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.
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Curiousgeorge says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:23 am
@ur momisugly Jean Parisot says:
April 24, 2012 at 5:52 am
Racist? ! How the hell does one get from logic and math to racist?
Racist: n, 1. term used by a member of the progressive political cult to reply to a question for which he has no answer. 2. anyone who is winning an argument with a Liberal…
@ur momisugly Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 24, 2012 at 4:53 am
You say that “It has long been established by experiment and measurement that adding greenhouse gases to an atmosphere like ours will be likely to cause warming.” The consensus is in regards to anthropogenic climate change, you acknowledge that this consensus is true and backed up by science.
There is also a consensus on climate sensitivity, and if your maths is true, it will be accepted into this consensus. But that is yet to happen because I would think you feel the peer review process is tainted?
Monckton of Brenchley – Shine on, you crazy diamond. GK
A wonderfully refreshing piece, Lord Monckton! I am in the process of framing the following insightful statement, sourced from J N-G, the esteemed Texas State Climatologist, who reminded me that:
“There are lots of things wrong with existing models, so finding something else wrong with them will not get you very far unless you can demonstrate the importance of the shortcoming.”
Setting aside outright data manipulation, of which I personally know you are aware, my mathematical background compels me to remind people that multiplying one uncertainty by another uncertainty, and then taking their product and multiplying it against another set of uncertainly derived products, cannot provide reliable information.
Narrowing some factors within decent zones of probability gives the appearance of rigor, but “geo-engineering” public policy to account for those multiples of uncertainty taken to many higher powers is the essence of malfeasance, particularly when some of the claimed effects just aren’t there. Now the following isn’t definitive by any means, but should give some pause to policymakers in the process of squandering trillions of our world’s currencies:
http://www.colderside.com/Colderside/Temp_%26_CO2.html
Your willingness to continue public discourse on this topic is totally refreshing, and much appreciated!!!
Monckton of Brenchley says:
”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.””
Well, I could agree to that if an accuracy caveat were inserted with respect to the extent to which we cannot determine a future climate state. In other words, I believe we could determine (if not now at least in the near future) large scale future climate states given the variables we do know, could surmise, or even postulate about such as Milankovitch cycles, solar constant, atmospheric composition, volcanic activity, etc. such that it could be predicted to some degree of accuracy what the climate would be like; i.e. be able to predict glacial vs. interglacial, but not be able to predict LIA vs. MWP perhaps, and certainly not 1988 vs. 1998.
@Tom: “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. ”
This is yet another recitation of the warmist mantra. If it can be shown that there are a record number of extreme events, *and* that they are human-caused, I might be persuaded to join your ranks. Note particularly the second clause.
Show your work!
Meanwhile, I’ll remain skeptical. (Not holding my breath)
Mike
There is already a global warming consensus. It has been achieved by Ben Santer in 1995.
cgh & Jeremy: Yes, I thought “Drake” as soon as I read the post. If drake meant a goose, instead of a duck, it would be a canard.
Jean Parisot says: “This article just received a genuine check of approval for me. I…pasted it into an email to [a] green friend who is otherwise a competant scientist, his response: racist.”
Surely your friend was being jocular, playing on the fact that people whose arguments are totally indefensible eventually have to play “the race card,”
Well done, I agree. I would add that if one does consider the climate as a bistable system (or more generally as a multistable system) the actual evidence is that we are already in the warm phase of what is surely the nonlinear feedback process that leads to the local stability of both the warm and the cold phase, where the cold phase is more stable, and clearly dominant, over the entire Pliestocene (extremely so over the last 700 thousand to million years).
The climate record, OTOH, has no evidence whatsover of a “still warmer phase” than what was observed some 5 mya, when the global temperature was around 1.5-2 C warmer than it is today. All of the same general sensitivities would have held at that time, one expects. The actual data, then, suggest that negative feedback strictly limits global temperatures to be no more than 1-2 C warmer than they are today even for the extreme values of CO_2 concentration that likely held back in the warm phase (values that are roughly what the IPCC thinks we might achieve by the end of the century).
Long before we get there, though, two things will happen. One is that we will simply stop burning as much carbon-based fossil fuel not to “save the earth” but to “save money”. With or without subsidy or focussed investment, alternative energy sources will inexorably come of age with improvements in technology, with both new fission and possibly fusion based nuclear still metaphorically waiting in the wings as fossil fuel resources, the latter practically inexhaustible. The other is that it is highly probable that we will gradually accrue enough data and build enough improved instrumentation to be able to fill in many of the gaps in our knowledge of the climate (once evidence forces the abandonment of the trivial “one parameter” forcing equation like the one above altogether). We’ve only had satellite based measurements of any kind for order of 50 years. We’ve only had “modern physics” for order of 150 years (or less, depending on which lines you draw — perhaps less than 100 years if you include quantum theory, perhaps order of sixty or seventy years if you include a meaningful model for the energy production mechanism used by the Sun).
Let’s be perfectly clear — we had no real idea of how the Sun worked until 1939, when Hans Bethe proposed a theory that later — really rather much later — proved to be the basis for what is correct although we are still working on the details, which is a hard problem because it is difficult to “see” into the sun to where all of the action takes place with real-time probes so much has to be inferred from indirect indicators.
We are therefore trying to use a baseline of perhaps 50 years, perhaps 30-40 years, of reasonably reliable measurements made with reasonably modern instrumentation (much of it in Earth orbit where it can see what is really going on globally instead of trying to make inferences from a handful of local observatories scattered irregularly across a vast surface in a highly biased way) to make inferences stretching back billions of years and predict the future centuries in advance. This is, of course, all but impossible. I do modelling, and you cannot squeeze blood from a turnip or make a reliable inference from inadequate data. Yes, the central limit theorem suggests that eventually you might get things right. However, it doesn’t guarantee that you will get them right soon or from small observational baselines, especially not multivariate statistics with complex multivariate probability distribution functions produced by nonlinear dynamics in coupled open hydrodynamic systems.
It’s a goddamn hard problem. Why is it so difficult for “classicists” to acknowledge that one fact?
rgb
All this talk about logic, great, and what also about the logic of your own eyes on sea level. My comment on Real Science (the hack is back, today postings are at: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/):
Now with Envisat down, how are we going to know if sea levels are rising to unsustainable levels? We’ll be flying blind on sea level. /s
My reply:
Oh yeah, a person said “go to the beach!”
No, that won’t work. Don’t believe your own eyes. “You’ve got lying eyes” when it comes to sea level. We need enhanced satellite imaging and fourth generation data processing, and perhaps also if we can finally get a moon base we should observe sea levels from there also.
Robbie says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:09 am
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.]
In defense of “The Mod Squad”: I made a comment on another thread that never showed up. I took no offense. I thought it might get snipped because it veered from the direction and wasn’t really a comment that fit with the context of the thread. True, I don’t see everything that is being snipped but from what I have seen here, and the comments the mods have made when something is snipped, they are not engaging in censorship. If your comment had a point that added to the thread, even if the mods disagreed with, it would have remained … even if they know you are a troll.
A minor quibble, but facts are important…
While argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam are indeed logical fallacies, they are not amongst the 13 logical fallacies described by Aristotle in ‘On Sophistical Refutations’.
“There are two styles of refutation: for some depend on the language used, while some are independent of language. Those ways of producing the false appearance of an argument which depend on language are six in number: they are ambiguity, amphiboly, combination, division of words, accent, form of expression….
Of fallacies, on the other hand, that are independent of language there are seven kinds:
(1) that which depends upon Accident:
(2) the use of an expression absolutely or not absolutely but with some qualification of respect or place, or time, or relation:
(3) that which depends upon ignorance of what ‘refutation’ is:
(4) that which depends upon the consequent:
(5) that which depends upon assuming the original conclusion:
(6) stating as cause what is not the cause:
(7) the making of more than one question into one.”
Aristotle – On Sophistical Refutations (translation by W. A. Pickard-Cambridge)
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/sophistical/
A few more replies to commenters:
Mr. Henry P. says the world has been cooling since 1994. The UK Met Office says there has been no statistically-significant global warming since 1997 – a period of 15 years. Yet NOAA, in its State of the Climate report for 2008, said that a period of 15 years or more without warming would be inconsistent with what the models had predicted. In other words, either the temperature measurements are wrong or the models are exaggerating the influence of CO2 on temperature. I suspect it is more the latter than the former.
Mr. Mkelly asks what is the fundamental equation of radiative transfer. This equation, also known as the Stefan-Boltzmann equation after the Slovene who discovered it empirically and his Austrian pupil who demonstrated it formally, states that the flux of radiation at the characteristic-emission surface of an astronomical body is equal to the product of the emissivity of that surface, and the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, and the fourth power of the temperature at that surface.
Mr. Mkelly also wonders whether the Planck parameter should be zero. No. At the Earth’s characteristic-emission surface, 3-5 miles above us, the radiative flux is 238 Watts per square meter. Therefore, taking emissivity as constant at unity (that is near enough) and the Stefan-Boltzmann constant as 5.67 x 10^-8 Watts per square meter per Kelvin to the fourth power, the equation indicates that the Earth’s emission temperature is 255 Kelvin. The first differential of the equation is simply the emission temperature divided by (four times the radiative flux), i.e. 0.267 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. Increase this by about one-sixth to allow for non-uniformity in the latitudinal distribution of global temperatures, and the Planck parameter’s value as given by the IPCC is 0.313 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, or approximately the reciprocal of 3.2. However, as I have pointed out in my head posting, the lunar Diviner mission has shown that the Moon’s characteristic-emission temperature as determined by the same method is some 35-40% greater than the actual lunar global mean temperature as implied by the satellite’s measurements of lunar equatorial mean temperature. It may be, therefore, that the Earth’s theoretical characteristic-emission temperature – and consequently the theoretical value of the Planck parameter that is derived from it – is also a substantial exaggeration. In that event, though there are constraints on the extent to which the terrestrial Planck parameter may have been exaggerated, on this ground alone the models may be overestimating climate sensitivity by between one-third and one-half.
And so to a troll, skulking under the pseudonym “Major9985”, who unfairly complains that what he calls “comments that speak the truth are not allowed” at WUWT. In fact, Anthony’s policy is to allow climate extremists the freedom to hang themselves by their illogical and often intemperately-expressed arguments, though there are now sensible and proportionate limits on mere invective and on attempts by trolls to introduce red herrings calculated to disrupt the flow of legitimate scientific discussion. The policies of climate-extremist propaganda websites – such as “Real” “Climate” and “Skeptical” “Science” – are typically far less generous in allowing free speech to dissenters.
Major9985, whoever he or she may be, says I have an (unspecified) “tainted past”. That is the tired logical fallacy of the argumentum ad hominem, the attack on the man rather than his argument. It has no place in civilized human discourse, but the hard Left, following Saul Alinsky’s rules for radicals, all too frequently resort to it without the slightest provocation when they realize that they are unable to muster a respectable scientific or economic argument against the hated capitalists.
Major9985 accuses me of acknowledging that “the consensus on anthropogenic climate change is true and backed up by science”, when I had explicitly and repeatedly stated that the fact that adding greenhouse gases such as CO2 to an atmosphere such as ours will cause some warming has been established by oft-repeated experiments and does not require to be sanctified by any headcount among scientists or anyone else. It is the direction of the argument that one must be clear about here. Scientific experiments and measurements have established that there is a greenhouse effect, and that – not the imagined existence of some consensus or another – is why I accept that our adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause some warming.
Major9985 then tries to maintain that “there is also a consensus on climate sensitivity”. This is simply untrue. Most climate scientists have never studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a reviewed journal. According to Professor Lindzen, only a few dozen have done so. Of these, about half are modelers (whose models, using the NOAA 2008 test, are now shown to have exaggerated the influence of CO2 on temperatures). The modelers tend to maintain that climate sensitivity is high – i.e., that there will be as much warming as a result of our adding CO2 to the atmosphere as the IPCC thinks there will be. The empiricists, on the other hand (and I am one of those) mostly find climate sensitivity to be one-third to one-fifth of the IPCC’s central estimate. In short, we may see perhaps 1 Celsius degree of warming this century as a result of our activities, and that is simply not enough to be harmful.
My head posting demonstrates why there can be no consensus as to climate sensitivity. Every single one of the seven crucial quantities on the right-hand side of the fundamental equation of climate sensitivity is unmeasured and unmeasurable, unknown and unknowable. As one or two commenters have rightly pointed out, the uncertainty as to the value of the product of several unknown quantities will be considerably greater than the uncertainty as to the value of each individual quantity. Major9985’s assertion that there is a consensus as to climate sensitivity when there is not in fact and simply cannot in theory be any such thing is not a constructive contribution to this debate.
@mondo: The loop gain required for the onset of violent oscillations is 1, not 0.1. One tenth of that, 0.1, gives sufficient error margin so that even under the worst case scenario, the system won’t oscillate.
Lord Monckton: Your are a GEM! Brilliant!
I’m sorry. I’m a fan of Lord Monckton sometimes, but this is a bit too much for me. For one thing, since when does the existence or non-existence of a consensus depend on there being good reason for it. There used to be a consensus that the world was flat. Those who held this view didn’t have adequate justification for the belief, but they held it anyway and at the time almost everyone agreed, so there was a consensus. So, the claim of this essay – that there cannot be a consensus on global warming doesn’t work for me. Of course there can be a consensus. It just can’t be justified.
Secondly, human reasoning is almost always heuristic. The most important logical fallacy that I’m afraid Lord Monckton fails to identify is the fallacy of over-reliance on codified logical fallacies.
Imagine a few years from now astronomers announce the discovery of a small (1 km) rock headed toward Earth. After months of observation astronomers announce that the rock will hit the Earth and appears headed straight for New York City on November 10 at 9:53AM. Around the world astronomers concur. But you don’t know astrophysics. And you don’t have access to a good telescope. You cannot independently confirm the claim of the authorities.
Forget about right or wrong; would it even be RATIONAL to remain in New York on November 10? Can you seriously imagine yourself chiding your friends and family who are packing up to leave, for “falling” for the argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam fallacies? No, it is they who would quite properly regard you as insane.
Obviously. But why? Think about it.
Forget the analogy, PeterGeorge! Scientists don’t just present the “…claim of authorities.” They publish material, give justification, make data available (not all do this, I’m afraid), and give enough information, peer reviewed or otherwise, so that the decision to remain in NYC will NOT be made in a vacuum, given the modicum of education available to both of us.
Monckton of Brenchley,
You need to take a look at this hatch job. Talk about shooting the messenger — its inexcusable.
Capital Weekly
Opinion: The tangled tale of Lord Christopher Monckton
By Tim O’Connor | 03/21/12 12:00 AM PST
source: http://capitolweekly.net/article.php?_c=10isa7mgcq2t933&xid=10fvjrdhae3lve3&done=.10isa84vc3h29ay
“Who do you believe when it comes to climate change? The more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field who agree that climate change is real and human caused, or a front man who speaks for oil companies that put profits before people?”
PeterGeorge says:
April 24, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Imagine a few years from now astronomers announce the discovery of a small (1 km) rock headed toward Earth. After months of observation astronomers announce that the rock will hit the Earth and appears headed straight for New York City on November 10 at 9:53AM. Around the world astronomers concur. But you don’t know astrophysics. And you don’t have access to a good telescope. You cannot independently confirm the claim of the authorities.
Forget about right or wrong; would it even be RATIONAL to remain in New York on November 10? Can you seriously imagine yourself chiding your friends and family who are packing up to leave, for “falling” for the argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam fallacies? No, it is they who would quite properly regard you as insane.
——————————————————————————
And when you find out that afterward the astronomers are buying up the real estate in NYC?
There are other threads here that show the motives of those supporting and hyping AGW (or whatever they’re calling it now). It’s being used as a tool to promote an agenda. There was a quote by some Greenpeace (I think.) guy that said it didn’t matter if AGW was real or not. They could use it to forward their financial agenda.
Maybe Mann really does believe in his Hockey Stick. Maybe after all the work he put into it, pride keeps him form admitting he was wrong. I don’t know. But those who are swinging it for their own purposes keep shouting, “BUT THERE”S A CONSENUS!”. If I understood what Monckton was saying (maybe I didn’t), there can’t be.
Does 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples or applesause? What’s the consensus? Depends what you’re selling.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 24, 2012 at 4:53 am
“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. ”
The reason I asked the question is that given the part of negative feedback (I consider the whole picture) that we do reasonably understand ie Boltzman dF=4sT^3.dT is extremely greater than non-linear for changes in T. Latent heat of evaporation from the surface of the sea may well be more than linear as returning radiation from water vapour could preferentally ‘be absorbed and dislodge sea water molecules in the 1st micron) which then rise taking the latent heat with them and cooling the surface. ie it strikes me that negative feedbacks may well tend to be greater than linear whereas the logarithmic growth of greenhouse gas feedbacks is much less than linear.
John from CA says:
April 24, 2012 at 12:38 pm
=====
typo s/b
hatchet job
PeterGeorge says:
April 24, 2012 at 12:07 pm
“Imagine a few years from now astronomers announce the discovery of a small (1 km) rock headed toward Earth. After months of observation astronomers announce that the rock will hit the Earth and appears headed straight for New York City on November 10 at 9:53AM. Around the world astronomers concur. But you don’t know astrophysics. And you don’t have access to a good telescope. You cannot independently confirm the claim of the authorities.
Forget about right or wrong; would it even be RATIONAL to remain in New York on November 10? Can you seriously imagine yourself chiding your friends and family who are packing up to leave, for “falling” for the argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam fallacies? No, it is they who would quite properly regard you as insane.
Obviously. But why? Think about it.”
Horrible analogy. Your scenario holds a one time event to happen at an expected time and place. The results of the prediction will be well known at that time with no further threat to worry about. Once and done with people going back to their normal lives. NCCDs (natural climate change deniers) want to permanently change the way we live, redistribute wealth and seek the creation of a world government to keep the rest of us in line.
Monckton of Brenchley: “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.”
The premises, and indeed the argument, need not be explicit. And in an informal situation, such as a blog, arguments are not often fully and explicitly expressed. For example, in your previous article you quoted the assertion of the “bossy environmentalist”: “But there’s a CONSENSUS!”, confident that your reader would understand this as a reference to the consensus argument.
“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.”
Which is based on the assumption that, all else being equal, expertise trumps non-expertise. It is then possible to argue that on any given matter, the expert will be more likely to be correct that the non-expert. This is sufficient to establish a line of reasoning as an argument from [genuine] authority.
And this is just what you do. Take this line of argument: “The Classicist knows that the central argument of the climate extremists…is an unholy conflation of the argumentum ad populum and the argumentum ad verecundiam.”
In this argument, 1) The Classicist is claimed to be an authority; 2) The Classicist makes a claim about the consensus and authority arguments; 3) The conclusion is deemed to be true.
A clear argument from authority.
Tom in Florida says:
April 24, 2012 at 1:22 pm
“Imagine a few years from now astronomers announce the discovery of a small (1 km) rock headed toward Earth. After months of observation astronomers announce that the rock will hit the Earth and appears headed straight for New York City on November 10 at 9:53AM. etc etc”
I assume you believe in your analogy, and it’s not meant to be a wind up? Well, I’m not buying it. The measurement of a trajectory is a convergent process – you gather more and more data of the orbit and the error bars become smaller and smaller and the probability of impact becomes closer and closer to unity – if indeed, that is what the data shows. The science underpinning this is Newtonian physics which nobody can refute. Indeed, anybody acting in the way you described, would indeed be thought insane. That is because, as Lord Monckton has pointed out in a reply, a law of physics does not need a consensus to endorse it. It is a law, and that is the end of it.
The CAGW position is not a law – it cannot even muster as a theory. To call it a hypothesis is somewhat over generous, and some skeptics have argued that it should more accurately be called a conjecture. How then, can a conjecture be put on the same footing as a law? I just don’t understand your logic.
PeterGeorge says:
April 24, 2012 at 12:07 pm
I’m sorry. I’m a fan of Lord Monckton sometimes, …
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A very good clear posting. Might be distorted and misinterpreted soon, I am afraid.