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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In reply to Joel Shore, an earlier commenter had asked me to outline how Professor Lindzen reached a quantitative conclusion, and I replied by providing the quantitative basis and pointing out that application of the value he assigns to lambda seems in line with the IPCC’s interval of climate-sensitivity estimates. If Mr. Shore has any queries about the reason why Professor Lindzen assigns the stated value to lambda, then he should not talk impolitely about “numerical coincidences” or about “my assumption” about the relationship between changes in evaporation and climate sensitivity. I made no such assumption: I merely reported what Professor Lindzen had said and outlined his calculation. I should not be surprised if, in due course, the Professor were to publish a paper on the implications of the remarkably substantial discrepancy between the model-predicted and actually-observed rates of change in surface evaporation per unit change in surface temperature. Yet again, the models’ predictions are shown to be unskilful, and – if the Professor is right – yet again they have erred greatly on the side of exaggerating climate sensitivity.
Lord Monckton has proved to be an effective debater. Usually, the logic of his arguments is impeccable. However, his arguments have a logical weak spot.
While Monckton asserts that the IPCC climate models make “predictions,” they make only “projections” and while the predictions of a model are falsifiable, the projections of a model are not.
The logical fault in the IPCC’s argument for CAGM is not as represented by Monckton. While he represents that this fault lies in inconsistency of the predictions of the models with a global average surface air temperature time serties, the fault truely lies in our inability to statistically test the projections of these models.
Joel Shore says:
March 11, 2012 at 4:38 pm
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.
_______________________________________
Indeed Joel. What is it that makes it hard for yourself to understand that the adiabatic lapse rate determines how much warmer the surface is than the mean temperature of the Earth-plus-atmosphere system, which is not particularly close to 255K by the way, but would be found somewhere in the troposphere, stratosphere or mesosphere. I’m sure you will also find that this lapse rate would be the same for an 80% pure nitrogen and 20% pure oxygen atmosphere, because such lapse rate is a function of the acceleration due to gravity. Does this conflict with your own ideology, Joel?
Mr. Oldberg draws what seems a largely artificial distinction between “prediction” and “projection”. Any prediction or projection that is not falsifiable does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis: it is simply a guess.
Here are just some of the predictions (or projections, or forecasts, or rune-riddlings, or tea-leaf readings, or entrail-inspections, or magpie-countings) of the IPCC and its devotees that have gone agley:
The IPCC predicts, as its central estimate, 1.5 K warming by 2100 because of the CO2 we add this century, with another 0.6 K for “already-committed” warming and 0.7 K for warming from non-CO2 greenhouse gases: total 2.8 K (the mean of the predictions on all six emissions scenarios). Of this 2.8 K, 0.2 K should have occurred since 2000, but the outturn is 0.0 K.
The IPCC predicts 2.8 K manmade warming from 2000-2100, but the warming from 1950-2010 was equivalent to just 1.2 K/century. There will need to be much acceleration of warming to reach the IPCC’s prediction. The required acceleration is most unlikely because each additional molecule of CO2 has less warming effect than its predecessor, and because …
The IPCC predicts that the anthropogenic fraction of CO2 will rise exponentially this century, yet in the past decade the rate of increase in CO2 concentration has been falling.
The IPCC’s central estimate of CO2 concentration by 2100 is 713 ppmv, but on current trends there will be no more than 590 ppmv in the atmosphere by then.
The IPCC’s predicted rate of increase in ocean heat content over the past decade or two has proven to be four and a half times greater than the observed rate of increase.
The IPCC predicts a 1ft-2ft sea-level rise by 2100, with a best estimate 1ft 5in. Yet for the past eight years sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century, and sea level last year was lower than in any of the previous seven years.
Al Gore, in 2005, predicted an imminent sea-level rise of 20 ft. Yet the same year he spent $4 million buying a swank condo in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the allegedly-rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf.
James Hansen, in 2010, wrote an article in the British Marxist daily newspaper The Guardian saying that because of Man’s activities sea level would eventually rise by 246 feet (he called it 75 meters). There is no basis in the sea-level data for any such prediction.
The IPCC’s prediction that hurricanes would increase their intensity, frequency, and duration as a result of “global warming” has failed. In the past year, the Accumulated Cyclone-Energy Index was at its least in the 30-year satellite record, notwithstanding the net global warming over the period.
The UN, a few years ago, confidently predicted that there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010. There weren’t and aren’t.
Bottom line: It. Isn’t. Happening. I don’t care whether the predictions are called projections: they are wrong. Just about all of the failed predictions have erred extravagantly on the side of exaggeration. The models don’t work because a) their continuing tendency to exaggerate beyond reason indicates prejudice on the part of those who are supplying them with data; and b) “the climate is a coupled, non-linear chaotic object”, and, therefore, “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (IPCC, 2001, para. 14.2.2.2). The best the IPCC says it can do is a probability distribution: but it can’t. Time to shut it down for aye.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
“Time to shut it down for aye.”
Are you saying time to shut down the IPCC? (I’d say aye.)
Or is this a sort of sign off as in time to stop posting?
Thank you for all you’re doing to inject reason and perspective into this mess!
I do wish, however, you’d find a picture of a spade for your presentation, a square shovel just ain’t the same.
Sarah J says:
March 10, 2012 at 4:34 am
If the guy who wrote that is meant to be a journalist he should be ashamed … Hideous bias, and maligning of those whose point of view he doesn’t agree with. My mind feels dirty just having read it.
Well Sarah. I say we smear our bodies with CO2 and have some seriously dirty fun. You up for it?
Henry@Leigh/Monckton etc
I think it is very difficult to assess increased evaporation from warming.
For example, if I leave the pump of my swimming pool off during the day (light) and at the end of that day I dive in the pool, I find that there is a layer of warm water lying on top. This is because water absorbs in the (hot) IR and this is being re-radiated in the top layers of the water. Needless to say that evaporation increases as the temp. of the water increases. So the evaporation all depends on how the top layers are mixed or not mixed. The only way it might be possible to assess the increase in evaporation is to pair the increase in temps. with that of the observed increased rainfall.
Most people, including myself and Spencer, estimate the (“global” ) warming during the past 38 years at about 0,14 degrees C per decade. That is about 0,56 degrees in total for the past 4 decades. As stated before, the results of my 22 odd weather stations indicate an average increase in rainfall 1.5 mm per month/decade. This is about 6 mm per month extra.
So for one degree warming I estimate that rainfall will increase by ca. 10 mm.
Mind you, for some rerason(s) that I still have to figure out, humidity decreased over the same period, by about 0,2% RH/decade, globally.
This observation confirms the red lines in Fig. 3.38 of the relevant IPCC report, showing that warmer nights have been decreasing and colder nights have been increasing (since 1979). So, overall there is more natural warming caused by increasing maxima causing more evaporation and more condensation, at the same time.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Allow me to add my voice to the chorus of thanks for Lord Monckton’s always calm, gracious, and reasoned essays. There are many realists doing an excellent job of punching holes in this vast scam, such as Anthony and Steve McIntyre; and some welcome apostates like Judith Curry, but I believe when it comes to winning converts, no one has been as effective as Christopher Monckton.
Plus, I love that he used “agley” – hadn’t come across that since H.S. English Lit & good old Bobby Burns:
Justin Pulliam’s summation was well written & thorough, but way over the top in places – almost sycophantic. If only for credibility’s sake, I suggest that he throttle it back a little next time.
Fact Check.
Gore’s Condo in the St Regis is more than a kilometer from the San Francisco Bay, more than 3 km from Fisherman’s Wharf, not “just feet away” unless you mean over 10,000 feet. It’s more than 10 km from the Pacific Ocean.
The base of the building is 65 feet above sea level, where I think the confusion may come from.
Has Monkton changed his arguments since the guy from deltoid handed him his arse using Plimmer?
And corrected his claims that he made up about the work of Dr. Pinker?
Because that was mildly hilarious, and he didn’t change his tune for a few talks afterwards at least.
We need to get Lord Monckton to do another tour of Australia. We urgently need his common-sense here. If we could persaude Professor Lindzen to do one with him as well,that would be the ideal team so to speak.
————-
Monckton of Brenchley,
Thank you once again for a remarkable open dialog. Independent thinking is the unstoppable intellectual element in the dialog critical of the manipulated ‘science’ of IPCC centric CAGWist’s.
Falsifiability is not the most important scientifically focused restraint on a ‘prediction’ or ‘projection’ or ‘guess’. Falsifiability has necessary epistemological precursors.
The most important scientifically focused restraint on a ‘prediction’ or ‘projection’ or ‘guess’ is that the basis of making one (prediction/projection/guess) includes the statement of relevant reasonably identifiable metaphysical entities that are the means/focus of what is being predicted/projected/guessed. Makin the entities up arbitrarily to support an argument is insufficient scientifically.
John
What an awful recording! Anyhow, Lord Monckton performed admirably. Excellent work.
And yet for all the goodness, certain individuals here would nail Monckton to the wall for his personal beliefs. For shame. Grow up!
Some much better examples of this lecture can be seen at the UKIP Scotland website, repost of this story, which has extra information and alternative recordings of this Monckton Lecture. There are two alternative videos and even a low bandwidth slides/audio presentation.
Firstly there is a near identical lecture given at Minnesota on the 8th March, and secondly there is the very similar lecture given at Hartford on the 3rd March. The Minnesota version is an 8-part YouTube presentation lasting for about 100 minutes, and the Hartford version is a continuous slides and broadband video presentation, in a special “Echo Player” flash applet.
Furthermore, the Hartford Echo Player (as recommended by Lord Monckton himself) does afford an opportunity for those with limited bandwidth, or in network congested areas to view an audio only presentation accompanied by high quality slides, as used in teh actual lecture, and using the sound track from the actual lecture. Many educationalists will find this latter example invaluable I am sure.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
March 11, 2012 at 12:48 pm
“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.”
Since I wrote that post, I did some searching and found the paper by Wentz to which you referred. From this paper it seems that evaporation meant evaporation rate. Doing some further digging, it seems that Wentz made an assumption in his analysis that is probably not valid .
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ken/PUB/comment_on_wentz_et_al_2007.pdf
“Absrtact: Wentz et al. (Reports, 13 July 2007, p. 233) present a satellite estimate of
global-mean rainfall that increases with global warming faster than predicted
by climate models. An independent estimate of global-mean evaporation provides
additional support, but critical assumptions on relative humidity and the
air-sea temperature difference changes are made that do not have adequate
observational basis and are inconsistent with climate models.”
In the text, the authors point out that the all models do not assume a reduction in wind speed contrary to what Wentz said in his paper. Also Wentz neglects the fact that small changes in relative humidity or difference between surface and near air temperatures can result in large changes in evaporation rates based on their equation (1) which determines evaporation rate. Wentz assumed that the wind speed change was the sole determining factor affecting evaporation rates.
Another paper criticized Wentz’s analysis because he did not consider other factors which play a role in precipitation such as global brightening during the period of study; and the error bars in Wentz’s estimate of the evaporation rate increase was considerable.
:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~stine/Files/Lambert_Stine_Krakauer_Chiang_2008_EOS_how_much_will_precipitation_increase_with_global_warming.pdf
For these reasons, one shouldn’t put much faith in the argument that estimates of evaporation rate changes, with temperature, show that the climate sensitivity is as low as Lindzen and Monckton are claiming.
Monckton of Brenchly (March 11, 2012 at 7:07 pm):
Thank you for taking the time to reply. It is easy to discriminate models that make predictions from models that make only projections, for a statistical population underlies the former type of model but not the latter. If you were to search for the population underlying the models cited by IPCC Working Group 1 in AR4 you’d search in vain, for there isn’t one.
The statistical testing of a predictive model features a comparison of predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the various possible outcomes in the observed events that belong to a statistical sample which was drawn from the underlying population. If there is a match between the predicted and observed relative frequencies with respect to each possible outcome, the model is said to be “validated” by the statistical evidence. Otherwise, it is said to be “falsified” by this evidence. Obviously, this process cannot take place in the absence of the underlying population. As it cannot take place, claims made on the basis of Working Group 1’s models are not falsifiable thus lying outside science.
This state of affairs is obscured by a use of language in the climatological literature in which terms make ambiguous reference to the associated ideas with consequential negation of Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. In its argument for the existence of CAGW, Working Group 1 employs the negated law as a false premise thusly arriving at the conclusion that CAGW is proved when it is not proved on account of the false premise.
I’ve covered this topic with a degree of depth in the peer reviewed article at http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/15/the-principles-of-reasoning-part-iii-logic-and-climatology/ . Among the works cited by the article is one by the climatologist Kevin Trenberth in which he states that the IPCC has never made so much as one prediction. However, it has made many projections. Some of them are pictured in AR4 in the report of Working Group 1.
So when might Lord Monckton die of ‘natural causes’ like Andrew Breitbart and the other fellow who made his living impersonating Obama in a stand up act?
I pray Monckton lives to see the entire global warming scam tossed into the trash heap of phony science.
From early in his Union College talk last week we have (by my transcription of his talk-JW):
I support the position of it being “not yet definitive” that CO2 has had any significant impact on warming over the period Monckton of Brenchley mentioned.
The science needed in that area is not yet started and any that has been done was not objectively treated by IPCC centric processes. The lack of that independent science over the past 20+ years was due primarily to:
1) Overwhelming bias toward CAGW funding,
2) Broad manipulation against independent (skeptical) scientists. Just one of several examples that manipulation is the well documented activity of the group of IPCC centric scientists shown in CG1 & CG2.
3) The intellectual dishonesty and lack of ethical integrity shown by an almost complete boycott by MSM of objective balance in climate science reporting,
4) NGO’s providing incredibly large amounts of money for PR to media and governments to feed the radical ideology of CAGWism.
We have just begun the era in climate science where objective and balanced dialog will focus on how much warming is from mankind’s emission of CO2. We see, in this new era, only the beginning of the additional necessary independent (skeptical) science now.
Regarding everyone making claims as to definitive amounts of the warming from man’s CO2, they serve no actual scientific contribution at this time; the claims are instead just open commentary in the face of insufficient independent (skeptical) science so far. I am not against open commentary, it is needed but it is not science per se.
John
In response to the childish and malevolently-expressed comment of whoever lurks under the cowardly pseudonym “Wombat”, I did not “make up” anything about Dr. Pinker’s paper of 2005. I pointed out, correctly, that she had identified a naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 that had exercised a radiative forcing of some 6 Watts per square meter. And I drew the not unreasonable conclusion (which I did not attribute to her) that after deducting the naturally-caused radiative forcing from the reduction in cloud cover the anthropogenic component in climate sensitivity over the period was likely to have been considerably less than the IPCC had imagined.
I say my conclusion was “not unreasonable” because Dr. Scafetta, in a posting at WattsUpWithThat today, has also concluded that, once the natural 60-year cycles of the great ocean oscillations are accounted for (and it may be these cycles that express themselves in changes in cloud cover such as that which Dr. Pinker had identified), the anthropogenic component in global warming is considerably less than the IPCC imagines.
The unspeakable BBC, looking desperately for ways to discredit me in a documentary entitled “Meet The Sceptics” that it broadcast last year, sent Dr. Pinker a copy of a paper on the cloud-cover issue and its implications for climate sensitivity that I had presented at the annual seminar on planetary emergencies held by the World Federation of Scientists in Erice, Sicily. From their outright refusal to show me her letter in response, and from their failure to include any mention of the issue in their documentary, one deduces that she did not find too much to complain about in my actually entirely straightforward presentation of her conclusions. She may or may not have agreed with the inferences I drew from those conclusions: but I did not “make up” the conclusions, and the suggestion that I did is libel.
My paper is now published in the official Proceedings of the seminar, and a development of it, with a distinguished analysis of Dr. Pinker’s data by Dr. Joseph Boston, was later also published as a chapter in the book “Evidence-Based Climate Science”, edited by Don Easterbrook.
It would surely be more constructive if the likes of Wombat (whoever he or she may be) were to read the source material and think about it rather than carelessly and libelously parroting the climate-extremists’ party line. In this instance, the party line is derived from a misdescription of of what I had said by a climate-extremist blogger in an email to Dr. Pinker, who had understandably replied that my remarks as deliberately misdescribed by the blogger did not reflect what she had said in her paper.
This questionable technique proved so damaging to my reputation that it was later serially adopted by “Professor” Abraham in a howlingly mendacious personal attack on me broadcast by the fourteenth-rate bible college where he “teaches”. As a result, scientists all over the place are saying I misrepresented their work, when the worst that could fairly be said is that I drew conclusions from it with which they found it expedient or profitable to disagree. For these reasons, I have seen no reason to “change my tune” on Dr. Pinker’s paper: on the contrary, my “tune” is now to be found in the scientific literature.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
Fine…So your claim is based on a completely unsubstantiated claim by Lindzen. Given Lindzen’s recent track-record with claims (see, e.g. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/03/misrepresentation-from-lindzen/ ), I would expect that skeptics would want some actual evidence…or at least a compelling argument…in support of such a claim before they took it with anything more than a grain of salt.
Anyone quoting realclimate as a reliable source of information on climate issues really has lost the argument.
@Monckton of Brenchley says: March 12, 2012 at 9:04 am
Dr. Pinker responded multiple times to you misrepresentation of her work including, I believe, your error riddled testimony before the US congressional committee. And the BBC could have dedicated their entire documentary on your array of disinformation, but their scope wasn’t that narrow. You “make up” your own conclusions regularly while disregarding those of paper authors. Mr. Abraham, Mr. Hadfield, and others have exposed your reprehensible disinformation techniques, Mr. Monckton. We’re still waiting for your promised point-by-point engagement with Mr. Hadfield, which was supposed to take place upon return from your last trip. As Mr. Hadfield documented so well, your “tune” changes so frequently as to recommend DJ as your next profession.
REPLY: I think this is a job for…SuperMandia! (Abraham’s cohort on the CRRT) – A
Henry@Evan Green
I think your remarks to Lord Monckton are insulting and without any scientific substance or evidence.
WUWT is a public forum and here we ask you to rather bring (scientific) evidence of your claims so that we can all peek in on it. You will find that we deal very harshly with people calling names and making insulting remarks. We despise people like you.
I should tell you that my own evidence collected over the past two years clearly proves that the warming of the past 4 decades was natural or largely natural and I challenge you to prove to me (considering at least as many data as went past my eyes) that the warming over the past 4 decades was largely not natural.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Goodbye Mr.Green, if that is your real name. Please don’t come back unless you have actually tested something yourself that you can be proud of.
Joel Shore:
I know Richard Lindzen’s track-record so I trust what he says unless and until shown he has made an error.
And I know the track-record of RealClimate. So, if RealClimate disagrees with Lindzen (you assert they do) then that can only be taken as confirmatory evidence that Lindzen is right.
Evan Green:
Your rant is not capable of rational response because it fails to provide a single point, substantiated claim and/or item of evidence. It consists entirely of offensive, unsupported assertions such as;
“your error riddled testimony before the US congressional committee.”
There is a word for contributions such as yours. It is ‘twaddle’.
Please provide a post that makes a proper point or go away. Mindless distractions such as your contribution waste time reading them.
Richard
I’m reminded once again to never pick a battle of wits when fighting British gentry.
Richard S Courtney says:
So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say. (By the way, it is not hard to verify that RC is correct on the particular point in question that I provided as an example.)
I honestly I can’t say that I am at all surprised, but it is still interesting to have it so directly confirmed.
Evan Green says:
March 12, 2012 at 10:43 am
@Monckton of Brenchley says: March 12, 2012 at 9:04 am
Dr. Pinker responded multiple times to you misrepresentation of her work including…
———————————————————
Are you daft, or perhaps pixalated? Monckton clearly stated , “I pointed out, correctly, that she had identified a naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 that had exercised a radiative forcing of some 6 Watts per square meter. And I drew the not unreasonable conclusion (which I did not attribute to her) that after deducting the naturally-caused radiative forcing from the reduction in cloud cover the anthropogenic component in climate sensitivity over the period was likely to have been considerably less than the IPCC had imagined.”
He also clearly stated, “…the party line is derived from a misdescription of what I had said by a climate-extremist blogger in an email to Dr. Pinker, who had understandably replied that my remarks as deliberately misdescribed by the blogger did not reflect what she had said in her paper.”
In other words, another mendacious CAGW proponent ‘Gleicked” him. As his comment was almost two hours before your baseless rant, which did not addresss his real points, you remarks fit right in with Gleick, and mendacious Mann. Both your Mom and I are very disappointed in your actions.