By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In a previous post, I explained that many of the climate-extremists’ commonest arguments are instances of logical fallacies codified by Aristotle in his Sophistical Refutations 2300 years ago. Not the least of these is the argumentum ad populum, the consensus or head-count fallacy.
The fallacy of reliance upon consensus, particularly when combined with the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the authority or reputation of presumed experts, is more likely than any other to mislead those who have not been Classically trained in mathematical or in formal logic.
To the Classicist, an argument founded upon any of the Aristotelian logical fallacies is defective a priori. Nothing more need be said about it. However, few these days are Classicists. Accordingly, in this post I propose to explain mathematically why there can be no legitimate consensus about the answer to the central scientific question in the climate debate: how much warming will occur by 2100 as a result of our sins of emission?
There can be no consensus because all of the key parameters in the fundamental equation of climate sensitivity are unknown and unknowable. Not one can be directly measured, indirectly inferred, or determined by any theoretical method to a precision sufficient to give us a reliable answer.
The fundamental equation of climate sensitivity determines how much global warming may be expected to occur once the climate has settled back to a presumed pre-existing state of equilibrium after we have perturbed it by doubling the atmospheric concentration of CO2. The simplifying assumption that temperature feedbacks are linear introduces little error, so I shall adopt it. For clarity, I have colored the equation’s principal terms:
Climate sensitivity at CO2 doubling (blue) equals the product of the CO2 forcing (green), the Planck parameter (purple) and the feedback gain factor (red).
The term in green, ΔF2x, is the “radiative forcing” that the IPCC expects to occur in response to a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the air. Measurement and modeling have established that the relation between a change in CO2 concentration and a corresponding change in the net down-minus-up flux of radiation at the top of the climatically-active region of the atmosphere (the tropopause) is approximately logarithmic. In other words, each additional molecule of CO2 exerts less influence on the net radiative flux, and hence on global temperature, than its predecessors. The returns diminish.
To determine the radiative forcing in response to a CO2 doubling, one multiplies the natural logarithm of 2 by an unknown coefficient. The IPCC’s first and second Assessment Reports set it at 6.3, but the third and fourth reduced it by a hefty 15% to 5.35. The CO2 forcing is now thought to be 5.35 ln 2 = 3.708 Watts per square meter. This value was obtained by inter-comparison between three models: but models cannot reliably determine it. Both of the IPCC’s values for the vital coefficient are guesses.
The term in purple, 
, denominated in Kelvin per Watt per square meter of direct forcing, is the Planck or zero-feedback climate-sensitivity parameter. This is one of the most important quantities in the equation, because both the direct pre-feedback warming and separately the feedback gain factor depend upon it. Yet the literature on it is thin. Recent observations have indicated that the IPCC’s value is a large exaggeration.
The Planck parameter is – in theory – the first differential of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer about 3-5 miles above us, where incoming and outgoing fluxes of radiation are equal by definition. The measured radiative flux is 238 Watts per square meter. The radiative-transfer equation then gives us the theoretical mean atmospheric temperature of 255 Kelvin at that altitude, and its first differential is 255 / (4 x 238), or 0.267 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. This value is increased by a sixth to 0.313 because global temperatures are not uniformly distributed. However, it is also guesswork, and the current Lunar Diviner mission suggests it is a considerable overestimate.
Theory predicts that the Moon’s mean surface temperature should be around 270 Kelvin. However, Diviner has now found the mean lunar equatorial temperature to be 206 K, implying that mean lunar surface temperature is little more than 192 K. If so, the theoretical value of 270 K, and thus the lunar Planck parameter, is a 40% exaggeration.
If the terrestrial Planck parameter were similarly exaggerated, even if all other parameters were held constant the climate sensitivity would – on this ground alone – have to be reduced by more than half, from 3.3 K to just 1.5 K per CO2 doubling. There is evidence that the overestimate may be no more than 20%, in which event climate sensitivity would be at least 2.1 K: still below two-thirds of the IPCC’s current central estimate.
If there were no temperature feedbacks acting to amplify or attenuate the direct warming caused by a CO2 doubling, then the warming would simply be the product of the CO2 radiative forcing and the Planck parameter: thus, using the IPCC’s values, 3.708 x 0.313 = 1.2 K.
But that is not enough to generate the climate crisis the IPCC’s founding document orders it to demonstrate: so the IPCC assumes the existence of several temperature feedbacks – additional forcings fn demonimated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the direct warming that triggered them. The IPCC also imagines that these feedbacks are so strongly net-positive that they very nearly triple the direct warming we cause by adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
The term in red in the climate-sensitivity equation is the overall feedback gain factor, which is unitless. It is the reciprocal of (1 minus the product of the Planck parameter and the sum of all temperature feedbacks), and it multiplies the direct warming from CO2 more than 2.8 times.
Remarkably, the IPCC relies upon a single paper, Soden & Held (2006), to establish its central estimates of the values of the principal temperature feedbacks. It did not publish all of these feedback values until its fourth and most recent Assessment Report in 2007.
The values it gives are: Water vapor feedback fH2O = 1.80 ± 0.18; lapse-rate feedback flap = –0.84 ± 0.26; surface albedo feedback falb = 0.26 ± 0.08; cloud feedback fcld = 0.69 ± 0.38 Watts per square meter per Kelvin. There is also an implicit allowance of 0.15 Kelvin for the CO2 feedback and other small feedbacks, giving a net feedback sum of approximately 2.06 Watts per square meter of additional forcing per Kelvin of direct warming.
Note how small the error bars are. Yet even the sign of most of these feedbacks is disputed in the literature, and not one of them can be established definitively either by measurement or by theory, nor even distinguished by any observational method from the direct forcings that triggered them. Accordingly, there is no scientific basis for the assumption that any of these feedbacks is anywhere close to the stated values, still less for the notion that in aggregate they have so drastic an effect as almost to triple the forcing that triggered them.
Multiplying the feedback sum by the Planck parameter gives an implicit central estimate of 0.64 for the closed-loop gain in the climate system as imagined by the IPCC. And that, as any process engineer will tell you, is impossible. In electronic circuits intended to remain stable and not to oscillate, the loop gain is designed not to exceed 0.1. Global temperatures have very probably not departed by more than 3% from the long-run mean over the past 64 million years, and perhaps over the past 750 million years, so that a climate system with a loop gain as high as two-thirds of the value at which violent oscillation sets in is impossible, for no such violent oscillation has been observed or inferred.
Multiplying the 1.2 K direct warming from CO2 by its unrealistically overstated overall feedback gain factor of 2.8 gives an implicit central estimate of the IPCC’s central estimate of 3.3 K for the term in blue, 
, which is the quantity we are looking for: the equilibrium warming in Kelvin in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration.
To sum up: the precise values of the CO2 radiative forcing, the Planck parameter, and all five relevant temperature feedbacks are unmeasured and unmeasurable, unknown and unknowable. The feedbacks are particularly uncertain, and may well be somewhat net-negative rather than strongly net-positive: yet the IPCC’s error-bars suggest, quite falsely, that they are known to an extraordinary precision.
It is the imagined influence of feedbacks on climate sensitivity that is the chief bone of contention between the skeptics and the climate extremists. For instance, Paltridge et al. (2009) find that the water-vapor feedback may not be anything like as strongly positive as the IPCC thinks; Lindzen and Choi (2009, 2011) report that satellite measurements of changes in outgoing radiation in response to changes in sea-surface temperature indicate that the feedback sum is net-negative, implying a climate sensitivity of 0.7 K, or less than a quarter of the IPCC’s central estimate; Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011) agree with this estimate, on the basis that the cloud feedback is as strongly negative as the IPCC imagines it to be positive; etc., etc.
Since all seven of the key parameters in the climate sensitivity equation are unknown and unknowable, the IPCC and its acolytes are manifestly incorrect in stating or implying that there is – or can possibly be – a consensus about how much global warming a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause.
The difficulties are even greater than this. For the equilibrium climate sensitivity to a CO2 doubling is not the only quantity we need to determine. One must also establish three additional quantities, all of then unmeasured and unmeasurable: the negative forcing from anthropogenic non-greenhouse sources (notably particulate aerosols); the warming that will occur this century as a result of our previous enrichment of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases (the IPCC says 0.6 K); the transient-sensitivity parameter for the 21st century (the IPCC implies 0.4 K per Watt per square meter); and the fraction of total anthropogenic forcings represented by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (the IPCC implies 70%).
Accordingly, the IPCC’s implicit estimate of the warming we shall cause by 2100 as a result of the CO2 we add to the atmosphere this century is just 1.5 K. Even if we were to have emitted no CO2 from 2000-2100, the world would be just 1.5 K cooler by 2100 than it is today. And that is on the assumption that the IPCC has not greatly exaggerated the sensitivity of the global temperature to CO2.
There is a final, insuperable difficulty. The climate is a coupled, non-linear, mathematically-chaotic object, so that even the IPCC admits that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. It attempts to overcome this Lorenz constraint by presenting climate sensitivity as a probability distribution. However, in view of the uncertainty as to the values of any of the relevant parameters, a probability distribution is no less likely to fail than a central estimate flanked by error-bars.
If by this time your head hurts from too much math, consider how much easier it is if one is a Classicist. The Classicist knows that the central argument of the climate extremists – that there is a (carefully-unspecified) consensus among the experts – is an unholy conflation of the argumentum ad populum and the argumentum ad verecundiam. That is enough on its own to demonstrate to him that the climate-extremist argument is unmeritorious. However, you now know the math. The fact that not one of the necessary key parameters can be or has been determined by any method amply confirms that there is no scientific basis for any assumption that climate sensitivity is or will ever be high enough to be dangerous in the least.
Mindbuilder says:
April 23, 2012 at 6:02 pm
“Probabalistic reasoning often properly relies on logical falacies.”
No; “probabilistic reasoning” uses a different set of values and operators than boolean logic. Yet the way you combine those operators must follow all the rules of logic or you end up with a meaningless way of combining your measurements to form a decision. In other words, you surely can argue logically WHY you do a certain probabilistic computation. So the logic is there – just not manifested as boolean logic in the dataflow.
Who cares that 206K is little more than 192K? Why is 192K important? — John M Reynolds
Joe Born says:
April 24, 2012 at 3:14 am
“But it strikes me that the calculations would be exceedingly tedious, involving not only a large number of wavelength bands per gas to get the necessary resolution but also a wide variation in atmospheric composition among the various altitudes at various latitudes. Do you have confirmation that someone did indeed subject himself to the necessary tedium? Did he show his work?”
Ferenc Miskolczi did.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/ferenc-miskolczi-short-interview-and-letter-to-epa/#comment-17446
Brendan H says:
April 24, 2012 at 4:13 am
“The underlying assumption is that those who have acquired a certain type of training in mathematical or formal logic are less likely to be misled by logical fallacies; that is, they are better placed to identify logical fallacies than those not so blessed.
And this, of course, is an argument from authority, where those who are “Classically trained” in mathematical or formal logic are considered to have a better understanding of the subject than those not so well trained. ”
No, Brendan, it is not an argument from authority to assume that someone who knows a topic is more likely to have better understanding of the topic than someone who hasn’t such a topic.
It WOULD be an argument from authority if Monckton would go on to say “You are not a classicist so you are wrong.”
But he doesn’t say that.
I am particularly grateful to the many commenters who have illuminated the discussion on this thread. Trolls are almost entirely absent, and that is welcome: we can enjoy a proper scientific discussion without vexatious distractions. As usual, I shall respond to the individual points of interest that have been raised.
Mr. Mindbuilder says: “Probabilistic reasoning often properly relies on logical fallacies.” No, it doesn’t: it properly relies upon the laws of probability, which were first devised to illuminate the mathematics of expectation in gambling. No reasoning properly relies on logical fallacies. Mindbuilder’s implication seems to be that even though there is no scientific basis for the IPCC’s assumption that climate sensitivity is high we should act expensively on the assumption that there is.
John West, with great courtesy, disagrees with my assertion (backed by a citation from an admittedly unreliable source, the IPCC) to the effect that the climate, mathematically speaking, behaves as a chaotic object. Mr. West is in respectable company: Professor Lindzen recently took me to task for saying that the climate object behaves chaotically. And so did Fred Singer, until I explained to him that mathematically-chaotic objects, though they exhibit non-periodic behavior, are nevertheless deterministic. Chaos, in the mathematical sense, was first defined, described and demonstrated (with a five-parameter climate model) by the late Edward N. Lorenz, the father of numerical weather forecasting, in his justifiably celebrated 1963 paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow, published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. The climate object that we observe exhibits both periodic and non-periodic behavior and is deterministic. In this formal sense, then, it is in my submission a chaotic object; and, even if it is not, it behaves as though it is, at least to the extent that, though it is deterministic, its non-periodic behaviors, or bifurcations, are not determinable by any method, because we do not and shall never know to a sufficient precision the values of the millions of parameters that define the state of the object at any chosen moment. Even if the climate object is not chaotic, in all relevant respects it behaves as though it were, so the IPCC rightly says that “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Mr. Ethically Civil says: “The legitimacy of the consensus hangs only on the nature of the unaniminty of the group on the matter.” However, it has not been any part of my argument to suggest that no consensus can ever be legitimate. However, no argument from consensus can ever be legitimate, even where the matter upon which the consensus is agreed is true. It cannot be too often stated that the mere existence of a consensus, even among experts, tells us nothing in itself about whether or not the proposition to which subscribers to the consensus are said to assent is true or false.
Mr. Bobl says the total feedback factor is 1.8. No, it is 2.8. Like so many of the key quantities in the discussion of climate sensitivity, its value is not made explicit in the IPCC’s documents. However, it may be derived simply enough as follows: divide the IPCC’s multi-model mean central estimate of 3.26 K for equilibrium warming in response to a CO2 doubling (IPCC, 2007, p. 798, box 10.2) by the radiative forcing of 5.35 ln 2 = 3.708 Watts per square meter at Co2 doubling (Myhre et al., 1998) and also by the Planck parameter of 1/3.2 = 0.3125 Kelvin per Watt per square meter (IPCC, 2007, p. 631 fn). The answer is 2.813.
Mr. Oldberg says that “Monckton’s [clmate-sensitivity] equation is not falsifiable, lying outside science.” Well, it is not my equation, but that which the IPCC uses. Its origins lie in quite an interesting paper by James Hansen in 1984, which has a particularly clear account of how the feedback-amplification equation is derived. Mr. Oldberg makes a fair point when he says that, since the equation is looking for equilibrium warming and equilibrium will not be reached for some time [1000-3000 years: Solomon et al., 2009], it is not falsifiable. And that is indeed exactly the point. It might be 130 generations before the answer became apparent, and even then it will prove impossible to distinguish clearly enough between natural and anthropogenic contributions to temperature change.
Mr. Higley7, off topic, says there is no greenhouse effect. There is: get used to it.
Mr. Bubbagyro says “Onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat” – the burden of proof is upon the assertor, not upon the denier. That is not quite right. Science approaches the truth by two methods, one rare, one perforce more common. The rare method is that of absolute mathematical demonstration. It is particularly rare in the physical sciences, and rarer still in the slippery sciences such as climatology. The usual method by which science approaches the truth is known as the “scientific method”. Here, once a hypothesis has been credibly asserted (usually these days by publication in a learned journal after peer review), it is up to the scientific community at large to try to shoot it down in what Popper, in his celebrated paper of 1934 on the scientific method, calls the “error elimination” phase. To the extent that the hypothesis survives and flies on, it gains credibility. However, if it is shot down and shown to be false, that is the end of it. This method, first adumbrated by al-Haytham a thousand years ago, accordingly encourages scientists to come up with hypotheses, even if they are somewhat speculative. The onus is then upon the scientific community to falsify it, thus reversing the usual burden of proof.
Mr. Major9985 asks: “Are you saying that we are causing climate change but the consensus is now focused on how much?” It has long been established by experiment and measurement that adding greenhouse gases to an atmosphere like ours will be likely to cause warming. Accordingly there is no need to pray “consensus” in aid in support of that proposition: it has been sufficiently and repeatedly demonstrated. The true question is and has always been how much warming our doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will cause. On that subject, as the head posting here shows, there is insufficient knowledge of the seven key parameters that define equilibrium climate sensitivity to allow a basis for any general agreement on how much warming will occur. Nor do I say that any consensus truly exists on the answer to the “how-much-warming” question, or, therefore, upon the luridly-fancied disasters that would be consequent upon a very large warming. My point is simply that there is no scientific basis for any consensus as to how much warming a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause, because the fundamental equation of climate sensitivity contains too many unknown and unknowable unknowns.
Mr. SonOfMulder asks how I can assert that little error will arise from the simplifying assumption that all feedbacks are linear. Well, my argument is confined to the question whether we know enough about the value of the individual feedbacks (or of their sum) to make reliable estimates of the warming to be expected in response to a CO2 doubling, and it is my contention that, even under the simplifying assumption that the feedbacks are linear, neither equilibrium nor transient climate sensitivity is determinable to any respectable precision. If some or all of the feedbacks are non-linear (see Roe, 2009, for an interesting discussion), then in additiion to knowing the initial value of each feedback we must also know the profile of its non-linear evolution over time – and we do not know that either. Accordingly, assuming that some or all feedbacks are non-linear introduces yet another series of unknown and unknowable unknowns into the equation, demonstrating a fortiori my conclusion that there can be no consensus as to the amount of warming we shall see.
Mr. Mosher says we can be sure of the value of the CO2 radiative forcing because it has been established by line-by-line radiative-transfer modeling. If that were so, there would have been no need for the IPCC to reduce the value of the CO2 forcing by a hefty 15% between its 1995 and 2001 reports. Some years ago I consulted one of the modelers who had performed the earliest radiative-transfer calculations to establish the form of the CO2 forcing equation. He was happy to confirm to me that the calculations indicated that the equation was indeed logarithmic: i.e., that each additional molecule of CO2 in the air has less forcing and hence warming effect than any of its predecessors. However, he was unable to warrant that the coefficient in the equation was correct. He thought it was in the right ballpark, but was quite unable to say how big the ballpark was. The assumption that because a model is complex its output must be right is a fallacy that Aristotle would have pounced upon if there had been computers in his day. The greater the complexity of the model, the more likely it is – all other things being equal – to produce incorrect output. That is not to say that no model has value, nor that there is no scientific matter that can be modeled. However, it should by now be obvious to all who have done me the kindness of following this thread that no model – however sophisticated – can possibly give us the answer to the “how-much-warming” question of not just some but all of the parameters that are essential to the calculation are unknown and unknowable.
Monckton of Brenchley says “…since the equation is looking for equilibrium warming and equilibrium will not be reached for some time [1000-3000 years: Solomon et al., 2009], it is not falsifiable.” It sounds as though Lord Monckton and I are in substantial agreement but may differ on some details.
As I understand the term, the “equilibrium temperature” is the temperature that is reached after an infinite period of time during which all forcings are held constant. In the real world it is true that: a) forcings are not generally constant and b) scientists cannot wait for infinite periods of time before making their measurements. For both reasons, the equilibrium temperature is not observable. Thus, claims about the magnitude of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (e.g. that it is about 3 Celsius per doubling of the CO2 concentration) are non-falsifiable thus lying outside science. However, claims of this kind are at the heart of the IPCC’s argument for CAGW. Thus, currently there isn’t a scientific argument for regulation of CO2 emissions. The case for regulation has been made through logical fallacies.
While equilibrium temperatures are not observable, temperatures are. Thus, while a science of global warming cannot be built upon observations of equilibrium temperatures, such a science could be built upon observations of temperatures. The temperatures that would be observed would be the outcomes of statistically independent events. In a breach of professional duty, climatologists have thus far failed to describe these events for us. That they have failed to describe them leaves their claims non-falsifiable and thus pseudo-scientific.
Good explanation, but the politicians ain’t listening.
” Obama wants 469 million to fight overseas global warming ” http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/washington-secrets/2012/04/obama-wants-469-million-fight-overseas-global-warming/524076 .
Bobl says:
“The Climate is chaotic, this is not to say it is unstable, just that you cannot reliably predict the outcome (output) from the inputs. There are non-linear thresholds for example that prevent the sea temperature exceeding a limit, because the moment they do, storms arise and extract the heat. It is the non-linearities that make the climate chaotic.
This for example is why the weather can’t be accurately predicted beyond 4 days, and forecasts have a habit of being defeated by nature, because some unknown confluence of factors results in a storm. Perhaps a sea temperature difference of less than 0.5 degree might be the difference between a storm and no storm, or a pressure difference of 1 hPa, or a temp of 1 degree.”
You’re right, chaotic does not mean unstable. Storms are weather not climate but I guess it comes down to what one defines as “sensitive”. What’s the difference between a glacial and an interglacial, a change of 10W/m2, 1 W/m2, or 0.1 W/m2; or more relevantly to the issue at hand 30 W/m2, 3 W/m2, or 0.3 W/m2? I think we’d all agree that a 30 W/m2 change would result in significant climate change, 3 W/m2 probably not much at all, and 0.3 W/m2 would be indiscernible. If 0.3 W/m2 change resulted in significant climate change, then I would whole heartily agree that climate is chaotic. If a 3 W/m2 change results in significant climate change then I might be persuaded into agreeing that’s at least somewhat chaotic. Otherwise, I’ll continue to consider the climate an amalgamation of coupled damped oscillating systems. It seems to me that the question that remains to be resolved is whether the net damping is critical, over, or under.
DirkH: thanks for the corrections offered to Mindbuilder on “probabilistic reasoning” and to Brendan H on the “paradox” of claiming that those familiar with a subject are shutting down debate when they ask others to follow the plot. On the latter point we could write volumes; there is a great tendency today to use credentials as trump cards. That is exactly NOT what Lord Monckton does. He shows his work and his sources. He also thinks and writes so clearly that there is almost no excuse for a reader not being able to follow the plot. I would speculate that many of those who argue from authority, do so because they are too lazy, sloppy or unsure of their own work to show it. I say nothing of corruption; which usually thrives behind claims of authority.
Well, it couldn’t last. Here comes a troll. Brendan H says that the assertion that one trained in logic will be likely to be more skilled in that subject than one who is not thus trained is an instance of the logical fallacy of appeal to authority.
That is to misunderstand what the form of a logical argument is. If the argument is to be an argument at all, it must comprise at least one premise and a conclusion. If it is to be valid, its premises must entail its conclusion. If it is to be sound, its premises must all be true and must validly entail its conclusion, whereupon the conclusion will be necessarily true.
If one were to say, “The IPCC says that those trained in climatology are likely to be more skilled in that subject than those who are not thus trained, and the IPCC is full of experts, and therefore it is true that those trained in climatology are more likely to be skilled in that subject than those who are not thus trained,” then that would indeed be an argument (in that it contains one or more premises and a conclusion); and it would be fallacious, because it relies upon the authority of the IPCC rather than any merit intrinsic to the argument itself. Note that the argument is fallacious even though, in this instance, its conclusion is self-evidently true.
I had made the surely unobjectionable – and again self-evidently true – statement that the fallacious arguments from consensus and from authority or reputation are more likely to mislead those who have not been trained in logic than those who have. A single declarative statement such as this is not an argument: it is merely an assertion, albeit a truthful one. Many hundreds of billions of dollars that have been wasted on various scams and boondoggles to make “global warming” go away could have been spent on something more useful,, such as alleviating poverty or eradicating disease, if everyone had been given elementary training in logic, as every educated person was from the Middle Ages until my own generation. With universal Classical training, no one would have been fooled for an instant by the climate extremists.
In the paper that Eric Adler pointed out to me regarding the “cool sun” 534 MY BCE, the figure of 94.5% of current value was used as the starting point. Eric also referred to Milankovitch Cycles, which upon further review, cause fluctuations of solar irradiation up to… 23.5%, right in line with your calculation of 22%. The paper also stated that less than ~500 ppm CO2 would kick off an ice age, with that number up around 1000 ppm during the “cool sun” period. Yet here we are, being shrieked at because CO2 is a paltry 387 ppm — you’d think they’d be praying for more, based on that paper.
One of Carl Sagan’s “baloney detector” precepts was that all of the links in a chain of argument had to work — not just most of them. It seems to me that there are a lot of weak and even missing links in the CAGW argument, when a paper referenced by a CAGW proponent can have so much material refuting their hypothesis.
This article just received a genuine check of approval for me. I copy and pasted it into an email to an green friend who is otherwise a competant scientist, his response: racist.
For the sake of our well-being and future prosperity, if our British government had had any sense, it would have ‘co-opted’ Chistopher Monckton long ago to its inner circle of policy advisors. Instead, all we have is a bunch of wholly blinkered, AGW ‘climate-change’ ministers, advised by the equally blinkered Lord Stern, Sir Paul Nurse, and the like. Thoroughly depressing.
What: “Trolls are almost entirely absent” Lord Monckton?
They are not allowed to post and are simply filtered out.
Just like me in your previous post about the “blonde with the messy hair”. I tried to post there twice and didn’t succeed.
[The incessant Hadfield comments are to thread bombing, and violate site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
[snip. Provide a legitimate email address in order to have comment privileges. ~dbs, mod.]
@ur momisugly Jean Parisot says:
April 24, 2012 at 5:52 am
This article just received a genuine check of approval for me. I copy and pasted it into an email to an green friend who is otherwise a competant scientist, his response: racist.
********************************************************************************************
Racist? ! How the hell does one get from logic and math to racist?
DirkH: “Ferenc Miskolczi did.”
Thank you for bringing Miskolczi’s theory to my attention.
As to the question of whether he did indeed calculate the open-loop response of temperature to CO2 concentration, however, I have yet to overcome my skepticism. My initial take on his work is that he compared the trend over time a single “optical depth” value with the corresponding CO2-concentration trend, purporting to show that decreases in other optical-depth contributions canceled the CO2 contribution’s increase. Nothing I’ve seen so far gives me much basis for concluding that he computed what the CO2 contribution contribution to “optical depth” actually was. (I placed the phrase in quotes because, given that intensity decay must differ for different wavelengths, times of day, and latitudes, I don’t personally know exactly what those folks mean when they say “optical depth.”)
You can not find consensus on this because there are many among us who are wedded to excesses and continued denial of the unambiguous evidence that we(all humans) are by our sheer numbers creating stresses on our environment and climate. The stresses we are creating are making the climate react in ways that are extreme. One only needs to look at the record numbers of extreme weather events occurring in recent years. Things are getting wilder. Just like the people studying earths climate say it will.
Now who would want to denial or prevent us from reaching consensus on this process?
It is the people who for their own personal self interest and maintenance of their narrow but tenuous positions will do most anything to keep the rest of us from acting in sane and rational to the dangers we all face.
A good article by his Lordship. I must say, as soon as I saw that equation with all those made up terms, it reminded me of another nefarious equation – The Drake Equation. Both, though logically correct, are entirely meaningless and add absolutely no information to that which existed previously.
It is interesting, perhaps noteworthy, how much that red factor looks like parts of the Drake Equation.
Sorry my dear Lord, but here I have to disagree.
we have weatherstations and we have statistics.
If you use these tools correctly then you can only see that it has been cooling since 1994….
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
(it is a lot of work, though…..)
tom says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:58 am
“Now who would want to denial or prevent us from reaching consensus on this process? t is the people who for their own personal self interest and maintenance of their narrow but tenuous positions will do most anything to keep the rest of us from acting in sane and rational to the dangers we all face.”
Ok, now let me ask you a question: Who would want to promote a consensus on this process? It is the people who for their own personal self interest and maintenance of their narrow but tenuous positions who will do most anything to keep the rest of us from acting in a sane and rational way. In other words, rent-seekers looking to enrich themselves from the taxpayer subsidies of various boondoggle schemes to build power sources from wind and sunlight, deft white-collar opportunists who wish to enrich themselves by transacting in emission certificates, grant-seeking individuals and their departments and various eco-zealots who want us to “change our ways” (ie, go medieval).
“You can not find consensus on this because there are many among us who are wedded to excesses and continued denial of the unambiguous evidence that we(all humans) are by our sheer numbers creating stresses on our environment and climate.”
A complete non-sequitur. The article is about the climate sensitivity due to CO2 emissions. It is certainly not a contradiction to insist that such sensitivity is lower than touted, whilst still acknowledging the “stresses” that humans are creating on the planet. Your’s is the sort of argument that attempts to lump together individuals who are skeptical of what is emanating on the science from certain quarters, with those who condone environmental destruction. There are plenty of scares – overfishing, rain forest destruction – but what has any of that got to do with CO2?
In fact, your argument, taken to its conclusion is ridiculous, because most of the so-called “mitigation” of CO2 emissions causes worse problems that that which existed before the mitigation. Who is it that is ripping up rain forest to make way for biofuel projection? Not the skeptics. Who is it that is harming the environment by covering the land with wind farms? Not the skeptics.
It seems to me that it is those who are pushing this scare that are more harmful to the planet than those against. Ironical, isn’t it?
Monckton of Brenchley says:”The Planck parameter is – in theory – the first differential of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer about 3-5 miles above us, where incoming and outgoing fluxes of radiation are equal by definition.”
I am familiar with the fundamental equation of radiative HEAT transfer, but not with the fundamental equation of radiative transfer. Could you be so kind as to tell what that is.
The fundamental radiative heat transfer equation (q/a = e * SB * (T1^4 – T2^4) tells us that when T1=T2 heat transfer is zero. So that could suggest that the Planck parameter is zero and by extention the entire equation leads to zero.
Mr. Tom says we are causing stresses not only on the environment (true) but on the climate (largely false), and points to what he says is a recent increase in the frequency of extreme-weather events. But one does not need to be a climatologist to understand that, since there has been no global warming for 15 years, the extreme-weather events of the past year or two cannot legitimately be attributed to global warming.
Nor is there any evidence that the frequency, duration, or intensity of extreme-weather events is increasing. Theory would lead us to suppose that, certainly outside the tropics and arguably within the tropics as well, warmer weather would reduce the temperature differentials that cause extreme weather, reducing the frequency and intensity of extreme-weather events.
Tthe climate extremists may argue till they are blue in the face that each extreme-weather event (now much more widely reported than in previous generations) is attributable to global warming: however, this is merely another instance of the fallacy of argument from ignorance. We do not know why extreme-weather events occur, though we know they have always occurred: so, if we exploit our ignorance by arbitrarily or capriciously attributing extreme-weather events to “global warming” we perpetrate the argumentum ad ignorantiam.
Robbie says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:09 am
Yes, it is sad that real comments which speak the truth are not allowed to be posted on WUWT. Monckton has a tainted past that will never go away.
It seems that Fermi’s quote of Johnny Van Neuman is appropriate:
“…with four parameters I can put an elephant in the room, with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
With six he could probably make that elephant dance a jig.
Now how many of these forcings and feedbacks are known quantities and not assumed ranges?