Cooking the books
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Mr. John Cook, who runs a website puzzlingly entitled Skeptical Science” (for he is not in the least sceptical of the “official” position) seems annoyed that I won the 2011 televised debate with Dr. Denniss of the Australia Institute, and has published a commentary on what I said. It has been suggested that I should reply to the commentary. So, seriatim, I shall consider the points made. Mr. Cook’s comments are in Roman face: my replies are in bold face. Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good enough to make sure that this reply to his commentary is posted on his website in the interest of balance.
Chaotic climate
Cook: “Monckton launched his Gish Gallop by arguing that climate cannot be predicted in the long-term because it’s too chaotic because, [Monckton says],
‘the climate is chaotic…it is not predictable in the long-term…they [the IPCC] say that the climate is a coupled, non-linear, chaotic object, and that therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.’
… It’s really quite self-evident that Monckton’s statement here is incorrect.”
Reply: Paragraph 5 section 14.2.2.2 of the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 TAR report says:
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
My quotation from the IPCC, given from memory, was in substance accurate. Here and throughout, I shall ignore Mr. Cook’s numerous, disfiguring, ad-hominem comments.
Consensus
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to demonstrate his confusion about the causal relationship between science and consensus: [he says: ‘the idea that you decide any scientific question by mere consensus [is incorrect].’ … He suggests that somehow climate science is done by first creating a consensus when in reality the consensus exists because the scientific evidence supporting the anthropogenic global warming theory is so strong.”
Reply: This seems a quibble. Dr. Denniss had said he was satisfied with the science because there was a consensus. He had appealed repeatedly to consensus. Yet in the Aristotelian canon the argumentum ad populum, or headcount fallacy, is rightly regarded as unacceptable because the consensus view – and whatever “science” the consensus opinion is founded upon – may or may not be correct, and the mere fact that there is a consensus tells us nothing about the correctness of the consensus opinion or of the rationale behind that opinion.
Adding carbon dioxide to an atmosphere will cause warming, but we need not (and should not) plead “consensus” in aid of that notion: for it is a result long proven by experiment, and has no need of “consensus” to sanctify it. However, the real scientific debate is about how much warming extra CO2 in the air will cause. There is no “consensus” on that; and, even if there were, science is not done by consensus.
Mediaeval warm period
Cook: “Every single peer-reviewed millennial temperature reconstruction agrees that current temperatures are hotter than during the peak of the [Mediaeval Warm Period]. …
Reply: At www.co2science.org, Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries providing evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was generally warmer than the present, sometimes by as much as 3-4 C°. Many of these papers provide millennial reconstructions.
Cook: “The climate scientists involved in creating those first millennial proxy temperature reconstructions are not under criminal investigation.”
Reply: The Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Mr. Cuccinelli, issued a press statement on May 28, 2010, repeating an earlier statement that –
“The revelations of Climategate indicate that some climate data may have been deliberately manipulated to arrive at pre-set conclusions. The use of manipulated data to apply for taxpayer-funded research grants in Virginia is potentially fraud. … This is a fraud investigation.”
Fraud, in the Commonwealth of Virginia as in most jurisdictions, is a criminal offence. The Attorney-General’s investigation is being conducted in terms of the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act 2000.
Is there a human fingerprint?
Cook: “The scientific literature at the time [of the 1995 Second Assessment Report of the IPCC] clearly demonstrated a number of ‘fingerprints’ of human-caused global warming.”
Reply: The scientists’ final draft of the 1995 Report said plainly, on five separate occasions, that no evidence of an anthropogenic influence on global climate was detectable, and that it was not known when such an influence would become evident.
However, a single scientist, Dr. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, rewrote the draft at the IPCC’s request, deleting all five statements, replacing them with a single statement to the effect that a human influence on global climate was now discernible, and making some 200 consequential amendments.
These changes were considered by a political contact group, but they were not referred back to the vast majority of the authors whose texts Dr. Santer had tampered with, and whose five-times-stated principal conclusion he had single-handedly and unjustifiably negated.
We now have the evidence of Prof. “Phil” Jones of the University of East Anglia, in one of the recently-released Climategate emails, that the warming of the past century falls well within the natural variability of the climate – consistent with the conclusion that Dr. Santer had negated.
The IPCC’s fraudulent statistical technique
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to make another bizarre claim about the IPCC reports which we’ve never heard before: that they use a ‘fraudulent statistical technique’ to inflate global warming’ … As long as the claim sounds like it could be true, the audience likely cannot determine the difference between a fact and a lie.”
Reply: Mr. Cook is here accusing me of lying. Yet my email address is well enough known and Mr. Cook could have asked me for my evidence for the fraudulent statistical technique before he decided to call me a liar. He did not do so. Like the hapless Professor Abraham, he did not bother to check the facts with me before making his malevolent and, as I shall now show, baseless accusation.
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, carries in three places a graph in which the Hadley Center’s global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset from 1850-2005 is displayed with four arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines overlaid upon it. At each place where the altered graph is displayed, the incorrect conclusion is drawn that because trend-lines starting closer to the present have a steeper slope than those starting farther back, the rate of warming is accelerating and that we are to blame.
I wrote both to Railroad Engineer Pachauri (in 2009) and to a lead author of the 2007 report (in 2011), and visited both of them in person, to report this defective graph. They both refused to have it corrected, though neither was able to argue that the technique was appropriate. I have now had the data anonymized and reviewed by a statistician, who has confirmed that the technique is unacceptable. In the circumstances, the refusal of the two senior IPCC figures to correct the error constitutes fraud and, when the statistician has been shown the context of the data that he saw in an anonymized form, the police authorities in the relevant nations will be notified and prosecution sought.
Climate sensitivity
Cook: “Where Monckton gets this claim that the Australian government’s central climate sensitivity estimate to doubled CO2 is 5.1 C° is a complete mystery.
Reply: The “mystery” could and should have been cleared up by Mr. Cook simply asking me. The estimate is that of Professor Ross Garnaut, the Australian Government’s economic adviser on climate questions. It is on that figure that his economic analysis – accepted by the Australian Government – centres.
Cook: “Monckton also repeats a myth … that most climate sensitivity estimates are based on models, and those few which are based on observations arrive at lower estimates. The only study which matches Monckton’s description is the immensely-flawed Lindzen and Choi (2009).”
Reply: I am not sure what qualifications Mr. Cook has to find Professor Lindzen’s work “immensely flawed”. However, among the numerous papers that find climate sensitivity low are Douglass et al. (2004, 2007) and Coleman & Thorne (2005), who reported the absence of the projected fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas warming in the tropical mid-troposphere; Douglass & Christy (2009), who found the overall feedback gain in the climate system to be somewhat net-negative; Wentz et al. (2007), who found that the rate of evaporation from the Earth’s surface with warming rose thrice as fast as the models predicted, implying climate-sensitivity is overstated threefold in the models; Shaviv (2005, 2011), who found that if the cosmic-ray influence on climate were factored into palaeoclimate reconstructions the climate sensitivities cohered at 1-1.7 C° per CO2 doubling, one-half to one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate; Paltridge et al. (2009), who found that additional water vapor at altitude (caused by warming) tends to subside to lower altitudes, allowing radiation to escape to space much as before and greatly reducing the water vapor feedback implicit in a naïve application of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation; Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011), who found the cloud feedback as strongly negative as the IPCC finds it positive, explicitly confirming Lindzen & Choi’s estimated climate sensitivity; Loehle & Scafetta (2011), who followed Tsonis et al. (2006) in finding that much of the warming of the period 1976-2001 was caused not by us but by the natural cycles in the climate system, notably the great ocean oscillations; etc., etc.
Cook: “Monckton at various times has claimed that climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is anywhere between 0.2 and 1.6 C°.”
Reply: I have indeed done climate sensitivity estimates by a variety of methods, and those methods tend to cohere at a low sensitivity. The IPCC at various times has claimed that a central estimate of climate sensitivity is 3.8 C° (1995); 3.5 C° (2001); and 3.26 C° (2007); and its range of estimates of 21st-century warming in the 2007 report is 1.1-6.4 C°. Ranges of estimates are usual where it is not possible to derive an exact value.
Carbon pricing economics
Cook: “Monckton employs the common ‘skeptic’ trick of focusing on the costs of carbon pricing while completely ignoring the benefits.”
Reply: On the contrary: my analysis, presented in detail at the Los Alamos Santa Fe climate conference in 2011, explicitly calculates the costs of taxing, trading, regulating, reducing, or replacing CO2 and sets against the costs the cost of not preventing the quantum of “global warming” that will be reduced this century as a result of the “investment”. Yet again, if Mr. Cook had bothered to check I could have sent him my slides and the underlying paper.
Cook: “Economic studies consistently predict that the benefits [of carbon dioxide control] will outweigh the costs several times over.”
Reply: No, they don’t. True, the Stern and Garnaut reports – neither of them peer-reviewed – came to this conclusion by questionable methods, including the use of an absurdly low inter-temporal discount rate. However, if one were permitted to use the word “consensus”, one would have to point out that the overwhelming majority of economic studies on the subject (which are summarized in my paper) find the cost of climate action greatly exceeds the cost of inaction. Indeed, two review papers – Lomborg (2007) and Tol (2009) – found near-unanimity on this point in the peer-reviewed literature. Cook is here forced back on to the argument from consensus, citing only an opinion survey of “economists with climate expertise”. However, he does not say how many were interviewed, how they were selected, what weightings and other methods were used: and, in any event, the study was not peer-reviewed. Science is not, repeat not, repeat not done by opinion surveys or any form of head-count.
Abrupt warming
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to claim that abrupt climate change simply does not happen:
‘Ask the question how in science there could be any chance that the rate of just roughly 1 C° per century of warming that has been occurring could suddenly become roughly 5 C° per century as it were overnight. There is no physical basis in science for any such sudden lurch in what has proven to be an immensely stable climate.’
The paleoclimate record begs to differ. A stable climate is the exception, not the norm, at least over long timescales.”
Reply: Mr. Cook displays a graph of temperature changes over the past 450,000 years. At the resolution of the graph, and at the resolution of the proxy reconstructions on which it was based, it would be quite impossible to detect or display a 5 C° warming over a period of as little as a century.
Global temperatures have indeed remained stable over the past 100 million years, varying by just 3% either side of the long-term mean. That 3% is around 8 C° up or down compared with today, and it is enough to give us a hothouse Earth at the high end and an ice age at the low end.
However, very extreme temperature change can only happen in a very short time when conditions are very different from what they are today. For instance, at the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event, 11,400 years ago, temperature in Antarctica rose by 5 C° in just three years, according to the ice cores (which, over that recent period, still have sufficient resolution to allow determination of annual temperatures). No such lurch in temperatures has happened since, and none is reasonably foreseeable.
We now have confirmation from the UK Met Office that there has been no “global warming” to speak of for 15 years. That is hardly the profile of an imminent 5 C° increase in global temperature. Bottom line: a stable climate is the rule, not the exception: and nothing that we can do to alter the climate can cause a major change such as that which terminates ice ages. Remember Canute: our power is limited.
Human influence on the climate
Cook: “There has never before been a large human influence on the climate, so why should we expect it to behave exactly as it has in the past when only natural effects were at work?”
Reply: I did not say that the climate will behave “exactly” as it has in the past. We are capable of exerting some influence over it, but not very much. The notion that we can exercise a large influence is based on the mistaken idea that the initial warming from a doubling of CO2 concentration (which might be about 1 K) will be tripled by net-positive temperature feedbacks. This unfortunate assumption is what truly separates the IPCC from scientific reality. The IPCC makes the mistake of assuming that the feedback mathematics that apply to an electronic circuit (Bode, 1945) are also applicable to the climate. In two very important respects that the models are tuned to overlook, this is not so. First, precisely because the climate has proven temperature-stable, we may legitimately infer that major amplifications or attenuations caused by feedbacks have simply not been occurring.
Secondly, the Bode equation for mutual amplification of feedbacks in an electronic circuit has a singularity (just above the maximum temperature predicted by the Stern report, for instance, or by Murphy et al., 2009) at which the very strongly net-positive feedbacks that reinforce warming suddenly become just as strongly net-negative, dampening it. I have not yet heard of a convincing physical explanation for any such proposed behaviour as applied to the climate. But if we must use the Bode equation then it necessarily follows from the climate’s formidable temperature-stability that the feedback loop gain in the climate system is either zero or somewhat net-negative. A climate subject to the very strongly net-positive feedbacks imagined by the IPCC simply would not have remained as stable as it has.
Has Earth warmed as expected?
Cook: “Monckton … repeats … that Earth hasn’t warmed as much as expected … [He says} ‘If we go back to 1750 … using the Central England Temperature Record as a proxy for global temperatures … we’ve had 0.9 C° of warming …’. It should go without saying that the temperature record for a single geographic location cannot be an accurate proxy for average global temperature.”
Reply: Central England is at a latitude suitable to take the long-run temperature record as a fair proxy for global temperatures. However, if Mr. Cook were unhappy with that, he could and should have contacted me to ask for an independent verification of the 0.9 C° warming since 1750. Hansen (1984) found 0.5 C° of warming had occurred until that year, and there has been 0.4 C° of warming since, making 0.9 C°. Indeed, in another article on Mr. Cook’s website he himself uses a value of 0.8 C° in the context of a discussion of warming since 1970.
The significance, of course, is that the radiative forcings we have caused since 1750 are equivalent to those from a doubling of CO2 concentration, suggesting that the transient sensitivity to CO2 doubling is around 1 C°.
Cook: “… Human aerosol emissions, which have a cooling effect, have also increased over this period. And while 3 C° is the IPCC’s best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity, the climate system is not yet in equilibrium. Neglecting these two factors (aerosols and thermal inertia of the global climate), as Monckton and Lindzen have done, will certainly give you an underestimate of equilibrium sensitivity, by a large margin. This is how Monckton supports his lowball climate sensitivity claim – by neglecting two important climate factors.”
Reply: Once again, Mr. Cook has failed to check his facts with me. Of course my calculations include the effect of aerosols (which, however, is by no means as certain in its magnitude as Mr. Cook seems to think). And of course I have not ignored temperature feedbacks (which Mr. Cook mistakenly confuses with “the thermal inertia of the global climate”: actually, it is I who have been arguing that there is considerable homoeostasis in global temperatures, and he who had earlier been arguing that global climate was not stable). If I am right about temperature feedbacks (see above), then the equilibrium sensitivity will be about the same as the transient sensitivity – around 1 C°. And that, on most analyses, would actually be beneficial.
Cook: “The warming over the past 60 years is consistent with the IPCC climate sensitivity range and inconsistent with Lindzen and Monckton’s lowball climate sensitivity claims. Monckton claims the observational data supports his low sensitivity claims – reality is that observational data contradicts them.”
Reply: Warming from 1950 to date was 0.7 C°. Net forcings since 1950 were 1.8 Watts per square meter, using the functions given in Myhre (1998) for the major greenhouse gases and making due allowance for aerosols and other negative anthropogenic forcings. The transient climate-sensitivity parameter over the period was thus 0.4 Celsius degrees per Watt per square meter, consistent with the 0.5 derivable from Table 10.26 on page 803 of IPCC (2007) on each of the IPCC’s six emissions scenarios. In that event, the transient warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration over the present century would be 0.4(5.35 ln 2) = 1 C°, again using a function from Myhre (1998). Interestingly, the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of warming from CO2 this century is only 50% above this estimate, at 1.5 C°.
In short, even if the IPCC is right about the warming this century from CO2, that warming is simply not going to be enough to cause damage.
Lying
Cook: “Monckton spent almost the entire debate misrepresenting the scientific (and economic) literature at best, lying at worst.”
Reply: Now that readers have had a chance to hear both sides, they will be able to form a view on who was lying and who was not.
“Joe Ryan says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:38 am
If it weren’t for argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam.they’d have no argumentum at all.”
Just a little wordy for a Blues song.
Thank you Lord Monckton for doing what you do so well.
Re: Steve E, Chance N.
I think Lord M might have incorrectly referenced AR4, when it should have been TAR. See: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm . The paragraph/quote is there, verbatim.
In general a good rebuttal and, as always, an entertaining read. I’m not, myself, certain about the climate stability arguments. While there are bounds to the climate based on our understanding of the geological record, within those outside temperature boundaries, it appears shifts between climate states can occur with amazing speed (Lord M. cites the end of the Younger Dryas as an example; he could also have cited its onset). I’d be curious to see what understanding exists of how these prior climate shifts have occurred – what conditions initiated them? (I know there is a theory/hypothesis that the onset of the Younger Dryas resulted from the draining of Lake Aggasiz into the ocean, where the freshwater pulse impacted the Atlantic thermohaline circulation.) Lord M. says those conditions don’t exist today, but its not clear what that argument is based on.
HIstorical abrupt shifts in climate cut both ways: the suggestion that the recent, mild warming is either abrupt or unusual is undercut; at the same time, it opens the door to “warmaggedon” arguments that a modest increase in temperature could lead to more rapid temperature increases in the future (until the outer bounds are hit, presumably).
However, since we are still likely cooler than the MWP, and certainly cooler than the Holocene Optimum, it’s not readily apparent to me, that the warming experienced in the late 20th C. is unusual (or principally being driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions). Even so, its an interesting area that doesn’t get as much attention as it needs (beyond claims of alarmists that every change in the Arctic ice cover is, yet again, another tipping point…).
Re: Steve E, Chance N., Ian
I contacted Monckton and of course he authorized an update/correction and link is added to the 2007 TAR.
Thank to everyone for catching this.
Anthony
Cook: “Monckton employs the common ‘skeptic’ trick of focusing on the costs of carbon pricing while completely ignoring the benefits.”
This particular canard is, to my mind, the most laughable of all. Not only because, as Lord Monckton’s response demonstrates, it is wrong in this instance, but because in the several decades of this controversy the purveyors of alarmist hyperbole have only in the rarest circumstances been willing to suggest that they recognize that there are any positive human benefits to higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. From what I’ve seen those benefits, which have been widely and obviously demonstrated, most notably by the Idsos, are either denied or unrecognized in almost every calculation of the C/B ratios for the various assaults on liberty and prosperity that the alarmist community has been demanding we all accept, based on their application of the entirely ignorant “precautionary principle”. That makes this particular critique probably the ultimate example of the pot and the kettle that you will ever see.
Ian– correct. Moncton quoted properly, but has the wrong citation.
Well done Christopher !
@Dave Wendt,
That double standard gave me a chortle too. Such clear cognitive dissonance should be used as an example in psychology text books.
eyesonu says:
February 3, 2012 at 10:01 am
DirkH says:
February 3, 2012 at 9:36 am
SteveE says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:08 am
I think the next sentence puts Moncktons statement in context though:
‘The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.’
Where is the support for the theory that a bunch of inaccurate models will produce an accurate probability distribution of possible future climate states?
@mrsean2k
WRT the graph claiming to show acceleration; by coincidence, George Monbiot has been shilling an “Escalator” graph which claims to show the “skeptical” viewpoint:
Have you asked George if he’s seen this response
🙂
M’Lord, an excellent rebuttal framed in very moderate terms but, nevertheless, a swingeing put-down which was rather well-deserved. It was also a very educational read for which, many thanks.
Good lord, that was a smack down!
Is there any doubt that adapting to climate change will be a lot cheaper than trying to prevent it? Considering that whatever we do to prevent climate change will be the wrong thing, or will have unintended consequences, or will be negligible, it makes sense to wait and see if the climate starts warming again (or cools.) and then do what we can to adapt. Since they are claiming that aerosols are the reason the climate hasn’t warmed, it sounds like we may have already found a solution to global warming – should it become a problem – that doesn’t starve the world’s plant life.
Spending trillions to chase phantoms is irresponsible, especially when most of the money is not used to reduce CO2 but to create propaganda for public consumption. If they can make people feel guilty about their very existence, they won’t convince them to breath out less CO2 but they may convince them to pay more in taxes as an indulgence for their sins. The whole idea of “consensus” is not about the science, it is to convince the public that all the really cool people support them. It’s just a complete coincidence that all the really cool people stand to benefit in some way from the trillions that will be spent.
I do wish Lord Monckton would stop agreeing that carbon dioxide is having any effect, because it isn’t.
It has now been proven computationally and empirically that the energy contained in any radiation emitted spontaneously from a significantly cooler part of the atmosphere than the surface cannot be converted to thermal energy when it meets the surface. Only thermal energy adds to other thermal energy. So, without additional thermal energy there can be neither slowing of the cooling rate nor increasing of the warming rate.
For details see the first two pages of my site http://climate-change-theory.com for this is the truth of the matter and it must prevail.
Note in particular the evidence provided by infra-red cameras whose sensors cannot be warmed by radiation from the cold clouds.
Thank you Lord Monckton. I unfortunately lost a friendship last year over the CAGW scare. I fought the Middle School in Portola Valley, Ca (Corte Madera) for showing Al Gore’s movie and portraying it “As fact”. They have stopped showing it, but one of my alarmist friends personally attacked me for fighting(and winning, sort of…) that battle. I started comparing the two sites(WUWT, SS) and was a bit overwhelmed. We(I) need some help from you guys. It would be helpful if some of you could put together an easily referenced rebutal to that “thermometer” on the upper left hand of the SS website. They have thier “beginner” and “advanced” CAGW rebutal to the non alarmist view. I started fact checking(with my limited ability in this field) and found mistakes in their data. A little help with “fact checking” on their 10 point “thermometer” would help us that are less educated in the topic to debate our alarmists friends(not that we have many anymore). Thanks, Mark
2008:
web.archive.org/web/20080507024314/www.skepticalscience.com/ocean-and-global-warming.htm
“What the science says…
The notion that the ocean is causing global warming is ruled out by the observation that the ocean is warming (Levitus 2005). Internal climate changes such as El Nino and thermohaline variability stem from transfers of heat such as from the ocean to the atmosphere.
If the ocean was feeding atmospheric warming, the oceans would be cooling.”
2010:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/cooling-oceans.htm
“Claims that the ocean has been cooling are correct. Claims that global warming has stopped are not.”
What to make of this:
2008: “If the ocean was feeding atmospheric warming, the oceans would be cooling.”
2010: “Claims that the ocean has been cooling are correct.”
Anthony, you should add Skeptical Science link to your “Pro AGW Views” list…
REPLY: They used to be there, but they now occupy a category of their own on the right sidebar – Anthony
Anthony after seeing the above and because of the article on him recently there is another site you should add to the “Pro AGW Views” list although with the amount of comments that disappear it should be put into that new category you made, that is the Bad Astronomer at Discovery Mag. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
Don’t know if it can added as it covers some astronomy also 🙂
GOOD LORD!! Bloody good show, Sir.
If Cook wasn’t “naked” before, he is now!
Excellent piece. Copied and saved.
….
Wait? What’s that?? I think I hear Cook praying!
WE HAVE A CONVERT! Opps, sorry. Just the dog snoring.
/sarc
Richard M says: “There are two kinds of “smarts”. One is based on more or less on memory skills and the other is based on logical/critical thinking. In most Western education systems the former type is rewarded with higher grades on average….”
Yes, at least two kinds, plus the ability to synthesize using the results of both. Feynman, in one of his books, mentioned visiting a university in South America where rote learning (your first kind of smarts), was the total objective. He bluntly told them so at a commencement address, much to their shock and horror. A student came up to him afterwards and agreed with him.
This evidently applies to a lot of universities in the US & UK, too!
I find it quite laughable when the Chicken Little CO2 AGW/CC Believing Alarmists, Call Christopher Monckton a ‘Climate Crank’ as our NZ’s own Chicken Little Hot-Topic Blog does. Even though he’s the one that often is right. While their Climate Change Icons they love to believe and dote on their every word turn out to be quite often 9 out of 10 the Real ‘Climate Cranks’. Al Gore, Hansen, Mann. Just to name a few!
Babsy says:
It would be interesting to see if that could be, if it hasn’t already been, experimentally confirmed.
It’s easier to grasp if you remember that the second law of thermal dynamics is applicable to kinetic energy transfer, which in itself is subject to the laws of motion.
Light is a very broad spectrum of electromagnetic energy and usually expressed as Watts per square meter per second. It’s a constant energy force and is therefore subject to the laws of energy conservation. If you have a closed system and keep putting energy in then it will accumulate to infinity. This can’t happen in our universe because it is an open system.
This means any energy flowing back to a radiating surface adds to the power of the emitting surface. You cannot destroy energy so any back radiation cannot just disappear.
Radio waves are just very long electromagnetic waves and this concept is applied to amplify a directional antennas output.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi-Uda_antenna
I think we should all be thankful for a free internet, without which none of us would have heard of Lord Monkton! or any of the sung and unsung heroes of this fight for our freedom. Thankfully they left this ten years too late, I would so like to see Lord Monkton leading a like minded party running the UK, I have escaped my country for Canada and watch despairingly as the socialist elite destroy it and most or europe with it, maybe this scam will destroy the old order, at least we now know who in the corridors of power can be trusted, few as they are!
A huge debt is owed to WUWT, Lord Monkton and all the sceptics who have fought for us.
Thank you.
Monckton, I love the way your classics always teach me new words.
I’ve now discovered what “Gish Gallop” means… found some interesting stuff. Google no. 1 is RationalWiki, set up to “debunk” “pseudosciences” to which global warming denialism belongs, of course. Then I found a little U-tube piece – well well, SkSci again.
A phrase haunts me over all this… “A lie travels halfway round the world before truth has got its pants on”. We’ve seen this happen, and this is how it happens: the liar, who of course is the expert in lying, publicly accuses his accusors of the very lies he himself practices, before they accuse him publicly… his accusations are believable because they draw on his own expertise of lying, and they are believed because he got there first.
Al Gore declared in his lying film that all scientists who disagreed with the “consensus” were either “kooks or crooks”. After that time, it became harder for scientists to disagree without risking their reputation, livelihood, and even wellbeing.
But we have an even greater phrase: “Truth Will Out”.
TRM says:
Indeed, Monckton is a very skilled debater, which is why he does so well with audiences who do not have the scientific background to see the errors in his arguments. With those who do have those scientific credentials, well, he is not regarded with anything near the worship that he seems to be regarded by most here.
As just a couple of examples of Monckton’s error –
Monckton of Brenchley says:
Actually, 0.4(5.35 ln 2) = 1.48°C, not 1°C as Monckton claims, which puts his estimate toward the lower end, but well within the range of 1.3°C to 2.6°C that the IPCC lists for transient climate responses in the various the 19 models for which this value was computed ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html#table-8-2 ), especially when one considers that the 2.6°C is a bit of an outliers with the next highest value being 2.2°C. So, Monckton’s estimate actually supports the IPCC values once the math is done correctly.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
For example, one of the methods that he uses, as has been discussed in past posts here, is to look at the total temperature increase attributable to the natural greenhouse effect (~33°C) and to compare this to the total radiative effect of ~100 W/m^2 that is attributed to all greenhouse gases. He claims that this gives a result for climate sensitivity that includes the effect of feedbacks. However, that claim is easily demonstrated to be incorrect…For example, his calculation assumes that none of the water vapor in that atmosphere is the result of feedbacks from the warming due to the non-condensable greenhouse gases, or in other words, that there is no water vapor feedback!!! It also assumes there is no ice-albedo feedback since the radiative effect of any change in albedo due to changes in ice or snow cover is not taken into account.
Perhaps these two examples can help you to understand why Monckton’s “point by point evisceration of his opposition” does not impress qualified scientists nearly as much as it impresses lay people like yourself.
Babsy says:
No…Scientists and engineers have been using the equations of radiative transfer for the last hundred years or so but nobody has ever bothered to experimentally verify them!
Seriously, statements like this are just bizarre!
As an update on my previous post, the values for the transient climate response in that IPCC table ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html#table-8-2 ) actually range from 1.2 to 2.6 C (I missed that 1.2 C value), with a mean +/- one standard deviation of 1.76 C +/- 0.35 C. So, Lord Monckton’s estimate of 1.48 C from the historical temperature record is within the one-standard deviation of the average from the 19 climate models in the IPCC AR4 report that reported this value.
Just to note, most scientists would also note that any sort of estimate like Monckton’s using the historical temperature data actually carries quite large error bars, mainly because of the uncertainty in the anthropogenic aerosol forcing. This is why the historical temperature record alone does not very tightly constrain equilibrium climate sensitivity (or transient climate response) and hence why other empirical data is used to get as tight a constraint as possible (which is, nonetheless, not as tight a constraint as we would like to have).
The burning question I have is did you write this over a nice cuppa Lord M as this would make you the perfect english gentleman if you did in my books, no matter what sh*t gets thrown at you you respond with dignity and a little humour.
John Marshall says:
February 3, 2012 at 6:16 am
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As I have said many times before, it is one of the greatest PR scoops of all time that the public have a perception that the warmists can point to temperature charts and claim a correlation between CO2 and temperature. U say this because, in practice, there is no correlation either in the geological record or in the instrument record.
For sure, in the geological record there are some similarities but only to the extent that temperature controls CO2, not the other way around. As regards the instrument record there is only one small part where CO2 and temperature track (the late 20th century) but given that the rate of temperature change is no greater than the rate of change between about 1920 to 1940, rvrn thr late 20th century warming provides no real correlation.