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.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Of course a lot of people don’t yet believe what Claes Johnson, a well published Professor of Applied Mathematics has written in his Computational Blackbody Radiation which extends the work of Einstein and Planck in particular, and solves a dilemma which troubled Einstein all his life. It’s common for such scientists to be disbelieved in the early stages.
Maybe I wouldn’t believe it either if the climate records actually did show a human footprint, or if IR cameras like those microbolometers did actually form images of objects more than 30 degrees below zero. But, according to their manufacturers’ specifications, any IR radiation from significantly cooler sections of the atmosphere apparently doesn’t warm their sensors, which is exactly what Prof. Johnson would predict – and exactly why backradiation doesn’t warm the surface.
So how about you go and argue with him on his site if you think you can find fault with his assumptions, computations and/or conclusions? Come back and let us all know if you think you are the first in the world to do so.
You might also like to put up your argument as to why you think the Earth’s surface acts like a blackbody, and thus why my arguments on my Home page are considered faulty by yourself. No doubt you’ll find all your answers on SkS – or will you?
If you want to read a brief summary, or get a link to his document, you know where to look: http://climate-change-theory.com/RadiationAbsorption.html
But let’s agree to talk facts and figures on this site, shall we? Everyone here has heard enough comments from people like yourself in the past – just echoing the IPCC and SkS. What’s your motive – to push an agenda, or to seek the real truth?
Well done Lord Monckton.
You are the kind of statesman this world needs more of. Thank you for all of your efforts and hard work.
I have not bothered with Skeptical junk science in a number of years. I spent a short time there several years back and recall reading their claim that the climate system was not chaotic, their claims of course were ridiculous and unfounded and quite bluntly to anyone that had studied chaotic systems would recognize immediately they were ignorant fools. I could not find a method to successfully argue with people that did not understand what they were arguing about, a problem I still have today.
Kudos to Lord Monckton for presenting a rational and convincing rebuttal to the clownery of Mr. Cook. Although I sincerely doubt Mr. Cook has any clue what has been done to his argumentative rapport. Although I am certain with his limited skill of thought he will not be aware.
For anyone who feels I have slighted Mr Cook with ad hom assaults, yes I have, he deserves no better, nor do any of his fraudulent and ignorant friends.
Cheers to Lord Monckton!
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 3, 2:11 pm
Just to keep it to one simple point, you wrote in part of Christopher Monckton’s comments:
There may well be a water vapour feedback, but as I’ve asked of you before to no avail, if that is the case, would it not also be reasonable to expect a change in cloud cover? Also, according to the great prophet Trenberth, by far the greatest cooling effect from the surface is evapotranspiration, which is arguably augmented by thermals. (sometimes jointly AKA convection). So what happens if there is a small change there too? Would you please clarify in your great wisdom what the sign of these multiple joint interactions might be? Here are the numbers again according to the Trenberth 2009 energy balance cartoon, in W/m^2:
• Thermals = 17
• Evapotranspiration = 80
• Via radiation directly to space = 40
• Via radiation temporarily absorbed in the atmosphere and clouds = 23 (GHE)
• Disapearados = 1
Your clarifications to us mere mortals on this would be appreciated.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 2:15 pm
“A photon of infrared light doesn’t know if it came from a body warmer or colder than its destination”
The body which it strikes “knows” because the peak frequency of the radiation (hence its energy) is lower than its own peak emission frequency if the emitting body was cooler than the receiving body. The peak frequency of emission is proportional to the absolute temperature.
There cannot be any conversion of the energy in the radiation to thermal energy if the temperature of the emitting body was (significantly) less than that of the receiving body. That is why an atmospheric “greenhouse effect” is a physical impossibility.
This is why an IR camera which depends on radiation warming its sensors cannot form an image of a body (cloud etc) which is significantly cooler than its sensor. Have we told you enough times yet?
You really need to learn some basic physics – try the link on my site to Johnson’s Computational Blackbody Radiation which I have recommended (in another post) that you read, but perhaps I need to say, study.
Yes, you linked three papers on radiation experiments, two of which I would have had to pay to read and none of which you quoted in any detail – but, as far as I can see, at least one which I could read free acknowledged that a lot of radiation passes through a solid without being absorbed – as Johnson would expect – just being scattered. None seemed to have performed a simple experiment to see if actual backradiation from the atmosphere really does warm anything like a metal plate. The microbolometer IR cameras seem to demonstrate such an experiment would fail. (PS Don’t come back quoting IR cameras that measure low temperatures using the frequenct of the radiation as that’s irrelevant.)
.
Anthony,
Christopher Monckton is too modest. Why don’t you tell the good readers of WUWT about his big plan for countries like Australia and the UK? What’s needed is, he says, for the super rich to buy an existing TV station or set up a new one, employ the likes of Joanna Nova and hey presto, they’ll have ” free, fair and balanced coverage” just like you do in the US with Fox!
http://www.getup.org.au/minersmediaplan
What will he think of next?
@tempterrain
If it balances out the unquestioning warmist bias of the BBC, and the relentless pro warming/ socialist Labor bias of the Fairfax Press and ABC here in OZ, then I’ll be a very happy camper.
More power to the miners!
Lord Monckton says
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.
I don’t actually agree with that. sorry. I don’t regard that as completely proven. Nobody has actually come to me with a balance sheet of how much radiative warming (24hrs/day) and radiative cooling (12 hrs per day) is caused by each GHG and how much cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in photo synthesis.
In fact, if such a balance sheet actually exists, it should have time somewhere in the dimensions?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Joel Shore
your egalitarian non discriminating sense of intelligence has dutifully commit the wrong mnemonic to the subject
I still think Monckton deserves a noble prize.
the forlorn ir photons (travelling the wrong way..) do not know they are travelling the wrong way and indeed make individually hot places still hotter.
the matter is settled at satisfaction, at the source of the transmission, with stats: there are MORE photons sent out from the hot place than out of the cold place, as a matter of, well as a matter of the definition of being hotter actually.
this does not deny the possibility of a phlogiston fridge with photonic osmosis screens
henryP
I quite agree
The sensitive issue of “CO2 is a GHG” is conflated with the fact it has great heat capacity and is used for fire retardants etc.
there is scant experimental evidence it is a major GHG though. Certainly less so than H2O and there is 100 times more H2O than CO2 in the air (0.5-4% volume) .H2O is more effective due to its properties (higher melting and boiling point, which allows water to easier create suspensions clouds)
Just like H2O , trace gas CO2 (0.04% volume) acts like punch balls or those pouche air seats that were popular in the 70s.
where as interaction between O2 and N2 is like billiard balls, when N2 and CO2 interact (exchange a photon) it is like CO2 gets a punch and then slowly hisses the punch away. the billiard ricocheting is for ever lost as the CO2 molecule hisses empty and energy radiates out in empty space.
So adding more punchballs losens the kinetic energy of the mix.
CO2 cools the atmosphere.
We all know that. CO2 is the major feeback for temperature regulation of planet earth: when atmosphere heats, CO2 is dissolved from ocean water and that cools the atmosphere.
now the picture changes of course when you use ONLY CO2 for your atmosphere. Then it acts a s a mantle as every CO2 molecule can only interact with other CO2 molecules.
JimF says:
February 3, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Check this out:
First plants cooled the Ordovician
Timothy M. Lenton, Michael Crouch, Martin Johnson, Nuno Pires and Liam Dolan
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/pdf/ngeo1390.pdf
“…Between 488 and 444 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, … Yet complex climate models8,9 suggest atmospheric CO2 levels had to drop to about 8 PAL to trigger glaciations at this time….”
———————————————————-
This study made me literally laugh. These people actually believe the stuff they are spouting. “Weathering” is a magical process, but sounds very scientific and the very use of the word allows to people to suspend rational judgement and believe CO2 magically controls the climate .
The Ordovician ice age is very easy to explain (and it has nothing to do with plants or CO2). In fact, the same explanation also works for the Carboniferous ice age and the glaciation of Antarctica 35 million years ago. … and Greenland’s glaciation and Siberia’s glaciation 156 Mya and Snowball Earth and so on and so on.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/images/figure05_10.jpg
http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/9508/tempco2570mlefttoright.png
Lord Monckton & HenryP:
No one seems to have published a simple experiment showing backradiation warming something.
How easy it would be to have two metal plates insulated from the ground sitting there, one absorbing backadiation at night and the other shielded from the backradiation. Just compare the pair.
I find it really hard to believe that someone has not done such an obvious test, or, if not, why the IPCC would not have requested it? The whole thing looks very suspicious, but then, what doesn’t in this field?. Surely Lord Monckton could arrange such a simple experiment.
The specifications for those microbolometer IR cameras whose sensors are not warmed by radiation from a cloud at -35 deg.C for example, should be an encouragement.
“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. ”
Not true. This is based on consensus not science. As many debates on this site has shown. CO2 slows the rate of cooling very slightly. It does not cause warming. (Despite a flawed deminishing consensus).
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 3, 2:11 pm
…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!!!
=========================================
I will leave it for Monckton to express what is, or is not in his calculation, which is I think based on observations so includes whatever affects nature throws at it.
However it sounds like you assume water vapor and clouds have a net positive reinforcement to CO2 induced warming. This is nothing more then an assumption.
Any increase in water vapor is in and of itself a spectral modification of incoming TSI reducing SW radiation at the surface. Check any solar spectrum chart; It will show that about 98% of that energy lies between about 250 nm in the UV and 4.0 microns; with the remaining as 1% left over at each end. Such graphs often have superimposed on them the actual ground level (air Mass once) spectrum; that shows the amounts of that energy taken out by primarily O2, O3, and H2O, in the case of H2O which absorbs in the visible and near IR perhaps 20% of the total solar energy is capture by water VAPOR (clear sky) clouds are an additional loss over and above that !!
Water vapor and clouds have a far larger effect on the SWR entering the ocean, and on SWR reflecting back to space, then CO2 has on the residence time of LWIR in the atmosphere. A CO2 induced LWIR atmospheric warming primarily increases evaporation at the ocean surface, which increases water vapor and clouds, which reduce SWR entering the oceans. Several studies since 1979 have shown a limit on T in the tropics due to this observation.
CO2 operates on a well known small percentage of the LWIR in the atmosphere riding on the shoulders of water vapor. Water vapor and clouds effect a much larger portion of the TSI [than] CO2, and affect it not only at the LW spectrum in the atmosphere, but where it matters the most, at the SW spectrum entering the oceans. Oceans are a far stronger GHLiquid then anything in the atmosphere. Your assumption that water vapor is net positive to the entire ocean/land/atmosphere is not matched by observations.
@Doug Cotton:
Doug: It is hard to catalog all of the errors and misstatements you make here and on your website, but I will try to hit the highlights:
(1) Claim: Back-radiation does not warm a surface. Reality: In one sense this is true. If you have an object that is emitting radiation but not receiving energy from elsewhere (or from the conversion of some other form of energy into thermal energy) then it will indeed not warm due to back-radiation. It will simply cool more slowly since the net flow of heat is away from the body. However, the Earth is also receiving energy from the sun. Its steady-state temperature is determined by the balance between what it receives from the sun and what it radiates back into space. In such a case, an increase in back-radiation will indeed result in a higher steady-state temperature.
(2) Claim: Einstein did not believe in the particle (“photon”) nature of light. Reality: In fact, when Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize, the one thing that the citation specifically mentioned was his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which he explained by light having a particle nature with the quantum of energy being Planck’ constant h times the frequency.
(3) Claim: Claes Johnson has proven that back-radiation does not exist. Reality: Cleaes has not proven anything. Claes rejects a whole field of physics, statistical physics, which has successfully explained everything from thermodynamics (including the Second Law) to phase transitions to the behavior of steps and island growth on solid surfaces. He has tried to replace the well-understood way that the statistics of large numbers of particles naturally explains why the transition from the microscale to the macroscale leads to dissipation, entropy increasing, etc. by a new postulate: He proposes that dissipation occurs at macroscopic scales because it occurs at microscopic scales. And, he believes it occurs at microscopic scales because of an artifact that occurs in the numerical solution of partial differential equations by discretization, whereby this discretization introduces artificial viscosity and dissipation. Everybody else in the field of numerical analysis would say that this dissipation is an artifact of the numerical technique, but Claes believes it to be a fundamental physical principle governing the universe. It is sort of the ultimate example of someone believing models over reality, which is why it is so ironic that some “AGW skeptics” like you have embraced such nonsense! Claes claims to have shown that he can re-derive a few basic laws (like that governing the net radiative exchange between two blackbodies at different temperatures) with his new postulate, although I don’t think anybody has bothered to check his math in detail because his starting point is so nutty. He has not even come close to showing that he can explain everything that a century’s worth of statistical physics has explained, nor has he given any evidence that he can provide explanations of any experimental data that cannot be explained by the current theoretical framework.
(4) Claim: Claes’s arguments show that the greenhouse effect does not exist. Reality: One of the ironies of Claes’s work is even that if you believe it, he has not provided any evidence that the greenhouse effect does not exist. In fact, as I noted, he has re-derived the law for net radiative exchange between two blackbodies at different temperatures and it is this law that leads to the greenhouse effect existing. Whether or not you consider one of the terms in that equation to represent “back-radiation” is irrelevant! The equation still gives the same results if you don’t adopt that interpretation, and that result is a greenhouse effect.
Doug Cotton says:
Can you remind me of your and Claes’s background in physics? I’ll run down mine: * PhD from one of the top physics grad schools in the U.S. * Publications in some of the top physics journals in the world (e.g., Physical Review Letters), mostly in the field of statistical physics, which provides the underlying understanding of thermodynamics. * Practical physical modeling in industry for 13 years, including some calculations of radiative transfer. * Teaching of introductory physics at the university level, including thermodynamics.
I think you need to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
David says:
The simple point is that by counting the enter water vapor content of the atmosphere as being a forcing, he is implicitly making the assumption that none of the water vapor is there as a feedback, i.e., as a result of the temperature increase that occurs when you add in the non-condensable greenhouse gases.
The radiative effects of water vapor in the atmosphere can and are calculated using the same radiative transfer equations that have been well-verified in a variety of fields extending from remote sensing to more down-to-earth applications.
Bob Ferley-Jones says:
Yes, there is a cloud feedback also.
It is not hard to understand the basic effects of this because what convection (including evapotranspiration) do is maintain the lapse rate in the troposphere at close to the appropriate (dry or moist) adiabatic lapse rate. For those parts of the troposphere where the lapse rate is close to the dry adiabatic lapse rate, that means the lapse rate doesn’t change. For those parts of the troposphere where the lapse rate is close to the moist adiabatic lapse rate (which is itself a decreasing function of the temperature), the lapse rate does decrease a bit with rising temperatures, hence providing a negative feedback included in all of the climate models. This negative feedback offsets a part of the positive feedback due to water vapor…and, because the two feedbacks involve much of the same physics, models with a larger magnitude of lapse rate feedback also tend to have a larger magnitude of the water vapor feedback. As a result, the net effect of these two feedbacks is better constrained than each feedback individually.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Dear Joel,
For all the mathematical skill and scientific prowess that you possess and demonstrate for us here on WUWT I must sadly inform you that you *DID NOT* understand what I was thinking about when you quoted me here:
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Have a wonderful weekend!
Babsy says:
February 4, 2012 at 6:22 am
Correction: My statement should have said: “I must sadly inform you that you *DID NOT* understand what I was thinking about when you quoted me here:”
Henry@ur momisuglyWinnie the Pooh
It seems only a few people have actually discovered that O2 is sort of also a GHG, because it has very slight absorption in the same 14-16 region where H2O and CO2 also absorbs. But O2 is very high, 21%
Henry @ur momisugly Doug Cotton
True. We only have the closed box experiments which only show the warming properties, not the cooling properties of a gas.
I say more CO2 is better and I have my (scientific) reasons for that.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Say what?
Have you no concept of how optical or EM reflectors operate?
You’re mixing apples and orange; don’t confuse an energy level below a certain ‘threshold’ for an energy level which has no effect!
.
Joel:
Interesting reading your comments. Thank you.
As you have given your credentials, impressive.
I now have a couple of questions:
1. We all know that temps started rising at the end of the LIA, and have continued to rise to a fairly flat peak as of late. Whether that peak establishes a meaningful high will only be known in approx 60-100 years. With this said, what percentage of the rise since the LIA do you contribute to mainly C02 and what percentage do you contribute to Holocene climatic flucuations?
2. Has the warming trend established since the close of the LIA a few centuries ago been anything out of the ordinary when looked at within the whole of the Holocene?
3. Proxy data indicates that the Holocene Optimum was warmer than present. And it was warmer for 1,000’s of years. The resolution of the proxy data is such that it is not inconcieveable that those folks experienced spike temps much much higher than present. With that in mind, what is extraordinary about the current warm period?
Joel:
TSI has recently been shown to be very stable. Even during times of low sunspot activity.
However, even tho stable there is documented effects of sunspot/precipitation activity.
I am sure you know the papers, so I won’t post them all here.
We all know that the models concerning climate have a hard time with the H20 cycles etc. A very small change in the H20 cycle will have profound effects on temps as we also know that H20 dwarfs C02 as any kind of “climate” regulator.
Without the use of present satillites, and even there is disagreement of cloud coverage, realative humidity, etc….how do we know the effects of the H20 cycles on temperatures?
We can make assumptions, but when made with error bars displayed, the assumptions become mostly meaningless as the range concerning temperature is so wide that it virtually encompasses the temperature variations potentially experienced during the Holocen period.
Thank you in advance for you generous response.
Science has moved on past this elementary fact; are you not aware of commercial radiative coolers (which require a clear nighttiime sky for instance)?
Shore addressed this point further up, yet you bring up the same strawman; it isn’t so muc WARMING as it is a lessening of (the reduction of the rate of) COOLING due to the insertion of an EM active ‘element’ like a CH4, CO2 or H2O into the atmosphere.
Else, how do you explain Infrared Spectroscopy?
Molecular vibration and attendant EM absorption and re-radiation anyone?
Cotton?
Bueller?
.
Henry @Camburn
You honestly don’t think Joel is going to give you straight answers to those 3 questions?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok