Monckton vanquishes Union College “Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds”
Guest post by Justin Pulliam
THE NEWS that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled. Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly.
Traveling with Lord Monckton on the East Coast leg of his current whistle-stop tour of the US and Canada, I was looking forward to documenting the Schenectady showdown. I have had the pleasure of listening to His Lordship at previous campus events. He is at his best when confronted by a hostile audience. The angrier and more indignant they are, the more he seems to like it.
The Union Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) sponsored the lecture, which was video streamed by CampusReform.org (where a video recording is available). The afternoon of the event, Lord Monckton appeared on the CFACT leaders’ hour-long weekly show on the Union College radio station. As a result, that evening 200 people packed a campus lecture theater to hear Lord Monckton speak.
As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.
“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy? From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.
Lord Monckton was shown a graph demonstrating a superficially close correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature over the past 150,000 years. Mildly, he asked, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it CO2 concentration that changed first, or temperature that changed first, driving the changes in CO2 concentration?”
The student clutching the graph mumbled that it was impossible to tell, and nobody really knew.
At Lord Monckton’s elbow, an elderly lady – presumably on faculty at Union College – said, “Perhaps I can help. It was temperature that changed first.”
“Exactly,” said Lord Monckton.
“However,” she continued, “CO2 then acted as a feedback, amplifying the temperature change. That’s one way we know CO2 is a problem today. And what,” she said, turning noticeably acerbic in a twinkling of Lord Monckton’s eye, “caused the changes in temperature?”
“Well,” said Lord Monckton, “we don’t know for certain, but one plausible explanation …”
“… is the Milankovich cycles!” burst in the venerable PhD, anxious not to have her punch-line stolen.
“Yes,” Monckton agreed imperturbably, “the precession of the equinoxes, and variations in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and in the obliquity of its axis with respect to the plane of the ecliptic. Actually, it is arguable that the cycles were first posited by an autodidact university janitor, a Mr. Croll.” The yakking crowd of environmentalists grew more thoughtful. Their propaganda had made him out to be an ignorant nincompoop, and they had begun to realize they had made the mistake of believing it.
Lord Monckton moved into the auditorium and began with his now-famous, exuberantly verbose parody of how the IPCC might describe a spade. This elegantly hilarious gem, delivered from memory, is rumored to be longer than the Gettysburg Address. Then he said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.
The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).
You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.
Lord Monckton then startled his audience by saying it was settled science that there is a greenhouse effect, that CO2 adds to it, that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, that we are largely to blame, and that some warming can be expected to result. But these facts had been established by easily-replicable and frequently-replicated measurements first performed by John Tyndall in 1859 at the Royal Institution in London, “just down the road from m’ club, don’t y’ know” (laughter). Therefore, these conclusions did not need to be sanctified by consensus.
The audience were startled again when Lord Monckton showed a slide indicating that the rate of warming since 1950 was equivalent to little more than 1 Celsius degree per century, while the rate of warming the IPCC predicts for the 21st century is three times greater. His slide described this difference as the “IPCC credibility gap”.
Next, Lord Monckton baffled his audience, including the professors and PhDs (whose faces were a picture) by displaying a series of equations and graphs demonstrating that, while it was generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 1 C° of warming in the absence of temperature feedbacks, the real scientific dispute between the skeptics and the believers was that the believers thought that feedbacks triggered by the original warming would triple it to 3.3 C°, while the skeptics thought the warming would stay at around 1 C°.
He moved on to show that the principal conclusions of each of the four IPCC “gospels” were questionable at best and downright fraudulent at worst. The 2007 gospel had concluded that the rate of warming was itself accelerating and that we were to blame, but this conclusion had been reached by a bogus statistical technique. By applying the same technique to a sine-wave (which the audience had agreed exhibits a zero trend), it is possible to show either a rapidly-accelerating uptrend or a rapidly-plummeting downtrend, depending on the choice of endpoints for the trend-lines on the data.
The 2001 IPCC gospel had abolished the medieval warm period by another piece of dubious statistical prestidigitation that was now under investigation by the Attorney-General of Virginia under the Fraud against Taxpayers Act 2000 (gasps of gaping astonishment from some of the environmentalists, who seemed not to have been told this before).
The 1995 gospel had been rewritten by just one man, to replace the scientists’ five-times-expressed conclusion that no human influence on global climate was discernible with a single statement flatly (and incorrectly) to the contrary.
The 1990 gospel had claimed to be able to predict temperature changes for 100 years into the future. Yet an entire generation had passed since then, and the warming over that generation had turned out to be below the lowest estimate in the IPCC’s 1990 gospel and well below its central estimate. For eight years, sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century. Worldwide hurricane activity is almost at its least in the 30-year satellite record. Global sea-ice extent has scarcely declined in that time. Here, the message was blunt: “It. Isn’t. Happening.”
Next, Lord Monckton turned to climate economics and demonstrated that the cost of acting to prevent global warming is many times greater than the cost of inaction. The example of Australia’s carbon dioxide tax showed why this was so. Australia accounts for only 1.2% of global CO2 emissions, and the government’s policy was to reduce this percentage by 5% over the ten-year life of the tax. On the generous assumption that the entire reduction would be achieved from year 1 onward, the fraction of global emissions abated would be just 0.06%. Because this fraction was so small, the projected CO2 concentration of 412 ppmv that would otherwise obtain in the atmosphere by 2020 would fall to 411.987 ppmv. Because this reduction in CO2 concentration was so small, the warming abated over the 10-year period of the tax would be just 0.000085 C°, at a discounted cost of $130 billion over the ten-year term.
Therefore, the cost of abating all of the 0.15 C° of warming that the IPCC predicted would occur between 2011 and 2020 by using measures as cost-effective as Australia’s carbon dioxide tax would be $309 trillion, 57.4% of global GDP to 2020, or $44,000 per head of the world’s population. On this basis, the cost of abating 1 C° of global warming would be $1.5 quadrillion. That, said Lord Monckton, is not cheap. In fact, it is 110 times more costly than doing nothing and paying the eventual cost of any damage that might arise from warmer weather this century.
Australia’s carbon dioxide tax is typical of the climate-mitigation measures now being proposed or implemented. All such measures are extravagantly cost-ineffective. No policy to abate global warming by controlling CO2 emissions would prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit from climate mitigation. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable would be ineffective; strategies costly enough to be effective would be unaffordable. Focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such future global warming as might arise would be many times more cost-effective than doing anything now. “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure,” Monckton advised.
In any event, said Lord Monckton, the West is no longer the problem. Its emissions have been rising very slowly, but emissions in the emerging economies are rising many times faster. China, in particular, was opening one or two new coal-fired power stations every week. She was right to do so. The most efficient way to stabilize a growing population was to raise its standard of living above the poverty line, and the cheapest way to do that was to give the population electricity generated by burning fossil fuels.
Lord Monckton ended, devastatingly, by showing that a sufferer from trichiasis, a consequence of trachoma that causes the eyelashes to grow inward, causing piercingly acute pain followed eventually by blindness, can be cured at a cost of just $8. He showed a picture of a lady from Africa, smiling with delight now that she could see again. He said that the diversion of resources away from those who most urgently and immediately needed our help, in the name of addressing a non-problem that could not in any event be cost-effectively dealt with by CO2 mitigation, must be reversed at once for the sake of those who needed our help now.
Both in the Q&A session that followed Monckton’s address and in the counter-meeting held by the environmentalists (in which Lord Monckton sat in the front row taking notes), the questions flew thick and fast. Why, said a professor of environmental sciences in a rambling question apparently designed to prevent anyone else from getting a question in, had Lord Monckton not cited peer-reviewed sources? He had cited several, but he apologized that the IPCC – which he had cited frequently – was not a peer-reviewed source: indeed, fully one-third of the references its 2007 gospel had cited had not been peer-reviewed.
Why had Lord Monckton said that from 1695-1735 the temperature in central England had risen by 2.2 degrees (implying 0.55 degrees of warming per decade) when he had gone on to say that the warming rate per decade was 0.4 degrees? He explained that the warming rate was correctly calculated on the basis of the least-squares linear-regression trend, giving 0.39 degrees, which he had rounded for convenience.
Did Lord Monckton not accept that we could quantify the CO2 feedback? This point came from the professor. “Well,” replied Lord Monckton in one of his most crushing responses, “perhaps the professor can quantify it, but the IPCC can’t: its 2007 gospel gives an exceptionally wide range of answers, from 25 to 225 parts per million by volume per Kelvin – in short, they don’t know.”
Why had Lord Monckton said that we could learn about temperatures in the medieval warm period from the foraminifera on the ocean floor, when the resolution was surely too poor? Read Pudsey (2006), said Lord Monckton: the paper showed that the Larsen B ice-shelf, which had disintegrated a few years ago and provided a poster-child for global warming in Al Gore’s movie, had not been present during the medieval warm period, indicating that those who said the warm period applied only to the North Atlantic might not be right. He added that Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of peer-reviewed papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries establishing that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was at least as warm as the present and was probably warmer.
What about the methane from cattle? Should we give up eating meat to Save The Planet? The professor thought so. Lord Monckton, as always, had the data to hand. In the past decade, he said, methane concentration had risen by just 20 parts per billion, which might cause 1/350 C° of warming. This was too little to matter. Leave the cows alone.
What about peak fossil fuels? Should we not start cutting back now? No, said Lord Monckton. The recent discovery of vast and now-recoverable reserves of shale gas meant that we had several hundred years’ supply of fossil fuel. The professor agreed that shale gas had a contribution to make: it produced more energy per ton of CO2 emitted than oil or coal.
Why had Lord Monckton cherry-picked the Australian carbon dioxide tax as his economic example? He said that in a short lecture he could only take one example, so he had taken the Australian case because all other mitigation policies were quite similar to it. It was between 10 and 100 times more costly to try to make global warming go away today than to let the warming occur – even if the warming were at the rate predicted by the IPCC, and even if the cost of inaction was as high as the Stern Report had imagined – and to concentrate on focused adaptation when and where and only if and only to the extent that might be necessary.
Was not dendrochronology now so sophisticated that we could distinguish between the broadening of annual tree-rings caused by warmer weather and the broadening caused either by wetter weather or by more CO2 in the air? The Professor said this was now indeed possible. Lord Monckton replied that it was not possible. From 1960 onwards, the tree-ring series, even after all the complex adjustments made by the dendrochronastrologists, had showed global temperatures plummeting, while the thermometers had showed them soaring. That was why the Climategate emailers had spent so much time discussing how to “hide the decline” in the tree-ring predictions of temperature change from 1960 onward. This precipitate “decline” cast precisely the doubt upon the reliability of tree-ring temperature reconstructions that the IPCC had originally had in mind when it recommended against the use of tree-rings for reconstructing pre-instrumental temperatures. The professor had no answer to that.
The professor said he was emotional about the damage caused by global warming because in Peru and Ecuador he had seen the collapse in the water supply caused by the melting glaciers. Lord Monckton said that in nearly all parts of the world it was not the glaciers but the snow-melt that provided the water supply. Data from the Rutgers University Snow and Ice Lab showed no trend in northern-hemisphere snow cover in 40 years. He added that in the tropical Andes, according to Polissar et al. (2006), the normal state of all but the very highest peaks had been ice-free; therefore, it could not be said for certain that our influence on climate was causing any change that might not have occurred naturally anyway.
Why had Lord Monckton bothered to deal with the science at all, if the economic case against taking any action to address global warming was so overwhelming? Lord Monckton replied that it was necessary to understand that there was no scientific case for action either, and that it was necessary for policymakers and governments to realize that key elements in the IPCC’s scientific case – such as the supposedly “accelerating” warming that had been arrived at by the bogus statistical technique he had demonstrated with a sine-wave – were downright false.
The professor then asked the students in to raise their hands if they agreed with him that the IPCC’s use of the statistical technique questioned by Lord Monckton was correct. Dutifully, fearfully, about two-thirds of the hands in the room went up. Lord Monckton turned to the professor and told him he should not have done that. He then turned to the students who had raised their hands and asked them how many of them were statisticians. Just one student began to raise his hand and then – apparently realizing that admitting he was a statistician was to admit he had knowingly raised his hand to endorse a manifest statistical falsehood – slowly lowered it again, blushing furiously.
Another student asked, in that shrill tone beloved of environmental extremists everywhere, whether Lord Monckton was a statistician. No, he said, and that was why he had taken care to anonymize the data and send them to a statistician, who had confirmed the obvious: since the same technique, applied to the same data, could produce precisely opposite results depending upon a careful choice of the endpoints for the multiple trend-lines that the IPCC’s bureaucrats had superimposed on the perfectly correct graph of 150 years of temperature changes that the scientists had submitted, the technique must be defective and any results obtained by its use must be meaningless.
Lord Monckton, sternly but sadly, told those who had raised their hands: “You know, from the plain and clear demonstration that I gave during my lecture, that the IPCC’s statistical abuse was just that – an abuse. Yet, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to your professor, you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”
That pin, if you had dropped it, could have been heard again. Many young heads were hung in shame. Even their professor looked just a little less arrogant than he had done throughout the proceedings. Quietly they shuffled out into the darkness.
That night, the Gore Effect worked overtime. Temperatures plummeted to 14° F. The following morning, as we drove through the snowy landscape of upstate New York towards the next venue the following morning, I asked Lord Monckton what he had thought of the strange conduct of the professor, particularly when he had abused his authority by asking his students to assent to the correctness of a statistical technique that he and they had known to be plainly false.
Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”
Justin Pulliam is the Northeast Regional Field Coordinator for CampusReform.org. He graduated Cum Laude with University Honors from Texas A&M University in December 2011, where he led the local Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow Chapter. He can be reached at justinpulliam@gmail.com.
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A Ustream video recording of the event is available here
Henry@Bart
A agree that we do have our own responsibility! That is exactly why I started my own investigation.
I am sure it is the same with Doug.
The problem for me was to figure out whether the warming we observed in the past 3 or 4 decades was natural or caused by an increase in GHG’s and to find out whether more CO2 is bad or beneficial.
If the warming were caused by more GHG’s one would expect minimum temps. to rise, pushing up average temperatures. That is not happening. I found the opposite is happening: Average temps. are being pushed up by the high rises in the maxima. That means the warming was largely natural –
either the sun shone a bit more brightly and/ or there were less clouds and/or there less ozone…
etc. There are different theories on that.
It appears that CO2 is really plant food and together with the extra warming and man wanting more trees and gardens, some extra greening of earth which has indeed taken place.
This has also caused some heat entrapment.
Note the difference in my tables Grootfontein (Namibia) where it has been getting very much greener and Tandil in Argentine where they hacked all the trees off.
So the point you could make is that indirectly some of the warming is due to the CO2 but is the greening of earth not exactly what God wanted us to do? In fact, I think we should our knowledge to the next planet, Mars and start making that also a green planet so that people can move there as well.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Brian Johnson uk says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator?
Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He doesn’t claim to have proof . . . that is faith.
And it was reported here as part of a comment Lord Monckton made in a private setting, away from the lecture. It has nothing to do with his scientific beliefs.
The religious aspect can be taken out of the debate . . . f’rinstance, Kevin Rudd, ex-PM of Australia and one of Down Under’s most ardent warmists, is a committed Christian.
I’m a denier, both of God and CAGW, but if anyone wants to believe in the former then that’s their business. As, by the way, is a belief in CAGW. It’s when either lot tries to impose their views on me and sticks their hands in my pocket that I take exception.
I attended a Lord Monckton lecture in Whangarei, New Zealand, last year. From this article, it was similar in content to the Schenectady address and brilliantly delivered.
Monckton was very generous with his time and after a drawn-out Q&A session sat with members of the audience and discussed a wide variety of topics, covering ecological, scientific, economic and political areas. Very few of them came within cooee of his intellectual power but he gave everyone a fair hearing and a considered answer.
All in all, a brilliant fellow and one of the realists’ greatest assets.
Astley Agreed i don’t believe human induced excess or otherwise of atmospheric gases C02 etc., (except water vapour which will cause cooling if cloud increases), during phases of excess will cause ANY long term effect on climate (100 to 1000 yrs) due to negative feedback otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. Any temp excess is lost out to space. Excessive cooling probably causes atmospheric heat to be “retained”
Bart says:
March 11, 2012 at 1:44 am
But, that is exactly the process everyone is describing.
Not really. All the NASA and Trenberth et al energy diagrams treat solar radiation and atmospheric radiation exactly the same, with a clear implication that the energy in radiation from the atmosphere is converted to thermal energy in the surface, which could then exit by evaporation, diffusion or additional radiation.
Please understand that I cannot cover everything I’ve written in 6,600 words (plus graphics) in a post like this, so you’ll need to read it Tuesday (GMT) I gather
But, you must express it in the language of mathematics and quantify it,
Do you consider that the IPCC quantified the increase in diffusion and evaporation due to any decrease in radiation? (Anyway, I approach the “proof” differently – see #3 in the Appendix re this issue.) Did they quantify the effect on slowing the radiation due to carbon dioxide molecules, compared with water vapour molecules, noting that the CO2 ones have far fewer frequencies at which they can resonate, and thus far less effect than WV molecules on slowing the radiation rate. That means there are 20 to 50 times as many WV molecules each having a far greater effect than each CO2 molecule.
Now do you see the importance of the difference between conversion to thermal energy (which would violate the Second Law) and merely slowing the rate of radiation without adding energy to the surface?
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Justin Pulliam – Report at WUWT – What honest debate looks like. Lord Moncktons Schenectady showdown
HenryP
“Back radiation CO2 – 101″
_________________________
Yes, I’ve mentioned this in Section 6 and used the red and yellow graphic “Solar Radiation Spectrum” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation There is a chapter in Slaying the Sky Dragon in which the assumed warming effect was shown to be only 13% of the cooling effect, but I have not checked the calculations and don’t consider there to be any warming effect at all anyway.
Of course water vapour send far more solar backradiation to space than CO2, so this certainly helps to rule out any possible positive feedback due to WV.
Ken Coffman says:
March 10, 2012 at 5:57 pm
It occurs to me there is one more miraculous feature of atmospheric CO2 as imagined by purveyors of conventional wisdom: it heats up very quickly, but cools very slowly. I wonder how that works and if there are other examples of this kind of amazing asymmetry in nature.
It’s a supermolecule! I shall add that to the properties I know about it.
Defying gravity carbon dioxide travels under his own volition through the atmosphere and stays up in the sky for hundreds and thousands of years, astonishing.
Becomes a bit of a bully though in leaving weight and volume behind, it slims down to practically nothing but a hard dot and under its own momentum rises from the ground at great speeds and travels through the empty volumeless atmosphere bashing into other molecules which have likewise shed their plump attractiveness – getting thoroughly mixed up in their aloofness they lose all sense of up and down. Well, lose sense of everything really.
BTW: I’m still patiently waiting for a link to the easily replicable Tyndall experiment that shows radiation overpowering convection to modulate the atmospheric lapse rate. I haven’t seen anything like this in the collected Tyndall papers.
It’s not there? I gave up looking and settled for getting lost in the fascinating read following the meticulous thinking of real scientists doing real cutting edge experiments to try and make sense of our world.
Thanks for this. The headline summary was reposted at UKIP Scotland blog, with a link to the actual video of the lecture at the stream provider (applet not embeddable in wordpress) , and a link to the full story on WUWT. If only Lord Monckton could be allowed to have his lectures broadcast on mainstream media, then he would surely embarrass all the “Global Warming” collaborators. It is too easy for the “computerati” to forget that still the vast majority of people still get their “news” from the old “one-eyed goggle-box” and still yet rely on, so called “newspapers”, like the Washington Times and similar dead tree press.
Gary Hladik says:
March 10, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Myrrh says (March 10, 2012 at 4:52 pm): “Seems Latour has managed to get Spencer to re-think his thought experiment..”
Eh? Myrrh, did you even read the references in your own reference? Dr. Spencer retracted nothing, and even added real-world examples of why LaTour is wrong. I respect(ed) O’Sullivan’s reputation, but he blew that one big time.
Please point out the added real-world examples Spencer gave to show why Latour is wrong.
My emphasis.
To remind you what O’Sullivan wrote: “Dr. Spencer, without question a leading researcher of great integrity, has since gone on record to concede that he may be wrong and being misled by an ‘assumption bias.”
“This is really odd, you ask for experimental proof from basic traditional science on this…”
Nope. I’m asking for experimental proof of fringe science, which contradicts “basic traditional science” used by both sides of the CAGW issue.
Hmm, well let me put it this way. Show me empirical work and explanations from what you call “basic traditional science” – and, please fetch it. Don’t bother giving any more “thought experiments”, come back with actual proven scientific experiments. And remember, what is called basic traditional science says categorically and unequivocally that heat does not flow from colder to hotter, there is no ‘backradiation’.
“..surely you’re the one who should be providing experimental proof?”
Why? I have nothing to gain, nothing to prove. If LaTour, however, gets the results he expects from a real-life version of the “Yes Virginia” experiment, he not only gets a Nobel Prize, but he also gets to say, “Bazinga, Spencer!” I’m absolutely baffled that he hasn’t yet done so.
He’s already done so.. He showed that it is the nonsense that it is, it is already falsified – because all real basic traditional physics contradicts it. You can’t merely parrot back those words and claim they relate to your novelties..
Latour is a real empirically trained applied scientist – without his understanding the Apollo programme wouldn’t have worked – you really think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? You really think some still not empirically shown ‘thought experiment’ from Spencer has anything of any worth to claim against that?
Put your thought experiment down in proper physical experiment before you dare claim that it is “real basic science”.
You haven’t done so.
That “both sides” of the CAGW use this unproven thought experiment shows the origin of the paucity of rational scientific thinking from them..
Myrrh, perhaps you could use your influence to persuade LaTour, Johnson, or Cotton to do the definitive experiment that should consign the IPCC to the dustbin of history? For the children? 🙂
Seriously, stop being ridiculous – you provide the experiment to prove that this backradiation claim of yours is real world science and not as it clearly is, an idea from the imagination based on no known real world basic physics.
It is falsified from the start because it contradicts all real world basic applied and tested physics.
Enough of this bs.
Latour says: “Examples are all around us. Chemical engineers design and operate radiant, convection and conduction furnaces, kilns, forges, chemical reactors and boilers for refining petroleum, manufacturing chemicals and generating electricity since 1920. We no longer need more experiments. No back-radiation is observed. Conducting this experiment will allow nature to tell which prediction is correct. This has been done already by Prof Nasif Nahle, reported on 26 Sep 11 [2.]. Findings confirm the prediction T remains 150 is correct because a warm body cannot absorb cooler back-radiation.” http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still
That’s real world basic physics – it is already proven and used in the real world in industries all around us! Really, get a grip.
“Examples are all around us. Chemical engineers design and operate radiant, convection and conduction furnaces, kilns, forges, chemical reactors and boilers for refining petroleum, manufacturing chemicals and generating electricity since 1920. We no longer need more experiments. No back-radiation is observed.”
“No back-radiation is observed”
Enough of this nonsense fantasy fisics passing itself of as real world.
“No back-radiation is observed”
“No back-radiation is observed”
If you’ve got anything that disproves 100 years of testing in industries in the real world where this ‘imagined backradiation claim’ is never observed – show it.
Show it.
Bart says:
March 11, 2012 at 1:44 am
But, that is exactly the process everyone is describing. The “backradiation” explanation is simply an heuristic argument based on the fact that, in equilibrium, the backradiation from the atmosphere and the incoming solar radiation must balance with the outgoing surface radiation.
Thank you. This is a point some willfully ignore. For a system to remain in a state of stability, it must radiate away the initiating constant forcing. One Watt in and one Watt out.
Since the gas molecule absorbs and the re-radiates the wave equally in all directions it must radiate half away and half back.
The half back cannot just disappear, the law of energy conservation doesn’t allow it. Consequently it will then be absorbed by the black body and re-radiate back.
This reverberation will build until the molecule is absorbing two Watts, with one Watt going back and one Watt going away. At this point the system is in a state of radiative stability.
What the detractors don’t understand is this a “Theoretical construct”.
Einstein was a master of this technique, as were many of his contemporaries.
I have offered to debate Lord Monckton in the past. He has never accepted. Why is he afraid to debate?
[reply . . you would need to put up your real name and evidence of your invitation if you wish to be taken at all seriously. Otherwise you are just a simple troll . . kbmod]
Brian Johnson uk says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
” Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator? ”
You are Brian, aren’t you ?
Myrrh says
Seriously, stop being ridiculous – you provide the experiment to prove that this backradiation claim of yours is real world science and not as it clearly is, an idea from the imagination based on no known real world basic physics.
It is falsified from the start because it contradicts all real world basic applied and tested physics.
Enough of this bs.
Henry@Myrrh
Myrrh
You are bitter. I think I smell something rotten.
Trying to make you understand even the very basics of radiation I have asked you repeatedly to explain to me why white clouds -carrying more wv and less water- are white
and why dark clouds – carrying more water and less wv- are dark (blue).
Up to now you have not even bothered to investigate and come back to me with an answer.
I suggest you go to Back-radiation CO2 – 101
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
and study that. I have updated it a bit so that even simple minded people might understand it better. Come back to me on anything that you don’t understand or that you don’t agree with.
As it stands I am inclined to agree with the others and believe you are a troll sent by the CAGW to hi-jack all serious discussions here at WUWT on the subject of back radiation.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
March 10, 2012 at 7:48 pm
Finally, I think the moderators are going to have to do something about the tiresome clique that, time and time again, hijack the comment threads at WattsUpWithThat by asserting that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect, when it has been repeatedly measured both in the laboratory and in the atmosphere, and its physics – even down to the quantum level – are quite well understood.
I asked you in another discussion for this ‘claimed to be in existence’, “it has been repeatedly measured both in the laboratory and in the atmosphere, and its physics – even down to the quantum level – are quite well understood.”, perhaps you missed it?
It is something I continue to ask for, it is never produced. Do you want to have a go here at providing it?
My suggestion is that in future all such comments should be redirected to a separate thread of their own, so as not to interfere tiresomely, tediously and repetitively with the workings of this blog. It is beginning to look as though the soi-disant “dragon-slayers”, who deny the existence of the greenhouse effect, are intent not on rational, scientific debate but on outright sabotage.
Gosh, you’re now claiming you’re debating rationally by wanting us censored in this debate?
Roy Spencer’s thoughtful and well-considered explanation of how a colder body adjacent to a warmer body can make that warmer body warmer still is excellent, as is Jack Barrett’s paper explaining the behaviour of greenhouse-gas molecules at the quantum level when they interact with long-wave radiation at their characteristic absorption wavelengths (their “absorption bands”). Professor Christopher Essex offers an excellent analogy: when outgoing radiation at the right wavelength meets a greenhouse-gas molecule, it switches it on as though the molecule were a tiny radiator. There is plenty of doubt about how much additional warming our enhancement of the greenhouse effect may cause, but there is no legitimate doubt about the fact of the greenhouse effect.
Please see my post to Gary Hladik, at the moment I can’t give you a comment number as it hasn’t yet appeared, so I give an extract and expect you to respond honestly as you expect from others debating this, trying to censor my questions shows hypocrisy – do you realise that?
To Gary Hladik, Monckton and All Greenhouse Effect claimants:
Seriously, stop being ridiculous – you provide the experiment to prove that this backradiation claim of yours is real world science and not as it clearly is, an idea from the imagination based on no known real world basic physics.
It is falsified from the start because it contradicts all real world basic applied and tested physics.
Enough of this bs.
Latour says: “Examples are all around us. Chemical engineers design and operate radiant, convection and conduction furnaces, kilns, forges, chemical reactors and boilers for refining petroleum, manufacturing chemicals and generating electricity since 1920. We no longer need more experiments. No back-radiation is observed. Conducting this experiment will allow nature to tell which prediction is correct. This has been done already by Prof Nasif Nahle, reported on 26 Sep 11 [2.]. Findings confirm the prediction T remains 150 is correct because a warm body cannot absorb cooler back-radiation.” http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-
objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still
That’s real world basic physics – it is already proven and used in the real world in industries all around us! Really, get a grip.
No back-radiation is observed”
Perhaps the moderators could establish a Dunces’ Corner where those who deny two centuries of established scientific results in a baseless, unscientific and often loutishly bellicose manner can still have their say without interfering with those of us who would like to engage in courteous, scientific discussions.
Courteous discussion? You call demanding those opposing your point of view be not only censored, but denigrated. You are a hypocrite, proved by your posts here where you expect from others what you don’t see fit to extend to those exposing the failings of your physics.
Fortunately, not all are like this. At a debate before the Galway branch of the Law Society of Ireland last month, I deployed the feedback argument and added, for good measure, that the Bode feedback-amplification equation upon which the IPCC relies for two-thirds of its projected warming from CO2 was not the appropriate equation. My opponent, Professor Bates, the author of several papers on feedbacks, not only understood the argument perfectly but agreed with it, and was honest enough to say so publicly.
Would you like to try again?
You have never shown any of this actually exists.
There is no The Greenhouse Effect – why not? Because skullduggery has been employed to make the pretence that there is such a thing – dishonest in intent, deceitful in creation, and bullying censorship used in practice to keep this from being discussed.
Those creating The Greenhouse Effect have taken out of their energy budget, the whole of the Water Cycle!
Yes, really, the con, the scientific fraud of AGW and TGE is all from that sleight of hand, and, all you ‘warmists’ arguing that backradiation from CO2 exists are pushing this fraud without ever giving any proof that the Greenhouse effect exists, because you can’t, there is none.
What happens when we put the Water Cycle back in? Think deserts. An Earth without the Water Cycle would be 67°C, 52°C hotter than the 15°C we have.
The ‘greenhouse gas’ water cools the Earth by 52°C.
Simply by taking out the whole chunk of the process of one of the two major players in the energy budget and then claiming that the plus 33°C difference between the Earth without any atmosphere at all, at -18°C, and the Earth with complete atmosphere, at 15°C, is due to the unproven Greenhouse Effect from greenhouse gas warming and by presenting a mangled physics in support – this is a scientific fraud.
Carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle which cools the Earth in our real atmosphere, where we have gravity and therefore weight and volume and real molecules which have attraction, carbon dioxide and water vapour spontaneously join and become carbonic acid – all pure clean rain is carbonic acid.
Rain which is formed when water vapour, anyway lighter than air, evaporates as it is heated at the surface and rises to the colder heights of the heavy gaseous atmosphere pressing down on our shoulders a ton weight, there giving up its heat and condensing back to fluid water or ice to come down as rain or snow together with all the carbon dioxide around.
And as for the other major player in the energy budget, the Sun, that too has been distorted beyond recognition in The Greenhouse Effect energy budget – gosh, no direct heat from your Sun even reaches Earth!
And you’ve given all the properties of the Sun’s direct thermal energy, thermal infrared, to the Sun’s light waves!
What an absolutely ludicrous topsy-turvyish world, great fun if through the looking glass with Alice – but not so much fun when those like you are intent on censoring us to foist this fantasy fisics onto the unsuspecting general population.
Of course you want us censored – you prefer your audience to accept your intellectual baby talk as if real world physics. Difficult to believe that a public school in your day would have taught any of this, that didn’t know the difference between heat and light..
Sarah J:
“My mind feels dirty just having read it.”
BAD THOUGHT! BAD THOUGHT!
Myrrh says:
“No back-radiation is observed”
Yes it is. Take any IR temperature thermometer (Infrared Temperature Gun) outside at night, point it up to the sky and press the button. What you’ll read is the equivalent temperature to the “backradiation” commonly called the greenhouse effect, that’s what the instrument is measuring, not the temperature of some distant planet.
Please read:
http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut37%20Radiative%20Cooling.pdf
Note that Clouds and Relative Humidity are the major players. We experience this frequently as a cloudy winter night staying warmer than a clear winter night.
Or try this one:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/cootime.html#c1
I can confirm that when I took “Heat Transfer” in the ’80’s we used that same equation for estimating cooling. Note the equation calculates the NET radiation by subtracting the ambient temperature to the fourth power (AIR) from the temperature of the cooling object to the fourth power(SURFACE) and then multiplying by the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Constant. Algebraically this is IDENTICAL to calculating the objects radiation and the “backradiation” separately with the Stefan-Boltzmann equation and then subtracting the back radiation from the object’s radiation. Basically, it’s subtracting the “backradiation” from the cooling object’s radiation based on the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and Engineers (not known for accounting for anything that violates Laws of Physics) have been doing this for decades.
(Note: I used the word estimating because the atmosphere isn’t technically a grey body, but Stefan-Boltzmann still works good enough for most Engineering applications.)
The earlier comment about microwaves is well silly. Microwaves are not thermal radiation. And they do not heat the air. Invalid comparison. They work by vibrating the water molecules.
“Hmm, well let me put it this way. Show me empirical work and explanations from what you call “basic traditional science” – and, please fetch it. Don’t bother giving any more “thought experiments”, come back with actual proven scientific experiments. And remember, what is called basic traditional science says categorically and unequivocally that heat does not flow from colder to hotter, there is no ‘backradiation’. ”
Oh dear. Is this argument still going on?
Basic traditional science says *categorically* and *unequivocally* that heat *can* flow from colder to hotter, and in an *unrelated* point that backradiation does exist. You have misunderstood the second law – it doesn’t say what you think it says. And scores of people have provided numerous examples, which you just skirt around and then go back to saying what you said before.
The most obvious example of heat flowing from colder to hotter is a refrigerator. The second law says that work has to be done to accomplish it, but it does not say that heat can never flow from colder to hotter. Refrigerators don’t break any laws.
A more familiar example is a blanket. The blanket is colder than you are, but it still causes your skin temperature to rise when you cover yourself with it.
A third example is a microwave oven. A room-temperature cavity resonator produces radiation at a wavelength associated with blackbody temperatures down around absolute zero which is absorbed by hot food to make it hotter. It’s an absolute nonsense to say that ‘cold’ radiation can’t be absorbed by warm objects.
Another familiar observation is that hot things cool down more slowly when put in a slightly cooler container than when put in a very much colder one. The heat flow by radiation between objects of the same material at temperatures T1 and T2 is proportional to T1^4 – T2^4. This additive formula is exactly what you’d get if each radiated power proportional to T^4 independently, and the net flow was simply the radiative energy flowing one way minus the radiative energy flowing the other way. This two-way flow still conforms to the second law, because the second law only talks about *net* flows.
A more sophisticated experiment is to set up an infrared pinhole camera. A target consisting of warm and very cold panels is set up. A sheet of super-cold ice with a one inch hole is set up in front of it. Then a (warm) thermally insulating plate is placed in front of that. The pinhole setup demonstrates the radiation travels in straight lines. The cooling of the plate by radiation is slightly faster where it is not being irradiated by the warm panels. The difference is small and takes some sensitivity to detect, but it is arguably the best demonstration.
The basic physics has been demonstrated time and again, and is in routine use by engineers and physicists. All objects radiate independently of their surroundings. Radiation of any frequency can be absorbed by objects at all temperatures. Only the *net* heat flow, in the absence of external work, is constrained by the second law, and all this stuff disputing it is contradicted by everyday experience and is distracting – especially when innocent threads are spammed with off-topic bletherings on the subject. We make space and discuss it properly often enough – why bombard every other thread with it? It doesn’t become more convincing by repetition, you know.
And as an attack on the AGW orthodoxy it misses the target entirely – because it is based on another fundamental misunderstanding of how the greenhouse effect works. The greenhouse effect has nothing to do with backradiation anyway, so shooting backradiation down would achieve precisely nothing.
The greenhouse effects occurs because:
1. The Earth gets a roughly constant heat input from the sun.
2. Outer space is a vacuum and objects in a vacuum can only lose heat by radiation.
3. The hotter an object is the more it radiates.
4. The radiating surface heats or cools until it is at the right temperature to radiate all the heat absorbed.
5. Because of greenhouse gases this planetary surface radiating to space is *not* the solid surface, but a fuzzy layer averaging about 6 km up.
6. Gases cool on expanding and are warmed by compression.
7. In a convective atmosphere air rising and falling is expanded and compressed by air pressure, this sets up a constant vertical temperature gradient.
8. Convection on Earth is driven by differences in insolation, between equator and poles, and between day and night. (A temperature difference is required to drive any heat engine.)
9. The temperature gradient combined with the height difference between the surface radiating to space and the solid ground causes a temperature difference, maintained by the external work done by convection, that keeps the ground warmer than the radiating surface.
10. The equation for the greenhouse effect is T_surf = T_eff + LR * AARTS. T_surf is the surface temperature. T_eff is the effective radiative temperature. LR is the lapse rate (the vertical thermal gradient), and AARTS is the average altitude of radiation to space. This has been the standard equation for it since the 1960s.
Note that backradiation has not been mentioned. It is not in the picture.
Here’s Carl Sagan on Venus: ( http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967ApJ…149..731S ) He calculates the predicted surface temperature, you’ll note, with *no mention* of backradiation or even CO2’s greenhouse properties. It’s a result of cloud height. Backradiation is a complete red herring. Stop wasting your time on it.
I *know* this won’t stop the argument, but it makes me feel better to have a rant about it every now and then. Apologies to everyone I’ve just bored to death.
In any thermal test chamber, the effects of free flow convection will produce an undesirable temperature gradient if allowed to go unchecked. One method to curtail the formation of these temperature gradients is to design the chamber such that the air circulates from the top of the chamber to the bottom. This “counterflow” design will aid in mixing the warm air that tends to raise to the top of the chamber with the cooler air that will tend to settle on the bottom of the chamber.
http://www.sigmasystems.com/tech-docs/download-files/tech-documents/chamber-size-discussion.pdf
Oh, what silliness from the engineering community. Of course, the hot air at the top of the chamber radiates IR to the bottom. If radiation from cold, rarefied air can increase the Earth’s surface temperature by 33C then radiation from heated air must increase the temperature of the bottom of the chamber by what? Hundreds of degrees? I’m surprised these chambers don’t self-melt into slag.
Brian Johnson uk says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator?
Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?
Interesting question. Let me turn it around and ask you what proof you that there is not a Creator? Both your question and mine come up with the same answer from a purely deductive standpoint.
However, if you use induction, Ockham’s Razor and symmetry, you might just be surprised at the results…
Bart says:
March 10, 2012 at 7:53 pm
Such astounding efficiency gains would be a game changer. But, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I will have to see it happen with my own eyes before I believe it.
==========
I completely agree, Dr. Nocera’s POP presentation isn’t intended to cover all the technical aspects but, in my opinion, does an excellent job of framing the issues and proposing a solution that looks at the problems holistically instead of separating them into separate tasks which fail to deliver a definitive solution.
We need a game changer that addresses solutions for the end user instead of stumbling over the definition of climate problems. This is why I suggested Lord Monckton, if his travels took him to Boston, should consider chatting with Dr. Nocera. Lord Monckton’s lecture includes issues related to economics and the economics relate to alternatives and innovations.
What better way to bring the economic point home than to illustrate solutions with a pure product advantage in the marketplace which are largely overlooked or under funded because of this foolish debate and funding to shore up the IPCC’s inability to be honest about the state of their science.
The IPCC should NOT be in the solutions game related to their own conclusions. Disbanding the UN solution work groups would go a long way to restoring confidence in the Science. IMO, Illustrating the UN solutions side-by-side with other alternatives is a great way to illustrate this.
[SNIP: Site policy requires a valid e-mail address. -REP]
Nullius in Verba says
Backradiation is a complete red herring. Stop wasting your time on it.
Henry says
Surely, if it exists, like, for example, demonstrated here,
CO2 back radiating in the near infra red,
see here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/644/1/551/64090.web.pdf?request-id=76e1a830-4451-4c80-aa58-4728c1d646ec
(They measured this re-radiation from CO2 as it bounced back to earth from the moon. So the direction was sun-earth (day)-moon (night, i.e. unlit by sun) -earth (night). Follow the green line in fig. 6, bottom. Note that it already starts at 1.2 um, then one peak at 1.4 um, then various peaks at 1.6 um and 3 big peaks at 2 um. You can see that it all comes back to us via the moon in fig. 6 top & fig. 7. Note that even methane cools the atmosphere by re-radiating in the 2.2 to 2.4 um range).
it might be worth discussing if the net effect of more CO2 is more warming or more cooling?
Not that anyone actually has any decent neasured figures on it. As is my experience./
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
The Global Warming Agenda – Lord Monckton Debunks the Myth (again !)
This video lecture has nearly the same content as the Schenectady performance, but is more than twice as long and has much better audio and video. After appearing at Princeton earlier in the day, Lord Christopher Monkcton spoke on March 8th, 2012 at the University of Minnesota, on the latest leg of his USA College Tour, when he updated his well known Climate of Freedom lecture, to take account of the latest research and revelations of political shenanigans.
This video is in an 8-Part Playlist, lasting for around 110 minutes.
This is at the top of the main webpage
at the website linked to the name “Axel”
The Senior Director of Communications & Marketing at Union College, Jill Hungsberg, should be notified of this piece. Her email address is: hungsbej@union.edu
Union is a highly selective small college that was founded in 1795. It is unusual for a school of this comparatively small size ( 2,200 ) to offer strong programs in liberal arts, engineering and sciences.
It was not necessary for Mr. Pulliam to engage in the literary device of painting a blanket picture characterizing the student body and faculty as a monolithic entity. That smacks of an amateurish, propaganda-like attempt to generalize the College as representative of the evil academy. It does you no credit.