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
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If he so chooses, Justin Pulliam has a fine career ahead of him in journalism. I commend him for this piece of work. Masterfully done.
John from CA says:
March 11, 2012 at 9:53 am
We are in agreement generally, then. I hope his idea pans out. But, for now, I still think the real solution is nuclear power.
mkelly says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:24 am
“Microwaves are not thermal radiation.”
This is a useless distinction. All radiation is thermal radiation. Any wavelength can heat an object if it is absorbed by that object. But, typical microwave ovens broadcast at 12 cm, which is near infrared.
“And they do not heat the air. Invalid comparison..”
Yes, they do. That is why polystyrene foam is generally not microwave safe:
Nullius in Verba says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:58 am
Thank you for your effort. Your post is quite comprehensive, and should be the last word. It will not be, of course, but it should.
CommieBob wrote: “By dint of superior lawyering, I have often seen the guilty exonerated and the innocent convicted. Debate, as a method of establishing the truth, has its limitations.”
This brings to mind Churchill’s quote that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest.” What is the alternative to debate in establishing truth?
Dave Dardinger says:
March 10, 2012 at 3:05 pm
‘Unfortunately VOST people confuse the issue, and since CAGW advocates like to attack weak points, also thus weaken the entire skeptic position. I’d like to invite a nice polite collegial discussion, but from a practical POV I have to say, “knock it off!”’
________________________________________________
Bart says:
March 10, 2012 at 7:47 pm
…..AMEN! If people want to troll that kind of stuff, take it to one of the blogs that freely deal in fringe ideas. This is not my blog, and I cannot speak for Anthony, but seeing WUWT do such an amazing job countering the Warmists on the merits, it wrenches my gut every time I see posters trying to turn this site into another ignorable and inconsequential fringe hangout……
________________________________________________
I very much disagree. Anthony is not running an echo chamber. If someone brings in an off the wall idea that is very wrong it gets trampled into the dust, AND the people who are doing the trampling use science to back up their point. THAT is the beauty of this site. Otherwise it would be like the warmist sites an echo chamber.
Gail Combs says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:06 am
I agree that it is a difficult balancing act. Obviously, he shouldn’t (IMHO, at least) entertain posters who claim that the climate is being manipulated by space aliens. The question is, where do you draw the line?
I must admit to having a twinge of self-consciousness when I wrote that, as there are a few items I still have valid concerns about (e.g., the attribution of the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the last 1/2 century to wholly anthropogenic sources) which are generally accepted as settled even by most technically oriented skeptics. But, in my defense, when I bring it up, I do not simply repeat myself and attempt to bludgeon people into submission – at least, I don’t think I do – but try to listen to their counterarguments and respond to them.
Maybe you are right, and it is best to leave things open. It may be a mirage, but I think Doug Cotton in particular is beginning to address the issue from a more rigorous standpoint. So, maybe it is all to the good in the end. But, those of us who worry that the more extreme views may become fodder for preemptive dismissal by the alarmists have a responsibility to make sure the fringe doesn’t take over the forum and paint us all in the same shade.
On the other hand, maybe the alarmists are going to nail us no matter what we do, and we should take Otter’s advice: Toga Party.
[SNIP: OT. -REP]
If I may ask one favor of the extreme contrarians, though, it would be this: keep it short. Nobody (well, I doubt many) is going to read your dissertation length, hand-waving, assertion laden exposition. Make your points, and then back off and respond precisely to criticisms. It’s these long posts that get really annoying. If you take more than three paragraphs to make your point, then you don’t really have a point.
Monkcton of Benchley Says:
“Leigh Kelley asks how Professor Lindzen derives a climate sensitivity one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate from the observation in Wentz et al. (2007) that the observed increase in evaporation from the Earth’s surface per Kelvin of warming is almost 6%, while the models incorrectly predict 1-3%.
Lindzen (2011) reports that Wentz et al. (2007) used space-based observations to measure how evaporation changed with temperature compared with results from models and found that in GCMs, evaporation rose 1-3% for each 1 K warming, while observed evaporation rose approximately three times faster, at 5.7%.
The heat flux associated with the percentage change ΔE/ΔT in evaporation per 1 K surface warming is (0.8 ΔE/ΔT) W m–2 K–1, and λ is in effect the reciprocal of this heat flux, so that (1) gives consequent transient climate sensitivity in Kelvin:
∆T(2x) = ∆F(2x) λ = ∆F(2x) / (0.8 ∆E/∆T). (1)
As a checksum, we can plug the modeled 3%-per-Kelvin (2) and 1%-per-Kelvin (3) increases in evaporation with warming, as well as the observed 5.7% increase (4), into (1) to determine the warming ∆T(2x) at a doubling of CO2 concentration:
∆T(2x) = (5.35 ln 2) λ = 3.71 / (0.8 x 3.0) = 1.6 K. (2)
∆T(2x) = (5.35 ln 2) λ = 3.71 / (0.8 x 1.0) = 4.6 K. (3)
∆T(2x) = (5.35 ln 2) λ = 3.71 / (0.8 x 5.7) = 0.8 K. (4)
Note that the implicit climate-sensitivity interval from the models (2,3) is [1.6, 4.6] K, which broadly coincides with the interval {1.5, 4.5] K in the IPCC’s 2001 report, and differs little from the [2.0, 4.5] K in the 2007 report. Accordingly, (2,3) show that the model offered by Professor Lindzen is well calibrated.
The IPCC’s current multi-model mean central estimate of the warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration is 3.3 K (IPCC, 2007, p. 798, box 10.2). However, the climate sensitivity derivable from the observed rate of increase in evaporation (4) is 0.8K, which is little more than one-quarter of the central estimate of climate sensitivity predicted by the models, and is about half of the IPCC’s current least estimate.”
Without proper references, there is no way to check whether Monckton’s statements are correct. Monckton doesn’t define what is meant by “evaporation”, and doesn’t give a citation for his claim that “in GCM’s evaporation rose 1 to 3% per degree C”. Is he talking about evaporation rate, or water vapor concentration in the atmosphere? He also doesn’t specify the mechanism by which evaporation contributes to climate sensitivity. Is it transport of energy into the atmosphere by transpiration, or the increased downwelling radiation from an increased amount of water in that atmosphere? He also gives an expression for heat flux but which has the wrong units, W M-2 K-1. He also refers to an equation (1) which is not shown. There is no way to make any sense of what he has written. It is a travesty.
I am sure that this comment will not be posted.
[REPLY: Eric, you seem sure of a lot of things. -REP]
Bart says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:27 am
Gail Combs says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:06 am
I agree that it is a difficult balancing act. Obviously, he shouldn’t (IMHO, at least) entertain posters who claim that the climate is being manipulated by space aliens. The question is, where do you draw the line?
I must admit to having a twinge of self-consciousness when I wrote that, as there are a few items I still have valid concerns about (e.g., the attribution of the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the last 1/2 century to wholly anthropogenic sources) which are generally accepted as settled even by most technically oriented skeptics. But, in my defense, when I bring it up, I do not simply repeat myself and attempt to bludgeon people into submission – at least, I don’t think I do – but try to listen to their counterarguments and respond to them.
Maybe you are right, and it is best to leave things open…..
________________________________________________
Bart,
I think that many people here on WUWT forget that for every Doug, who is relatively new to the site, there are one hundred lurkers. Most of those lurkers have a lot less science and math then the people who post here do. Heck most of them haven’t even heard of thermodynamics much less the second law. So even though this is all old hat for regulars, repeating the discussion occasionally is very important because the primary goal for all of us is the advancement of science and the education of those who have been messed up by our education system.
Without educating the public the green Luddites will win.
BTW the “for every one person you hear from there are 100 others” comes from a customer service study done by a corporation I worked for.
HenryP says:
March 11, 2012 at 7:39 am
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.
Look around you, I’m a 12 hour flight away..
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).
And I gave you a reply as best I could.
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.
That’s a lie. I suggest you re-read what I posted in reply.
OK, here, I’ll fetch my last one: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/22/omitted-variable-fraud-vast-evidence-for-solar-climate-driver-rates-one-oblique-sentence-in-ar5/#comment-906717
Do you see my problem? You’re making up your own terms in a science, optics, which has long ago defined the terms they use to describe specific processes and effects.
I had earlier posted on refraction and reflection/scattering, what these mean, visible light gets reflected/scattered by being absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in our real world atmosphere [it is therefore not ‘transparent’ to visible as claimed in the TGE AGW energy budget..], and in the real world water is a transparent medium for visible, visible gets transmitted through without being absorbed.
These are technical terms in optics which mean specific things. I posted a good description on refraction through transparent mediums. These are known effects and processes in what happens when light meets matter and are applicable directly to your question about clouds.
So, when I ask the question, in order to be able to discuss your question further, “Do you mean refraction or reflection?” and you reply:
I mean deflection also called back radiation or re-radiation.
I have no choice but to reply as I did:
“I have no idea what those words mean here, I simply don’t know what you’re talking about. When you can explain it in the language of OPTICS, into which category this falls, then we can discuss it further.
Until then, thanks for the discussion, but I’m leaving this.”
But, after your post to me here, I have no interest in discussing this further with you.
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.
You can believe what you like, y’all obviously enjoy projecting your fantasies onto what you read from me..
..doesn’t alter the fact that none of you fixated on radiation in your empty space ideal gas atmosphere without any sound has absolutely anything relevant to say about the energy budget in the real world.
I do so wish y’all would stop pretending you have.
Eric Adler says that without references there is no way to check whether my statements (which merely repeat those made by Professor Lindzen at a conference at which he and I spoke in Colombia last year) are accurate. In fact, the underlying reference is of course given: it is Wentz et al. (2007), which is mentioned twice in the text. If Mr. Adler had had any difficulty in finding the paper, he had merely to ask me, rather than casting doubt on the accuracy of what I had said.
He also says I do not define “evaporation”. Read Wentz and check with Professor Lindzen.
He also says I do not specify the method by which evaporation affects climate sensitivity. However, my comment was in reply to a question a previous commenter had asked about how Professor Lindzen had reached his climate-sensitivity estimate. I explained that. Again, if Mr. Adler wants further details he should first read Wentz et al. and then approach Professor Lindzen.
Next, Mr. Adler says that I have used the wrong units for heat flux. However, I have of course used the right units. Radiative flux is measured in Watts per square meter; and radiative flux change in response to a given change in temperature – which is what we are dealing with here – is expressed, as I expressed it, in Watts per square meter per Kelvin (the units the IPCC itself uses to express temperature feedbacks, for instance: for they, too, are changes in radiative flux per unit change in temperature). If Mr. Adler is unfamiliar with such units, any standard textbook of climatological physics will be able to assist him.
Then he says I use an Equation (1) that is not shown. However, I have of course shown Equation (1). Hint: it is the first equation shown, and it is labeled (1), in exactly the same fashion as the three subsequent equations appear seriatim and are (perhaps unimaginatively) labeled (2), (3), (4) respectively.
Next, he adds – with the habitual offensiveness that seems to be the hallmark of climate extremists everywhere – that there is no way to make any sense of what I have written. The usual approach is to read it first, to check politely whatever is not clear, and then to think.
He also adds – again with gratuitous impoliteness – that what I have written is “a travesty”. No: what I wrote was a full and careful response to a sensible enquiry from a legitimate and genuinely interested commenter.
He concludes: “I am sure that this comment will not be posted.” Well, it was posted, which is why I am able to reply to it. Frankly, if Mr. Adler had wanted to ask detailed technical questions about what I had written he should simply have gotten in touch with me, rather than writing what looks very much like a baseless but artful attempt at discrediting what I had said, and by implication discrediting Professor Lindzen and Dr. Wentz.
Eric Adler says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:50 am
“He also gives an expression for heat flux but which has the wrong units, W M-2 K-1.”
That would be Watts per square meter per Kelvin. These are the correct units.
Gail Combs says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:55 am
“… there are one hundred lurkers.”
Yikes! I wish you hadn’t told me that. I feel exposed.
Myrrh says (March 11, 2012 at 5:58 am): “He’s already done so.”
Really? So where’s LaTour’s Nobel Prize? Where’s the experiment? Where is it published?
Myrrh, did you ever ask yourself why Johnson, LaTour, and our own Doug Cotton are content to remain trol–er, voices in the wilderness, when they could revolutionize physics, claim wealth and fame, and silence their critics with one comparatively simple experiment? I mean, doesn’t it make you just the least bit suspicious?
“These are the correct units…” for sensitivity of evaporative heat flux to 1K of surface warming as stated.
Nullius in Verba says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:58 am
Note that backradiation has not been mentioned. It is not in the picture.
Neither curiously were the words “logarithmic” or “saturation” mentioned either.
It is always a pleasure to see Lord Monckton debating, and he seems to have outdone himself here. And kudos to Justin for a superb narrative.
Having read the comments, which are mostly supportive, it is depressing to see the same tired, old “violation of 2nd law” postings that appear whenever the phrase “greenhouse gas” is mentioned. It’s like those self styled “physicists” that set up blogs claiming to have proof that Einstein was wrong. Such “proofs”, if they can be dignified by such a term, invariably turn out to be no more than a set of logical statements attempting to establish a contradiction. All the arguments I’ve ever read, fail by the falsity of their own logic.
I’ve posted enough times about why there is no 2nd law violation. I’ve grown tired of it, and I’ll say no more on the subject.
Thank you Lord Monckton and Justin.
Bart and others discussing microwaves …
There’s a note (#5 in my Appendix) about microwaves. They primarily heat water and some fats and sugars. The air in the plastic could of course include some WV. The main point is that they do not have much effect on composite blackbodies. The same applies for radio waves which are not absorbed much by the atmosphere or the surface. In fact radio waves support the hypothesis of Claes Johnson that low frequency radiation is not converted to thermal energy by blackbodies at normal Earth temperatures – which generally emit much higher frequencies themselves. Note that 12cm corresponds to spontaneous emission at only 0.0241481 K
Nullius in Verba says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:58 am
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’.
___________________________________________
Yes to the first, but “traditional physics” does not say the atmosphere cannot emit radiation in the direction of the Earth’s surface, some of which will reach the surface.
Wait till Tuesday morning (UK time) for more detail, but read Claes Johnson Computational Blackbody Radiation first as linked from my ‘Radiation’ page..
>>>All of the warming is it at high latitudes where it was caused the biosphere to expand.
Really?
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/ghcn-temperature-adjustments-affect-40-of-the-arctic/#more-964
John West says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:04 am
I don’t have time at the moment to follow those links, will get back to this in a couple of days.
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Nullius in Verba says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:58 am
“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.
The reason it is still going on is because of people like you mangling the 2nd Law and giving examples which are not relevant – here at least you have mentioned “work has to be done to accomplish it”, which sounds like someone tried to teach you..
Yes it does say that it can’t flow from colder to hotter, because it makes the distinction that this applies to spontaneous heat flow, heat cannot flow from colder to hotter without work being done.
Just as water cannot flow uphill unless work is done to effect such a change.
And as for that poor old chewed blanket, if you lived in a world which had conduction and convection in the atmosphere you could work out for yourself what was happening,
“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.”
No it doesn’t, because immediately the cold blanket will take heat from you, it can slow your heat loss and act to delay conduction of your body’s heat to the cold air around you, which is why you feel cold in the first place, and depending on how cold the air and how effective the blanket, you will hopefully regain your body’s working temperature, and if very efficient, could make you overheat.
But, just how is the trace amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere effective as an insulating blanket? The air is practically 100% not carbon dioxide! Find the blanket!
And, let’s have the figures, how much does this practically non-existing blanket of carbon dioxide actually raise temperature of matter? Surely you must have tons of experiments to prove this? Where are the industries that have incorporated this amazing power of minute quantities of carbon dioxide to raise matter’s temperature? Why isn’t this astonishing breakthrough in understanding in the design of my central heating system? I could save a fortune on fuel costs. Come on, don’t keep it a secret – how do I lag my attic with it? Ooops, already lagged with atmospheric concentrations..
==========
Gary Hladik says:
March 11, 2012 at 12:55 pm
Myrrh says (March 11, 2012 at 5:58 am): “He’s already done so.”
Really? So where’s LaTour’s Nobel Prize? Where’s the experiment? Where is it published?
Myrrh, did you ever ask yourself why Johnson, LaTour, and our own Doug Cotton are content to remain trol–er, voices in the wilderness, when they could revolutionize physics, claim wealth and fame, and silence their critics with one comparatively simple experiment? I mean, doesn’t it make you just the least bit suspicious?
Gary, I first became suspicious when introduced to these warmist backradiation ideas – my very first problem with it was seeing the claimed ‘rise in industrial CO2 driving temperatures’ linked to a temperature rise from, and described as the Earth’s norm, the end of the Little Ice Age and realising the great outpouring from industry didn’t begin until the middle of the last century, maybe you’re too young to remember the few cars being driven on practically empty motorways in rush hour.. and then, I discovered the HokeySchtick shenanigans. My second problem was being astounded to find that I had to believe that carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years – and I found this repeated everywhere as “well known”, and with carbon dioxide blamed for the warming rise out of the LIA because we had increased it – somehow I just couldn’t get my head around how I could be told this at the same time, practically in the same sentence, as being told that this was disruption to the norm and that carbon dioxide levels had been stable for some 400,600,800,000 years previously, so obviously, the rise in carbon dioxide now was the cause of our warming; regardless that this was being graphed from a beginning at the bottom of the LIA and even though the industry supposedly at fault didn’t exist until much, much later, but extraordinarily, regardless also that this showed carbon dioxide was irrelevant to driving temperatures, because, if it had been stable all those hundreds of thousands of years previously, then it had nothing to do with our periodic massive rises in temperatures when gazillions of tons of ice melted and sea levels rose 300′ plus in a short space of time at our entries into the benign conditions of our interglacials, our brief respites from the Ice Age we are still in, and into which we shall return, soon, for another 100,000 years or so.
That’s when I became suspicious, that I was dealing with people who couldn’t keep logically coherent from the beginning to end of one sentence. Then of course, I found it was because they had been fed a diet of tweaked fisics, ideas taken from real physics and mangled by swapping around properties and taking laws out context, and much more, and instead of being able to look objectively at the information they were regurgitating in pre-programmed memes when given an alternative view from the real world, they would tie themselves in knots to come back with some reply or other, straw man and ad hom mostly when they failed, because, the AGW paradigm was all they knew, they had had no reason to distrust it. Didn’t want to distrust it, perhaps.
I was luckier than those, I found no reason to trust it, I had a little real world physics under my belt and could see the incoherence. You can continue to argue for The Greenhouse Effect, but until you can explain how carbon dioxide can drive global warming at the beginning of our interglacials around 800 years before it itself begins increasing – then you are peddling magic, not science.
I’m sorry you’re confused about the difference.
Lord Monckton:
Thank you for responding (@3/10 – 7:48 p.m.) to my query. I am sorry about the unpleasant little tiff with Eric Adler. I reread Wentz several times today and still have a number of questions, but I should contact Lindzen directly. The Wentz paper does not really address energy fluxes, and so I am still not clear about what the 0.8 W/m^2 per deg.K flux is, e.g., a latent heat flux from the ocean surface into the atmosphere, or from the surface via convection and latent heat release to space, or something in between. Moreover, the large increase in observed evaporation(vs the much smaller increases in the model outputs) is not a simple direct function of increased sea surface temperatures. Changes in global (and especially tropical) wind speeds are crucial. As Wentz et. al. noted, the model atmospheric energy budgets could still balance (in a way pleasing to the warmists) if as the models also predicted global and tropical wind speeds significantly deceased. They did just the opposite! In any event, the unexpected and large observed increases in evaporation and precipitation imply huge heat fluxes away from the surface, fluxes that the models got quite wrong. We have Lindzen & Choi (2011). If with this alternative derivation we have a substantially different way of reaching a similar result, that would be profound. I just want to see it all worked out in detail, step by step.
Again thank you. And BTW, I did so much enjoy your Union College presentation. I am only sorry that neither the lecture nor the Q&A video included the professor asking students to raise their hands and your response to that.
I’m curious about the 33C of average surface temperature contributed by greenhouse gases. It’s an average, so what is its span? Is it a Gaussian distribution? Where are the -3db shoulders? at +/-10%? +/-20%? +/-100%? Does it vary by latitude, i.e., is it greater or less in the polar regions; greater or lesser in the tropical regions? Is it 33C in winter and in summer? Is it constant year around?
While waiting for wise commentary and guidance from the community, I’m still patiently waiting for a reference to Tyndall’s easily replicable experiment that documents omnidirectional warming from stimulated CO2 molecules in the presence of unrestricted convection.
Ken says:
Ken: The 33 C figure is derived from looking at the global energy balance, i.e., comparing the actual average surface temperature to the average surface temperature that one would of necessity have to have if the Earth were otherwise the same (in particular, same albedo) but there was no greenhouse effect. As such, it doesn’t give you the answers to your questions and you would have to do more detailed modeling to study how an atmosphere without the greenhouse effect.
The science is really not that hard to understand for those capable of understanding science that conflicts with what their ideology makes them want to believe that the science should say.
Myrrh says (March 11, 2012 at 2:59 pm): “Gary, I first became suspicious when introduced to these warmist backradiation ideas…”
Since you’re not suspicious of fringe physicists’ refusal to support their “theories” with actual experiments–despite very lucrative rewards for doing so–I must conclude you’re extremely gul–er, receptive to new and exciting ideas and opportunities. Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I happen to own several very nice bridg–oh, but I forget, you’ve already bought one. 🙂
Monckton of Brenchley says:
I see no justifications whatsoever for the claim that “λ is in effect the reciprocal of this heat flux”. You claim such a justification from the coincidence that the 1% to 3% increase in evaporation seen across the models yields a range of climate sensitivities more or less in line with the IPCC range. However, in order to show that this is likely anything more than a happy coincidence, you would have to demonstrate that the models that show a 1% increase are those with sensitivities around 4.5 C and those that show a 3% increase are those with sensitivities around 1.5 C, or in general that there is a good inverse correlation between what the models predict in terms of sensitivity and what they predict in terms of changes in evaporation. Without such evidence, there is nobody likely to believe such numerical coincidences are any indication that your assumption about the relationship between increase in evaporation and sensitivity is justified! Remember, you are talking to an audience that calls themselves “skeptics” here!