UPDATE: Below is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. Comments are open. – Anthony
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Various You-Tube videos by a former “science writer” who uses a speleological pseudonym “potholer54” sneeringly deliver a series of petty smears about artfully-distorted and often inconsequential aspects of my talks on climate change. Here, briefly, I shall answer some of his silly allegations. I noted them down rather hastily, since I am disinclined to waste much time on him, so the sentences in quote-marks may not be word for word what he said, but I hope that they fairly convey his meaning.
For fuller answers to these allegations, many of which he has ineptly and confusedly recycled from a serially mendacious video by some no-account non-climatologist at a fourth-rank bible college in Nowheresville, Minnesota, please see my comprehensive written reply to that video at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. The guy couldn’t even get his elementary arithmetic right – not that the caveman mentions that fact, of course.
The allegations, with my answers, are as follows:
“Monckton says he advised Margaret Thatcher on climate change. He didn’t.” I did.
“Monckton says he wrote a peer-reviewed paper. He didn’t.” The editors of Physics and Society asked me to write a paper on climate sensitivity in 2008. The review editor reviewed it in the usual way and it was published in the July 2008 edition, which, like most previous editions, carried a headnote to the effect that Physics and Society published “reviewed articles”. Peer-review takes various forms. From the fact that the paper was invited, written, reviewed and then published, one supposes the journal had followed its own customary procedures. If it hadn’t, don’t blame me. Subsequent editions changed the wording of the headnote to say the journal published “non-peer-reviewed” articles, and the editors got the push. No mention of any of this by the caveman, of course.
“Monckton says the Earth is cooling. It isn’t.” At the time when I said the Earth was cooling, it had indeed been cooling since late 2001. The strong El Niño of 2010 canceled the cooling, and my recent talks and graphs have of course reflected that fact by stating instead that there has been no statistically-significant warming this millennium. The caveman made his video after the cooling had ended, but – without saying so – showed a slide from a presentation given by me while the cooling was still in effect. Was that honest of him?
“Monckton says Greenland is not melting. It is.” Well, it is now, but for 12 years from 1992-2003 inclusive, according to Johannessen et al. (2005), the mean spatially-averaged thickness of Greenland’s ice sheet increased by 5 cm (2 inches) per year, or 2 feet in total over the period. The high-altitude ice mass in central northern Greenland thickened fastest, more than matching a decline in ice thickness along the coastline. Since 2005, according to Johannessen et al. (2009), an ice mass that I calculate is equivalent to some six inches of the 2 feet of increase in Greenland’s ice thickness over the previous decade or so has gone back into the ocean, raising global sea levels by a not very terrifying 0.7 millimeters. According to the Aviso Envisat satellite, in the past eight years sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 2 inches per century. Not per decade: per century. If so, where has all the additional ice that the usual suspects seem to imagine has melted from Greenland gone? Two possibilities: not as much ice has melted as we are being told, or its melting has had far less impact on sea level than we are being invited to believe.
“Monckton says there’s no systematic loss of sea-ice in the Arctic. There is.” No, I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009. The caveman, if he were capable of checking these or any data, would find this to be so. In fact, he knew this to be so, because the slide I was showing at that point in his video, taken from the University of Illinois’ Cryosphere monitoring program, shows it. Of course, the slide was only in the background of his video and was shown only for a few seconds. Since that particular talk of mine the Arctic sea ice has declined again and came close to its 2007 low in 2011. But it is arguable from the descriptions of melting Arctic ice in 1922 that there may have been less sea ice in the Arctic then than now.
“Monckton says there has been no correlation between temperature and CO2 for the past 500 million years. There has.” Well, there has in the past few thousand years, but the correlation since the Cambrian era has been spectacularly poor, as the slide (from a peer-reviewed paper) that the caveman fleetingly shows me using at that point demonstrates very clearly. For most of that long period, global temperatures were about 7 Celsius degrees warmer than the present: yet CO2 concentration has inexorably declined throughout the period.
“Monckton says a pre-Cambrian ice-planet shows CO2 has no effect on climate. It doesn’t.” No, I cited Professor Ian Plimer, a leading geologist, as having said that the formation of dolomitic rock 750 million years ago could not have taken place unless there had been 300,000 ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere: yet glaciers a mile high had come and gone twice at sea-level and at the Equator at that time. Professor Plimer had concluded that, even allowing for the fainter Sun and higher ice-albedo in those days, the equatorial glaciers could not have formed twice if the warming effect of CO2 were as great as the IPCC wants us to believe. At no point have I ever said CO2 has no effect on climate, for its effect was demonstrated by a simple but robust experiment as long ago as 1859. However, I have said, over and over again, that CO2 probably has a much smaller warming effect than the IPCC’s range of estimates. The caveman must have known that, because he says he has watched “hours and hours” of my videos. So why did he misrepresent me?
“Monckton said there had been no change in the Himalayan glaciers for 200 years. There has.” No, I cited Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey, who had told me on several occasions that the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change”: indeed, it is the opposite, for advance and retreat are both changes. Why did the caveman misrepresent me?
“Monckton says only one Himalayan glacier has been retreating. Many have.” No, I mentioned the Gangotri and Ronggbuk glaciers as being notable examples of glacial retreat in the Himalayas caused by geological instability in the region. To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating. Why did the caveman misrepresent me? It is this kind of intellectual dishonesty that permeates the caveman’s cheesy videos. He has not the slightest intention of being accurate or fair. If he had, he would surely have mentioned that the IPCC tried for months to pretend that all of the glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone by 2035. The IPCC’s own “peer-reviewers” had said the figure should be “2350”, not “2035”, but the lead author of the chapter in question had left in the wrong figure, knowing it to be unverified, because, as he later publicly admitted, he wanted to influence governments.
The caveman says I misquoted the lead author who had left in the erroneous date for the extinction of the Himalayan glaciers, but here is what that author actually said in an interview with the Daily Mail: “We thought that if we can highlight it [the erroneous date], it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” For good measure, he said I had misquoted Sir John Houghton, the IPCC’s first science chairman, who had said that unless we announced disasters no one would listen.
Sir John, too, tried to maintain that I had misquoted him, and even menaced me with a libel suit, until I told him I had a copy of the cutting from the London Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995, in which he had said, “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster”, and that I also had a copy of an article in the Manchester Guardian of July 28, 2003, in which Sir John had luridly ascribed numerous specific natural disasters to “global warming”, which he described as “a weapon of mass destruction” that was “at least as dangerous as nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism”. Perhaps the caveman didn’t know any of this, but here’s the thing: I do not recall that he has ever bothered to check any of his “facts” with me (though, if he had, I wouldn’t have known because he lurks behind a pseudonym and, even though I am told he has revealed his identity I have no time to keep track of the pseudonyms of people who lack the courage and decency to publish under their own names).
“Monckton says Dr. Pinker found that a loss of cloud cover had caused recent warming. She disagreed.” No, I drew the conclusion from Dr. Pinker’s paper, and from several others, that cloud cover does not remain constant, but waxes and wanes broadly in step with the cooling and warming phases respectively of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I did not misrepresent Dr. Pinker’s paper in any way: I merely used it as a source for my own calculations, which I presented at the annual seminar on planetary emergencies of the World Federation of Scientists in 2010, where they were well received. Less cloud cover, particularly in the tropics, naturally warms the Earth: the point is surely uncontroversial. If one removes the influence of this natural warming phase from the record since 1976, it is reasonable to deduce that climate sensitivity based on that period is much lower than the IPCC thinks. Strictly speaking, one should study temperature trends in multiples of 60 years, so as to ensure that the warming and cooling phases of the PDO cancel one another out.
Frankly, that’s quite enough of these dull allegations. There are others, but they are all as half-baked and dishonest as these and it would be tedious to deal with each one. You get the drift: the caveman is a zealot and we need not ask who paid him to watch “hours and hours” of my YouTube videos to realize from these examples that his videos are unreliable. More importantly, it would interfere with my research: I hope shortly to be in a position to demonstrate formally that climate sensitivity is unarguably little more than one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate. My objective is to reach the truth, not to distort it or misrepresent it as the caveman has done.
He concludes by challenging his small band of followers to check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible”. Of course the Earth has been warming since 1750: I have at no point denied it, though that is the implication of the caveman’s statement.
And of course there are scientists who say CO2 is “largely responsible” for the warming: that is the principal conclusion of the IPCC’s 2007 report, reached on the basis of a fraudulent statistical abuse: comparison of the slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines on the global-temperature dataset falsely to suggest that “global warming” is accelerating and that it is our fault. Not that one has ever heard the caveman utter a word of condemnation of the IPCC’s too-often fictional “science”. But it is also reasonable to mention the growing band of scientists who say CO2 may not be “largely responsible” but only partly responsible for the warming since 1950. Would it not have been fairer if the caveman had pointed that out?
Climate skeptics have come under intensive attack from various quarters, and the attacks have too often been as unpleasantly dishonest as those of the caveman. Also, there is evidence that someone has been spending a lot of money on trying malevolently to discredit those who dare to ask any questions at all about the party line on climate.
For instance, after a speech by me in in the US in October 2009 went viral and received a million YouTube hits in a week (possibly the fastest YouTube platinum ever for a speech), a Texan professor who monitors the seamier side of the internet got in touch to tell me that someone had paid the operators of various search engines a sum that he estimated at not less than $250,000 to enhance the page rankings of some two dozen specially-created web-pages containing meaningless jumbles of symbols among which the word “Monckton video” appeared.
These nonsense pages would not normally have attracted any hits at all, and the search engines would normally have ranked them well below the video that had gone platinum. The intention of this elaborate and expensive artifice, as the professor explained, was to ensure that anyone looking for the real video would instead find page after page of junk and simply give up. The viral chain was duly broken, but so many websites carried the video that more than 5 million people ended up seeing it, so the dishonestly-spent $250,000 was wasted.
At one level, of course, all of this attention is an unintended compliment. But no amount of sneering or smearing will alter two salient facts: the Earth has not been warming at anything like the predicted rate and is not now at all likely to do so; and, in any event, even if the climate-extremists’ predictions were right, it would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective to wait and adapt in a focused way to any adverse consequences of manmade “global warming” than it would be to tax, trade, regulate, reduce, or replace CO2 today.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
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Note: for anyone who wishes to see what this is about, you can see “potholer54” aka Peter Hadfield on Monckton at YouTube here – Anthony
UPDATE: Here is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. – Anthony
Response from Peter Hadfield:
In January, Christopher Monckton criticized me on WUWT after I made a series of videos exposing errors in most of his claims. I have asked Anthony Watts for the opportunity to respond in kind, so that we can put Mr. Monckton’s verbatim assertions up against the documentary evidence he cites.
At first I was puzzled as to what Mr. Monckton was responding to in his WUWT guest-post, because he failed to address any of the rebuttals or the evidence I showed in my five videos. Then I realized he must have watched only the last video in the series, including a light-hearted 30-second ‘mistake count’. So in this response I am going to deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, as shown and rebutted in my videos, rather than what he thinks I think he said, and what he thinks I rebutted.
Mr. Monckton doesn’t claim to be an expert, and neither do I. All I can do is to check and verify his claims. So the question is whether Mr. Monckton has reported the sources he cites accurately in order to reach his conclusions. I have made it very easy for you to check by playing clips of Mr. Monckton making these assertions in my videos, then showing images of the documentary evidence he cites. Since this response is text I will write out Mr. Monckton’s assertions verbatim and quote the documentary sources verbatim (with references in the body of the text.) References to the relevant video (linked at the bottom) and the time on the video where they are shown, will be shown in square brackets.
ON THE COOLING EARTH:
Since Mr. Monckton failed to address the evidence, but implies I was duplicitous in my timing, let’s see what my video actually showed. In a speech given in Melbourne in February 2009, Mr. Monckton said: “We’ve had nine years of a global cooling trend since the first of January 2001” [Ref 1 – 4:06] — and St. Paul in October 2009: “There has been global cooling for the last eight or nine years” [ibid.].
So in my video, the period Mr. Monckton was talking about was clearly identified in his own words, as well as in the graphs he showed, and I showed the dates the speeches were made, and the studies I cited covered the same period.
[“Waiting for Global Cooling” – R. Fawcett and D. Jones, National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, April 2008]
[“Statisticians reject global cooling” — Associated Press 10/26/2009 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33482750/ns/us_news-environment/]
ON THE MELTING OF GREENLAND:
Again, let’s deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, which is what I rebutted. In a speech in St. Paul in 2009, Mr. Monckton cited a paper by Ola Johannessen, and told the audience: “What he found was that between 1992 and 2003, the average thickness of the vast Greenland ice sheet increased by two inches a year.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM 11:40)
No, he found no such thing. Johannessen said he only measured the interior of Greenland above 1,500 metres [1 – 11:59] In fact, he specifically warns that the very conclusion Mr Monckton reaches cannot be made: “We cannot make an integrated assessment of elevation changes… for the whole Greenland Ice Sheet, including its outlet glaciers, from these observations alone, because the marginal areas are not measured completely…. ” [“Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland” Ola M. Johannessen et al, Science November 2005]
ON THE LOSS OF ARCTIC ICE:
Mr. Monckton claimed there is no long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic, and I rebutted this with studies showing a decline in Arctic summer sea-ice extent since satellite measurements began in 1979. [1 – 8:20 onwards]
Mr. Monckton’s response: “I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009.”
So, as I said, he did not tell his audience there had been a 30-year decline. Quite the opposite – he said there was no long-term decline. Mr. Monckton showed his audience a slide covering just three years, referring to the 2007 low as a “temporary loss of sea ice” which had recovered by 2009. Then he told them: “So we’re not looking at a sort of long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic.” [1 – 8:27]
ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN CO2 AND GLOBAL TEMPERATURES SINCE THE CAMBRIAN:
Mr. Monckton’s conclusion about a lack of correlation rests entirely on a graph showing CO2 concentration and temperature over the last 500 million years [3 – 0:04]. The graph uses temperature data from Scotese and CO2 data from Berner. Neither researcher supports Mr. Monckton’s ‘no correlation’ conclusion. On the contrary, Berner writes: “Over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the greenhouse effect.” [“Geocarb III: A revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time” — R. Berner and Z. Kothavala, American Journal of Science, Feb 2001]
How so? Because paleoclimatologists have to factor in solar output, which has been getting stronger over time [3 – 4:45]. If the rising curve of solar output is compared to global temperatures over the phanerozoic (500 million years) there is a similar lack of correlation. But it would be absurd to draw the conclusion that the sun therefore has no effect on climate.
So when gradually rising solar output is taken into account there is a very clear correlation between CO2 and global temperatures, and the source of Mr. Monckton’s data points that out. So does another senior researcher in the field [“CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” — D. Royer et al, GSA Today, March 2004].
ON THE PRE-CAMBRIAN ICE PLANET:
Again, let’s look at what I showed in my video, which was a clip of Mr. Monckton himself, speaking in a debate:
“750 million years ago, a mile of ice at the equator, ice planet all round, therefore at the surface 300,000 ppm of CO2. Will you tell me how that much CO2 could have been in the atmosphere and yet allowed that amount of ice at the equator?” [3 – 5:17]
Since Mr. Monckton thinks this is a puzzle for climatologists, let’s go through the well-understood explanation step by step.
Mr. Monckton agrees with the experts that the frozen planet was due to very weak solar output (about 8% less than today.) And he agrees that the high albedo (reflectivity) of this white surface would have reflected most of what little solar warmth the Earth did receive.
But he doesn’t seem to accept that volcanoes would have continued releasing CO2 into the atmosphere of this frozen planet over millions of years, and that this eventually warmed the planet enough to unfreeze it [“CO2 levels required for deglaciation of a ‘near-snowball’ Earth” T. Crowley et al, Geophysical Research Letters, 2001]. He cites no peer-reviewed research showing why paleoclimatologists are wrong. (No, the opinion of “a leading geologist” is not the same thing.)
ON HIMALAYAN GLACIERS:
Mr. Monckton writes in his WUWT response: “the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change””
Then let’s look at what Mr. Monckton actually said to his audience in St. Paul:
“The glaciers are showing no particular change in 200 years. The only glacier that’s declined a little is Gangoltri.” [3 – 10:20]
So is it a pattern of advance and retreat? Or no particular change? Or only one glacier retreating? Which?
In his WUWT resp onse, Mr. Monckton went on to say: “To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating.”
But you DID say it, Mr. Monckton. Here it is again: “Only one of them [Himalayan glaciers] is retreating a little and that’s Gangoltri.”
ON MISQUOTING MURARI LAL:
Speaking about Murari Lal, the man behind the IPCC’s 2035 disappearing glaciers fiasco, Mr. Monckton told his audience there was: “….an admission that he [Lal] knew that figure was wrong but had left it in anyway because he knew that the IPCC wanted to influence governments and politicians.”[4 – 3:50]
This is not even borne out by Monckton’s own source, cited in his response, which is a quote from Lal in the Daily Mail about the 2035 date: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” Nowhere does Lal say he knew the figure was erroneous.
MISQUOTING SIR JOHN HOUGHTON:
Mr. Monckton claims Houghton wrote this in the Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” [4 – 5:50]
And I maintain Houghton wrote: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster. It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.”
Who is right? Well, both Mr. Monckton and I have exactly the same source [Sunday Telegraph, September 10, 1995], but I actually show an image of it in my video [4 – 7:24]. Take a look. Even though it turns out my quote is correct and Mr. Monckton’s is clearly a gross misquote, he still insists in his WUWT response that he got the quote right.
ON HIS CLAIMS ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE SUN…
Mr. Monckton showed and quoted an extract from a paper by Sami Solanki: “The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episodoes on to come.” [5 – 1:21 onwards]
That could suggest the sun is a likely culprit for recent warming. But why didn’t Mr. Monckton tell or show his audience what Solanki wrote in the very next line?
“Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades.” [“Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the last 11,000 years” — S.K. Solanki et al, Nature Sep 2004]
ON THE ROLE OF THE SUN IN RECENT WARMING:
Mr. Monckton said: “The solar physicists – you might take Scafetta and West, say, in 2008, they attribute 69% of all the recent global warming to the sun.” [5 – 3:48]
No, they don’t. In my video [5 – 4:32] I showed the actual document Mr. Monckton refers to (an opinion piece) where Scafetta and West wrote: “We estimate that the sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in the Earth’s average temperature.” [“Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” Nicola Scafetta and Bruce J. West, Physics Today March 2008]
I hope we all understand the difference between “69%” and “as much as 69%.” But what about all those other “solar physicists” who purportedly support Monckton’s position? Well, they don’t. Solanki’s figure is up to just 30%, Erlykin less than 14%, Bernstad 7%, Lean ‘negligable’and Lockwood –1.3% [5 — 4:40]
[4:41 “Can solar variability explain global warming since 1970?”– S. K. Solanki and N. A. Krivova, Journal of Geophysical Research, May 2003]
[“Solar Activity and the Mean Global Temperature”
A.D. Erlykin et al, Physics Geo 2009]
[“Solar trends and global warming” — R. Benestad and G. Schmidt, Journal of Geophysical Research” July 2009]
[“How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006” J. Lean and D. Rind, Geophysical Research Letters, Sep 2008]
[“Recent changes in solar outputs and the global mean surface temperature. III. Analysis of contributions to global mean air surface temperature rise” — M. Lockwood, June 2008]
Mr. Monckton then asserts that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) agrees with this conclusion (that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming.) After he had been confronted during a TV interview with the plain fact that it didn’t [5 – 5:49 “Meet the Climate Sceptics” BBC TV Feb 2011], Monckton gave a reason for the error in his WUWT response:
“I cited a paper given by Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov at the 2004 symposium of the IAU in St. Petersburg, Fla, but put “IAU” at the foot of the slide rather than Dr. Abdussamatov’s name.”
Maybe so. But that doesn’t explain why Mr. Monckton continued to make exactly the same claim elsewhere. At St. Paul he said:
“Most solar physicists agree [that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming]. The International Astronomical Union in 2004 had a symposium on it, they concluded that that was the case.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:27]
And in his film ‘Apocalypse No!’ a slide headed ‘International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004’ was shown to an audience, along with its main conclusions. Third on the list, Monckton read: “The sun caused today’s global warming.”
Monckton told the audience: “This is not my conclusion, this is the conclusion of the International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004. This is what they said, this is not me talking here.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:34]
Mr. Monckton has to accept that this claim is completely spurious. This is why he dislikes detailed examinations of his sources. While he takes every opportunity to debate on stage, where his speaking skills are essential and his assertions can’t be checked, an online debate is far tougher, because every paper and fact CAN be checked. So come on, Mr. Monckton, let’s debate this on WUWT to see which of us has correctly read your sources.
The rebuttals I made are not “inconsequential aspects of my talks” as Mr. Monckton claims; they include almost every major topic he covers, from the melting of Arctic and glacial ice, to the role of the sun and the correlation between CO2 and temperature. His only recourse in his WUWT response was therefore to call me names, attack my character and my competence, and question my financing and my motivation… anything but answer the documentary evidence I presented. And then he adds one more error — a ridiculous claim that I asked my “small band of followers” to “check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible.”
Since I can’t establish that myself, I certainly wouldn’t advise other amateurs to have a go. So I ask Mr. Monckton to cite the source for this claim, sure in the knowledge that once again we will see a yawning gap between what the source actually says (in this case, me) and what Mr. Monckton claims it says.
References: (Hadfield’s own videos)
1 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM
2 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTY3FnsFZ7Q
3 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpF48b6Lsbo
4 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3giRaGNTMA
5 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRCyctTvuCo
@R. Gates
“please site the exact, precise place, that I claim that CO2 is the “primary driver” of temperature.”
That is easy: when you say that, “A mixture of greenhouse gases keeps our planet warmer than it would be without them, and the mixture of them keeps the world warmer than the sum of their individual warming. (i.e. take away the non-condensing CO2 and we go back an ice planet within a few decades)”
You have said many similar things in the past. You have numerous times attributed all warming since the LIA to the 40% increase in CO2, both directly and by implication. Please recognise that you are speaking to people who understand warmist ‘cleverness’ and attribution by ‘implications’. Howver in the quote above which you thoughtfully provided immediately after you write asking for a citation, your implication is that without CO2 the planet would cool to a frozen Earth snowball.
This is I preseume, a reference the idea that water vapour is only a ‘feedback’ and without the blessing of live-giving CO2, no water vaopur would be present in the atmosphere as there would be no precious magical CO2 to drive it there. As we both know, this is nonsense so there is little point in making such implications as you have just done.
Water vapour is a forcing factor just like methane. Without CO2, we would have a dead planet with no large lifeforms but not because it was frozen. It would be because there is no CO2 to feed the plants.
You continue, “…such that with the two together, water vapor may contribute more, but take away CO2, and water vapor matters less.”
Less? You are implying that without CO2 there is perhaps ‘nearly no effect from water vapour’? What exactly then are you implying? What number would you put on it? Your oft-cited 40% CO2 rise and your oft-cited temperature rise are together in post after post, with your repeated implication that one must be leading to the other. The CO2 rose 40% and the temperature went up about 1.5 degrees. That is a very low sensitivity even if 100% of the temperature rise was caused by CO2, (as seems not to be the case). Why would removing all CO2 precipitate a massive drop if there is only a small rise, or portion of a small rise?
“It is the combination of the two that keep us at the temperature we enjoy.” There are many factors oether than CO2 and water that warm the planet. Willis is doing a good job if pointing that out.
The failure of some skeptics to fully understand the huge difference that combining a condensing with a non-condensing greenhouse gas is a huge vacuum of ignorance for them. But I sense, that at least for some skeptics, there is no real desire to fill that vacuum.”
Let’s review your points:
1. the mixture of them keeps the world warmer than the sum of their individual warming.
2. take away the non-condensing CO2 and we go back an ice planet
The second does not follow from the first for a whole variety of reasons. One of them is that CO2 is not the only non-condensing GHG – methane is there naturally, for instance. Another is that atmospheric heating is not only due to re-radiation of long-wave IR (“the greenhouse effect”) but also due to reactions with short-wave uv (e.g. tropospheric ozone). Another is that in a slightly cooler world there would be less cloud cover, therefore less reflection and more insolation of the surface leading to greater evaporation of water. Your thought experiment is a fail.
@Monckton of Brenchley
“it is important for Anthony’s readers to be able to see for themselves how the skeptics argue, usually with politeness and with patience and with science, and to see how – by painful contrast – the climate-extremists argue, all too often with illiteracy, innumeracy, vulgarity, vain repetition, wilful perversion of the truth, and outright hatred.”
Vulgarity:
“…delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face — he looks like an overcooked prawn),”
“confusedly recycled from a serially mendacious video by some no-account non-climatologist at a fourth-rank bible college in Nowheresville”
“The guy couldn’t even get his elementary arithmetic right – not that the caveman mentions that fact, of course.”
Wilful perversion of the truth:
“There has indeed been a remarkable correlation between CO2 and temperatures over the past 500 million years” Monckton, September 18, 2011
“Well, there has in the past few thousand years, but the correlation since the Cambrian era has been spectacularly poor” Monckton, January 11, 2012
“They [the NOAA] rely only on data from ships dropping canvas buckets down as they randomly pass across the oceans, and pulling up some water and sticking a thermometer in.” Monckton, 2009
“Mr. Monckton’s statement to the effect that we used temperature measurements of seawater gathered by dragging canvas buckets through the ocean are completely false. In fact, I know of no scientific group that would even think such a technique could supply useful measurements!”
Sydney Levitus, 2011
[Note: several very similar and redundant posts with the same quotes deleted. ~dbs, mod.]
[snip sorry – we have limits to hijacking threads and you’ve exceeded it. We get the point, you don’t like Monckton and you think he is hypocritcal. Time to move on. Please be as upset as you wish – Anthony]
[snip]
Lord Monckton said:
“So let us provide some elementary, and definitive evidence, that Kiehl & Trenberth’s estimate of the radiative forcing caused by the presence (as opposed to the total absence) of the top five greenhouse gases is what they say it is – an estimate of the forcing – and not an estimate of the forcing plus any consequent temperature feedbacks.
Kiehl and Trenberth’s paper says, in effect, that about 27% of the total forcing from the top five greenhouse gases is attributable to CO2. And 27% of 101 Watts per square meter is around 27 Watts per square meter. What we need to do, therefore, is to find another “mainstream” way of calculating the forcing effect of all 392 ppmv of CO2 now in the atmosphere. A logarithmic function attributed by the IPCC to James Hansen allows us to determine the total CO2 forcing dF, before taking account of any feedbacks, even when the unperturbed concentration is zero, thus:
dF = 3.35 ln(1 + 1.2 x 392 + 0.005 x 392 squared + 0.0000014 x 392 cubed) = 24 W/m2
And that unquestionably pre-feedback value is pretty close to Kiehl & Trenberth’s implicit 27 Watts per square meter, from which it follows either that Kiehl and Trenberth’s value must a pre-feedback value or that feedbacks are a tiny fraction of what the IPCC tries to tell us they are.
___________
Very well done, and I think essentially correct, and on target and at least not off by an order of magnitude. As Trenberth has estimated the total downward backradiation LW from the atmosphere to be approximately 333 W/m2, and if you take the average estimated contribution from CO2 of that total which is about 17%, then that would give you about 57 W/m2. But of course this 57 W/m2 might include at least some of the feedback effects (to the extent they exist), as it is based on measurements, and not model data, and thus might well be higher than the 24 or 27 W/m2 first order logarithmic calculation.
More difficult of course is estimating how any addtional W/m2 of forcing from additional CO2 will translate into temperature changes over the short term (transient response) or over the longer term (equilibrium response), and thus, we can eagerly await Lord Monckton’s upcoming paper on this with my particular interest in seeing how he will prove that these two responses will be “nearly equal”.
SteveE,
Can you understand the difference between thousands of years and 500 million years? And when have you ever been critical of Mann’s using corrupted proxies like Tiljander? Or are you completely blind to the fabrications and scientific misconduct endemic to the Mann/Jones clique?
Smokey says… “However, AGW is not a hypothesis, and it is certainly not a “theory”. It is only a scientific conjecture.”
Really? An idea that was first proposed over 100 years ago? An idea which was based on research that began almost 200 years ago now. An idea that has the support of more than 100,000 published research papers is only scientific conjecture?
Look, arguing climate sensitivity has some merit. You might want to constrain your discussion to this because saying that AGW is merely conjecture has absolutely no basis. I’m sure even prominent skeptics like Spencer and Christy would agree.
Honeycutt says:
“You might want to constrain your discussion to this because saying that AGW is merely conjecture has absolutely no basis.”
Wrong: Basis. Get up to speed. AGW is a conjecture for the basic reason that it is not testable. Hypotheses must be testable.
@Monckton of Brenchley
The criticism here is something you clearly find worth addressing, as you keep responding. It would be nice if you would address the ones who point out how you are shown on video saying one thing, then shown denying you said it, such as when you said only Gangotri was retreating. Potholer54 plays this over and over in his video, and your rebuttal here makes it seem like he’s referring to another quote by you entirely. You then knock down the strawman you constructed. I find this dishonest.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
Okay…So, if you really believe that, then here is a question for you: How did Kiehl and Trenberth separate the total radiative effect of water vapor into the effect from that water vapor that would be there even if the CO2 were removed and the effect from the water vapor that is added to the atmosphere as a result of the temperature increase due to CO2 (i.e., the feedback)? Did they do this using their psychic abilities? Did they describe anywhere how they did this? Is there in fact any smidgeon of evidence anywhere that they did this? I don’t think so.
That is because it was a paper discussing the radiative effects of the various greenhouse gases that are in the current atmosphere and not any attempt to discuss how these gases got into the atmosphere.
This is completely irrelevant. The problem is not with the CO2 forcing. The problem is with the “forcing” due to water vapor (& clouds). The relevant question is how much of that water vapor “forcing” would disappear if the temperature of the atmosphere were lowered due to the removal of the CO2 from the atmosphere.
SteveE says:
January 13, 2012 at 8:36 am
[snip sorry – we have limits to hijacking threads and you’ve exceeded it. We get the point, you don’t like Monckton and you think he is hypocritcal. Time to move on. Please be as upset as you wish – Anthony]
Hi Anthony,
I submitted several post but when I hit the post comment button the screen just refreshed and my comment wasn’t on the waiting moderation list, hence I submitted them again. I assume that a word in the quotes from Monckton put it in some auto-moderation queue. I only wanted to submit four posts all but one of them were published, the other were just duplicates that I altered slightly each time I resubmitted them.
Hope this helps explain the rational for the numerous comments submitted.
Regards
Steve
Smokey, I think you’ve misread my post both of those quotes are from Monckton:
“There has indeed been a remarkable correlation between CO2 and temperatures over the past 500 million years” Monckton, September 18, 2011
“Well, there has in the past few thousand years, but the correlation since the Cambrian era has been spectacularly poor” Monckton, January 11, 2012
As you can see they contradict each other, one he says there is a correlation going back 500 million years and the other he says it only goes back a few thousand.
I do understand the difference between thousands of years and 500 million years, please just reread my post.
Regards
Steve
Smokey
“AGW is a conjecture for the basic reason that it is not testable. Hypotheses must be testable.”
The philosophic requirement for testability is a logical test. That is, the hypothesis must be testable in principle. I’ll suggest that you start with reading AJ ayers and move on from there.
1. Everything happens according to God’s will, is not testable.
2. neptune is made of green cheese, is testable in principle. Go there and see. in practical
terms, we confirm these hypothesis in indirect ways.
a) if it were made of green cheese, we would expect to see x, y, z..
b) sensor returns are consistent with an explanation that says it is made of p, q and r
AGW is testable in principle passing the philosophical requirement, confirming it and testing it in practice depends on a wide variety of evidence.
Smokey
“Mr. Metzler, in a pointlessly angry posting, wonders whether anyone at WattsUpWithThat accepts the physical properties of CO2 that were established 200 years ago. My post explicitly mentioned, with approval, John Tyndale’s experiment of 1859, which established that the greenhouse effect is real and that CO2 contributes to it. It is really no longer possible for the climate-extremist faction to continue to maintain that the scientific debate between skeptics and alarmists is about whether CO2 causes warming. It does: get used to it. The debate is about how much warming the CO2 causes – a quantitative, not a qualitative, question. And, as I hope shortly to prove, the warming that CO2 causes is not enough to worry about, still less to spend trillions on.”
You better go tell Lord M, that AGW is not testable.
Sky dragons descend and take on the good lord.
maybe its time for WUWT to ban C02 “contrarians” along with the chem trail bunch.
GHGs warm the planet. The question is how much
steven mosher,
[First, the quote you posted above was not my quote. You make it appear that it is by posting my name above it.]
Steven, being testable “in principle” does not necessarily mean being testable in reality. Anything that does not violate causation is testable “in principle”. However, in order to comply with the scientific method, a conjecture must be testable in practice in order to be elevated to the status of a hypothesis.
The scientific method requires a hypothesis to be testable in the real world, so that others can attempt to replicate the claimed results. Pointing out that AGW is a conjecture is using the term correctly. Conjecture is the first step in the scientific method. It would settle most if not all of the debate if AGW was a testable hypothesis, and thus quantifiable. But the debate still rages, specifically due to the fact that AGW is still an untestable conjecture.
Smokey says:
Oh, yes! After all, evolution is a testable hypothesis…And, look how little debate we get about it! Why, there is even a majority of Americans who believe in it if you define it weakly enough!
Surely it is the business of science to enquire open-mindedly with the aim of determining the objective truth? Those who, like me, try to ask reasonable questions are assailed from one direction by the climate-extremists, who seem to resent any expression of doubt about the party line, and from the other by the “no-greenhouse-effect-exists” brigade.
What is the truth about the Himalayan glaciers? The IPCC maintained for years that all the ice would be gone from the Himalayas within 25 years of now. They were wrong: and Railroad Engineer Pachauri was wrong to say, month after month, that anyone who said they were wrong was anti-science. No, we were pro-science and anti- the party line.
Yet those who maunder on and on about whether Gangotri is the only glacier receding in the Himalayas seem uninterested either in correcting manifest errors in the party line or in trying to determine the objective scientific truth. The truth, as I have stated time and again, is that the pattern of advance and recession of the Himalayan glaciers is much as it has been in the 200 years since the Raj began keeping records. That, at any rate, is the opinion of Prof. M.I. Bhat, of the Indian Geological Survey, whose job is to monitor the 9,575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India. Gangotri has shown particularly strong recession, but that – according to Professor Bhat – is principally attributable to local geological disturbances,
To seize on one unscripted talk by me, in which I carelessly suggested in passing that Gangotri was the only glacier receding in the Himalayas (given that there are 9,575 of them, and given the climatic variability and geological instability of the Himalayas that would be an untenable proposition), and to go on and on and on and on about it when there are plenty of references to the correct position in other talks and writings by me seems less than reasonable.
And then there is the question of the correlation between CO2 concentration and temperatures over the past 500 million years. SteveE purports to quote an earlier posting by me, but he neglects to complete the quotation: I said that the causative direction appeared to be the opposite of that stated in the party line: namely, that in the paleoclimate it was temperature that changed first and CO2 concentration that followed it. And if one looks at the slide that I was showing at the point when the caveman took me to task, it is obvious from that slide that, whichever the direction of causation, over a sufficiently long timescale the correlation between the two variables is remarkably poor, though there are various periods within that long timescale where the correlation is excellent – except that it was the temperature changes that preceded and inferentially drove the CO2 concentration changes, and not – as the party line would have it – the other way about.
Finally, yet again, Joel Shore sullenly persists in his error about whether Kiehl and Trenberth’s value for the total radiative forcing from the presence of the top five greenhouse gases in the atmosphere included the effect of temperature feedbacks. The answer is that it did not. He has still failed to address the following points I have made:
1. Kiehl and Trenberth do not mention temperature feedbacks anywhere in their paper. They are concerned with forcings, because their paper is concerned with the annual energy budget of the Earth, and most feedbacks do not operate over such short timescales.
2. Kiehl and Trenberth denominate the forcings in Watts per square meter, the units in which forcings are expressed.
3. Kiehl and Trenberth do not denominate the forcings in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, the units in which temperature feedbacks are expressed.
Next, when I demonstrated, using one of the IPCC’s own forcing functions, that the radiative forcing (and only the forcing) from the presence of all the CO2 in the atmsophere was 24 Watts per square meter, very close to Kiehl and Trenberth’s 27 Watts per square meter CO2 forcing, and drew the obvious conclusion that either Kiehl and Trenberth were indeed talking only about forcings and not about feedbacks or that their implicit value for feedbacks is no more than an insignificant fraction of the tripling of the base forcing that the IPCC imagines, he dismissed the point – without even an attempt at argument – as irrelevant. Once again, I do not get the impression that Mr. Shore is in search of the scientific truth. If the pun be permitted, he seems more interested in Shoring up the party line even at points where it has long been seen to fail than in making any genuine attempt to understand the objective scientific truth. And truth alone, as Fr. Vincent McNabb used to say, is worthy of our entire devotion.
Monckton of Brenchley:
(A little confused on the right way to address you. Should I start this with Dear Lord? 🙂 )
“One commenter says that creating these pages would have cost only a few hundred dollars. Quite right. But the really high-ticket item, so the Professor told me, was getting the search-engines to give all two dozen of these rubbish pages – which no one would actually want to read, because there was nothing that made any sense in them except the words “Monckton video” – a page-ranking higher than that of the page containing my speech.”
Many thanks for your response, and I assume that was my post you were referring to. I’m still a little confused, or perhaps you are or the professor was, but I don’t know of any way to spend that much money doing what you describe. I have no doubt that it’s easy to create some pages full of gibberish, and indeed to get them to the top of the search rankings for any given term for a short time. But it costs, say, ten dollars a page, and you can’t help matters by paying Google. All you do is spam the links all over the place, like on these comments pages – hence the spam filtering. You can get a team of people in India or Taiwan or some such who’ll do it for peanuts.
Without additional information, my best guess for the figures the professor gave is that he took the cost to have a real site optimised for search engines in a sustainable, long-term way – a costly and complicated exercise – for which a reasonable figure might well be $10,000, and applied it inappropriately to a similar short-term process which is far less costly.
Otherwise, I can only imagine that there was presumed spending on adwords and similar – paid keywords on Google – but they are not capable of being used in the way you describe.
I can’t help wondering if this wasn’t actually just spam. These nonsense pages are not uncommonly created for ‘viral’ keywords. The resulting revenues are not high, which says a lot about the creation cost. One might adapt the old saying about not ascribing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence to the internet: never ascribe to malice that which can be explained as spam.
My apologies if I’ve missed some key fact which renders my speculation pointless; my intention is to help find a form of words which accurately conveys the concept you have in mind.
Smokey says:
January 13, 2012 at 9:44 am
Honeycutt says:
“You might want to constrain your discussion to this because saying that AGW is merely conjecture has absolutely no basis.”
Wrong: Basis. Get up to speed. AGW is a conjecture for the basic reason that it is not testable. Hypotheses must be testable.
________
You are nothing if not entertaining Smokey. This old meme of yours is of course quite silly. The Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, is just that…a theory. It might have been a “conjecture” a century ago, but has gone far beyond that. Of course, your insistence that it is just a “conjecture” helps to make it seem small and insignificant, and I would offer the “conjecture” that this brings great comfort to skeptics such yourself. At least some skeptics were bold enough to alter the title given to the Theory of AGW, and call it a “Sky Dragon”. Afterall, it would hardly be very exciting to suggest that they slew the terrible “Conjecture of AGW”. Doesn’t real grab the imagination now does it.
Gates, I understand that your mind is closed, but for the benefit of our numerous readers: AGW is a conjecture, because it is not empirically testable. If it were testable it would be quantifiable, and the presumed “human fingerprint” of global warming could then be accurately measured. But that is not the case, which is why there is an ongoing disagreement over the issue.
AGW is certainly not a “theory”, such as Evolution or Relativity. A theory is a hypothesis with at least one nontrivial validating datum, therefore AGW does not qualify. Theories make accurate predictions; AGW cannot. AGW is a conjecture based on radiative physics [and I agree with the AGW conjecture, although the effect is obviously very small; otherwise temperature would track CO2. It doesn’t].
Attempting to mis-classify AGW with the Theory of Relativity and the Theory of Evolution is nonsense, because AGW simply does not fit the definition of a theory. Or, for that matter, of a hypothesis. But thanx for your opinion. It shows that you misuse accepted scientific definitions in a lame attempt to support a weak argument. Good arguments do not need such rhetorical support.
• • •
Joel Shore says:
“Smokey says:
‘It would settle most if not all of the debate if AGW was a testable hypothesis, and thus quantifiable.’
“Oh, yes! After all, evolution is a testable hypothesis…And, look how little debate we get about it! Why, there is even a majority of Americans who believe in it if you define it weakly enough!”
Joel, put down the wine glass and try to think clearly. Evolution is a hypothesis; I’m surprised that you don’t know that all Theories and Laws are also hypotheses. And the fact that there is a raging debate over the AGW conjecture proves my point that AGW is not a hypothesis. If it were a hypothesis, it would be repeatedly testable and thus verifiable. It is neither empirically testable nor quantifiable. Guesstimates range from a cooling effect through more than 100% of the [natural] warming since the LIA! These are only opinions. Quantifiable, measuable testability would nail down the specific fraction of warming attributable to AGW. Unfortunately, there is no such testability. Thus, AGW remains a conjecture.
Correctly labeling AGW as a conjecture is the first step in the scientific method. But to elevate a conjecture to the status of a hypothesis requires that it must be testable, per the scientific method. AGW is not testable; it relies upon radiative physics. And there is a leap of faith required to presume that AGW is a hypothesis – based on a different hypothesis. Gates even insists that AGW is a Theory, putting him squarely in the lunatic fringe. You’re getting close yourself, and I would advise you to not take that final step by misusing scientific terminology.
It is simply untrue to claim that I have not answered this point (many times!), although it is such a pathetically weak argument to start with that the fact that it has become the mainstay of your argument shows how little actual argument you have.
I have explained to you that whether something is a forcing or a feedback depends on context. In particular, one has to imagine a certain experiment (i.e., changing some forcing or another) in order to decide what contributions might be feedbacks to that forcing. Since Kiehl and Trenberth are just trying to get the energy budget correct, they are not considering any such experiment: They are simply asking what the radiative effects are of the various components in our current atmosphere. E.g., they are not addressing how or why that particular amount of water vapor or clouds happen to be in the atmosphere. They are just taking them to be there in the amounts that they are and calculating the radiative effect of them.
And, your claim that most feedbacks do not operate over such short timescales” is laughable: Your proposed thought experiment to determine the climate sensitivity was to look at the difference between the atmosphere with all greenhouse gases present and all removed. You were presumably considering allowing as much time as necessary for the feedbacks to operate and give the equilibrium climate sensitivity.
To convert between these units of feedback and forcing, all you need to do is multiply by a temperature change. For example, if you imagine removing all of the CO2 from the atmosphere, that causes a certain temperature change. If you then take this temperature change and multiply by the value for the water vapor feedback, that will give you the resulting radiative effect that occurs due to the fact that this lower temperature results in less water vapor being present in the atmosphere. (In reality, you have to solve self-consistently, since as water vapor is removed, the temperature will drop more and this will cause a further reduction in water vapor…)
I said it was irrelevant because it is irrelevant. The experiment we are talking interested in is one in which CO2 is indeed a forcing. Hence, the question is not about how much of the CO2 should be considered a feedback rather than the forcing; rather, the question is how much of the water vapor and clouds should be considered a feedback rather than a forcing. I do not contest the notion that CO2 contributes a forcing of 27 W/m^2 in the current atmosphere.
Maybe you get that impression because of psychological projection: As a politician, you find it hard to imagine a life such as mine, devoted to scientific research and teaching and the search for scientific truth for truth’s sake. You try to look at me, but you only see only your own reflection in the mirror.
Here are the arguments of mine that you really truly have never even ATTEMPTED to answer:
(1) You have never attempted to engage the substance of my argument, namely, that some of the water vapor in the atmosphere would end up condensing out of the atmosphere if we removed only the CO2 from the atmosphere (because of the resulting temperature drop). This illustrates that we do not have to reduce the forcing by the full ~100 W/m^2 that you attribute to all the greenhouse elements in order to get the full temperature reduction of 33 K. I can understand why you refuse to engage this argument, since your best hope is just to ignore it and hope people don’t notice that you are doing that.
(2) You have never attempted to engage in a discussion of my “Bill Gates feedback” analogy that makes it clear, even for someone like yourself who seems to be so confused about forcings and feedbacks, what is wrong with your argument.
Yes, “petty smears” are terrible, aren’t they? And “artfully-distorted”, “inconsequential”, “silly allegations”, “disinclined to waste much time on him”, “ineptly and confusedly recycled”, “serially mendacious”, “no-account non-climatologist”, “fourth-rank bible college”, “Nowheresville”, “couldn’t even get his elementary arithmetic right”, and “caveman” are not at all infantile, are they?
video response from pothole
[SNIP: No, Lance, those are the videos Lord Monckton is responding to and Anthony has already linked to them in the article. -REP]
To see all of moncktons mistakes in context with evidence to back up where he went wrong, it is all pointed out in potholer54’s videos:
Lord Monckton Bunkum Part 1 – Global cooling and melting ice
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM
Monckton Bunkum Part 2 – Sensitivity
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTY3FnsFZ7Q
Monckton Bunkum Part 3 – Correlations and Himalayan glaciers
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpF48b6Lsbo
Monckton Bunkum Part 4 — Quotes and misquotes
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3giRaGNTMA
Monckton bunkum Part 5 — What, MORE errors, my lord?
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRCyctTvuCo
[MODERATOR’S NOTE: Yes, by all means, watch the videos and see how Hadfield erects strawmen and then claims they are Lord Monckton’s mistakes. As Steve McIntyre often puts it, watch the pea under the thimble. -REP]