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.
Jim says: Science has moved on past this elementary fact;
In fact, very few people have understood it.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-884090
Neither have you, apparently.
Bill Illis says:
February 4, 2012 at 4:27 am
Yeah, it’s hard to find a geological paper these days that doesn’t crank up a GCM and do some CO2 estimating and arm-waving. I’m not sure if it’s just a matter of satisfying funding requirements or if they really believe that CO2 is the “god molecule” of Earth. I referenced the paper primarily to make the point that “abrupt” is a relative term, i.e. millions of years in this particular case.
However, I think the plant-geochemical weathering link is undoubtedly important. Plants molest rocks both chemically and mechanically, and their effect on geologic processes will be an interesting field of study.
Thanks for that link to the polar wandering diagram. I suppose that is a simplification from this:
Gondwanan palaeogeographyand palaeoclimatology
C. R. SCOTESE, 1’* A. J. BOUCOT 2 and W. S. MCKERROW 3
Now be aware that they say:
“…If Gondwana’s changing climates were solely the result of its changing latitudinal position then it would be a simple matter to predict expected climates through time. However, superimposed on this pattern of secular climatic change is a signal of global climatic change. During the 500 million years that Gondwana and its fragments existed, the Earth’s global climate system has shifted from ‘Ice House’ conditions to ‘Hot House’ conditions four times (Fig. 2) (Frakes et al., 1992)….”
Without a doubt the more of tracegas CO2 in the atmosphere the better, for it is a plant fertiliser.
Realclimate.org has no good answer how to maintain global plantlevels with a reduction of CO2.
Anyway just for the scientific curious it remains an amusing (yet trifling) matter whether CO2 can be apportioned for some benign warming.
I hope it does, but we remain unsure about this to this day.
the killimandjharro lost snow in the 1800s when global CO2 rise was not an issue.
fotos exist (or can be made to exist) of swimming polar bears , from floe to floe, in the 1800s as well.
Where does this leave us?
Well we need more CO2 to make the effects if there are, more visible.
For that, I propose to build more windmills as they are about the surest devices yet we have designed that contribute to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
cheers
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 6:15 am
Re David says:
February 4, 2012 at 5:10 am
Your assumption that water vapor is net postive to the entire ocean/land/atmosphere is not matched by observations (Joel cuts out all the subtance of my comment as well as the time and comes up with a simplistic respnse not addressing any of the issues I brought up)
Joel responds “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.”
=====================================================================
Geez, I write a comment about water vapor feedback, which include clouds, albedo, further cloud induced reduction of allready significant water vapor (clear sky only) reduced surface insolation to the surface, , conduction, convection, evaporation, and your response is only in regard to the radiative effects of water vapor, as if that was the end all of the story, sheesh, such simplistic thinking, as if there is a consensous. The bottom line is the TOA observations do not support positive feedback from additional water vapor. Water vapor is not a linear response where the feedback is the same regardless of T or the current atmospheric W/V content, is it.
In my opinion, that none of you offend, full consideration of climate change on Earth, I think, is not related to the causes of which are the subject of endless and useless discussions. Basic or genuine and radical causes of these changes are consequences of established laws in the constellation of the solar system. Earth can not warm up or cool down and none of the factors on which you are discussing. These are much more powerful elements that generate the magnetic field of the Sun and planets, which in turn bring their warming effect of the very bowels of the heavenly bodies. Just need to know who and how to create the effects of magnetic fields. A little more clearly-known principle of electric-arc furnace. For the rest it needs the cooperation of those who offer something new. This is all so far is not effective if you want to find out the real causes of all phenomena in our sun
Babsy says (February 3, 2012 at 8:34 am): “It would be interesting to see if that could be, if it hasn’t already been, experimentally confirmed.”
With a modest outlay of cash, you can do the experiment yourself. Or, you could read Dr. Roy Spencer’s results from his own backyard experiment:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/help-back-radiation-has-invaded-my-backyard/
There are good reasons to be skeptical of global warming alarmism, but thermodynamics isn’t one of them.
Gary Hladik says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:22 pm
My comment wasn’t about thermodynamics. Its about quantum mechanics. It was about what happens to a CO2 molecule after it absorbs an IR photon. When does the molecule in the new excited energy state lose the extra energy by emission of a photon and return to its previous energy level? Thanks for the link. It will be interesting reading.
Myrrrh says (February 3, 2012 at 5:35 pm): “And what’s the mechanism that makes it a net hotter to colder?”
The earth (due to sunshine) is warmer than the upper atmosphere (cooled by radiation to space), so the net radiative flow (leaving out conduction and convection) is from surface to atmosphere, i.e. warmer to cooler. That doesn’t prevent the surface from receiving some of the atmosphere’s radiation, which keeps the surface temperature warmer than it would be in the absence of atmospheric infrared radiation.
Again, when a body emits a photon, the photon doesn’t know if its eventual destination is warmer or cooler than its source; it just…goes. If it helps, consider the “reverse commuter” who’s lucky enough to travel opposite the main freeway traffic flow in the morning. His destination suffers a net population loss during rush hour, yet its population is still one higher than it would be if he stayed home that day.
You don’t invoke consensus if you have proof! Think about it! If the theory of anthropogenic global warming is correct and the scientific evidence so overwhelming – then why would one seek consensus?. It does not and cannot make logical sense. The scientific evidence should be more than sufficient to counter any sceptical argument with respect to the proposed theory.
The fact that consensus has been invoked – implies that sufficient doubt exists in the substance of the proposition to warrant the calling for consensus to begin with. I can only arrive at the conclusion that one would seek consensus on a scientific issue because one cannot logically reason out a standpoint among a room full of critical minds.
Critical minds will seek-out all avenues of doubt and uncertainty. Science is fundamentally a works in progress – constantly being challenged with question after question after question.
It would seem to me that Consensus fundamentally strives for the opposite. It strives for certainty of opinion, a ‘collective take on things’ – whereas Science lives off doubt. This is the problem between Consensus and Science. I would argue that ‘Consensus’ strives for a solution to a perceived ‘problem’, whereas Science is always striving to understand the nature of a problem and whether the ‘perception’ of that problem is warranted or unwarranted, accurate or inaccurate.
Science is defined as the ‘state of knowing’. Science is concerned with facts, not opinions. Science is not concerned with predictions or projections – because they ultimately lie in the fields of uncertainty and assumption. These are not FACTS!
Personally, I would argue that one cannot arrive at a plausible conclusion about the elements which drive climate – unless a COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING of nature and the universe exists to begin with. Anything short of this understanding, in my opinion, cannot result in any rational determination of climate sensitivity because unless we have perfect knowledge of how the earth’s system operates and the processes at play – it simply can never be good enough to issue opinions and statements to the effect of ‘knowing’ what we ‘do not’.
Doug Cotton says (February 4, 2012 at 4:32 am): “No one seems to have published a simple experiment showing backradiation warming something.”
Dr. Roy Spencer has done something like that in his back yard:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/first-results-from-the-box-investigating-the-effects-of-infrared-sky-radiation-on-air-temperature/
“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.”
As Dr. Spencer points out in the comment thread, it’s not trivial to “shield” something from infrared radiation, as the shield itself is also an IR source. Further, both targets would need to be shielded from contact with ambient air and from IR sources other than the sky, e.g. trees, caterpillars, the experimenter, etc.
BTW, the comment thread is well worth reading.
@Postman77 says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:54 pm
wOw! The Postman delivers!
David says:
The bottom line is that the scientists who study the scientific evidence on this don’t agree with you:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841
By the way, as a practical matter, the water vapor feedback are usually not thought of as including clouds, but rather clouds are considered separately. The cloud feedback is truly more uncertain, but it becomes very hard to explain the paleoclimate history if the cloud feedback turns out to be significantly negative.
Joel
When you can show me empirical evidence of so-called backradiation on a humid night actually warming a plate of metal (or slowing its rate of cooling compared with an identical shielded plate) then we can all start to believe water vapour feedback (like the supposed carbon dioxide feedback) is real.
Whilever radiation from parts of the atmosphere colder than -35 degrees doesn’t even warm the highly sensitive sensors of a microbolometer IR camera, I’m more than somewhat doubtful that you will ever be able to show such – which would be in keeping with what Prof Johnson deduced that radiation from a significantly cooler source is merely scattered by a warmer surface and is not converted to thermal energy.
Noting Joel has not responded to either of my posts above.
Gary: Spencer’s test doesn’t have a “placebo.” He should have two identical boxes, one shielded from backradiation, the other not. Why not just use two metal plates in open air, but insulated from the surface? These would emulate the surface conditions, including the effect of molecular collisions transferring energy by diffusion between surface and air. Just place a large reflective shield about 1cm above one of the plates.
Joel Shore:
I see you quoted the following Dessler paper.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6010/1523.abstract
Do you really want to get into the mechanics etc of this paper and how poor they are?
The paper above is not showing anything of value….unfortuantely.
Camburn,
Joel can only attribute the warming since the LIA to CO2 as a matter of faith. He believes that somewhere in the middle of these charts that CO2 becomes a magical forcing agent, taking control and running the climate from there.
I would invite Joel to pick the year that CO2 takes over from whatever was causing the warming before CO2 started to rise. But I suspect I’d get the same response you’re getting.
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 4, 6:15 am
Joel, I’m flattered and surprised that you have responded to mine this time, although I’m not sure that you understood what the questions were, so I’ll re-phrase and expand on them:
First, I’ll repeat the numbers again according to the Trenberth 2009 energy balance cartoon, which no doubt will be repeated in AR5. (units = W/m^2):
• Thermals = 17; augmenting Evapotranspiration = 80; total; AKA “convection” = 97
• Via radiation directly to space = 40
• Via radiation temporarily absorbed in the atmosphere and clouds = 23 (GHE)
• Disapearados = 1
What to note here is that the combined surface heat loss transitorily attributable to absorption, (mostly in H2O vapour and CO2), is a small player compared with “convection”, let alone cloud cover. Your & IPCC dogma is that a small increase in CO2 will also result in increased water vapour, and hence a positive feedback. However, IF there is increased water vapour, then it is reasonable to conjecture both increased cloud cover, and increased “convection”. (= evapotranspiration + thermals). Thus since surface cooling from these latter thingies is over four times greater than the radiative effects that are your baby, why do you assume that any change in the assumed warming radiative effects would exceed the reactive collective effects of that much greater pool of cooling potential?
BTW, a year or more ago, I had some Email exchanges with Roy Spencer, enquiring as to why there seemed to be a dearth of study into “convective” effects, and my interpretation of his responses was that: Oh well, “convection” is certainly very important, but we are all too busy competing on the (arguably less important) radiative effects. This is evidenced by the “warfare” between Dessler and he, and their contradictory conclusions. OK, I expect you to ridicule Spencer, but may I point out that even that elitist Dessler has in the past generously conceded that Spencer is a credible climate scientist.
Just noting that, despite Joel Shore’s misdirection, Monckton’s comments above about 0.4 (5.35 Ln(2)) are quite accurate.
Most pro-AGW people have a problem with basic math which is why we have ended up in this controversy in the first place. They are mainly environmentalists who “feel” their way through the math rather than actually calculate it.
Now what does that say about climate models. First run turns up no real warming. Well, then Gavin Schmidt goes in and plays around with the parameters in the models and increases the effect. Second run doesn’t look much different so even more emotional-derived parameterizations are required.
Eventually, the climate model must represent what Gavin’s boss (James Hansen) says it should be so the final 44 times re-run re-parameterized climate model produces 3.0C per doubling. Voila, guaranteed 3.0C per doubling.
Mhyre 1998 was supposedly based on line-by-line transfer code results but it was really tuned to produce 3.0C per doubling.
Smokey says:
February 4, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Drill here. Drill now.
Bill Illis says:
Really…So you want to go on record as saying that 0.4 (5.35 Ln(2)) = 1. That’s an interesting position to take.
Well, we’ll take it from someone who believes that 0.4 (5.35 Ln(2)) = 1.
Yes, it is all a diabolical plot… a grand conspiracy. How’s your tinfoil hat working for you these days, Bill?
Camburn says:
Your questions are a complete hijack of this thread. Can we talk about one topic at a time? I’ll give you a little hint as to general gist though: The fact that fires can occur naturally is not an argument against the police determination on the basis of strong evidence that a particular fire was caused by arson.
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Drill here. Drill now. And prosper.
MartinGAtkins:
Babsy is correct, but you should note that you started talking about emitted power, whereas Babsy was questioning if there was any empirical evidence that radiation from a cooler atmosphere can transfer thermal energy to a warmer surface. You change the subject to emitted power.
To explain, as I probably need to, if you shine two identical torches at a mirror it will indeed emit twice the power of one torch. But if there is perfect (100%) reflection there is no energy to be transferred, and thus no warming of the mirror.
The facts of life are that radiation from a (significantly) cooler source has a lower peak frequency than the peak frequency of the warmer receiving surface. Such radiation is scattered and does not lose any energy and so does not alter the thermal energy in the surface, whereas radiation which has a higher peak frequency (eg SW solar) is converted to thermal energy.
Gary Hladik says:
February 4, 2012 at 4:19 pm
“Doug Cotton says (February 4, 2012 at 4:32 am): “No one seems to have published a simple experiment showing backradiation warming something.”
Dr. Roy Spencer has done something like that in his back yard:
Sorry Gary, but Spencer’s experiment is flawed as some of the comments indicate. The most obvious problem is the lack of a control apparatus – a “placebo” if you like.
It is reasonably easy to shield backradiation with a shield having polished silver on the underside. If the shield is slightly sloped it will allowed warmed air to escape by convection. Other things such as radiation from humans can be avoided easily with longer cables to the sensing devices. So long as both sets of apparatus are used simultaneously, and then interchanged for a second experiment, that would seem OK to me – unlike his little drive down the mountain to make a second measurement at a later time, rather than using a phone to converse with another observer – well! Has he got no friends?
Henry@JoelShore
Here is something for you that you should think about.
So far, after evaluating the daily results from 20 weather stations balanced by +/- latitude and 70/30 sea/land, the score on my pool table for global warming is as follows:
MAXIMA: rising at a speed of 0.0385 degrees C per annum
MEANS : increasing at a speed of 0.0133 degrees C per annum
MINIMA: creeping up at 0.0048 degrees C per annum
HUMIDITY: decreasing at a rate of -0.02% RH per annum
PRECIPITATION: slight change at + 0.16 mm /month /year
The latest tables show that, over the past 4 decades, the rates of increase of temperatures on earth i.e. maxima, means (=average temperatures) and minima have risen at a ratio of about 8:3:1. Remember: these are the summaries of actual measured results from a number of weather stations all around the world….No junk science. No hypothesis. Every black figure on the tables is coming from a separate file of figures. Obviously I am able to provide these files of every black figure on the table.
As all the balls now lie on my table, surely, anyone must be able to understand that it was the rise of maximum temperatures (that occur during the day) that caused the average temperature and minima on earth to rise? This implies clearly that the observed warming over past 4 decades was largely due to natural causes. Either the sun shone a bit brighter or there were less clouds. There are different theories on that. Looking at the differences between the results from the northern hemisphere(NH) and the southern hemisphere (SH), what we see is happening from my dataset is that more (solar) heat went into the SH oceans and is taken away by water currents and/or weather systems to the NH. That is why the NH is warming and that is why the SH does not warm.
To understand more on why CO2 is good for you, read here:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok