By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in Rio de Janeiro
“BUT what about the ickle birdies?” wailed the ancient, off-blonde representative of the planet’s indigenous peoples in the shapeless, grimy, crumpled eco-sackcloth shift that is de rigueur this season among the female of the species here at the shapeless, grimy, crumpled Rio conference center.
“Don’t you care? Because of global warming the ickle wormies that the ickle birdies eat won’t hatch out at the right time for the ickle birdies to eat them and the ickle birdies will all die! Don’t you even care about all the millions of humans that are running away from all those droughts and floods and things? It’s all our fault!”
She got up untidily and flounced out (insofar as it is possible to flounce convincingly while wearing hemp flip-flops and a shapeless, grimy, gray eco-sackcloth shift).
One imagines the ickle wormies would be happy about global warming if it saved them from the ickle birdies. But I’m being unfair to this gallant champion of the ickle birdies and humans. She did not really talk like an infant. But she might as well have done. For the intellectual content of what she said was little better than baby-talk.
On the whole, I liked the cut of her jib (though not of her sackcloth). She had had the guts to come to a press conference given by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the sole environmental group recognized by the UN that does not believe the ickle birdies and humans will come to much harm as a result of warmer weather.
She had been courageous enough to speak up for her point of view. Nevertheless, if one really cares, mere self-indulgent, hand-wringing emotionalism is not enough. Rational thought is essential.
It is hard not to be dismayed by the feeble-mindedness of the useful idiots who are the cannon-fodder of Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund and suchlike sinister, corrupt, stinking-rich, taxpayer-subsidized environmentalist mega-corporations that cynically profit from the doom-laden falsehoods they so artfully but mendaciously peddle to the ignorant and the innocent.
As I watched the indigenous person trying not to catch her eco-sackcloth shift on the door as she did her best to flounce out, I wondered – not for the first time – whether it would ever be possible to find arguments clear enough to pierce the dark, dense cloud of unknowing in which so many of the drones of the environmentalist movement seem to dwell.
And then I thought of Table SPM.3 and Figure 10.26 in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, as one does. An idea began to form.
Why is it that these true-believers truly believe the untrue and the unbelievable? Surely it is because they find it comfortable, and safe not to question whatever they are told is the Party Line (now excitingly rebranded as the “consensus”). To convince the shiftless, shift-wearing, sandal-shuffling enviro-zombs that the climate scare is nothing to be scared about, it will be desirable to demonstrate to them that what the scientific consensus holds to be true is in fact harmless.
This is where Table SPM.3 and Figure 10.26 come in.
Please write down on a piece of paper the IPCC’s current central estimate in Celsius degrees of the global warming that will occur by 2100 as a result of the carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere this century.
That’s what it’s all about, right? Warming that does not happen until beyond 2100 is not a problem because we shall have plenty of time to adapt and adjust. It is the notion of rapid warming this century that is alarming, because damage may arise before we have the time to react. Besides, if warming is slow this century, there is no good reason why it should accelerate in subsequent centuries.
So, is the IPCC “consensus” looking at 3, 4, 5 or even 6 Celsius degrees of warming by 2100 as a result of the CO2 we add to the atmosphere this century?
Remarkably, no, it’s not. Nothing like. Be prepared for a welcome surprise.
Table SPM.3 in the Summary for Policymakers shows the manmade warming to be expected over the next 100 years on six distinct “emissions scenarios”. But the IPCC says each of the scenarios should be accorded equal weight, so we shall do just that by taking the unweighted average. It is 2.8 Celsius degrees.
But look more closely. Of this predicted warming, 0.6 C° is supposed to be locked-in or “committed” warming that will arise as a result of our past sins of emission. However, after a decade and a half without any statistically-significant warming, it is becoming questionable whether we can expect much warming as a hangover from the last century. In any event, if that warming really is “committed warming”, we cannot now do anything about it. So let us deduct it, for it is not policy-relevant.
That leaves 2.2 C° of warming predicted for the 21st century. From this we must deduct the contribution to global warming from greenhouse gases other than CO2. This is where the graphs in Fig. 10.26 are helpful. They are the size of postage-stamps, but they allow us to calculate that, on each scenario, the IPCC reckons non-CO2 gases will account for 30% of all 21st-century manmade greenhouse warming.
In reality, other greenhouse gases will contribute far less than this. The concentration of methane, the only significant non-CO2 greenhouse gas, has risen by just 20 parts per billion in the past decade, and that would cause a mere 1/350 C° of warming over the decade, or a quarter of a degree by 2100, so there is no need for what Jim Sensenbrenner calls a “cow-fart tax”.
Be that as it may, the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of the warming by 2100 driven by the CO2 we add to the atmosphere this century is 70% of 2.2 C°, or just 1.5 C°.
Now retrieve your piece of paper. Was your central estimate of the IPCC’s central estimate anything like as small as that? If so, be careful. You have been thinking for yourself, and that is dangerous to your reputation, I can tell you.
Check the result by another method. First, recall the IPCC’s view that the radiative forcing from a change in CO2 concentration is 5.35 times the logarithm of the proportionate change. Multiplying this forcing by an appropriate climate-sensitivity parameter gives the warming to be expected over any chosen period.
By combining the data from Table SPM.3 and Fig. 10.26, one deduces (for the IPCC makes none of this explicit) that its favored climate-sensitivity parameter for the 20th and 21st centuries together, on each of the six scenarios, is 0.5 C° per Watt per square meter of forcing. However, we are concerned only with 21st-century warming, so one should reduce this to, say, 0.4 C° W–1 m2.
The CO2 concentration predicted by the IPCC for 2100, taken as the average for all six emissions scenarios, is 713 parts per million by volume, compared with 368 ppmv in 2000. So the CO2-driven warming of the 21st century, excluding any hangover of committed warming from the previous century, is 0.4(5.35 ln 713/368), or 1.4 C°. This result from Fig. 10.26 broadly agrees with the 1.5 C° implicit in Table SPM.3.
But wait. There has been no warming during the first one-eighth of the 21st century. So it could be argued that the equation should read 0.4(5.35 ln 713/392), or less than 1.3 C° of warming to 2100 caused by the CO2 we add to the atmosphere this century.
Now for a real-world observational fact-check, just like what real scientists used to do. What has been the measured rate of warming since 1950? I choose that year for two reasons. First, it was from then on, as the world rebuilt itself after the Second World War, that manmade CO2 emissions became potentially significant. Secondly, 62 years have passed since 1950, and a complete warming and cooling cycle of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation takes about that long, so that choosing that time-frame cancels out a major potential natural distortion.
The rate at which the world has warmed since 1950, taken as the least-squares linear-regression trend on the Hadley Centre’s monthly temperature series, is equivalent to 1.2 C° per century. One would not expect much acceleration in this observed rate of warming, because even though Man’s CO2 emissions will rise quite sharply over the 21st century the consequent forcing and warming will respond logarithmically: each additional molecule of CO2 will have less warming effect than its predecessor.
If other greenhouse gases had indeed contributed 30% of the 1.2 C° warming since 1950, then CO2’s contribution was equivalent to just 0.8 C° per century. But if half of the warming since 1950 was natural (within the consensus range given by the IPCC), make that 0.4 C°/century.
The results of this inquiry:
| Mean predicted CO2-driven 21st-century warming (SPM.3) | 1.5 C° |
| Mean predicted CO2-driven 21st-century warming (10.26) | 1.4 C° |
| 10.26 adjusted for no global warming from 2000-2012 | 1.3 C° |
| Observed rate of warming per century since 1950 | 1.2 C° |
| Observed rate per century since 1950 from CO2 alone | 0.8 C° |
| Observed warming rate from CO2 if half was natural | 0.4 C° |
Every line of this unalarming table is mainstream, consensus science. I have merely made explicit what is implicit but carefully unstated in the IPCC’s predictions. One can only get faster warming than this by assuming improbably large contributions from greenhouse gases other than CO2 and from previously-committed warming.
Notice that the observationally-based CO2-driven centennial warming rates in the table are below the rates predicted by the IPCC’s model-derived data and methods.
Nearly all current mitigation strategies concentrate exclusively on CO2. The table shows that the most warming we could possibly forestall by these strategies, even if all worldwide CO2 emissions had ceased in 2000, would be just 1.5 C° by 2100, and it may well be considerably less than that.
I did not get the chance to make this entirely consensus-based argument to the indigenous person in the sackcloth shift, but I have tried it on other true-believers here, and it does make them worry just a little less about the ickle birdies.
###
Here’s a video summarizing Rio+20
Mr Mod :
It would appear something happened to my last post. Lost in cyberspace perhaps.
Here it is again:
===========================================================================
There is no hatred or bias except in your imagination.
I just thought it interesting that Monckton has adopted the look of a clergyman, in what is a quite religious country. Maybe he felt the “look” would give him some credibility in a country where he has had little exposure.
I was raised and educated in a strong Catholic environment. I cannot recall a lay person ever dressing in such a way. My guess is he is trying on a bit of psychological manipulation. It was just too easy to see through.
To each his (or her) own.
Not at all Gunga.
Read the first line of my post.
It was just an observation.
I only wish I could tell you., but all my replies seem to vanish.
Strange.
Regards.
Submitted on 2012/06/25 at 8:29 pm
Gee it’s tough Mr Watts, when you can’t even post a response.
Will you please advise Robert and Gunga.
Thank You.
[Moderator’s Note: Several of SPM’s comments have been consolidated here. -REP]
[Moderator’s Reply: This is really my fault. A few years ago the Head Moderator here was Charles, who “moderated lightly” and was fairly quick in his moderating. Charles has since attained emeritus status and the Head Moderator now is ~dbs, who moderates lightly but moderates a bit more deliberately (uhhh.. his last e-mail from June 20 was: “…checking out a commenter’s report of Susquatch sighting in the Cascades… will clear comments when I get back…”) I tend to moderate a little faster and some commenters have come to expect instant gratification. So, I took a bathroom break this week… and this is the result. My apologies to all. -REP]
[Further Note: SPM: You are a hater. If you cannot address the thread without attempting to divert it to irrelevancies, don’t expect to get cleared. -REP]
[snip – sorry, just not interested in troll bait – Anthony]
@Egan and SPM
Did either of you read the intro and watch the video? None of your comments addressed any of his points. At best, only the way he introduced them.
Did he hurt your widdle feelings?
[snip]
I doubt Dr. Curry and Dr. Brown will be impressed with the fact that Anthony posted this Monckton piece. I also suspect that they might wish to temper their support for Mr. Watts if he chooses to publish such material in the future – – isn’t that the crux of his argument about the use of “denier”?
You can’t have it both ways.
REPLY: They can read just as well as you, but your threats to “expose” me to others are ridiculously hollow…as it’s right in front of everybody. For the record, neither Dr. Brown nor Dr. Curry “support” me in any way. They comment just like anybody else. Be as upset as you wish…meanwhile I’m laughing at your silliness. – Anthony
What material? Monckton tells an amusing, if sad, anecdote. Yes, he calls a particular person in his anecdote — whom he carefully refrains from naming — an idiot. Reading the anecdote, I agree. I even agree that she’s being an idiot and that it is not really her fault. She, like a rather unfortunate fraction of the human race, is incapable of actually looking for and finding out the facts for herself, and analyzing whether or not they make sense. She therefore trusts some mix of her instincts and whoever sells her the most appealing picture of herself, helping to save the world.
From what I read last week on slashdot, a very similar strategy is used by the individuals who use the Nigerian Scam to make money. People wonder: How can anybody still be taken in by the so-called Nigerian Scam? Every human on the planet has to have received a hundred pieces of this viral plague on all of the houses of the world. What possible benefit can the scammers possibly derive, from continuing it? Who would fall for it now?
The answer is — the very, very stupid. The Nigerian scam letter is basically a filter. Smart people who reply, or even not completely stupid, but only partially stupid people that reply are often a waste of time and risk of exposure to the scammer. The letters are written to appeal only to the terminally stupid, the old, the senile, the weakest and most gullible members of our society. They are deliberately absurdly unbelievable. That way only the easiest of fish, fish that virtually reel themselves in, field dress themselves, and in their dying breath throw themselves into the hot pan ever reply. Very efficient, very safe.
Sadly, the very very stupid are the moral charges of all of those people who aren’t. Left to their own devices, they’ll just hurt themselves (and often others). Monckton’s article above (which isn’t published in or intended for a scientific venue, where one presumes that he would use appropriate language and leave out the “idiot” designations and most of the politics) is trying to do the moral equivalent of slapping some sense into the senseless and gullible people who do not take the time to read the actual climate consensus laid out in the IPCC report in progress, but instead are content to let con men and grifters read it — and interpret it — for them.
The sad thing is, plenty of sensible people are in the same boat. Who has time to read something like that? Who (out of the many people of the world) can understand it if they do?
I will not comment on whether or not his sarcasm (probably born at least partly of a frustration of epic proportions) is an effective way to accomplish his goal. My own experience is that even when dealing with idiots it does not actually help to call them an idiot, and on a few sad occasions in my life I’ve been proven completely and diametrically wrong by — um — an idiot who turned out not to be. I therefore have developed perhaps a slightly greater tolerance for idiocy that can easily be mistaken for humility by those that don’t know me — but really it is just fear of being caught out in my ignorance and a secret suspicion that I might be a bit of an idiot myself, sometimes. Being married really helps with this, by the way, in case I ever forget and start to feel cocky.
Being a teacher helps too, because in some sense every student is an “idiot” when they start out, only generally they’re really not, they are just ignorant and in need of instruction. Either you are patient and help them learn or you might as well go into politics or punditry or some other profession that requires a huge ego and little tolerance. Besides, every year some “idiot” student manages to teach me something about physics. Imagine that.
In the end, a major unstated point of Monckton’s article is that a lot of people who trust the very community that generated the consensus report generously interpreted by Monckton are being betrayed into behaving like idiots. In some sense it is the fault of that community, the community that writes the working group reports that are then rewritten to support the supposed “consensus” reports that catastrophe is at hand that the poor woman he describes is defending ickle birdies to the point of idiocy.
From what I’ve read — not being a participant myself — this has happened in just about every IPCC report. The actual scientific community has been comparatively reserved and balanced in their working group papers and far more cautious about concluding that anthropogenic warming will necessarily be catastrophic. Yet in the end the actual policy recommendations and the publicly stated conclusions are all extreme and draconian, maximally alarming, and without any trace of reserve or uncertainty.
How can this possibly happen? Given any number of senior paleoclimatologists who present(ed) reconstructions that clearly show the MWP and LIA, why is it that a very junior Michael Mann’s hockey stick makes it onto the front of the report? Why do the very scientists who (asked privately) often disagree with the IPCC projections and the accompanying recommendations (even if it is only in part) remain publicly silent? How is it that a climate scientist can tell me privately that mainstream climate science (57% of those polled) no longer accepts the scenario of catastrophic warming, tipping points we are likely to reach in two lifetimes, and so on, and not have this happy fact being trumpeted to the world in the IPCC report?
Or maybe it will be. Perhaps this is the one that will Do The Right Thing. Or even issue a minority report. Hell, the SCOTUS issues a minority opinion when the judges disagree, why not the IPCC?
If not, well, there is a plausible explanation for this — a rather sordid one involving preserving funding and avoiding social ostracism and maintaining a boom time for a profession that was all but forgotten two or three decades ago, or a still more plausible one of an international organization that is pursuing not a scientific agenda but a political one, one that wears the scientists like a cloak of respectability and just ignores those scientists once it has used them — again — to create idiots defending ickle birdies while legally picking our pockets. That of course, is Monckton’s real message, and how sad if it is true.
rgb
@ur momisugly Russ R.
Where her initials JP?
Scottish Sceptic says:
June 25, 2012 at 8:34 am
I didn’t say she was “a success”; I just quoted her accurate take on socialism (it’s fine until you run out of other people’s money).
The Pompous Git says:
June 25, 2012 at 1:20 pm
I prefer the definition of “capitalism” found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Definition of CAPITALISM
: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
What you describe as “coercive capitalism” I would not; you might call it “state capitalism” just to include the word “capitalism”, but that’s a contradiction in terms (there being very little “private” or “free market” components in that form of enterprise). Certainly none of the “movers and shakers” you name were concerned with private enterprise or the free market–they were the antithesis of such.
My studies of a free-market state vs any other form show that once a country abandons a free market orientation, their GDP drops about 40% in just a few years. The incentive to be productive in such circumstances is the unintended victim, with the corresponding consequence a drastic reduction in production. I’ve lived in both capitalistic and socialistic countries and the difference in attitude of the people is palpable; I’ve also worked for market-based and public service-based companies in the US and find a similar difference in attitude and performance.
I agree with your assessment about co-operative capitalism, however. Free enterprise capitalism has been shown to be the most productive engine of wealth generation the world has ever known. (And no, China isn’t what it’s cracked up to be–they’re still fudging the numbers to make their system appear to be superior to the “West”; in fact their whole system is starting to sag under the weight of state control and inefficiencies.) Any other brand of “capitalism” is pseudo-capitalism.
[snip . . OT . . we welcome additions to the debate and our knowledge , this does neither . . kbmod]
Crispin in Waterloo says:
June 25, 2012 at 9:58 pm
@ur momisugly Russ R.
Where her initials JP?
==================================
No, this was a different misinformed green, but I’m not surprised that you may have encountered others who fit the general pattern.
RockyRoad said @ur momisugly June 25, 2012 at 10:30 pm
And I prefer the definition in The Oxford English Dictionary:
capitalism
and for completeness,
capitalist
I think we would both agree that a return to free markets would be A Good Thing.
The Pompous Git says:
June 26, 2012 at 3:54 am
Indeed, you are correct.
@Gunga Din says: June 25, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Gunga, thank you for the translation. It is helpful to have someone fluent in both languages to translate. 😉
Agree with the first commenter about liking the “traffic-light tendency” that Chris Monckton mentions in the video during discussion about the infiltration of the environmental movement (starts around 3:00 in).
I shall be using that. Thanks Chris for another great piece.
Let’s cut to the chase here and skip all the textbook definition nonsense of Communist, Socialist, Capitalist that so many fools get stuck on.
For all practical purposes there are two kinds of people in the world: Slaves and Free Persons. The former gravitate to any road that leads to diminished power to the individual and consolidated power to the state / government / institution / etc. Whether it is the welfare state, or socialized medicine, or AGW pseudoscience it is all the same. Slaves are simply children that are forever seeking an authority figure, a surrogate mommy/daddy, a complex that Freud would have loved to diagnose (if only Karl Marx had been lying on his couch).
These natural-born slaves will not stop at satisfying their own mental illness, no, they fully intend to impose their solution on all of us free persons as well. This is what makes them deadly and why all of us free persons react so dramatically when encountering their so-called theories and arguments. And this is exactly why we must exercise the power we all have and NEVER ever vote for a socialist or someone that expresses these tendencies under any circumstances. Our civilization depends upon it. Our children and grandchildren depend on us, It is time to grow up. Ridicule these red-green socialists, and cast them out.
It’s not capitalism or socialism that is the problem, it’s how they are applied. One espouses competition, the other co-operation.
Thing is, which promotes cooperation and which promotes competition are NOT the ones most people think they are. There is far more cooperation in free-market capitalism than there is in socialist economies.
All this snipping is starting to become annoying.
Especially when accompagnied by a comment like “sorry, just not interested in troll bait”.
Which then turns it into sniptease.
[Reply: Respond to the specific scientific points and avoid personal attacks, challenges, and ad-homs, and your comment will always be posted. And please, no argument on this. The internet is a big place if you’re not happy here. ~dbs, mod.]
That should be me … Blade … workarounds for stupid WordPress bugs …. (~sigh~)
Durr said: June 25, 2012 at 4:31 am
This man is truly brilliant. It’s a shame what the aforementioned “true believers” have done to his reputation in certain left-leaning circles simply because the truth hurts.
==========
Any damage to his reputation is completely self inflicted.
It’s good to know that Lord Monckton is busy protecting the common folk from the rich and the mega-corporations, and that WUWT provides a forum for the Lord to speak upon us.
I see two trolls have belatedly appeared at the end of this thread. As usual, not a single scientific argument between the two of them. Just snide ad-hom. And they wonder how come they lost the argument on the climate question. By these intellectually babyish attacks on the likes of me, they do not undermine but do underline the truth of what we who have dared to ask questions have been saying.