of greenhouse warming. Arctic warming is certainly real and has existed since the turn of the twentieth century when it suddenly began. Before this there was nothing but slow cooling for two thousand years. It took a break in mid-century, then resumed, and is still going strong. But a sudden warming requires an equally sudden cause. We know that the amount of carbon dioxide did not suddenly increase when the warming began and this rules out the greenhouse effect as its cause. Laws of physics simply do not allow it. What started it was a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century that started bringing warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic. Direct measurements of water temperature reaching the Arctic in 2010 indicate that it exceeds anything seen within the last 2000 years.(2) All this leaves us without any proof whatsoever that greenhouse warming even exists. But this is exactly what should be expected from the work of Ferenc Miskolczi, a Hungarian scientist who worked for NASA. Using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he was able to show that the transparency of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon dioxide absorbs had been constant for 61 years. During this same period of time the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increased by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of this amount of carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. This is in accord with the inability of satellites to detect any actual greenhouse warming in nature, and also in accord with lack of greenhouse warming in the Arctic.It also follows that climate models using the greenhouse effect to predict dangerous warming ahead are all dead wrong. And it also tells us that the vaunted sensitivity of climate to doubling of CO2 concentration is exactly zero.
Ref.: (1) “What Warming?” available on Amazon; (2) Energy & Environment (2011) 11(8), pp. 1069-1084.
A question I have always wanted to ask.
You cannot increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (in ppm) without reducing other constituents of the atmosphere by a total of the same number of ppm.
So what effect does this reduction in concentration of other constituents of the atmosphere have, and are all other constituents affected equally ?
“an atmosphere-less earth would have an average temperature of 154K, why, does the atmosphere-less moon have one of 250K? Both would receive about the same energy from the sun.”
if this earth had 28 day duration day, would affect blackbody temperature?
Would it warm, cool or have no effect upon average temperature?
Harriet Harridan says:
So for a doubling of CO2, plugging in 580 ppm CO2, gives a temp of 15.5c: a rise of a 1.5c. Slightly more than M’lord, but substantially less than the IPCC’s “super”computer.
Do I win a prize?
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Nope. Figure out all the fast and slow feedbacks with calculations that take into account the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere and come back with a number…oh, and we won’t hold our breath as you’ll need a supercomputer and several months of processing time…and of course, the correct formulas for the feedbacks. And as we haven’t quite got all those feedbacks completely figured out yet, we might just want to take an ensemble average of climate models, and then average that with what the paleodata tell us…and what do you know…about 3C is a good number for a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial levels.
Luther Wu says:
December 30, 2011 at 1:45 pm
“Games aren’t won by the noisiest cheer leaders, but those without proper underpinnings are certainly a distraction, just like you: that’s the extent of your success.”
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Yet I should believe Lord Monckton who is certain that he has figured out that climate sensitivity is “low enough to be harmless” when we haven’t even seen an equalibrium point reached from the current level of CO2, and have no idea exactly where that point is as we are not sure exactly the full nature of all the feedbacks? Case in point, Arctic sea ice, which a huge factor in feedbacks to global warming seems to be diminishing faster than models forecast just a few years ago. This alone shows that models are doing a poor job at understanding the dynamics of all the feedback processes, and without a understanding them, projections of climate sensitivity are equally poor. So how can Lord Monckton be so certain of a sensitivity “low enough to be harmless”?
“Didact” is a teacher, though the word is seldom seen except in combination.
“Didactic” is “like a teacher”, i.e. giving instructions. However, the word Lord Monckton is riffing from is “autodidact”, “self-taught”. The prefix “a-” is a linguistic NOT operator, so an “adidact” is “not taught”, that is, what us rednecks refer to as “pig-ignernt.”
Regards,
Ric
R. Gates says:
December 30, 2011 at 5:23 pm
“This alone shows that models are doing a poor job at understanding the dynamics of all the feedback processes, and without a understanding them, projections of climate sensitivity are equally poor. ”
You seem to be the only warmist that can at the same time
– admit that the models are junk
– still believe in the IPCC’s climate sensitivity exaggerations (which they derived from model runs).