Christopher Monckton writes via email:
Dear Anthony, – Ivar Giaever and I were subjected to an unprovoked and more than usually scientifically illiterate personal attack at some length in the AGU’s Eos newsletter recently. I wrote the attached reply, which Eos are refusing to print. – Christopher
It appears that Eos has indeed refused to print this reply, as this according to the document properties, this document was created June 30th, when the early edition was available, and thereās been no response so far from Eos. -Anthony
Right of Reply
I am grateful to the editors of Eos for this right of reply to Corbin and Katz (Effective Strategies to Counter Campus Presentations on Climate Denial, Eos, 2012 July 3), an unjustifiable 1200-word personal attack on Dr. Giaever and me by way of a mĆ©lange or smĆørgasbord of the shop-worn logical fallacies of argument ad populum, ad verecundiam, and, above all, ad hominem.
The authors, arguing solely from consensus (ad pop.) among scientific experts (ad vcd.), say without evidence that speakers like us āintend to muddy the waters with respect to climate scienceā (ad hom.); they serially cite politicized websites and tendentious non-peer-reviewed presentations by non-climate-scientists against us as though they were authoritative (ad vcd.), while omitting to cite published rebuttals (e.g. Monckton of Brenchley, 2010) to these dubious sources (ad hom.); they accuse us of misrepresentation, distortion, and flawed analysis without adducing a single instance (ad hom.); they advance not a single scientific or economic argument; and they four times brand us as āclimate change deniersā (ad hom.) ā a hate-speech comparison with Holocaust denial. These allegations are serious and require a reply.
The authors also say we attempt to discredit their research when, as philosophers of science from al-Haytham via Huxley to Popper (1934) make clear, error-elimination by questioning of hypotheses is essential to the scientific method. They describe āstrategiesā to counter us ā including āpublic displaysā and āsocial mediaā ā which surely belong more in the realm of political propaganda than of scientific discourse.
Our argument against the Party line they so uncritically espouse is that catastrophic manmade global warming has not been occurring at anything like the predicted rate; that there is no sound scientific reason to expect that it will; and that, even if it did, future adaptation would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective than heavy spending on attempted mitigation today.
Predictions of doom have failed. Envisat data show sea level rising in the eight years 2004-2012 at a rate equivalent to 3 cm/century. Growth in Antarctic sea-ice extent almost matches the decline in the Arctic over the past 30 years. Greenlandās land-based ice grew by a net 0.5 m in thickness from 1993-2008. Antarctica has cooled for 30 years, and has gained land ice. Northern-hemisphere snow cover reached a 30-year maximum in 2010/11. Tropical-cyclone activity worldwide was at a 30-year low over the past two years.
Above all, in the generation since 1990, the observed warming rate has turned out below the least estimate projected by the IPCC in that year. The models agreed with one another, but events have proven the consensus wrong. Despite rapidly-increasing CO2 concentration, there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half. The post-1950 warming rate, as the least-squares trend on the Hadley/CRU surface temperature series (HadCRUt3, 2011), is just 1.2 K/century. Yet IPCC (2007, table SPM.3, taken with fig. 10.26) implicitly predicts as the mean of all six emissions scenarios that Manās influence, including an increase in CO2 concentration from 368 ppmv in 2000 to 713 ppmv by 2100, will cause 2.8 K warming by 2100 ā 0.6 K previously committed, 1.5 K from CO2 emitted in this century, and 0.7 K from other greenhouse gases. This predicted (though unalarming) more-than-doubling of the post-1950 warming rate depends upon at least three implausible assumptions: that other gases augment CO2ās contribution to warming by as much as 43%; that as much as half of the warming caused by our past sins of emission has not yet come through the pipeline; and, above all, that unmeasured and unmeasurable temperature feedbacks will near-triple the small direct warming from greenhouse gases: thus, two-thirds of predicted consensus warming is guesswork.
The first assumption lacks credibility now that methane, the most significant non-CO2 greenhouse gas we emit, has stabilized: its concentration grew by only 20 parts by billion over the past decade. The second and third assumptions imply a volatility in surface temperatures that is belied by the paleoclimate record, which ā allowing for great uncertainties āindicates that absolute temperature has not fluctuated by more than 3% or 8 K either side of the mean in the past 64 million years (Scotese, 1999; Zachos et al., 2001). That is enough to cause an ice age at one era and a hothouse Earth at another: but it is far too small to permit the closed-loop feedback gains of as much as 0.64[0.42, 0.74] that are implicit in the projected warming of 3.26[2, 4.5] K per CO2 doubling (IPCC, 2007, p. 798, box 10.2). In process engineering, where the mathematics of feedbacks adopted by climate science has its origins (see Bode, 1945; Roe, 2009), electronic circuits intended to be stable are designed to permit closed-loop gains of no more than 0.1. Given the Earthās formidable temperature stability, the IPCCās implicit interval of loop gains is far too close to the singularity in the feedback-amplification equation to be credible. For across that singularity, at a loop gain of 1, strongly net-positive feedback becomes as strongly net-negative: yet the inferred paleo-temperature record shows no such pattern of violent oscillation. Empirical evidence (e.g. Lindzen and Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer and Braswell, 2010, 2011), though hotly contested (e.g. Trenberth et al., 2010; Dessler et al., 2010, 2011), indeed suggests what process-engineering theory would lead us to expect: that feedbacks in the temperature-stable climate system, like those in a well-designed circuit, are at most barely net-positive and are more likely to be somewhat net-negative, consistent with a harmless continuance of the observed warming rate of the past 60 years but inconsistent with the substantially greater (though not necessarily harmful) warming rate predicted by the IPCC.
Even if we assume ad argumentum (and per impossibile) that our unmitigated emissions will greatly accelerate the observed warming rate, the very high cost of measures intended to mitigate CO2 emissions exceeds the likely cost of climate-related damage arising from our failure to act now. To take a single topical and typical example, carbon trading in Australia will cost $10.1 bn/year, plus $1.6 bn/year for administration (Wong, 2010, p. 5), plus $1.2 bn/year for renewables and other costs, a total of $13 bn/year, rising at 5%/year, or $130 bn by 2020 at n.p.v., to abate 5% of current emissions, which represent 1.2% of world emissions (derived from Boden et al., 2010ab). Thus the Australian measure, if it succeeded as fully as its promoters intend, would abate no more than 0.06% of global emissions over its 10-year term. CO2 concentration would fall from a business-as-usual 410 to 409.988 ppmv by the end of the term. Forcing abated is 0.0002 W mā2; warming consequently abated is 0.00006 K; mitigation cost-effectiveness, which is the cost of abating 1 K global warming by measures of equivalent cost-effectiveness, is $2,000 trillion/K. On the same basis, the cost of abating all projected warming over the ten-year life of the policy is $300 trillion, or $44,000/head, or 58% of global GDP over the period. The cost of mitigation by such measures would exceed the cost of climate-related damage consequent upon inaction by a factor of approximately 50.
The very high costs of CO2 mitigation policies and the undetectable returns in warming abated imply that focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such warming as may occur will be far more cost-effective than attempted mitigation today. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: strategies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. The question arises whether CO2 mitigation should any longer be attempted at all.
Readers of Eos may now decide for themselves to what extent the unsupported attack upon our reputations by Corbin and Katz was justifiable. True science is founded not upon invective and illogic but upon reason. Lose that: lose all.
References
Bode, H.W. (1945), Network analysis and feedback amplifier design, Van Nostrand, New York, USA, 551 pp.
Boden and Marland (2010a), Global CO2 Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring, 1751-2007, Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA.
Boden et al. (2010b), Ranking of the world’s countries by 2007 total CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA.
Dessler, A.E. (2010), A determination of the cloud feedback from climate variations over the past decade, Science 220, 1523-1527.
Dessler, A.E. (2011), Cloud Variations and the Earthās energy budget, Geophys. Res. Lett.
HadCRUt3 (2011), Monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies, 1850-2011, http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt.
IPCC (1990), Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (1990): Report prepared for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by Working Group I, J. T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins and J.J. Ephraums (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, New York, NY, USA, and Melbourne, Australia.
IPCC (2007), Climate Change 2007: the Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Avery, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)], Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and New York, NY, USA.
Lindzen, R.S., and Y.-S. Choi (2009), On the determination of feedbacks from ERBE data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L16705.
Lindzen, R.S., and Y.-S. Choi (2011), On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications, Asia-Pacific J. Atmos. Sci., 47(4), 377-390, doi:10.1007/s13143-011-0023-x.
Monckton of Brenchley, C.W. (2010), Response to John Abraham, SPPI Reprint Series, Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC, USA, July 12, http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/response_to_john_abraham.pdf.
Popper, K (1934), Logik der Forschung, rewritten by the author in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, London, 1959.
Roe, G. ( 2009), Feedbacks, Timescales, and Seeing Red, Ann. Rev. Earth & Planet. Sci. 37, 93-115.
Scotese, C.R., A.J. Boucot, and W.S. McKerrow (1999), Gondwanan paleogeography and paleoclimatology, J. Afr. Earth Sci. 28(1), 99-114.
Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell (2010), On the diagnosis of radiative feedback in the presence of unknown radiative forcing, J. Geophys. Res, 115, D16109.
Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell (2011), On the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in Earthās radiant-energy balance, Remote Sensing 3, 1603-1613, doi:10.3390/rs3081603.
Trenberth, K.E., J.T. Fasullo, C. OāDell, and T. Wong (2010), Relationships between tropical sea-surface temperature and top-of-atmosphere radiation, Geophys. Res. Lett, 37, L03702.
Wong, P. (2010), Portfolio Budget Statements 2010-11: Budget-Related Paper No. 1.4. Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Portfolio, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, Australia.
Zachos, J., M. Pagani, L. Sloan, E. Thomas, and K. Billups (2001), Trends, Rhythms and Aberrations in Global Climate 65 Ma to Present, Science 292, 686-693.
ā CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY, Chief Policy Advisor, Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington, DC, USA; monckton@mail.com.
…”True science is founded not upon invective and illogic but upon reason. Lose that: lose all.”
Then Eos has lost all.
Well no wonder Eos didn’t want to publish Monckton’s right of reply….. It’s got facts in it.
The thieves er scientists promoting anthropogenic global warming mitigation can not refute Christopher Moncktons facts so they render him voiceless by denying him responce space and time in their venues for spouting their idiocy. Cowards , charlatans , fraudsters , liars , etc.. They will fall that is sure because you only get away with lieing for awhile and their time is almost up. You can not beleive a word any of the government related or university related climate people say. They have been sucking at the easy teat of corruption and it will end.
Erudite and logicial, as usual, from the good lord.
One could reason with them ad naseum in perpetuum and they would still be immotus.
Excellent work as always, which would be quite compelling, IF this was a scientific discourse…but its not, its religious/political polemic. They are not likely to be listening…hands over ears shouting blah blah blah to block it out. But thanks for the facts.
ad magnifico
As Moncton et al. well know, because AGW catastrophism is at root an extreme-left radical political agenda, under no circumstances will its Green Gang of junk-science propagandists pay the slightest heed to objective or even rational presentation of mere facts. To those dismissing Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth etc. as well-meaning but misguided “researchers”, we answer: Read Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Keith Farnish, above all Kentti Linkola– not just doom-sayers but true totalitarian Luddite sociopaths. Warmists’ brutal anti-humanism is no laughing matter.
If Eos was a scientific magazine they would not print the ad hom attack on “deniers” in the first place?(give the dog a bad name and let it hang)
Since they did that and at the same time deny the “deniers” the right of reply are all strong signs of Eos being agenda or policy driven? Another social magazine?
Just how people who defame others, and then refuse to publish their response — how do they look in the mirror? How glad I am that I am not like them. This is why I left the Soviet Union 25 years ago. But that endemic Soviet brain rot, it spread all over the globe now. There is nowhere to run, we’ve got to exterminate the bug of cowardice before it kills us all.
“catastrophic manmade global warming has not been occurring at anything like the predicted rate”
faux pas, it has not been occurring at all.
Monckton, also publish this reply on arxiv.org so it will show us a citation for the original article.
If only Chris M would write his stuff in plain English and leave out all that Latin he might get to be published more often!
If Chris M would cut out the Latin and write more concisely in plain English he would stand more chance of getting published.
Monckton says
Above all, in the generation since 1990, the observed warming rate has turned out below the least estimate projected by the IPCC in that year. The models agreed with one another, but events have proven the consensus wrong. Despite rapidly-increasing CO2 concentration, there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half.
Henry says
Surprise. Surprise. As looked at from the development in maxima – which are not plotted by the honorable dr’s and prof’s and which more directly tells us what energy is coming in – we actually started on a cooling cycle, since 1995.
Though it all looks like natural processes at work, concerning the UV-O2-O3 cycle, I would still be a bit worried about how much cooling we can expect the future, exactly.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
trccurtin, dumbing down for the sake of readability will only dilute the effect of this quite lucid response. “All that Latin” happens to permeate scientific discourse to its base, it is inescapable. May I suggest a dictionary as an antidote to incomprehension.
My advice is to lose the latin and get to the point quicker.
“If Chris M would cut out the Latin…”
They’re not Latin for the sake of confounding readers but they’re the proper names of logical fallacies which just happen to be best known by Latin phrases which describe them.
I, on the other hand, have no compunction against writing: condemnant quod non intellegunt. So there! š
Alexander Feht says:
July 12, 2012 at 11:14 pm
“But that endemic Soviet brain rot, it spread all over the globe now. There is nowhere to run, weāve got to exterminate the bug of cowardice before it kills us all.”
I could not agree more – ‘the bug of cowardice’ is an excellent way to describe at least one of the problems. Folk are too frightened to rock the boat, any boat. But it seems that it is not that they cannot swim but that they do not wish to get wet!
They run from controversy, seeking solace in the illusory shield of consensus. They do their utmost to avoid standing out from the crowd. They are loathe to act in defence of what is right.
The health of the polity is most clearly at risk when we see wrong and yet do nothing.
Readers of Eos may now decide for themselves to what extent the unsupported attack upon our reputations by Corbin and Katz was justifiable. True science is founded not upon invective and illogic but upon reason. Lose that: lose all.
Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite.
When his cherished unproven science is questioned he becomes exactly like those he rants against here – demanding that we be sent into ghettos and not allowed to take part in any discussions which have the Greenhouse Effect as a given. Unable to give any real science to back this claim he to resorts to viscious ad homs and arguments from authority.
And it seems that is the ethos of this site. While proclaiming itself open to science views it ends up censoring anything it can’t handle which challenges its own entrenched unproven science.
So don’t be fooled by his appeal to objective science analysis and emotional angst about being censored, he’s just the same kind of sh*t.
dennisambler says:
July 12, 2012 at 11:15 pm
ācatastrophic manmade global warming has not been occurring at anything like the predicted rateā
faux pas, it has not been occurring at all.
=========================================================================
LOL… I think you have misinterpreted Lord Monckton’s British penchant for grand understatement….;-)
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
WUWT is the ‘guru’ blog representing the Global Warming skeptic consensus, so to speak. As they display, “the world’s most viewed climate website”, 120 million site views, 12 thousand followers, a site to be respected, I suggest.
The important thing is that there is more scientific evidence, data, claims and assessments presented by WUWT than all the IPCC publications and CAGW supporter papers. If not in quantity, certainly in quality.
This article by Christopher Monckton is an outstanding example of sound “skeptic” debate, covering a range of typical CAGW issues convincingly.
1. censoring information.
2. arguing solely from consensus
3. serially cite politicized websites and tendentious non-peer-reviewed presentations
4. failure to advance a single scientific or economic argument
5. Predictions of doom have failed
6. events have proven the consensus wrong
I agree with Christpher’s end statement “True science is founded not upon invective and illogic but upon reason. Lose that: lose all.”
I call for a boycott of AGU by all scientists who value the scientific method until the AGU leadership is replaced by those who do value scientific facts in the climate debate.
I fear his lordship has gone far beyond his claimed “rigth to reply” in making this into an essay on global warming. That unfortunately gives them a good excuse not to publish it.
Also his latin is more impressive than his use of English.
“attack on Dr. Giaever and me ” should be “Dr. Giaever and myself”.
“invective and illogic” , my dictionary is having trouble finding the word “illogic”.
While, as a member of the english aristocracy, he clearly is a superior being, he is probably only alienating his audience rather than impressing them with all the latin.
Dubious claims like “Growth in Antarctic sea-ice extent almost matches the decline in the Arctic over the past 30 years” are not likey to gain much credibility with anyone at EOS.
He would have done better stick to right to reply rather than try to use it a platform for a one page climate resumƩ.
“yet the inferred paleo-temperature record shows no such pattern of violent oscillation. ”
JK—-Some temperature charts show a series of ice ages of varying depths interspersed with warm periods that all reach similar peak temperatures. It is as if temperature were a random event, with a limit on the maximum temperature. (This is a well known occurrence in electronic circuits described as soft positive peak clipping.)
Thanks
JK
I read this with the usual dismay, then realised something of which I had not been clearly aware. Of course, the totalitarian programme makes me very angry, sometimes gasping with disbelief that they are getting away with it – it must have been like this in 1930’s Germany or early Soviet Russia, before the avalanches hit and the great silences began. But what hurts – what really hurts – is the perversion and corruption of science. For those of us – which is to say, all of us – whose lives depend on the truthfulness and morality of the scientific enterprise, this is a poisoning of the wells on an unprecedented scale. It is a crime against humanity, and I do mean this in a literal sense – many lives will be lost. It may be that people will learn to live under a global regime of extreme and enduring secular tyranny – we know that people can survive under such conditions, albeit in physical and spiritual misery.
However, to systematically dismantle the processes and results of true science is an attempt to condemn all of us to a kind of hell, a place where there is no hope. We should not only be angry, but very afraid. It may be asking too much of the courage of most scientists to stand up against what is happening now. In the past, I believe the only way these oppressive regimes have crumbled has been the pressures of internal contradictions making them unworkable. However, ‘pressure’ in this sense only arises when there is an outside world to exert that pressure, either by force or by competition. If the regime we are contemplating here is truly global, where is its Nemesis? Martians?
Myrrh says:
July 13, 2012 at 12:46 am
Whoops, someone forgot to take their meds.
/sarc
trccurtin says: July 12, 2012 at 11:37 pm
If Chris M would cut out the Latin and write more concisely in plain English he would stand more chance of getting published.
If that were the problem!
We all know the real problem is that Climate Science, and its outlets in “science” journals, has been usurped by brigands, and taken right out of being anything to do with real science. As Monckton says:
The Latin shows two things. First, it shows a breadth and depth of education, ergo, humanity. Second, especially in Latin, it reminds us of the serial faults of the brigands and usurpers; reminds us all, to pass the message on to others; reminds us all of the real key issues and lack of debate, over which the warmists are truly in denial.
Excellent logic as usual. You only have to ask two questions……….”What is the final solution to manmade global warming”……………………..”what is the ultimate ideological obkjcctive of Marxist Socialism”? The answer……..Global Government! Jaque Chirac President of France was observed to have said it after Kyoto was signed, “This is the first step towards Global Government!” A concept I find utterly abhorrent, undemocratic, anti-freedom, anti-free-enterprise capitaliam, & these people of dubious parentage love & are obsessed with the whole idea! Yet they comprise the WEKNOWWHATSBESTFOREVERYONEs, Neo-Socialists, Neo-Communists, Neo-Feudalists, Neo-Racists, Neo-bureaucrats, Obsessive-Compulsives, & just plane weirdos, war does indeed make strange bedfellows!!!!!
Myrrh: You are funny, funny, funny… Your comment will stand forever here without censorship, unlike Monckton’s at Eos, where they would not even post it… M cites fact after fact from cited sources – peer-reviewed papers, government statistics, IPCC publications, satellite data, etc. You obviously don’t read this site: opinions from all over the spectrum are expressed here, just as you were able to do. The only thing censored is over-the-top rudeness or profanity. Stick around a while – you might actually observe how science used to work…back when it worked.
Eh? If this is saying what it seems to be saying, I beg to differ. Negative feedback around a circuit reduces its gain, for sure, but only relative to its gain without feedback (its ‘open-loop’ gain, i.e. before the feedback loop is closed). I wonder whether this should read ‘gains of no more than 0.1 of the open-loop value‘, which does indeed represent a practical safety margin in most circuits. It’s quite true, of course, that positive feedback puts a circuit into a less-stable state and, if sufficient, makes it oscillate between its extremes.
Given that most practical op-amp chips have open-loop gains of 100,000 or so, this still allows a circuit to have a very useful gain of (say) 1000 by allowing negative feedback to maintain gain at around 0.01 of open-loop – in fact, as long as the open-loop gain is generally ‘high’ it doesn’t enter into the basic design equations at all. I’ve built plenty of circuits with that sort of gain, and they were perfectly stable, thanks. (With real-world components, of course, you also need to allow for parameter variation with frequency, noise, etc., which is where the design skill comes in.) But every hifi amplifier out there demonstrates that you can have an awful lot more than a gain of 0.1; if you couldn’t, rock’n’roll would be a very different animal …
But let not my nitpicking detract from another elegantly worded riposte to (yet) another insult from those who seem not to appreciate that civilised discourse is more than mere rant. Well said, sir. It’s a sad thing that we all know it won’t be the last time.
AGU is clearly a quasi-government organisation and its supporters fall mainly into the categories of government employees and/or grant addicts.
As I think most readers know, nearly every geologist in the private sector dismisses the concept of CAGW for being the crock it is, while those in the public sector tend to believe what they are told to believe, for reasons of job security etc.
The refusal of EOS to let Moncton respond to their diatribe is no more than the typical machinations of the CAGW cult trying to stifle all dissent and discussion on the non-problem of climate change.
Myrrh. Thank you for your fact filled rebuttal of Lord Moncktons letter. I, for one. was immediately converted to your cause and henceforth will change my name to Disko warmy Troop.
Myrr says: “And it seems that is the ethos of this site. While proclaiming itself open to science views it ends up censoring anything it canāt handle which challenges its own entrenched unproven science.”
Oh yeah, examples? I don’t recall seeing any such censorship going on here. (Oh of course, I wouldn’t see it would I , it was censored, LOL).
“So donāt be fooled by his appeal to objective science analysis and emotional angst about being censored, heās just the same kind of sh*t.”
I don’t see him showing angst about being censored, defamed maybe.
There is plenty of unproven science in this field, that is probably the key message of WUWT. However, I don’t seen anyone forcing an alternative entrenched unproven science here. There is open discussion of alternatives that is very varied, not “entrenched”. That adjective would better be applied to your twisted hand show that is supposed to replace the scientific method.
Between all the name calling and bad language we understand your belief system is being challenged. What else can you tell us?
http://www.glennbeck.com/bookczar/
Above weblink to “Arguing with Idiots”…Although politically oriented, the concept is the same.
Then, point to be taken…why bother? I dropped my long time associations with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Association of Chemical Engineers…as BOTH groups are run by “environmental idiots” these days. (Degrees in both fields.)
Alas, we may have to pray that the Chinese, the Indians and the Russians “take over”. As they do not “tolerate fools lightly”. More and more, we have become a “Ship of Fools”. (With apologies to Micheal Dunn). Please note what the time period of the action in that film was, and what it was a prelude to.
They have been sending EOS to me until recently for many years. I used to just wrap up my vegetable scraps in it and chuck it in the bin (trash can).
trccurtin says:
If only Chris M would write his stuff in plain English and leave out all that Latin he might get to be published more often!
Ahh. Google can be useful for some things .
and ignorance is really no excuse for non-publication…. oh wait.. methinks I probably is !!!! ;-))
I wouldn’t publish Monkton’s writings either–mainly because his writing style is pompous, ornamented, and seemingly designed to exhibit his knowledge of classical languages more than his knowledge of the facts. He desperately needs and editor. Until he can present his message to someone like me, who is generally symathetic, he has no hope at all of reaching anyone else. No one should assume his response was rejected because of an agenda. It’s just bad writing.
Excellent stuff, as always. But also, as always, it is unlikely to be read by politicians, and even if it is, it will be dismissed out of hand.
Myrrh says: July 13, 2012 at 12:46 am:
Myrrh: Please show evidence of any occasion, written or verbal, when Lord Monckton has said he does not believe in a Greenhouse Effect (sic). I leave it to others on this blog to point out the many more idiotic statements in you comment…
Myrrh says: July 13, 2012 at 12:46 am
????????????????????????
Explain.
Could you, by any chance, be projecting your own unacknowledged tendencies? This is a common issue with fact-free rebuttals like yours.
I don’t agree with all the science set out here. And neither do I agree with all the handling of the discussion, either. Though I applaud the general courtesy, reasonableness and openness of dialogue here, I feel it has failed on some occasions, particularly when dealing with frontier material, Nilolov and Zeller, or electric u****e, for instance. But frontiers need a very different mindset and it’s asking the impossible of Anthony who does a job that is so second to none I cannot fault its limitations. Same applies to Monckton.
I know some Latin..
‘Nil illegitemi carborundum.’
(Never let the b*stards grind you down – which should be the battle cry of us ‘skeptics’….!)
Nitpicking:
Steve C points out that amplifiers do have a closed loop gain greater than 0.1 and says: “But let not my nitpicking detract from another elegantly worded riposte”.
This isn’t nitpicking – the statement as written is 100% wrong. Amplifiers by their nature need a gain of greater than unity, otherwise they wouldn’t be amplifiers – they would be attenuators. Anyone with electronics knowledge who reads this will immediately see the error and potentially dismiss the rest of the article too. So the statement needs correcting.
I also agree with the sentiment expressed several times in comments for using plain English and brevity, these would aid communication of Monkton’s valid points.
Just one small correction to Lord Monckton’s remarks. I think that the observed rate of sea-level rise is 3mm per year. This gives a rise of 30 centimetres per century (approximately 1 foot per century). Greater tham 3 centimetres per century, but hardly catastrophic.
Snotrocket says:
July 13, 2012 at 3:23 am
Myrrh says: July 13, 2012 at 12:46 am:
āWhen his cherished unproven science is questioned he becomes exactly like those he rants against hereā¦not allowed to take part in any discussions which have the Greenhouse Effect as a given.ā
Myrrh: Please show evidence of any occasion, written or verbal, when Lord Monckton has said he does not believe in a Greenhouse Effect (sic). I leave it to others on this blog to point out the many more idiotic statements in you commentā¦
He does believe in the Greenhouse Effect – my point is that he brooks no arguments against it and goes so far as to demand those interrupting discussions where this is the basic premise be ghettoised. He demands censorship of opposing views, all the while ranting against those who want to censor him; he appeals to authority in proclaiming the Greenhouse Effect is true, all the while proclaiming that this is unscientific method. He is a hypocrite. Not only is he a hypocrite, he becomes just as nasty when challenged to give proof of the Greenhouse Effect.
Lucy Skywalker says:
July 13, 2012 at 3:29 am
Myrrh says: July 13, 2012 at 12:46 am
????????????????????????
Explain.
Could you, by any chance, be projecting your own unacknowledged tendencies? This is a common issue with fact-free rebuttals like yours.
I donāt agree with all the science set out here. And neither do I agree with all the handling of the discussion, either. Though I applaud the general courtesy, reasonableness and openness of dialogue here, I feel it has failed on some occasions, particularly when dealing with frontier material, Nilolov and Zeller, or electric u****e, for instance. But frontiers need a very different mindset and itās asking the impossible of Anthony who does a job that is so second to none I cannot fault its limitations. Same applies to Monckton.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/10/moncktons-schenectady-showdown/#comment-919500
As an example. He is a hypocrite, he is basically as irrational and nasty to those who question his science claims as he objects to in his confrontations with CAGWs. He demands that we be isolated from any discussions in ghetto threads.
He makes very compelling arguments for rationality and objectivity in science, that it is science truth which much be defended, then, for some reason, he doesn’t accept this applies to him and his claims:
“True science is founded not upon invective and illogic but upon reason. Lose that: lose all.”
He’s lost it. Pointing this out enrages him.
Sadly, you may have a point. The trouble is that he is describing logical fallacies and many of those are most commonly referred to by their latin names. http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Logical%20Fallacies.htm It will be difficult for him to convey the same meaning without using those terms.
On the other hand … If one truly wishes to communicate, one will not trot out language that one knows will be unfamiliar to one’s audience. A good writer can impart sophisticated meaning without resorting to jargon.
Lord Monkton for Dictator!
He has more style and substance than anyone selected from any recent elections, anywhere.
You are talking about this Eos Magazine right? A fine art photography magazine. After all a SCIENCE journal would encourage idea exchanges and rebuttal so it certainly can not be the ‘Transactions, American Geophysical Union.’ /sarc
Myrrh methinks you need to sit on the naughty step as throwing your toys out of the pram like that could have someones eye out !
‘Disko warmy Troop’
OK that’s a winner !!!
āThe human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.āā Robert A. Heinlein
P. Solar says:
July 13, 2012 at 1:57 am
āattack on Dr. Giaever and me ā should be āDr. Giaever and myselfā.
“Dr. Giaever and me” is the correct usage.
āinvective and illogicā , my dictionary is having trouble finding the word āillogicā.
When in doubt, go to Merriam-Webster.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/illogic
It would seem to me that EOS is on a par with Rolling Stone.
Myrrh says:
July 13, 2012 at 12:46 am
And it seems that is the ethos of this site. While proclaiming itself open to science views it ends up censoring anything it canāt handle which challenges its own entrenched unproven science.
The fact that you’ve been posting at WUWT for a good long while *without* being censored proves your statement is false.
One might try reading Lord Moncton’s writings out loud. They scan quite well. For me that is a sign of a very well trained writer. And in fairness to all, there are significant differences in the English that divide the British from the Americans. Dictionaries for all!!!
Who in AGU had the authority to reject the reply by Monckton? If they do not reconsider, I, for one, shall not renew my long-term memership of AGU,
Myrrh:
Do you hate everyone equally including yourself?
In grade school, were you the kid everyone liked to pick on?
Do you hold animosity for other’s circumstance of birth and jealously resent people who are born with station and titles?
Do you feel people should be punished for the color of their parents skin or any of the other superficiality(s) and attributes we are born with.
If yes… Do you know where to seek help? Just asking – out of concern. GK
The silver lining here is that FAR more people (including scientists) will read Monckton’s reply here than will ever read that sad little testament to ingrown academic politics known as “eos”.
If Eos were never published again, there are probably less than 100 people on the planet who would actually care. It’s just another propaganda vehicle now.
oldspanky says:
July 13, 2012 at 3:16 am
I wouldnāt publish Monktonās writings eitherāmainly because his writing style is pompous, ornamented, and seemingly designed to exhibit his knowledge of classical languages more than his knowledge of the facts…Itās just bad writing.
It’s actually very *good* writing. The reply was aimed at the editors and readers of Eos, who (we can reasonably presume) would have castigated him for failing to cite the appropriate references in taking Corbin and Katz to task.
Eos is defending the future funding of it trades union members. Huge amounts of MONEY are at stake and these climate bandits have to pay their mortgages and feed their families. Allowing the word ‘deniers’ is all about defending its member’s future funding by trying to shut down the debate. If anything the debate is getting worse due to the lack of warming and failed predictitons / projections.
Many times now, I have tried to explain that whether the net effect of more CO2 is one of warming or cooling, or wether an increase in CO2 is more or less neutral, has never been finally proven.
e.g. 1
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/06/uah-global-temperature-for-june-2012-up-slightly/#comment-1028920
e.g. 2
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
As my investigations continue (an ozone connection seems very likely) ,
it appears that global cooling has started
Monckton says
Above all, in the generation since 1990, the observed warming rate has turned out below the least estimate projected by the IPCC in that year. The models agreed with one another, but events have proven the consensus wrong. Despite rapidly-increasing CO2 concentration, there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half.
Henry says
Surprise. Surprise. As looked at from the development in maxima ā which are not plotted by the honorable drās and profās and which more directly tells us what amount of energy is coming in ā we actually started on a cooling cycle, since 1995.
Although to me it all looks like natural processes at work, concerning the UV-O2-O3 cycle, I would still be a bit worried about how much cooling we can expect in the future, exactly.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
So, as far as myself is concerned, I think this whole discussion on whether a bit more CO2 causes any warming at all is moot and a big waste of time. I would rather be more worried about the effects of “climate change” caused by (natural) cooling that is coming up ahead…
trccurtin says:
July 12, 2012 at 11:37 pm
If Chris M would cut out the Latin and write more concisely in plain English he would stand more chance of getting published.
_________________________
If the government’s “Progressive” that is Fabian schools would bother to actually TEACH instead of brainwash, people would be able to understand Lord Monckton. However the ability to read and the ability to reason is poison in a totalitarian socialist state so education is aimed at making us all good little ‘team players’ and not individualists.
Stuart B says:
July 13, 2012 at 2:09 am
Well said.
I think this deserves its own post, Anthony/moderators.
oldspanky: “He desperately needs and editor…who is generally symathetic, ”
In need of an editor, perhaps old spanky…?
old spanky says:
“I wouldnāt publish Monktonās writings eitherāmainly because his writing style is pompous, ornamented, and seemingly designed to exhibit his knowledge of classical languages more than his knowledge of the facts. He desperately needs and editor. Until he can present his message to someone like me, who is generally symathetic, he has no hope at all of reaching anyone else. No one should assume his response was rejected because of an agenda. Itās just bad writing.
Sir, I full heartedly agreed with your point when I was a tortured undergrad trying to understand the material my professors required me to learn. I struggled through and somewhere along the way realized that the āsecret scientific ninja (Latin/Greek) language actually made my understanding of concepts expressed in the many papers I read much easier. If a single ninja term succinctly expresses an idea that would take a small paragraph in plain English to describe, I am thankful for having learned the terms and their meanings. This is a science based blog and a great place to learn the language scientists and engineers use to express their ideas. Since many conversations span multiple disciplines, each with terms not common to others, you will sometimes need a dictionary other than Websterās to understand what is being expressed during the discourse. I have found on this site that if you are polite when asking, many here are happy to answer your questions and willing to explain any term you do not understand.
old spanky says:
“I wouldnāt publish Monktonās writings eitherāmainly because his writing style is pompous, ornamented, and seemingly designed to exhibit his knowledge of classical languages more than his knowledge of the facts. He desperately needs and editor. Until he can present his message to someone like me, who is generally symathetic, he has no hope at all of reaching anyone else. No one should assume his response was rejected because of an agenda. Itās just bad writing.
Sir, I full heartedly agreed with your point when I was a tortured undergrad trying to understand the material my professors required me to learn. I struggled through and somewhere along the way realized that the āsecret scientific ninja (Latin/Greek) language actually made my understanding of concepts expressed in the many papers I read much easier. If a single ninja term succinctly expresses an idea that would take a small paragraph in plain English to describe, I am thankful for having learned the terms and their meanings. This is a science based blog and a great place to learn the language scientists and engineers use to express their ideas. Since many conversations span multiple disciplines, each with terms not common to others, you will sometimes need a dictionary other than Websterās to understand what is being expressed during the discourse. I have found on this site that if you are polite when asking, many here are happy to answer your questions and willing to explain any term you do not understand.
Mod, Sorry about the double post. I think saying it one time was plenty.
Terri Jackson says:
July 13, 2012 at 1:46 am
I call for a boycott of AGU by all scientists who value the scientific method….
____________________________
I did that a long time ago with the American Chemical Society. I was a member for over thirty years when I dropped my membership with a scathing letter on their stand on CAGW.
But true science as a body of knowledge and a set of universal propositions developed during the Enlightenment is precisely what is being rejected. Rather than saying that outright, Eos simply refuses to publish a valiant stand on behalf of knowledge and a view of natural sciences that does not sway as the servant of political ideology.
This is supposed to be the Age when the behavioral sciences trump all and facts and reality are in the way. This week in the US the National Science Foundation (which has such plans for refashioning the West and the people who live here via the Belmont Challenge and now that Future Earth Alliance with UNESCO and UNEP part of the scheming coalition) was part of a large group of federal agencies that included many large tax-free foundations that rejected the traditional theory of how the human mind works. You know the one that has the extensive body of research backing it up. That was deemed to be “too narrowly focused on individual thinking and learning.”
In its place the US is positing all the Common Core education reforms it is financing and mandating on the sociocultural perspective of the mind. Why? Because it is a theory that can apply to all individuals. Because it is politically useful for a political bureaucracy intent on pushing a reorganization of the West around sustainability principles. No Matter the Cost.
As part of that tragic pivot the federal government officially redefined what is to constitute an academic discipline and how it is to be taught in school. Disciplines are now “distinct communities that engage in shared practices of ongoing knowledge creation, understanding and revision.”
I guess they are not interested in Lord Moncton’s type of revising. In particular science is redefined as “a social process through which individual scientists and communities of scientists continually create, revise, and elaborate scientific theories and ideas.”
I guess this new definition only applies to properly credentialed scientists which would go to Bain’s allusion earlier in the week that Jo Nova was not so qualified. Or officially sanctioned scientists for sharing in the desired political, social, or economic goals. There goes Lord Moncton.
Science is now a social process of the Right People? That really has never gone well.
Myrrh says:
Myrrh is the dried resin of several Commiphora tree species. The word comes from the Hebrew word murr or maror, which means “bitter”. (my bold)
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-myrrh.htm
Enough said.
Bravo! Encore!
(Estamos hablando otros idiomas ademƔs del InglƩs.)
Latin is a wonderfully rich yet incredibly efficient language, able through the use of affix, to pack tremendous meaning into a single word while retaining its rich and fluid sentence structure. Translate the highly efficient latin into English and you end up with a very heavy Bible indeed.
As to the argument, 4 marks to Lord M. By the way, the new US Common Core State Standards has done away with the overally emotional persuasive mode of writing and speech in favor of the factual logical argumentative mode. And Lord M. is the Master and Commander of that ship.
Overly Pam, not overally. But great example of silliousness doncha think?
Stuart B says:
July 13, 2012 at 2:09 am
I read this with the usual dismay, then realised something …..
____________________________
Yes that is the true horror. A world wide descent into the dark ages – literally.
The energy use per capita in the USA in 1900 were 40 % of today’s. The Luddites want to cut us to HALF the emissions of the year 1900 when 90% of Americans were self-supporting farmers and there was no real industry.
World energy consumption since 1820 in charts
Already in 2009, More than one in five British households suffers fuel poverty
To me the most horrifying thing of all was talking to a University prof about CAGW and finding he was quite willing to condemn his OWN CHILD to this misery. In his words “We have talked to her and she understands why she will not have the living standard we do.” Moments later the little girl (11 yrs) was grabbing my hand eagerly showing off her Daddy’s brand new SUV…. I felt sick.
Snotrocket says:
July 13, 2012 at 3:23 am
Myrrh: Please show evidence of any occasion, written or verbal, when Lord Monckton has said he does not believe in a Greenhouse Effect (sic). I leave it to others on this blog to point out the many more idiotic statements in you commentā¦
_________________________
THAT is Myrrh’s problem. (s)he thinks that any version of the “Greenhouse Effect” – reradiation of IR towards earth by GHGs – is pure bunk. Second law and all that.
@ P. Solar July 13, 2012 at 1:57 am
*****
Also his latin is more impressive than his use of English.
āattack on Dr. Giaever and me ā should be āDr. Giaever and myselfā.
*****
Sorry, P. Solar, but “me” is perfectly correct and preferred by many who think that “myself” sounds a bit pretentious.
IanM
@Myrrh
>…Unable to give any real science to back this claim he to resorts to viscious ad homs and arguments from authority.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ! OK, Myrrh, have a look at Monckton’s investigation into the must-be-there-for-AGW-to-work tropical hotspot at 8-16 km above the surface of the Earth. This is the hot zone Al Gore hopes to find one day because he ‘knows it is there’.
It does not exist. It is a necessary requirment of the ‘science’ of CAGW. All IPCC models have it as part of their coding.
It does not exist. There is no CO2-induced hot spot capturing IR and re-radiating it back to the surface.
I am rebutting your ridiculous claim that Monckton does no ‘real science’. Read and try to understand his excellent, once-and-for-all-time disproof about anything like a ‘hot spot’ created by ‘CO2 trapping IR’.
Next, scrutinise the soon to come AR5 which will have to address the issue because it is the cornerstone of CO2-based AGW. If there is no hotspot, there is not AGW, finis and klaar. People have been sending up ballons to measure the temperature there so everyone is expecting to see the results in AR5 proving AGW based on the measurements. The temperature will have to have a clear increase with altitude, peak, then decrease with increased elevation. All the models contain this effect/result. It is the very basis of AGW. Monckton’s proper scientific analysis of the reality of the atmospheric temperatures showed years ago that it does not exist. You will find it with his other scientific investigations all of which are interesting and informative.
Alternatively, bring your scientific investigations, Myrrh. Show us the hot spot. After you have done so, we will perhaps believe some of your ad homs.
Christopher Monckton is not a scientist, and his ‘theory’ has many flaws. I’m still waiting to see the alternative theory that explains what CO2 emissions are supposed to do if not trapping infra red radiation into the atmosphere (which cause warming).
I am most grateful to commenters here for taking an interest in the bad behavior of the AGU. Itsr pretext for refusing me a right of reply was that what I had written had already appeared at icecap.us. This was a convenient untruth.
I am particularly grateful to Anthony for having given me the opportunity to publish this reply to a far larger and more impartial audience than the hard-left ideologues of the now-discredited AGU.
Since a question has been raised in this thread, It is worth confirming that in the eight years during which Envisat collected sea-level data the raw data show that the mean annual rate of increase was equivalent to just 3 cm/century, not 30 cm/century. This result is consistent with the absence of any global warming over the past 15 years: but it has not, of course, received any publicity in the mainstream news media, because it is so greatly at odds with the outlandish official predictions.
To those who questioned my use of Latin, I apologize. This article was originally written for what purports to be a journal for scientists, not for the general public. Also, as several commenters have rightly pointed out, it is more concise to refer to the fundamental fallacies of logic in human discourse by the Latin names that the medieval schoolmen gave them than to spell out the meaning of each in English: though, after naming the three fallacies of which my attackers in Eos were guilty I gave brief instances of each fallacy from their shoddy article.
An anonymous contributor venomously takes me to task for asserting that there is a greenhouse effect. As I have said before, the question whether there is or is not a greenhouse effect is irrelevant to my argument, since if there were no greenhouse effect then my assertion that there is no point in attempting to mitigate CO2 concentration would be demonstrated a fortiori.
A fortiori means that my argument would be still more self-evidently true if there were no greenhouse effect than if there is one. Yet there is one: its existence has long been definitively established by observation, experiment, and theory. I continue to recommend that the usually ill-tempered and extravagantly off-topic contributions of a small, largely anonymous and scientifically-illiterate group ought really to be channeled into a separate thread. As so often in the past, the tiresome, yah-boo, unevidenced whingeing of the “no-greenhouse-effect” brigade does not belong in this (or any) scientific discussion. If they do not believe there is a greenhouse effect, and if they wish to convince anyone of that belief, then they should confine their argument for their religion to an appropriate forum, and they should deploy reason and science rather than invective or illogic.By their attempts to derail the discussion here, they discredit themselves and re-emphasize the inadequacy of their argument.
RockyRoad says:
Myrrh=BITTER
Henry says:
True
Henry@Myrrh
it’s BETTER
to stick with me
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031411
(you must be able to show some results that you or someone measured….???)
Caragea says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031487
Henry says
Do you actually read the messages being posted here? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031411
Or do you just want show off your ignorance, here to all of us?
On this blog we discuss the results of tests that you have measured or those of others that support your position. I am waiting for it….
HenryP, thank you and I appreciate your reply. I am interested in the truth, and I will do more studying in my search for it. Thanks for the links. We are all ignorants by various degrees, so I am not bothered by that part.
Myrrh
Glad I checked your quote. I see you have more substance than your rant here suggested.
Overall, it is as I suspected, exactly as I hinted at in my reply to you. Re-read my reply carefully, especially the last sentence. There is a lot of substance behind it. I might well agree with you over the science you take issue with. I had a tantalising glimpse of the real state of radiative science from Spartacusisfree at Bishop Hill recently. I do wish he’d contact me (paging Spartacusisfree … are you there??)
Relate to people for what they are good at, and thank them. This can always be used, when really necessary, to build the bridges to their weaker areas of understanding. And spell out the science. Heck, why not apologize here but write an article on what you see as the real science issue where you disagree with Monckton? If you do it properly, there should be a lot of readers.
trccurtin says:
July 12, 2012 at 11:37 pm
If Chris M would cut out the Latin and write more concisely in plain English he would stand more chance of getting published.
====================================================
I suspect that it wasn’t the latin that kept Eos from publishing his reply but rather the content of his reply.
A touch of devil’s advocate.
Lord Monckton’s reply is quite well written and makes for enjoyable reading. However, it does not meet EOS’s criterion for the maximum length of a reply, which is limited to 350 words.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/authors/manuscript_tools/eos/categories.shtml
Perhaps if he were a tad less verbose, the reply might get published. Brevity, soul of wit, if I had more time I would have written a shorter letter, all that jazz.
Alexander Feht says: July 12, 2012 at 11:14 pm
ā¦ā¦.. that endemic Soviet brain rot, it spread all over the globe now. There is nowhere to run, weāve got to exterminate the bug of cowardice before it kills us all.
*******************************
Dittos
But itās more than just cowardly brain rot. It is venal corrupt self-serving thugs using a grand hoax to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. See doe examples: the former Soviet Union, North Korea, or Cuba. Or, closer to home, Detroit, Buffalo, Flint, or Chicago. The current Liberal Democrat agenda brings NOTHING but poverty, desolation, and death.
The 1950 census found Detroit to be one of the wealthiest per-capita cities in the world. And it had the largest, wealthiest per-capita community of people with an African ancestry of any city in the world. The 2010 census showed that it is now the second poorest, ahead of only Cleveland. And in 2010 the Detroit City Council proposed bulldozing 40 square miles of abandoned housing.
The wealthiest community of African-Americans in the world laid waste by 60 years of Liberal agenda.
It was NEVER about science. It was ALWAYS about money, power, and control.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewettās evil twin.)
Robin says:
July 13, 2012 at 6:43 am
But true science as a body of knowledge and a set of universal propositions developed during the Enlightenment is precisely what is being rejected….
….the federal government officially redefined what is to constitute an academic discipline and how it is to be taught in school. Disciplines are now ādistinct communities that engage in shared practices of ongoing knowledge creation, understanding and revision.ā
….. In particular science is redefined as āa social process through which individual scientists and communities of scientists continually create, revise, and elaborate scientific theories and ideas.ā
_________________________________
A SOCIAL PROCESS??? Well so much for the scientific method. Looks like reality has now been ‘OFFICIALLY’ excised from science.
(I think I am going to be sick…)
Gail Combs says:
July 13, 2012 at 7:25 am
“…(s)he thinks that any version of the āGreenhouse Effectā ā reradiation of IR towards earth by GHGs ā is pure bunk. Second law and all that.”
====================================================
Gail, these are 2 different things. “Reradiation of IR towards earth by GHGs” is one thing, but “warming (or reduced cooling) by reradiation of IR towards earth by GHGs” is a quite different thing.
If the first one is true ( and it probably is, Tyndall’s experiment), you still need to prove the second one. Physically. Unfortunately, I have not seen any proof of that besides “thought experiments” which are not physical proofs at all.
So, no problem with re-radiating, but with warming.
A grand example of why any degree of warming here and there in Earth’s atmosphere, especially over land, causes/leads to cooling here and there, can be found in the magnificance of a thunderstorm brought about by the instability of warmed versus cool air in steamy battle. It is an obvious display of the poorly mixed soup only a dunderhead would call a well-mixed atmosphere. Lowly weather has been, is now, and will be the victor in this climate war.
@climatetruthinitiative
Also his latin is more impressive than his use of English.
āattack on Dr. Giaever and me ā should be āDr. Giaever and myselfā.
*****
Sorry, P. Solar, but āmeā is perfectly correct and preferred by many who think that āmyselfā sounds a bit pretentious.
It’s not just that it sounds pretentious; it’s flat out WRONG.
The only proper use of reflexive pronouns like “myself” is when the subject of a verb and an object (direct or indirect) of that verb name the same person. It substitutes for the objective case (me, us, you, him, her, it, them) that would otherwise be correct:
Right: “I beat myself up about mistakes.”
Wrong: “When you find you, come back to me.” [direct object] (Song lyrics often have bad grammar.)
Right: “He tried to do the job [by] himself.” [object of explicit or implicit “by” modifying verb]
Right: “Feel free to help yourself to some fine KC BBQ.”
Wrong “Please join The Bride of Monster and myself in celebrating Monsterette 1’s current pregnancy at the baby shower…” [Subject of imperative is implicit “you”]
Caragea says:
July 13, 2012 at 7:41 am
Christopher Monckton is not a scientist, and his ātheoryā has many flaws. Iām still waiting to see the alternative theory that explains what CO2 emissions are supposed to do if not trapping infra red radiation into the atmosphere (which cause warming).
________________________________
If you take as given CO2 acts as a ‘mirror’ and can ‘bounce’ LWIR radiated from the earth back down to the earth you STILL run into a problem.
This is off-the-cuff reasoning:
#1. Mankind’s addition to the annual CO2 cycle is about 3 to at max 4%
#2. Total CO2 is less than 400 ppm or only four-hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere. Water vapor can be up to four percent. and absorbs a lot more of the solar spectrum. link
#3. Only certain wavelengths (energy packets) can be absorbed by the CO2 molecule and the graph of the wavelengths radiated by earth show a large low sprawl compared to incoming sunlight. link Compare that to the amount of high energy wavelengths absorbed by the oceans. link
#4. When the energy packet is absorbed it can be transferred to another molecule by collision or reradiated. If it is reradiated it can be in any direction therefore only a small amount of the reradiated energy is directed towards the earth. (Think steradian or solid angle math and two spheres)
#5 LWIR is much lower in energy compared to the Visible, UV and EUV link that has been found to vary as much as 6%. NASA: Measurements by a variety of spacecraft indicate a 12-year lessening of the sun’s “irradiance” by about 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at EUV wavelengths
Total Solar Irradiance Monitoring results 1978 to present:…a recent National Research Council study which concluded that gradual variations in solar luminosity of as little as 0.25 % was the likely forcing for the ālittle ice ageā that persisted in varying degree from the late 14th to the mid 19th centuries.
NOAA: From the late 50’s the sun has been at its most active for more than 11,500 years…
So when you add it all up you have 4% of the four-hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere (CO2) grabbing a small amount of specific low energy radiation from the earth and redirecting an even smaller amount of that captured energy back to earth to be absorbed. Balanced against that is the ocean covering 70% of the earth that absorbs a large chunk of the high energy wavelengths (visible through extreme ultraviolet) direct from the sun that has just been found to be a lot more variable than the staid old solar scientists wanted to admit.
Sorry, the orders of magnitude of energy flow between the two “theories” say the Sun+Ocean + Water Vapor knock puny old Earth LWIR + CO2 right out of the game.
Caragea says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031607
Henry says
You are not far that way from the truth. God bless you on the way seeking it.\\
just keep your eyes wide open.
Lord Monckton of Brenchley says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031502
Henry says
thx. so much for your response!! we find it sometimes lacking from those who do leave posts here.
Honestly, though,
what is your reply to my assertion that there is no final proof that the net effect of more CO2 is that of warming, rather than cooling, or that – who knows what- perhaps the net effect of an increase in our carbon footprint is simply neutral.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Gareth says:
July 13, 2012 at 4:02 am
Nitpicking:
Amplifiers by their nature need a gain of greater than unity,
###
BZTTT! Wrong Answer!
Crispin in Waterloo says:
If your statements here were meant to demonstrate that Monckton does real science then you have not succeeded since your statements show only complete confusion and ignorance of the subject (although, to be fair, I don’t know what part of that is attributable to Monckton and what part is yours alone).
The predicted “hotspot” (more technically called tropical tropospheric amplification) is not CO2-induced and has nothing to do with CO2 capturing IR and re-radiating it back to the surface. It is a prediction of how warming will occur in the atmosphere due to **ANY*** cause (including El Nino, for example) and follows from the fact that the temperature profile with altitude in the tropics is expected to generally closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate profile.
It is not a necessary requirement for AGW. In fact, the most direct consequence of its absence would be that the lapse rate feedback, a negative feedback included in all of the climate models is not present and hence that the climate sensitivity predicted by these models is lower than it ought to be.
However, it is rather doubtful that it is missing since it is in fact seen quite clearly for temperature fluctuations such as those caused by ENSO. Where there has been more difficulty finding it is for the multidecadal warming trend. However, both the satellite data and the radiosonde data have artifacts that contaminate these long-term trends and thus to what extent you see the amplification or not for these long-term trends depends on which data set and analysis or re-analysis of the data you believe. It is hard to imagine a mechanism by which the amplification would be occurring on the monthly to yearly timescales associated with the temperature fluctuations but would be absent on the multidecadal time scales which is why the U.S. Climate change Program report on this issue concluded that it is most likely that most of the remaining discrepancy is problems with the data and not with the models. Interestingly, skeptical scientist Richard Lindzen has reached the same conclusion (although he tries to argue that the problem is with the surface temperature record in the tropics rather than the satellite and radiosonde temperature records at altitude) http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/17/richard-lindzen-a-case-against-precipitous-climate-action/ :
So, in other words:
(1) The “hotspot” has absolutely nothing to do with what you think it does and the most direct effect of its supposed absence would be that the climate models are including a negative feedback in them that does not actually exist.
(2) Given the known issues of the data and the wide-ranging differences in the different analyses of the data, the conclusion that the “hotspot” is absent is not warranted anyway.
joeldshore says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031657
Henry says
Your whole argument falls with my results, here,
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
and my results fall if you can bring me similar tables with different results.
(Note the development of maximum temperatures)
Gail says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031620
Henry says
either you are a genius
or perhaps you are an expert in collecting knowledge from all those commenting on this blog?
By the way, since the lapse rate feedback is not hard to understand, it is worthwhile briefly explaining it: When CO2 increases, it causes a radiative imbalance; that is, the Earth is now emitting less radiation back out into space than it is receiving from the sun. The result is that it will warm until the radiative balance is again restored. Since most of the radiation that successfully escapes to space occurs at higher altitudes in the troposphere, it is this region that must warm by a certain amount in order to restore the radiative balance.
But, tropical tropospheric amplification says that the troposphere at altitude in the tropics warms faster than at the surface. Hence, the surface temperature increase necessary to produce the required temperature increase at altitude is lower than it would be if the tropical troposphere warmed uniformly with height. This is referred to as the lapse rate feedback and it is a negative feedback because it reduces the climate sensitivity from what it would be in its absence.
Gail Combs
July 13, 2012 at 9:00 am
(I think I am going to be sickā¦)
###
I think Robin has been researching the same stuff I have. What I have been finding out will make one more then just sick. You think its any accident that the average College grad can not hold two independent concepts in their head at the same time?
@ climatetruthinitiative July 13, 2012 at 7:30 am
I quite agree. To English ears it can sometimes sound very pretentious indeed, especially coming from the mouths of those badly educated, low-level, bureaucratic types ā you know, people with hideous accents like that nauseating Barbara Roche. Definately!
As for Lord Monckton’s Latin: CAESAR ADSUM JAM FORTE. Q.E.D.
Oh wait – he’s a Cambridge classicist! Ā Fair enough then.
In any event, more power to him. Excellent stuff. Ā š
joeldshore says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031677
Henry says
that does not make sense (to me) unless or until you give me a relevant balance sheet (in the right dimensions) of how much warming and how much cooling (both radiative and due to increase in photo synthesis) is caused by the increase in CO2?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/06/uah-global-temperature-for-june-2012-up-slightly/#comment-1028920
Dear Anthony, ā Ivar Giaever and I were subjected to an unprovoked and more than usually scientifically illiterate personal attack at some length in the AGUās Eos newsletter recently.
———–
Hmmmm. Was this unprovoked attack anything like the incredibly chivalrous Lord Moncton’s unprovoked attack on that woman at a conference, published here at WUWT.
Here, in the land of real men, the rule is: if you can’t take, it don’t dish it out.
Joel Shore, with the characteristic unscientific impoliteness that makes him so relentlessly unconvincing, attacks one of the commenters here for having dared to cite with approval my paper on the significant real-world absence of the model-predicted tropical mid-troposphere āhot-spotā, which I had the honor of naming.
Mr. Shore bloviates: āIf your statements here were meant to demonstrate that Monckton does real science then you have not succeeded since your statements show only complete confusion and ignorance of the subject (although, to be fair, I donāt know what part of that is attributable to Monckton and what part is yours alone).ā
And yah-boo to you too.
Eventually, Mr. Shore gets around to the pseudo-scientific point he is trying to make: āThe predicted āhot-spotā ā¦ is not CO2-induced and has nothing to do with CO2 capturing IR and re-radiating it back to the surface. It is a prediction of how warming will occur in the atmosphere due to any cause (including El Nino, for example) and follows from the fact that the temperature profile with altitude in the tropics is expected to generally closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate profile. It is not a necessary requirement for anthropogenic global warming.ā
Mr. Shore is of course entitled to his point of view. But 50 years of real-world mid-troposphere temperature measurements by drop-sondes, balloon-mounted radiosondes and satellites do not show, as the models do, a tropical mid-troposphere warming rate that is twice to thrice the surface warming rate. It is fashionable among post-modernist climate āscientistsā to reject the data to the extent that they disagree with models, and that is what Mr. Shore seems to be doing here.
Let me briefly correct Mr. Shore by summarizing the science from the models this way:
1. The ability to distinguish between climate responses to different external forcing factors in observations depends on the extent to which those responses are distinct. The modeled vertical and zonal average signature of the temperature response should depend on the forcings.
2. The simulated responses to natural forcing are distinct from those due to anthropogenic forcings. Solar forcing results in a general warming of the atmosphere, with a pattern of surface warming that is similar to that expected from greenhouse gas warming, but, in contrast to the response to greenhouse warming, the simulated solar-forced warming extends throughout the atmosphere.
In contrast to Mr. Shoreās statement that the mid-troposphere hot-spot would be expected regardless of the forcings that triggered it, the models predict a very clear distinction between the significantly greater and more concentrated mid-troposphere warming caused by manmade forcings and the lesser and very much more diffuse vertical warming profile caused natural forcings such as that from the Sun.
Would it not have been better if Mr. Shore had admitted that he considers his precious models to have gotten matters wrong in this respect (as perhaps they have), rather than accusing me of a confusion for which I am not to blame? That confusion arises not from any misunderstanding on my part but from the official interpretations by climate āscientistsā of results from the official models. So, yet again, Mr. Shore – in attacking me personally rather than admitting that the models had made an error – has it exactly wrong. When he learns to eschew ad-hominem arguments and concentrate exclusively and dispassionately upon science, his contributions may begin to become useful.
Myrrh. Thank you for your fact filled rebuttal of Lord Moncktons letter
LOL!
Envisat data show sea level rising in the eight years 2004-2012 at a rate equivalent to 3 cm/century.
Too short a period to tell you anything about the trend. Besides, Envisat is known to have unresolved drift issues, rather than cherry-pick just one satellite AVISO combine data from all the satellite missions and obtain a slope of >3mm/year.
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/
Growth in Antarctic sea-ice extent almost matches the decline in the Arctic over the past 30 years. Greenlandās land-based ice grew by a net 0.5 m in thickness from 1993-2008. Antarctica has cooled for 30 years, and has gained land ice.
No, the rate in the Arctic is a factor of three higher and Antarctic land ice is decreasing rapidly. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL040222.shtml
Northern-hemisphere snow cover reached a 30-year maximum in 2010/11. Tropical-cyclone activity worldwide was at a 30-year low over the past two years.
Increased precipitation is an expected consequence of a warmer atmosphere, the tropical storm data show large variability so no conclusions can be drawn from a 2 year period.
Above all, in the generation since 1990, the observed warming rate has turned out below the least estimate projected by the IPCC in that year.
Except the IPCC projected we predict: under [BAU] increase of global mean temperature during the [21st] century of about 0.3 oC per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 oC per decade)
Monckton is starting a tad early. The 1990-2010 projections in AR3 turned out to be remarkably accurate. http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/552.htm
Despite rapidly-increasing CO2 concentration, there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half.
Phil Jones: “The key statement here is ‘not statistically significant’. It wasn’t for these years at the 95% level, but it would have been at the 90% level. If you add the value of 0.52 in for 2010 and look at 1995 to 2010 then the warming is statistically significant at the 95% level.” [What this means is that the warming trend for the past few years previously met a lower test of statistical significance. With addition of the results so far for 2010, it now means the higher test.]
The post-1950 warming rate, as the least-squares trend on the Hadley/CRU surface temperature series (HadCRUt3, 2011), is just 1.2 K/century.
And the trend since 1960 in that dataset is 0.13, since 1970 is 0.15 …. see above.
I think ‘fact-free’ is a better description of Monckton’s letter, rather than Myrrh’s response. EOS were entirely justified in not wasting valuable page space on this stuff.
Gail-yes. It says they are going with the socio-cultural perspective of learning because it is a model that can “apply to all individuals.” Unlike temperatures and weather generally, when you make political theory the official focus of your education model you can actually change the future. Just not in a good way. Not only do we have the problem of unintended consequences, there actual intended consequences are pretty lousy.
They are premised on a future redesigned economy based on Sustainability.
Nuts. Now it probably won’t surprise you I know the history of socio-cultural theory or what it’s current model looks like. I found it several months ago tracking through the basis for the nonsense going on in New Zealand and Australian education.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/courses/3615/Readings/BronfenbrennerModelofDevelopment.pdf is what it looks like. If you look on page 3 it admits it is just an untried theory used to create desired social programs and practices.
Desert Yote-I am not so much researching anymore as teaching myself the relevant economics to explain the consequences of what I can prove. Because there is a hurry to get this in place and because I wrote a book explaining to people I have never met what is happening and why it will matter to them, I basically speak the language everything is written in. I get the national pub list and see the obscure agency putting out something fundamental or how the disabilities law is being used to surreptitiously impose mandates on all students that would greatly upset all parents. I am also on many insider email lists because I know who is running the implementations so I signed up. I especially like the emails that point out this level of detail is only for those heavily involved with policy. Why yes I am. In explaining it.
Each day it seems like I see something that someone should have never put in print. Like the pub I was quoting from above where it said they were rejecting the idea that the human personality was fixed and going with the theory it was malleable. They even said malleable.
Which also means public employees intend to manipulate it. So much for people hoping what I was writing was not true or was just a fringe element without broad support.
Pushing these theories in education or climate change is what gets you the promotions and brings in the grants. Distributed costs and confined benefits and OPM. Here goes the West unless we wake up soon.
What is a Lazy Teenager doing in ‘the land of real men’? Visiting?āŗ
I shouldn’t make fun. We have a ‘real man’ right here. [Pay no attention to the girl’s bike]
P. Solar says: “I fear his lordship has gone far beyond his claimed ārigth to replyā in making this into an essay on global warming…Also his latin is more impressive than his use of English. āattack on Dr. Giaever and me ā should be āDr. Giaever and myselfā.
No, ‘myself’ is reflexive, and Monckton has it right. You, Solar, are wrong.
āinvective and illogicā , my dictionary is having trouble finding the word āillogicā.
If you had to look it up, you’re probably over your head, here. I’d suggest you get a new dictionary, but I’m not sure it will help you.
While, as a member of the english aristocracy, he clearly is a superior being, he is probably only alienating his audience rather than impressing them with all the latin.
Sadly, Solar, you’ve failed to impress me with all your English.
trccurtin says:
July 12, 2012 at 11:37 pm
If Chris M would cut out the Latin and write more concisely in plain English he would stand more chance of getting published.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Agreed!
When addressing psydoscience [ post-normal science ], we need to use verbage that makes the reader “feel good”.
In this way, Cardiologist could, when addressing such practioners of post-normal science, refer to your Cardiac Arrhythmia as – “that ickey poo-poo misbehaviors of heart-beats from the norm”. No need to tell them if it’s tachycardia or bradycardia or – let’s just call it…. “that not so fresh feeling”.
š
Let’s not confuse them with Normal Science terminology.
Phil Clarke says:
“I think āfact-freeā is a better description of Moncktonās letter…”
Actually, your post contains factual errors, while Lord Monckton’s appears to be entirely accurate.
For example, you say: “… the rate in the Arctic is a factor of three higher and Antarctic land ice is decreasing rapidly.” A lie by omission. The Antarctic contains ten times more ice than the Arctic.
And since you quote HadCRUt3, allow me to post a chart based on their data:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/HadCrut3Global.jpg
Lord Monckton always seems to have the correct facts. You… not so much.
A Lazy Teenager telling us about “real men”.
Oxymoron?
‘
Real Men aren’t Lazy or Teenagers IMO š
[SNIP your posting privilege is suspended due to using a bogus bogus email address, a moderator tried to contact you regarding a previous comment. A real working email address is required to comment here – see policy page – Anthony]
Monckton of Brenchley says:
No…What I am doing is not believing in the accuracy of the data beyond the error bars (due in this case to large systematic errors). I am also putting more weight on the data which is the most trustworthy, namely that which shows the fluctuations over monthly to yearly timescales and is not sensitive to artifacts that introduce spurious secular trends over large times and putting less weight on the data which is less trustworthy, namely the relatively small multidecadal trends that are very sensitive to such artifacts.
That is correct as far as it is explained…which leaves out the punchline! However, what needs to be emphasized is that the two different forcings are predicted to have virtually identical effect throughout the troposphere as shown here for the GISS Model: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ What is starkly different is what they predict for the stratosphere: A solar-induced warming should warm the stratosphere while a GHG-induced warming should cool it. As many readers will know, the unambiguous results from the data is that the stratopshere has undergone cooling, thus putting them well in line with the GHG-induced warming and not in line with a solar-induced warming. [One complicating factor is that some of the cooling of the stratosphere is attributable to decreases in stratospheric ozone rather than increase in greenhouse gases. However, even accounting for that, the amount and vertical structure of the cooling in the atmosphere is more than can be accounted for by stratospheric ozone depletion alone.]
That is manifestly incorrect, as one look at the GISS Model results that I linked to above would show you. The reason for Lord Monckton’s apparent misunderstanding here is attributable to his using a figure from the IPCC that is ill-suited for this particular purpose and then being unable to interpret the results of a countour plot correctly. That plot shows the predicted temperature structure due to the various contributions to warming and cooling that have actually occurred over the 20th century. However, because the warming effect due to the increase in solar luminosity is much smaller than that due to GHGs and the plots use a consistent contour scale of 0.2 C, the resolution of the solar plot is insufficient to conclude what Lord Monckton has concluded from it. Yes, the warming at altitude might look visually less dramatic than what one sees for the GHGs but that is simply because the contour resolution is so poor. Basically, what the plot shows is that the surface in the tropics warmed somewhere between 0 and 0.2 C at the surface and somewhere between 0.2 and 0.4 C at altitude. This is compatible with essentially any amplification factor between 1 and infinity between surface and altitude.
Far from illustrating “Monckton does [] āreal scienceā” as Crispin of Waterloo attempted to demonstrate, a closer look at the “hotspot” issue illustrates how Lord Monckton again and again makes serious errors that cause his conclusions which contradict the accepted science to be completely erroneous. (His conclusions on things such as the existence of the greenhouse effect, which of course agree with the accepted science, are by contrast correct.)
And, far from being “impolite” or engaging in “ad hominem” attacks, I am being quite polite and am explaining exactly where Monckton goes wrong in his analysis.
Phil Clarke says:
July 13, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Myrrh. Thank you for your fact filled rebuttal of Lord Moncktons letter
LOL!
You’re welcome, his letter was about censorship and ad homs etc. being used to avoid discussing the science.
HenryP says: @ July 13, 2012 at 11:12 am
Henry says
either you are a genius
or perhaps you are an expert in collecting knowledge from all those commenting on this blog?
_________________________
A collector of knowledge Henry. It is what I did professionally for years. Bits of knowledge from the factory workers, QC techs, research chemists and the chem engineers in the pilot plant. Stir well, sort into a logical pattern, run some experiments and solve the production problem.
It is all a matter of listening and trying to understand each piece of the puzzle. Atmospheric CO2 driven by Henry’s Law and the carbon cycle makes a lot more sense then CO2 as the ‘Climate Control Knob’ driving climate given all the bits and pieces.
Loop gain:
DesertYote says:
July 13, 2012 at 10:26 am
Gareth says:
July 13, 2012 at 4:02 am
Nitpicking:
Amplifiers by their nature need a gain of greater than unity,
###
BZTTT! Wrong Answer!
How so? – please explain or give an example.
Or do you simply mean that in an inverting amplifier with gain -n, the value -n could be said to be less than unity (which really would be nitpicking)?
Or are you just ‘aving a larf, as they say?
PS: the Monkton assertion “electronic circuits intended to be stable are designed to permit closed-loop gains of no more than 0.1” is still wrong, uncorrected and reduces the credibility of the rest of the piece.
Here is a different link to the Bronfenbrenner Ecological Systems Theoryhttp://virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/childdevelopment/Cheryl/Sp10/EcologicalHandout.pdf
Just in case someone thinks this is just about education. Education has become just a means to try to change the filtering values and memes that filter human thinking. All in an attempt to get people who will either embrace or tolerate the kind of planned society and economy being envisioned for the future a la Rio+20 or Planet under Pressure.
That link will show you why that has become the preferred theory in education. Because the environment as in climate and the Earth is an outer layer system and people and their interactions feed into other assumptions. With that kind of an all-encompassing system model, everything has to be changed or controlled.
Same function but it seems more necessary and palatable than Marxist political theory. Think of a discredited theory that was so useful to its nomenklatura having a PR makeover and a more touching storyline.
BEST is getting incorporated into the climate models designed to obtain political change just like it is into these ed learning theories. With no real support except it is useful.
We should be good and ignore facts and reality just like those profs pushing econometrics.
[snip – bogus email address]
I have already explained, it is the same as before wordpress stole it.
Your claims that you don’t censor is what is bogus.
[Reply: We don’t censor. And please, use a valid email address. ~dbs, mod.]
Gail Combs, DesertYote, Robin:
I took a look at your (Robin’s) Columbia link. It took me back about 45 years to one of Dr. Herbert Landar’s classes at Cal State LA. Some students had made the mistake of actually reading from Dr. Landar’s collateral reading list, and they had some questions about Benjamin Lee Whorf. Dr. Landar patiently explained that he put items on the list because they were important, not because he agreed with them. And added the exhortation, “If you are having trouble understanding what you are reading and it seems like so much nonsense, I beg of you, consider the possibility that it may be so much nonsense.” (Quote approximate, but close enough)
Read it and shuddered. A “d-word” in the title and five in the text. Sort of a self-disqualifier.
Christopher Monckton writes via email: …Our argument against the Party line they so uncritically espouse is that catastrophic manmade global warming has not been occurring at anything like the predicted rate; that there is no sound scientific reason to expect that it will; and that, even if it did, future adaptation would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective than heavy spending on attempted mitigation today.
=======================================================
The argument “adaptation vs mitigation” seems to be weak to me.
If it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, that “future adaptation would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective than heavy spending on attempted mitigation today”, then it would be wonderful, of course. But I doubt that it is possible. The future costs are a highly speculative matter. Besides, the AGW side argues that many people would die or suffer as a result of doing nothing, so how can these casualties be equated to a pure financial lost?
Such an approach will certainly fail in public opinion. The AGW side will make horrible predictions one after another and Lord Monckton will tell the public like “calm down, it is not that bad, we’ll adjust to a reasonable price.” This is not a winning strategy to me.
Let us recall that in Mr. Shoreās first (and very much off-topic) comment above on my Eos article he wrote:
āThe predicted āhotspotā ā¦ is not CO2-induced and has nothing to do with CO2 capturing IR and re-radiating it back to the surface. It is a prediction of how warming will occur in the atmosphere due to any cause (including El Nino, for example) and follows from the fact that the temperature profile with altitude in the tropics is expected to generally closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate profile. It is not a necessary requirement for AGW.ā
Accordingly, he calls into question the following numbered paragraph from my reply to his original comment, which is entirely at odds with his statement above:
ā2. The simulated responses to natural forcing are distinct from those due to anthropogenic forcings. Solar forcing results in a general warming of the atmosphere, with a pattern of surface warming that is similar to that expected from greenhouse gas warming, but, in contrast to the response to greenhouse warming, the simulated solar-forced warming extends throughout the atmosphere.ā
Mr. Shore says the āpunchlineā is that āthe two different forcings are predicted to have virtually identical effect throughout the troposphereā. No, theyāre not. The punchline is in the paragraph itself, which makes plain: āIN CONTRAST to the response to greenhouse warming [which the models predict will be concentrated in the mid-troposphere], the simulated solar-forced warming extends throughout the atmosphere.ā
What I neglected to point out in my reply to Mr. Shoreās comment is that the paragraph he now disputes is taken verbatim (for non-Latinists, that means āword for wordā) from Chapter 9 of the IPCCās Fourth Gospel. His original attack on me (which had nothing to do with my article for Eos, the subject of the head posting) was on the ground that it was I who had introduced what he called āconfusionā in my account of the tropical mid-troposphere āhot-spotā. As he will now realize, he is at odds with his own Holy Books: for it is they, and not I, who introduced what he calls the āconfusionā over whether the mid-troposphere hot-spot is a fingerprint of manmade āglobal warmingā.
Then he introduces past stratospheric cooling as though it were a fingerprint of manmade warming, but somehow fails to point out that the cooling seems to have stopped around the turn of the millennium.
And so on, and so forth. One understands his desperation as global temperatures continue to fail to rise at anything like the predicted rate. But his furious hostility to anyone who dares to disagree with the Holy Books of IPeCaC has undermined his credibility, particularly now that he himself is in fundamental and angry disagreement with them.
Another troll, Mr. Clarke, makes several dubious points. I shall answer them seriatim (i.e. āone by oneā):
He says the operators of Envisat combine its results on their website with those from other satellites, to show a trend ten times that which their own satellite showed. So they do: but they also show their own data separately. For eight years (and that is long enough to be worth noticing) sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to little more than one inch per century. The Jason II satellite, in its admittedly short lifetime, confirms that sea level is not rising at 30 cm/century: indeed, in the past year global mean sea level was lower than in any of the previous seven years.
He says the rate of sea-ice decline in the Arctic is thrice the rate of growth in the Antarctic, but fails to observe that the Antarctic is many times bigger than the Arctic, and that the satellites began measuring sea-ice extent at the very moment when it had reached what may have been a late-20th-century peak. A map of the northern Greenland coast drawn in 1957, for instance, show less ice there than at present, and show the so-called āwarming islandā as a land mass clearly distinct from the coastline.
He challenges my statement that northern-hemisphere snow cover reached a record maximum in 2010/11 not because it is inaccurate but because, in his opinion, it is consistent with the greater rainfall that āglobal warmingā will bring. Except that there has not been any statistically-significant āglobal warmingā for a decade and a half. An event cannot have been caused by āglobal warmingā that has not in fact occurred ā and has certainly not occurred at anything like the predicted rate.
He challenges my statement that the IPCCās 1990 predictions of the warming that should have occurred by now have been proven to be wild exaggerations by praising ā I kid you not ā the predictions in the IPCCās 2001 report, which was not published until 11 years after the report whose predictions I had questioned. By 2001, even the climate extremists had realized their original predictions were overblown: indeed, a revealing paragraph at the beginning of Box 10.2 on page 798 of the 2007 report shows that the modelsā estimates of wearming in response to a CO2 doubling have fallen from 3.8 K in 1995 via 3.5 K in 2001 to 3.26 K in 2007. Going down ā and these silly, model-based predictions have a long way to fall before they match reality.
He challenges my statement that the rate of warming since the 1950s was equivalent to just 1.2 K/century not by saying it was inaccurate (it was accurate), but because the trends starting from the 1970s are higher. Well, yes, because in 1976 the Pacific Decadal Oscillation turned from its cooling to its warming phases ā and an exceptionally strong one, that continued until late in 2001. These cooling and warming phases tend to endure for about 30 years each, so the correct method of establishing a trend is to ensure that one is covering 60 years of data. That, of course, is what I did: 62 years have passed since 1950, canceling out the otherwise distorting effects of the PDO on which Mr. Clarke ingeniously but unreasonably relies in obtaining his higher trends (which are certainly not evident in this millennium).
One understands that the belief system of the adherents of the New Religion is being challenged by unfolding events, which continue to call their doom-laden predictions into question, and by the gradual realization on the part of the people and even of politicians that the āglobal warmingā scare was an absurd exaggeration. Nevertheless, the time has come for them to understand that the sneering, bully-boy tone in which they produce such bogus pseudo-science is no longer convincing to anyone ā except, perhaps, to themselves.
Gail Combs says, July 13, 2012 at 10:14 am
Stop already. Use the word diffusion and only the word diffusion, quit the confusion.
Not according to Fowler’s Modern English Usage (see the 4th sentence under “self”). Other style guides follow Fowler: for instance Patricia O’Connor’s Woe Is I, p. 13, and Harry Shaw’s Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions, p. 159: “The use of myself for me is nonstandard; say, ‘The supervisor spoke to Jane and me (not myself).'”
That’s because you’re using an abridged dictionary. It’s in unabridged dictionaries like the Random House and the Oxford. And it can be located online by typing define illogic into Google.
The use of Latinate terms for the classical fallacies is common in books on logic, argumentation, fallacies, and critical thinking. I’m familiar with them, and everyone ought to be–certainly the editors and readers of a scholarly journal, to whom this was addressed, should not boggle at them. If they do, well why do they think they’re in a position to look down their noses at him? (That was his subtext, or “little dig”–get it?)
Of course, he was doing a bit of a cakewalk too, but so what?–It makes a change. I’d rather that, than have him talking down to me by tediously spelling things out. If a reader has to check his dictionary, or google for a word’s definition, good. It’s been a teachable moment.
He challenges my statement that northern-hemisphere snow cover reached a record maximum in 2010/11 not because it is inaccurate but because, in his opinion, it is consistent with the greater rainfall that āglobal warmingā will bring. Except that there has not been any statistically-significant āglobal warmingā for a decade and a half.
Your Lordship, No. The global warming trend in the HADCRut dataset is in factstatistically significant over the period stated. This is not opinion, this is hard, demonstrable statistical fact. If you have evidence to the contrary, then please present it.
Of course you will not, because you cannot. A sad end to your credibility -however you freely chose this path…..
It’s a little orotund, but so what? The world needs a little gingerbread. (I defended the use of Latin in my comment just above.) I enjoy seeing someone defiantly being his own unfashionable self–and so should everyone. The world needs more “characters.”
Only for his little glitches, like any other writer, not for his style. (OK, maybe a little of the gingerbread could be trimmed.) His main fault is his “don’t give an inch” tendency when told about certain usage errors he won’t acknowledge, as has happened in some of the private e-mails I’ve sent him. (E.g., his hyphenating adverbial compound modifiers.) But this is inseparable from his defiant nature, so it’s insoluble.
John Slayton-The worst kind of nonsense is mandated nonsense that becomes the basis of government policy with our money.
I put up that link so that the underlying nonsense would become better known. And also how embedded ed is as a tool to get access to people and resources and behavior.
Visually that 2nd link will help you see just how intrusive systems theory is when it is applied to the social sciences as a normative measure for the future.
Like Lord Monckton above-I have read too many awful machinations that are reminiscent of everything that went wrong in the 20th century to be willing to accept these rejections of reality so that we can once again try totalitarian political theories on free people in real time.
I just had another used book show up I pulled from a footnote and it describes from the mid-90s what was to be the govt/Big Business nexus to reimagine the economy to be sustainable in support of Gaia.
Anthony – my email is as before wordpress stole it. I’ve explained that. And I’ve also explained that this has been a public censorship and should be dealt with publically, and you are publically censoring my replies.
Your original censorship was wrong. You are being hypocritical just like Monckton, and your tactics are the same, whingeing about the times you are censored and complaining of bullying behaviour, but you dish it out yourself.
[snip – your email address has nothing to do with wordpress.com, nor did they “steal” it. You are simply making that up. Run the email address “as before” that you provide through this tool:
http://tools.email-checker.com/ and it comes up bad. One of my moderators tried to send you email, and it bounced, further confirming A valid email address is required to comment here by policy. So your choices are:
1. Get a new valid email address, or provide a different one.
2. Stop commenting here.
The simplest choice is #1, and that has not a thing to do with censorship or bullying. Be upset if you want, to but that’s the site policy. Commenting here is a privilege, not a right. – Anthony]
Scores:
Monckton ā unum bunchum
Shore, Clarke, et al ā notso muchum
Phil Clarke says:
“The global warming trend in the HADCRut dataset is in factstatistically significant over the period stated. This is not opinion, this is hard, demonstrable statistical fact. If you have evidence to the contrary, then please present it.”
OK, presented here:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/HadCrut3Global.jpg
And there is no correlation with CO2, either:
http://members.shaw.ca/sch25/FOS/GlobalTroposphereTemperaturesAverage.jpg
Lord Monckton’s credibility is fully intact. But Phil Clarke’s is in tatters.
Lord Monckton… +1
Phil Clarke ………. ā1
THUD!
Tee hee.
Hey, it’s gone very quiet.Ā Shore seems to be out for more than the count. Shall we call for an ambulance?
Monckton of Brenchley says:
(1) Since my original comment was directed at commenter “Crispin of Waterloo”, if this discussion of the “hotspot” was off-topic, that off-topic discussion was started not by me but by him. I was only correcting the numerous false statements in his comment, the gist of which he attributed to you (rightly or wrongly…but at least partly correctly from what we see here).
(2) As I noted in my previous comment, the statement that you now attribute to the IPCC “is correct as far as it is explained.” So, no, I am not diisputing what the IPCC said. I am disputing how you have misinterpreted it. The IPCC said “The simulated responses to natural forcing are distinct from those due to anthropogenic forcings. Solar forcing results in a general warming of the atmosphere, with a pattern of surface warming that is similar to that expected from greenhouse gas warming, but, in contrast to the response to greenhouse warming, the simulated solar-forced warming extends throughout the atmosphere.” What the IPCC meant by this is exactly what I said: The patterns are virtually identical in the troposphere but they differ in that the solar-forced warming extends through the stratosphere whereas the greenhouse warming is not. Perhaps the IPCC should have given a little more detail in their statements to prevent your misinterpretation, but it is often challenging to predict how creative people will be in misinterpreting what is written.
By the way, having now checked the IPCC report, I should note that Monckton’s words were not exactly verbatim from the IPCC report. The sentences in the IPCC report (Section 9.2.2.1) actually read:
The most important words missing from Monckton’s quote are “described above” since they clearer place it in the context of the previous paragraph, which talks about exactly the point I was making: that the anthropogenic forcings cause a warming of the troposphere and a cooling of the stratosphere. In particular, the most relevant part of the previous paragraph is this:
In the context of that, the IPCC statement becomes clearer and less easily misinterpreted.
Yet Good Will Come Of It
My Lord, but you are erudite!
Ex professo! and thereof right!
Magnum opus! — yet rattlecan
For facts sway not the lying man
Eugene WR Gallun
I don’t read every comment here as I simply do not have the time. I read Myrrh’s wrong the first time and assumed it was an alarmist attacking Monckton. Apparently he is a “dragon-slayer” skeptic and appears upset he cannot hijack any thread he chooses with his topic of interest – “is there a greenhouse effect?”. This sort of derailment is tiring and I understand Monckton’s argument here. And for clarification Monckton never used the word, “ghettos” but rather “dunces corner” – which was clearly sarcastic. It is perfectly normal moderation on any site to keep the discussion on topic.
I believe my comment went in to the filter.
Phil Clarke says:
July 13, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Despite rapidly-increasing CO2 concentration, there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half.
Phil Jones: āThe key statement here is ānot statistically significantā. It wasnāt for these years at the 95% level, but it would have been at the 90% level. If you add the value of 0.52 in for 2010 and look at 1995 to 2010 then the warming is statistically significant at the 95% level.ā [What this means is that the warming trend for the past few years previously met a lower test of statistical significance. With addition of the results so far for 2010, it now means the higher test.]
Phil Clarke says:
July 13, 2012 at 4:32 pm
Your Lordship, No. The global warming trend in the HADCRut dataset is in fact statistically significant over the period stated. This is not opinion, this is hard, demonstrable statistical fact. If you have evidence to the contrary, then please present it.
Of course you will not, because you cannot. A sad end to your credibility -however you freely chose this pathā¦..
Monckton is completely accurate in his statement that “there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half.” Here is the proof.
You are quoting Phil Jones from an interview from February 13, 2010 where he said the warming for the 15 years from 1995 to 2009 was ānot statistically significantā. Then when the numbers for 2010 came in a year later, it is true that for the 16 years from 1995 to 2010, the warming WAS significant. But you seem to completely ignore the fact that it is now July 13, 2012, and a lot has changed in the last 18 months. The Hadcrut3 data set only goes to March, 2012 on the WFT site. The slope for the latest ‘decade and a half’ would then be from April, 1997 to March 2012. And the value of the slope is -0.00127537 per year. Check for your self at http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/trend
Please tell me Phil, how can the ‘The global warming trend in the HADCRut dataset is in fact statistically significant over the period stated.’ when the slope is not even positive over the period Monckton stated?
Enjoy seeing Phil and Joel Shore having their backsides tanned by Lord Monckton.
The more they continue trolling the more they are made to look foolish.
joeldshore says:
July 13, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Perhaps the IPCC should have given a little more detail in their statements to prevent your misinterpretation, but it is often challenging to predict how creative people will be in misinterpreting what is written.
———————————————————————
It’s late and the Bushmills is definitely impacting my ability to process pretentious if at times eloquent language, but could you actually supply a concise American English list of falsifiable claims from the CAGW community? So far my impaired read of your (pl.) banter consists of “troposphere is hot no matter what so that proves nothing vs. it proves everything.”
Thanks. (I won’t attempt to find the precise Latin but I’m sure it’s something like au gratin)
Lord Monkton,
I have written before that when looking at the loop gain, you should probably formulate the problem into both negative and positive feedback components. Consider it as two sequential amplifiers, one with negative feedback, the other with positive. For example the total negative feedbacks amount to about 80% so the temperature effects of a CO2 doubling after applying the negative feedbacks is only 1.2/5 or 0.24 degrees, which then must be amplified to acheive a final temperature rise of 3 claimed by the IPCC a multiplication factor of 3/0.24 = 12.5 so while the net feedback may result in a gain of 3 the magnitude of the positive component of the feedback claimed by the IPCC must be 4 times larger in order to overcome the known negative feedback then adding a positive loop gain of 0.7 to deliver a final gain of 3, this implys a loop gain in the positive feedback component of almost 0.95 if my math is right.
In circumstances where the negative feedbacks acting were limited temperature would rise or fall almost without limit – there us no evidence for this.
Please correct me if I am wrong
EOS = End of Science
Mr. Shore makes much of his supposition that I had cited the IPCC out of context. However, he himself omits some important points of the context, not the least of which was that the chapter in question was about the vexed question of attributing global warming and, in particular, distinguishing between manmade and natural warming.
The paragraph numbered “1” in my original reply to his unprovoked and irrelevant, but characteristically unscientific and ad-hominem, attack was another direct quotation from the IPCC’s Fourth Gospel, underlining that this is the point at issue.
Mr. Shore shoots himself in the foot right from the outset by carefully selecting only that part of the text that mentions stratospheric cooling as a signature of greenhouse warming. Just one problem with that: there hasn’t been much stratospheric cooling in the past decade, notwithstanding continuing rises in CO2 concentration.
And his attempt to deny that the IPCC is somehow not regarding the existence of a tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” as significant is belied by the rather plain, very large, full-color diagram from Santer (2003) that accompanies the text I had cited. That diagram shows the model-predicted altitude-vs.-latitude temperature anomaly plots four separate natural forcings, for manmade greenhouse-gas forcing, and for all five forcings combined.
It is blindingly obvious, on looking at that diagram, that the pattern predicted anthropogenic warming within the troposphere is entirely distinct from that arising from the natural forcings. And it is not good enough for Mr. Shore to suggest that the resolution of the diagrams was insufficient to show the “hot-spot” that he thinks would arise even if the warming were solar-driven. The purport and intent of the diagram, taken with the text, is clearly to suggest (probably wrongly, like much else in the IPCC’s Gospels) that the “hot-spot” is a very clear fingerprint of manmade warming. That is how numerous commentators, scientific as well as other, have taken it. There have been several angst-laden reports trying to resolve the difficulty that the IPCC’s probably-inaccurate claim causes given the observed absence of this supposed signature of manmade warming: and Santer himself, in evident desperation, produced a further paper (in 2008, if I remember correctly) answering a paper by John Christy, Fred Singer and others pointing out the implications of the absence of the IPCC’s much-trumpeted anthropogenic fingerprint.
Frankly, it was disingenuous of Mr. Shore – characteristically so, alas, – not to place his remarks in this context. As he now belatedly admits, the IPCC could have been clearer in its exposition – in short, it was the IPCC, not I, that caused the confusion of which he now accuses me. Yet I submit that the IPCC could not have been clearer in its exposition: in a chapter whose subject was the attribution of warming as between natural and manmade causes, it plainly presents the vertical profile of manmade warming as being distinct from natural warming in various ways (of which the stratospheric difference – now shown by events to have been incorrect – was but one). His approach, precisely because its intent is to make personal attacks rather than to present the science fairly and objectively, is erroneous and contributes more warming than illumination to the discussion. His Holy Books got it very wrong, on this as on much else, and no amount of reinterpretation by him will alter that fact.
Mr. House, another regular troll whenever I contribute here, says he is not convinced by my argument that it is cheaper to adapt later than to abate now. Yet, as always, he fails to provide any quantitative justification for his diisagreement. He should know – for he is one who does science by head-count among the experts – which I call toeing the Party Line – that the economic peer-reviewed literature is near-unanimous in concluding that there is little or no case for spending on making “global warming” go away. I have contributed some detailed economic discussions to WattsUpWithThat: if he and other trolls want to argue, then let them be specific rather than just saying they do not like my argument.
Finally, Bold kindly strengthens my argument that the paleo-temperature record is inconsistent with the very high closed-loop feedback gains implicit in the IPCC’s interval of climate sensitivities. I am hoping to persuade Dr. David Evans, from whom I obtained the argument about feedbacks, to write a posting here to explain the argument and to take account of constructive points such as that which Bold has raised.
Steve C.
Gain is not feedback
If we set out to increase the gain of an amplifier using feedback positive reinforcement and the FEEDBACK loop has a gain of 0.1 or more (the reinforcing singal is in-phase and more than 1/10 of the excitation signal), then the circuit runs a great risk of being unstable.
The IPCC position posits a feedback ratio that is in phase and IIRC 0.64 x the forcing signal which Lord Monckton points out is highly likely to be unstable – more so than observation.
I go further than the Honourable Lord. We know there is a Negative feedback applied in the climate system which is out of phase and of magnitide 0.8 times the forcing. The Positive feedback to overcome this and provide the Net positive feedback of 0.64 proposed by the IPCC then has to be in phase and about .95 times the forcing signal. The IPCC posits that the Negative and Positive feedbacks combine (cancel out) to give the final feedback of 0.64 in – phase. But this will only happen if the feedback signals have EXACTLY THE SAME TIME LAG, and that the negative feedback occurs in ALL situations. The Negative and positive feedbacks however are independent – they have totally different mechanisms.with defferent time lags, and in certain situations the negative feedback mechanisms could be prevented from acting fully. In this case, then there are circumstances where the positive feedback could dominate and earth would be uninhabitable, wildly fuctuating between extreme heat and cold over periods dependent on the lags.
Earth is clearly habitable with remarkably stable temperatures over centenial timeframes which I believe implies the positive feedback COMPONENT of the climate system must be less than about 0.1-0.3 times the forcing signal and can be nowhere near 0.95 times the forcing signal..
If this is the case then the total feedback must be Negative and quite substantially so.
The simplistic view of the climate lobby effectively ignores phase/frequency effects,See how the presumption of substantial positive feedback defies science?
@joeldshore
>>It does not exist. It is a necessary requirment of the āscienceā of CAGW. All IPCC models have it as part of their coding.
>If your statements here were meant to demonstrate that Monckton does real science then you have not succeeded since your statements show only complete confusion and ignorance of the subject (although, to be fair, I donāt know what part of that is attributable to Monckton and what part is yours alone).
I note your ad homs and find myself in good company. I don’t think it helped your argument because taken together it amounted to appealing to your own authority. Respect is earned, not taken.
I look forward to your contributions to AR5 on this subject where a modelled and predicted effect is not borne out by measurements repeatedly taken in the atmosphere at the point where the effect is to be manifested. Your claims are extraordinary. There is a predicted heating advertised in the gutter press as ‘the greenhouse effect’ with the explanation that an increase in the CO2 concentration traps heat that would otherwise leave this planet alone, and cooler. Are you suggesting that this ‘hot zone’ is not caused by GHG’s? In other words, is the absence of this hot zone spawning some logical wiggles to downplay its being the core of GHG IR capture and re-radiation?
The putative hot zone is based, I believe, on a defective understanding of how heat is moved from the surface into space – a subject well addressed by A Bejan in his brief foray into global warming. Your lapse rate comments are relevant too. He quickly showed that the atmosphere moves heat as efficiently as possible without tipping into turbulence, no matter what the temperature. The relevant physics is in Ch 5 of Convective Heat Transfer, though he did not refer to his textbook. If the atmosphere is heated slightly more, it immediately compensates by moving the heat transfer zones (which you refer to) upwards slightly. The atmosphere has a huge capacity to vent additional heat and explains the drop in stratospheric water vapour (it has the effect of stripping water as you probably know). You may have heard about the unexpectedly efficient heat venting zone over the N Pacific. This effect is also observed during a tropical thunderstorm. He found it a completely uninteresting problem it was so simple. I read his comments to mean that he was dismissive of the CAGW hype though you may come to another conclusion. As the most prolific man on the planet in the field of heat transfer I take his comments and analysis seriously – I am appealing to his authority as a heat transfer expert.
But back to your ‘model trumps data’. A model that has no supporting data is speculative and does not qualify as science. It certainly does not qualify as ‘real science’, something you apparently claim to be doing and which you accuse Monckton of not doing. When he analyses the data and finds there is no hot spot (whether from GHG’s or any other cause) and which I observe to be a scientific investigation with all work shown, and you find 5 years later the same thing, how on earth can you conclude that the model is right and the data is wrong, and further, that he is not doing real science but you are? You have the same result from the same data! He says the effect is not real, you say the data must be defective because the model is correct! That is not a scientific statement, until the model is validated by observations. This is not astronomy where you look into the sky and then just make stuff up (a criticism I heard this evening from a physics prof).
Here is another way to look at it: what would invaliate the model? What is your falsification scenario? Gavin gave us a falsification scenario for the whole of CAGW and 80% of it has been fulfilled so we are watching RC with interest (for a change).
What on earth are you going to write in AR5 if you are already admitting publicly here that the data does not support the model? Fudge and kludge, smear-mumble-mumble? It would be very odd if the AR5 tries to claim the hot spot is there but undetectable and is in any case not important to the AGW effect (which is basically what you wrote above).
Invoking the ‘cautionary princple’ as people often do, one might say that the model will one day be validated by data so we should ‘act now’ just in case. It is true that it might be. It is at least possible. However if the effect is so difficult to detect that it takes decades of work to find, perhaps the CO2 sensitivity has been, as you suggest, ‘overestimated’ and the expense of treasure in ‘prevention’ not warranted as is continuously and sensibly pointed out by Monckton.
Any GHG provides at least some warming, by definition and in fact. Early on, the effect of CO2 was estimated (modelled) to be large and the hot spot was its signature. The absence of a detectable signature allows one to conclude with confidence that the sensitivity to CO2 is very low whether the model is correct in detail or not. Would you agree?
@All
For anyone who is not aware of how to get Monckton’s paper on the Hot Spot (and other possible causes of warming) go to:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/monckton/whatgreenhouse/moncktongreenhousewarming.pdf
Steve C.
A point I missed here implied but not stated that should help you. In an amplifier the Amplifier gain is a different concept to the loop gain of the feedback.
If I have an amplifier of gain 2 and I feed back the output to the input in phase, then the following would happen. If I give a 1 unit input, this would result in a 2 unit output, the 2 unit output fed back to the input, would then add to the input creating 3 units of input, resulting in 6 units of output, this continues until the amplifier saturates. In this case the Loop gain is 2 IE the feedback signal is 2 x the input.
For any system, if the fraction of the output fed back to the input is greater than the input, the output goes to infinity like this. Where the feedback signal = the input this defnes a loop gain of 1
If I have an amplifer of gain 100 and I feed back 1/100th of the output to the input, it has a loop gain of 1
In the case of climate the IPCC propose that the feedbacks amplify the input by 3, if you see above how the output cyclicly reinforces the input, you come to understand this is a progression, what fraction of the output must be fed back in order that the cumulative effect is a gain of 3. This number turns out to be about 0.64 so, for each 1 degree of CO2 rise another 0.64 gets added in, then this 0.64 results in another 0.64×0.64 degree rise and so on, the progression converges to about 3 in the limit (as n -> infinity), This means the loop gain is 0.64 in-phase and the system is highly likely unstable.
Smokey – the period in question was the rather imprecise ‘decade and a half’ – your (unsourced as usual, though I would also be embarrassed to rely on the amusingly named ‘Friends of Science’ for anything) trend line covers a rather shorter period.
Monckton is cherry-picking again, his chosen timescale has the massive 1998 El Nino at its start and the recent La Nina at its end, and he chooses the now-superceded v3 dataset. Here’s a rather more honest plot
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:180/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975
Phil Clarke says
And the trend since 1960 in that dataset is 0.13, since 1970 is 0.15 ā¦. see above.
Henry
true…….
but then you must carry on!!!
Looking at my table for means, here,
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
I get it that since 1980 it is 0.13 / decade and since 1990 it is 0.14/decade and since 2000 it is…../.
-0.17 decade.
Sorry. So now, there is no more global warming. It stopped. And then it started cooling.
It will take some time to get noticed. Sofar it is only about 0.2 degrees K cooler total since 2000. That falls within the error of most thermometers. However, seeing that the trend follows on a nice parabolic path, I can actually predict that by now (since 2012) we are cooling by as much as……
– 0.6 degrees/decade.
Place your bets now. No wonder the learned doctors an learned professors who had supported AGW quickly had to change AGW to ACC.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
I don’t particularly care what the “gutter press” says. What scientists say is that tropical tropospheric amplification has nothing to do with GHGs specifically. The pattern of the heating in the troposphere is dominated by convection and that is the reason for the models all predicting, in agreement as Lindzen notes with basic theory, that this tropical tropospheric amplification occurs.
And, it is not only me but Lindzen who thinks the problem most likely resides with the data. And, I explained the good reasons to believe that is the case, along with pointing out that the only part of the data that shows this problem is the part that we know to be dodgy: the multidecadal trends. The temperature fluctuations that occur on monthly to yearly timescales are amplified just as predicted.
In any field, there are always puzzles that exist between data and theory and it is only in a highly politicized environment like that surrounding AGW that any puzzle is expected to instantly invalidate the entire theory even, as I noted, when this particular prediction by the models & theory has nothing to do with the issue of what is causing the warming, despite your and Monckton’s attempt to rewrite science to say otherwise. Just look at what the models predict for the structure of the warming due to GHGs vs due to solar forcing: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/
I have no time to answer Lord Monckton now but will do so later.
Twenty thousand one hundred and one, twenty thousand one hundred and two, twenty thousand one hundred and three, twenty thousand one hundred and four….
š
Please tell me Phil, how can the āThe global warming trend in the HADCRut dataset is in fact statistically significant over the period stated.ā when the slope is not even positive over the period Monckton stated?
Because you – and Monckton – have chosen to use an outmoded dataset – Version 3, which underestimates Arctic temperatures, and cherry-picked a short period that has a massive El Nino at the start and the recent La Nina towards the end. Even in the obsolete dataset, if you slide your start point a couple of years either way, your ‘flat’ slope disappears, which rather undermines the claim of ‘no warming’.
Here ya go – I’ve thrown in the other land based index which also disprovces the claim.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/last:180/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:180/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/plot/gistemp/last:180/trend
HenryP – short (a decade or so) cooling trends in a long term warming are not exactly new, or significant. http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=4
joeldshore:
If you don’t mind sharing… What three lines of empirical evidence has convinced you that CAGW is a clear and present danger, and the single most causative factor is CO2. I am sure they will be definitive as you and many others are quite willing to bet the world’s disposable income on it.
If we know on what science you rely for your certainty, it might be easier to understand or at least tolerate some of your seemingly conformist consensus driven statements. It would help dispel the idea that you are not simply an advocate for social and political engineering and simply using climate change debate as a vehicle for social change. Surely, some actual evidence, which must be unambiguously convincing and not simply an obvious recovery from the LIA. I look forward to finally getting on the CAGW band-wagon, so I can be accepted by all the other “cool” alarmists. GK
MOD: Open italics tag at Crispin in Waterloo, 12:52 a.m. ??
REPLY: ON it, thanks -A
@joeldshore
Your ad homs are noted.
“…when this particular prediction by the models & theory has nothing to do with the issue of what is causing the warming, despite your and Moncktonās attempt to rewrite science to say otherwise.”
So it has nothing to do with what is causing the warming. So if it is predicted as a consequence of increased GHG’s ais nd not there, it does not matter, right? The failure of the model would be ‘just one of those things’.
I do not rewrite science, I apply it, daily. If I make a predition based on science, it has to be ‘predictive’. The science of a model that predicts large scale things that do not occur is not very scientific in the regular sense of the word.
Does the predicted increase in H2O vapour (the positive feedback mechanism) appear on a monthly or yearly timescale? This will no doubt be covered by AR5 as well. They should appear together.
Looks like at current UAH satellite trends July will come in a +0.18-0.20C so really knocking the trend pretty much dead.
O Domine Monckton,
Miserere eis non, if you would be so kind.
Thank you.
Phil Clarke says
ā short (a decade or so) cooling trends in a long term warming are not exactly new, or significant
Henry says
if you stare yourselves all blind looking at average temps on earth, you would not (easily) pick up on a significant trend. There is just too much ‘weather noise”
Look at the development of maxima
+ 0.36 K/decade since 1974
+0.29 K/ decade since 1980
+0.14 K /decade since 1990
– 0.16 K/decade since 2000
Now put that in a bi-nominal plot (parabolic)
and what you get is correlation coefficient =rsquare=0.998
Is that perhaps significant enough for you?
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Obviously all the dr’s and and prof’s here making their livelyhoods out of AGW or ACC refuse to look at the maxima….there must be a reason?
But how long do they think they can hide the truth and what will the final cost be to humanity, in terms of wasted crops in the areas that are cooling down faster than elsewhere?
(For example; like it is cooling now in Anchorage – as reported elsewhere here on WUWT : according to my tables in the link quoted above – it already got 1.5 K colder there since 2000)
Myrrh says:
July 13, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Anthony ā my email is as before wordpress stole it. Iāve explained that. And Iāve also explained that this has been a public censorship and should be dealt with publically, and you are publically censoring my replies.
Your original censorship was wrong. You are being hypocritical just like Monckton, and your tactics are the same, whingeing about the times you are censored and complaining of bullying behaviour, but you dish it out yourself.
[snip – your email address has nothing to do with wordpress.com, nor did they “steal” it. You are simply making that up. Run the email address “as before” that you provide through this tool:
http://tools.email-checker.com/ and it comes up bad. One of my moderators tried to send you email, and it bounced,
===========================================================
Perhaps Myrrh has a typo in the address he/she provided WUWT?
(If this doesn’t help, feel free to snip.)
REPLY: Doubtful, only myrrh can fix the problem, and so far he/she chooses not to. So, commenting privilege has been revoked – Anthony
Joel I don’t know what makes you tick.
It clearly involves an agenda that drives you to support the consensus science with a never-ending blinding appearance of science from you, an appearance that time and again is shown here to be without substance. If your arguments had substance, you would have converted me. But they are shown to be deceptive shams, every time. No, I’m not going to quote.
I couldn’t do what you do.
My experience is that truth matters. Wherever the chips fall. Better to be in the wrong, outed by a better truth, than maintain correctness in denial of the evidence. Even better to admit being wrong, the starting point of all twelve-step programs.
Your lookalike science, driven by an obsession to be seen to be siding with “correct” orthodoxy, frightens me – because I see the whole bunch of climate usurpers doing this. To me, they are all making mockery of true Science, Scientific Method, truth, humanity and justice. Yet I am grateful that you at least visit here to post – if only to give us an ongoing chance to engage, which “the team” never do.
Yet you never shift, only wriggle, and shed skins, like the snake.
There is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb to extinction the absorbable LWIR; addition of more CO2 would not add to atmospheric warming.
Phil Clarke says:
“HADCRut… an outmoded dataset ā Version 3, which underestimates Arctic temperatures…”
[Arctic temperatures].
Did it ever occur to Phil that HADCRut 4 is the new, “adjusted” data set, and that HADCRut3 was “adjusted” specifically because HADCRut3 showed cooling? Can’t have that, can we?
Phil Clarke says:
July 14, 2012 at 6:06 am
Because you ā and Monckton ā have chosen to use an outmoded dataset ā Version 3, which underestimates Arctic temperatures, and cherry-picked a short period that has a massive El Nino at the start and the recent La Nina towards the end. Even in the obsolete dataset, if you slide your start point a couple of years either way, your āflatā slope disappears, which rather undermines the claim of āno warmingā.
There is a lot of truth in what you say. However do not blame Monckton for what he said about the 15 years. For all we know, he may simply have been quoting the MET office:
At the following URL, the statement below appears: http://toryaardvark.com/2012/04/02/the-planet-has-not-warmed-in-15-years/
“The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (HadCRUT) has long been the gold standard in climate data used by the IPCC, now a new analysis of the data by the UK Met Office shows there has been no global warming for the last 15 years.” Did they then cherry-pick too?
It is not Monckton’s fault that 15 years ago just happens to be prior to the 1998 El Nino. Nor is Monckton wrong about the 15 years just because if you moved things over a year or two in either direction, the slope is not negative or not as negative.
If a shorter period is picked, like Smokey did, he is criticized for covering a rather shorter period. If I cover exactly 15 years, or 180 months, I am criticized for cherry-picking.
By the way, your quotes by Phil Jones referred to his comments on the Hadcrut3 set.
Now as for Hadcrut4, that is not up to date since it ends in 2010. However there is a way around that. If we plot GISS from 1997.5 to 2012.5 and also from 1997.5 to 2011, the difference in slope is 0.003 lower for the total period. If we plot Hadcrut4 from 1997.5 to 2011, its slope is 0.007. So if we now subtract 0.003 from this, we get 0.004 which should be very close to what we should get if it were up to date. Now going back to Phil Jones comments, 0.012 was barely NOT significant over 15 years. So if that is the case, then 0.004 certainly is NOT significant either over 15 years, despite using the Hadcrut4 set. What I talked about is illustrated below.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997.5/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997.5/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1997.5/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1997.5/plot/gistemp/from:1997.5/to:2011/trend
This does not get around your “cherry-picking” issue, but if the slope is 0.004 for a “cherry-picked” time, it should be right in the middle of the La Nina before the positive slope reaches significance.
Smokey says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1032521
Henry says
Do you get it now, when I say that I don’t trust anything anymore from all the “official” datasets, excepting my own, of course,
unless I get full insight as to how and how often calibration is done and what the accuracy and precision of those measurements are?
I don’t think that all are deliberately being manipulated to fit the models – the models MUST be right, remember…. – but I do think that there is also just a lot of incompetency in the generation of the datasets…
Crispin in Waterloo says:
(1) It is the predicted consequence of warming due to ANYTHING. It is not a specific signature of warming caused by GHGs.
(2) I didn’t say it didn’t matter. All such puzzles are interesting and important to scientists because they tell scientists of the limitations of their models or their data & data analysis. And, scientists are always striving to have better agreement between models and data. However, its importance is overblown…and definitely misstated, because the most direct consequence of the absence of the hot spot would seem to be that the models are underestimating the amount of warming that will occur. And, once again, it says nothing about the cause of the warming because this prediction doesn’t distinguish between the different causes of warming.
(3) Also, as I have noted, the fact that tropical tropospheric amplification is seen on monthly to yearly timescales makes it very difficult to even imagine how the models could be corrected: Almost any way one could imagine modifying convection to get rid of the amplification on the multidecadal time scales would get rid of it on the time scales where the data shows unambiguously that it is occurring. That is why remaining artifacts that affect the trends on multidecadal timescales are the primarily suspect.
joeldshore, you are a very patient person.
sceptical says:
Best not be too hasty with the magnanimity but yes, it does rather look that way.
Fellow Travelers generally have patience.
Joeldshore says
And, scientists are always striving to have better agreement between models and data
Henry says
that is exactly why I am worried about all of your UAH, Hardcrut, GISS,
etc.
\Who does the final approval of the data sets to make sure they do not contain any “cooling” errors?
Because according to my data, independently collected, they should be showing that it is getting cooler, like, for example, in Alaska:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/13/coldest-july-in-history-for-anchorage/#comment-1032955
Monckton of Brenchley says:
…which is why they discussed the different signatures of the two warming mechanisms in the stratosphere.
And, of course, it is well known by scientists that the trends over short timescales are not reliable indicators of the underlying long term trend. Furthermore, as I noted, the stratospheric signature is complicated by the contribution from ozone, which as the stratospheric ozone layer has begun to recover, has become a warmer forcing rather than a cooling forcing in the stratosphere.
No…What is blindingly obvious is how easily fooled someone is who doesn’t understand the pitfalls one faces when interpreting contour plots, which is why it is important to look at a picture where the magnitude of the solar and GHG forcings have been adjusted to produce roughly the same forcing: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ Then it becomes blindingly obvious that you are wrong. (Although it would be similarly obvious if you just applied some mathematical thought to the IPCC plot, as I did in my previous comment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1031800 .)
They have tried to understand this discrepancy not because it is a signature specific to AGW but because it is a signature of warming based on such basic physical principles thought to apply in the tropical atmosphere that it seems strange that it should not be seen. And, since you mention Santer, let’s see what Santer et al. actually say about tropical tropospheric amplification in the abstract of their 2005 paper, written before AR4 ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5740/1551.short ):
(Santer et al. have already been proven partly correct about residual errors in the data sets since not long after this an error was corrected in the UAH data set that caused a marked change in the trend in the tropics, significantly reducing [although not eliminating] the discrepancy between that particular data set and the models.) Note that this abstract and other statements in that paper completely support my view and provide no support for yours.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
I didn’t say the IPCC caused your confusion. The onus is not on them to state everything in a way that prevents any conceivable misinterpretation that one can possibly imagine. You have proven quite creative in misinterpreting things from a variety of sources. (See, for example, the video of your debate with Tim Lambert where you highlight a study that the author of the study say you have completely misinterpreted.)
Blah blah blah, fact free excuses with tenous connections and appealing to Realclimate and Ben Santer of all the people. Typical shoreworn excuses and non answers.
Joeldshgore says
And, of course, it is well known by scientists that the trends over short timescales are not reliable indicators of the underlying long term……Furthermore, as I noted, the stratospheric signature is complicated by the contribution from ozone, which as the stratospheric ozone layer has begun to recover, has become a warmer forcing rather than a cooling forcing in the stratosphere
Henry says
I have clearly shown that it is globally cooling since 1995 http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
It follows on a binominal (parabolic) curve, and, especially , if you would look at the development of maximum temperatures , this development cannot be disregarded as ‘short term”.
In fact, in trying to determine the actual cause for this, I find in favor of an ozone connection which started going down just before the fifties and is going up from 1995. Noting the type of my curve for the drop in maxima, there seems to be a 50-odd year sun cycle that influences this.
There is no “recovery” of ozone.. Ozone is increasing due to some process on the sun that affects the UV-O2-O3 cycle which subsequently determines how much UV (below 0.3 um) is deflected away from earth due to re-radiation by O3.
More ozone causes the cooling of earth, not warming.
Robert S says:
The first statement you make here is wrong for the following reason: The absorption lines of CO2 have a certain shape and while they may be saturated in the center of the line, they are not far enough out in the wings.
The second statement is wrong both because the first statement is wrong and because the first statement is somewhat of a “red herring”. The issue is not a binary one of whether the LWIR from the surface gets absorbed or not. The issue is one of where the last absorption occurs…i.e., at what height in the atmosphere the LWIR is emitted that can escape to space without being absorbed again. Because this occurs higher in the atmosphere, where it is colder (because of the lapse rate in the atmosphere), the surface will be at a higher temperature than it would be if all the IR emitted from the surface escaped to space.
There is zero controversy about this within the scientific community. Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, and Willis Eschenbach, as far as I have seen, all support this basic picture. I believe that Monckton would subscribe to it to.
Lucy Skywalker says:
Lucy, think about it: The exact same statement could be made by a Young Earth creationist to someone supporting the science of evolution. And, it would be wrong for exactly the same reason.
In fact, your point-of-view has been shown to be completely impervious to scientific facts. I think this is an observation that would be shared not only by “consenusus scientists” but even by many of the more moderate “skeptics” (Spencer, Eschenbach, Monckton, …) who would not agree with the sort of nonsense that is promulgated at places like Tallbloke’s blog and which you seem to completely buy into.
Venter says:
Speaking of “fact free”, your post consists of completely ad hominem dismissals of evidence.
If you think that Gavin Schmidt ran the GISS model incorrectly when he produced that plot, you can run it yourself since it is available online.
As for Santer, it was Monckton who brought him up; I was just demonstrating Monckton’s misrepresentation of what Santer has been arguing…i.e., I have shown that Santer et al. have clearly stated that the expected tropical tropospheric amplification is not a signature specific to anthropogenic warming but is simply a signature expected for any temperature fluctuation or trend in the tropical atmosphere due to the tendency of the average lapse rate in the tropical atmosphere to be determined by the moist adiabatic lapse rate.
henry says
More ozone causes the cooling of earth, not warming.
joeldshore says
………..
(NOTHING)
no clues
Henry says
Joel, you too, better start at the beginning, where you all went wrong in the first place…..
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
As the latest messages have mostly reduced to ad homs I for one will go back to the business of keeping up to date on other matters.
Noteworthy about this thread is the fact the multiple Team supporters showed up to take on the likes of nobodies like me on the subject of the tropical hot spot.
Anthony I think this shows what I noted earlier, that we should keep a very close eye on how the absence of any observable hotspot is handled in AR5. It is a core prediction and Monckton was right to analyse it thoroughly in 2007. I recall at the time being impressed at the time by the fact the GHG signature is quite different from other types of warming, something denied above by joel et all. That is itself quite a departure from the old party line.
What I will be looking for is what the raw data says, how it gets smoothed, averaged, homogenised, deleted, hidden etc to try to produce alternative interpretations. By alternative, I mean if it for example shows cooling where there should be warming, then the data may be manipulated to hide the fact, for example by averaging it over some altitude range. If it shows no warming at a faster rate than the surface (the core claim being that it should) they may try to hide this by providing ‘new interpretations’ of the physics while restating that they had the physics right all along.
Based on the offerings above, they are on the run. They are worried. This thread with the other that ran concurrently on almost the same theme drew in more fretting warmists than any recent topic – maybe in more than a year. What does that tell us? It tells us the troposhperic warming around 12 km altitude which is a well known and well advertised prediction of all (save one, correct) models is probably not there, they know it, and it is a major failure of the models.
There are different possible macro-level interpretations: the globe is not warming, or the models are seriously defective. The latter is hotly denied – all that stuff about the physics being right. Well, OK, if the physics are right, and the hot spot is either absent or undetectably, there are few interpretations we should investigate. One is that the forcing effect of CO2 (which no one denies is rising) has been overestimated perhaps substantially. Another is that the globe is cooling, not warming.
Forcing, cooling, or models. Which is it going to be?
Crispin in Waterloo ( Belgium?) says
There are different possible macro-level interpretations: the globe is not warming, ….Forcing, cooling, or models. Which is it going to be?
Henry says: you are correct, or at least not far away from the truth.
In fact, earth has started cooling down a bit.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1032454
Some places, like Anchorage (USA) and Kimberley (RSA), where temperatures dropped by more than 1.5 K since 2000, seem to be more affected than others, but the overall sum over all the earth is one of net cooling.
Has no one else noticed the following snippet from Corbin and Katz’s note:
specifically the phrase, “climate researchers most actively publishing”?
They’re quoting from that dubious Master’s Thesis project, which started with 10,000 or so requests, which were progressively whittled down to 77 out of 79 scientists with “more than half their papers in climatology” or something to that effect. This in itself says a lot about the sort of people we’re dealing with here.The difference between these guys and the typical warmista posting a comment on a thread such as this is that they are careful to include the qualifying phrase I’ve noted. But that doesn’t make their statement any less dubious, which I suspect they know – it just makes it ‘correct’ in some legalistic sense.
It’s as if these people can never avoid being duplicitous; it’s like a tic that they can’t suppress.
According to AGW theory, CO2 should have been warming us up as soon as the Earth’s orbit around the Sun signaled Spring to begin. Didn’t happen in Oregon. CO2 must be on vacation. Snow can still be seen on the mountain peaks. It was too cold for morels this year, grasshoppers are again the size of gnats, bats are still delaying birth, and wolverines are finding plenty of cold places to store their food. Don’t get me wrong, I can tell you why we are cold this decade compared to previous decades (oceanic and atmospheric oscillations). If AGW theory is valid, its effects are so small they are buried in natural oscillations.
Henry@rw
Don!t worry too much. Truth has a habit of showing up at some time. A good scientist isb onne who is able to predict the future. Those types of people are really only a few in 100
To return to the problem of EOS denying the right of reply, I think the rot set in when “Scientific American” denied Bjorn Lomborg his rights. At about that point “Scientific American” became more like “Popular Mechanics” and soon after that became part of the “Nature” group – and look what has happened to “Nature”. Rot will spread if not cut out.
Addendum to my previous comment:
I should have said that putting in that qualifying phrase makes the statement more accurate. But given the provenance of the statistic, it’s no less dubious.
Come to think of it, this 97% figure that is bandied about so often has a weird resemblance to voting tallies in countries with totalitarian regimes. It may be that in both situations the same vulgar mentality is revealed, that can be reassured by excessive proportions like these without realizing that it is this very excessiveness that makes them hard to credit.
Pam says
It is getting colder in Oregon too.
Henry says
Which is your nearest big airport there and I will probably be able to figure out by how much it got cooler there.
OFF TOPIC
I wonder why Lucy Skywalker’s ‘account’ atĀ http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Curious.htm has been suspended.
It was working a few days ago. How odd.
@rw
You are right about the survey story %, though it was 75 of 77, actually. In other words it was worse than you thought!
joeldshore says:
July 15, 2012 at 6:28 am
The issue is one of where the last absorption occursā¦i.e., at what height in the atmosphere the LWIR is emitted that can escape to space without being absorbed again. Because this occurs higher in the atmosphere, where it is colder (because of the lapse rate in the atmosphere), the surface will be at a higher temperature than it would be if all the IR emitted from the surface escaped to space.
====================================================
This notion is absolutely absurd.
@joeldshore:
You cherry pick points of convenience to obfucate the total. Firstly it doesn’t matter a damn whether CO2 warming has a different signature in the hot spot if the hot spot doesn’t appear. What this does is falsify the hypothesis that a near impossible magnification of 3 occurs due to increase in absolute humidity as the temperature rises. Lord Monckton has supported his argument by showing that the water feedback magnification claimed by the climate lobby requires a feedback loop gain of +0.64 which is close to being impossible in a stable system. I go further because this gain requires surviving a feedforward loop gain of almost +0.95 if the amplitude and/or lags due to the negative and positive feedbacks are independent. You don’t even mention this in your responses. So you are arguing semantics. To refute his claim you must restore the hotspot demonstrating that Water feedback is positive (at all) AND you must show that the climate could be as stable as it is with a net loop gain of +0.64 and a positive feedback component of +0.95, and must also show that the negative and positive feedbacks are not independent.
I await your proof?
This round would seem to go to Monckton.
Bobl says:
No it doesn’t. Do you care to let us in on your chain of logic that leads you to conclude that?
It’s just a bunch of vague assertions from analogies to electrical systems where I don’t even think the terms are necessarily defined in the same way. (We have had systems control people swear that net positive feedback in the context of that field means instability. However, this is only true in the climate science case if you define the zeroth order effect to be the radiative forcing and define Planck response to be a feedback, which is a not-unreasonable way to do things but in climate science they have traditionally defined the zeroth-order effect to be the temperature rise you get once you consider the Planck response but no other effects of the rise in temperature like the water vapor feedback. So, the whole argument comes down to ones of different definitions and correctly understanding how terminology is used in each field.) In order to be critiqued, it has to be actually fleshed out into a coherent argument rather than a vague assertion.
Furthermore, it must be explained why the models themselves, which have significant feedback loop gains don’t then exhibit such an instability. What are they missing that keeps them stable with such gains when the climate system would not be?
@joeldshore
“However, this is only true in the climate science case if you define the zeroth order effect to be the radiative forcing and define Planck response to be a feedback, which is a not-unreasonable way to do things but in climate science they have traditionally defined the zeroth-order effect to be the temperature rise you get once you consider the Planck response but no other effects of the rise in temperature like the water vapor feedback.”
That, sir, is the hallmark of ‘a vague assertion’. You do not seem to consider the possiblity, which many find convincing, that the watr vapour feedback leading to more cloudiness is negative which explains the remarkably balanced climate we have despite fluctuations in CO2 of 200-7000 ppm. No tipping points, no run-away. No crisis, no funding to study it, no dismantling of the economic system to ‘avert a crisis’. We have far larger problems, one of which is the corruption of scientific endeavour by anointed cliques.
The models do not have feedback instability because they are programmed not to, unlike real systems. Your expression of the idea that mathematical models do not have feedback instability so the climate must also not have instability is bizarre. If you don’t know anything about feedback instability (you have not said anything so far that indicates you do) perhaps consulting with some knowledgeable people who do will raise your understanding. It does not come down to different definitions, it comes down to the fact that the climate is virtually unaffected by a change in CO2 concentration once it has exceeded 200 ppm. It is a short and uninspiring story.
Spot on Crispin. Shore’s blah blah supposition based on his models discounts the real world and measurements. That’s what I meant in my earlier post as fact free rambling. The models have proved bugger all when compared to reality and have nothing to do with reality, They reflect the convoluted thinking of blind faith based on CO2 espoused by the RC crowd and Joel himself.
One more example of the models being useless and exaggerating is seen in today’s new thread at WUWT
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/15/texas-tall-tales-and-global-warming/#comments
joeldshore says:
July 15, 2012 at 6:28 am
Robert S says:
There is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb to extinction the absorbable LWIR; addition of more CO2 would not add to atmospheric warming.
The first statement you make here is wrong for the following reason: The absorption lines of CO2 have a certain shape and while they may be saturated in the center of the line, they are not far enough out in the wings.
The second statement is wrong both because the first statement is wrong and because the first statement is somewhat of a āred herringā. The issue is not a binary one of whether the LWIR from the surface gets absorbed or not. The issue is one of where the last absorption occursā¦i.e., at what height in the atmosphere the LWIR is emitted that can escape to space without being absorbed again. Because this occurs higher in the atmosphere, where it is colder (because of the lapse rate in the atmosphere), the surface will be at a higher temperature than it would be if all the IR emitted from the surface escaped to space.
There is zero controversy about this within the scientific community. Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, and Willis Eschenbach, as far as I have seen, all support this basic picture. I believe that Monckton would subscribe to it to.
Most contributors agree that your models are useless Joel so why should my carefully worked out conclusion concerning the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere be incorrect compared with your mere supposition.
Caragea says:
July 13, 2012 at 7:41 am
Christopher Monckton is not a scientist, and his ātheoryā has many flaws. Iām still waiting to see the alternative theory that explains what CO2 emissions are supposed to do if not trapping infra red radiation into the atmosphere (which cause warming).
Yes CO2 does absorb long wave infra red radiation but only in certain wavelengths that are soon absorbed to extinction after a relatively short traverse through the atmosphere. Addition of more CO2 would not absorb any further LWIR as the absorbable wavebands are ’empty’ and therefore not cause further warming.
The hypothesis stands on increased water vapor (some say relative, some say absolute) as a result of the initial increase in warming from CO2 re-radiated IR. The increased warming from the water vapor causes an increase in outgassing of CO2 from oceans, bacteria, and insect blooms, which warms us more, causing more water vapor from the oceans. It is the water vapor that takes over after CO2 is saturated. No one knows for sure what the maths are for this cycle so they include a fudge factor increase in the models partially based on the observed warming in the temp data sets.
Clearly, this is still an infant hypothesis with crappy nappies in need of changing.
@Pamela
I have no problem with people changing their models as new information and understandings surface. I do have a problem with them being taken as realistic forecasters. Note the structure of the pro-model arguments. “They are based on well-understood physics”. Well, that is probably true in that most people try to do a good job. But if the understanding is partial, clouds being a good example, then the models are not much more than toys.
I have to provide 3D drawings of parts that are used in CFD modelling – occupying my whole week. They are used to create projections of gas and heat flows in those parts. The physics of heat transfer and convection and gas flow through the parts is really well understood. But if you see the results from runs of the CFD programme, you rapidly realise that it is a tuning tool, not a predictor of performance. Even a really skilled modeller will only get improved results and good indications and guidance, not perfection. And we are speaking about things assumed to be in equilibrium when the printout comes.
Even the basic things I use it for are difficult to render perfectly. I use the these model outputs to guide my design process, not as a definitive statements of ‘what will happen’ when I change a port size or use thicker material or radius a joint. They do not show ‘the truth’ they indicate changes from a previous best guess.
The climate models are just extremely complex CFD models and have legitimate use for examining things that are already well understood, and for use as a guide to tuning some real system. As has often been noted on WUWT, people have started to believe their models, as if they are more real and comprehensive than the outside world. They treat the numbers spitting out as ‘data’. It is the dose of reality that actual measurements bring which should make them snap out of it. It is not working, mostly.
A good example of failed modelling is the trophospheric hot spot. The physics look great, but the model is incomplete. Until it is complete, the output is not valuable, and certainly not predictive of the consequences of a changed variable. A buncha people guessed in 1995 based on what they knew that CO2 would be proven to be very important to global temperature. They guessed wrong. That’s all. No big deal. Let’s move on.
Pam says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1033864
Henry says
I found humidity actually decreasing,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
at a rate of about -0.02% RH per annum since 1975
(and I am not the only one reporting this, somewhere some time ago WUWT also reported about
-0.01% RH per annum for the USA)
In hindsight, this makes sense to me, with maxima gradually dropping and therefore the total input of energy into earth also gradually dropping, this obviously causes more precipitation of water vapor in the atmosphere and less humidity.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Crispin in Waterloo says:
(1) Very few scientists working in the field find the evidence for such a negative feedback to be convincing. Lots of non-scientists who want to believe that AGW is not a problem find it convincing most likely because they find it convenient.
(2) Actually, the paleoclimate record shows that the climate is not remarkably balanced. In fact, it becomes quite difficult to explain things like the glacial-interglacial oscillations with such a negative feedback. Scientists studying paleoclimate have generally concluded that the climate sensitivities are likely in the range that the IPCC estimates, if not higher ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5697/821.summary )
Really? Could you explain to me how they are programmed not to?
Pamela Gray says:
No…The fact is that the CO2 effect does not saturate in the way that people like Robert S think it does. In the concentration range of interest, the forcing depends approximately logarithmically on CO2 concentration. That means that the forcing vs concentration curve has downward curvature…but it does not saturate. A log dependence means the amount of forcing change when you go from, say, 280 ppm to 560 ppm is the same as that to go from 140 ppm to 280 ppm.
No they don’t. The water vapor feedback is included in the models mechanistically…and its strength is now quite well-verified. The feedback due to clouds is more uncertain although it still isn’t put in using a fudge factor but uses various parametrizations of clouds that differ from model to model and account for most of the difference in climate sensitivity between different models.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
No it’s not. It is an example of disagreement between the models and some data sets. You have no justification for concluding definitively that it is a failure in the modeling. It is like saying, “The experiment where they measured faster-than-light neutrinos is a good example of the failure of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”
In fact, the history so far has been that the data sets have been the ones that seem to have the most problems with the multidecadal temperature trend in the tropical troposphere. Even since the Santer 2005 paper ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5740/1551.short ) was published, it has been found that UAH’s LT trend estimate for the tropics was highly erroneous. And, while the corrected trend is still not in agreement with the models (although RSS’s essentially is), the correction to the UAH data set went a long way (about half way, I think) toward resolving that discrepancy. And, this was not the first major correction that was needed to the UAH data set.
And, you are conveniently ignoring the other facts that undermine your hypothesis that it is the models that are wrong. For example, you ignore the fact that all the data sets and models are in basic agreement on tropical tropospheric amplification for fluctuations in temperature that occur on monthly to yearly time scales where the data is most reliable. Where the models and some of the data sets part company is on the multidecadal trends, exactly the aspect of the data that is most susceptible to known artifacts from changes in instrumentation, stitching together of data from different satellites, etc.
You also have failed to provide any sort of credible hypothesis as to how the models could get the amplification right on the monthly to yearly timescales but fail on the multidecadal ones. Since the principle leading to the prediction is the basic physics of convection in the tropical atmosphere, a process measured roughly on timescales of hours, it is rather difficult to come up with plausible scenarios. For example, some people have desperately tried to connect the “hotspot” issue with ideas of Lindzen and Spencer involving the cloud feedback, suggesting that the two are somehow related. However, this won’t work because the timescale over which Lindzen and Spencer have analyzed the cloud feedback correspond more to the monthly to yearly timescales, over which the models correctly predict the behavior.
@joeldshore
“(1) Very few scientists working in the field find the evidence for such a negative feedback to be convincing. Lots of non-scientists who want to believe that AGW is not a problem find it convincing most likely because they find it convenient.”
Would you accept that if the CO2 keeps rising and the Earth cools for 30 year, that the AGW theory is invalidated?
How about 15 years?
Crispin in Waterloo says
Would you accept that if the CO2 keeps rising and the Earth cools for 30 year, that the AGW theory is invalidated?
Henry says
I hope you people are aware of the fact that a lot of CO2 is dissolved in cold water and comes out when the oceans get warmer. Any chemistry student knows that the first smoke from the (warmed) water in a kettle is the CO2 being released. So, quite a number of scientists have reported that the increases of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past lagged the warming periods by quite a few hundred years. e.g. see here:http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
Cause and effect, get it? Smoking causes cancer but cancer does not cause smoking.
However, since it has been cooling since 1995, one would expect to see CO2 falling as well.
Unfortunately we seem to have only one station in Honululu reporting on (‘global”) CO2 and obviously it looks like those people have all been bought into trying to show that CO2 is still increasing.
If my results are right, they are simply lying.
@joeldshore says:
>>A good example of failed modelling is the trophospheric hot spot.
>No itās not. It is an example of disagreement between the models and some data sets. You have no justification for concluding definitively that it is a failure in the modeling. It is like saying, āThe experiment where they measured faster-than-light neutrinos is a good example of the failure of Einsteinās Theory of Relativity.ā
Wow. Einsteinās (General?) Theory of Relativity is not a model in the sense that a GCM is a model. There are a great many tests that have been done showing that the calculations inspired by Relativity have value in making accurate predictions. It may be superseded by a future theory that addresses some problems Relativity has (and has had for a long time). But that is not my point.
Any climate model that has never been validated is a very different kettle of fish from the works of Einstein, wouldn’t you agree? A climate model, or dozens of them, that predicts a trophespheric hot spot that heats up at about 3 times the surface temperature increase, but which is undetectable, is not ‘valid until invalidated’. It remains unvalidated computer code. A computer programme with that many constrained variables is a ‘just-so story’ until it receives substantial validation. What is the GCM prediction of global temperature for the next 5 years?
Monckton’s 2007 paper sets forth the predictions of the models pretty well. The ‘greenhouse effect’ is supposed to increase the heat retained by the Earth by trapping more of it at a predictable altitude, at a predictable rate, with a predictable consequent temperature increase. You may have noticed that after his paper AGW warmist emphasis switched from that ‘hot spot’ heating to ‘Arctic heating’. I noticed. Suddenly the models predicted no hot spot as before, but hot poles! So, no GHG effect after all then?
According to GISS and HADCRUT there has been a detectable temperature increase at the surface. Maybe they are pulling our legs, maybe not. I have not read about any temperature rises or falls that are outside historical norms. Canada and its Arctic were much warmer 5000 years ago. The proof is littered across the now-frozen landscape. The CO2 concentration seems to have had nothing to do with it then, or now. No carbon taxes from me, thanks.
@joeldshore
“Returning to the logics of scientific theories, it ought to be generally accepted that for a logical construction to be a scientific theory it has to be falsifiable. Otherwise predictions are not possible and the construction would not allow useful calculations.”
Cited in http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=AS12005.pdf
The trophospheric hot spot is a falsifiable prediction. Even in a world with a constant temperature and increasing CO2, the hot spot should still be detectable because that is how GHG’s are supposed to work. The surface temperature is detectable. The hot spot is not. Either there is something wrong with the model, or CO2 in a mixed, wet, dynamic atmosphere does not trap as much heat as was thought. It speaks to the claim for H2O vapour feedback with additional heating as well.
Mind you,
I think, they are a bit confused about the results they are getting,
they seem to be finding one excuse upon the other as to why they think they “were wrong”
yet, (or “so that”) they (can) keep up reporting that CO2 is going up.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/trends_log.html
I am going to look if I can find at least one other good station reporting on CO2.
Any ideas from the floor here as to where to look?
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 9:12 am
However, since it has been cooling since 1995, one would expect to see CO2 falling as well….If my results are right, they are simply lying.
That would only be the case if the Earth was at equilibrium and then temperatures dropped, and if there were no extenuating circumstances. However man is more than compensating for the cooling. There are many things to disagree on with respect to climate science, but the CO2 concentration over the past few decades seems to be the thing that there is the least doubt about.
HenryP says:
The solubility of CO2 in the ocean depends also on the partial pressure of the CO2 above the ocean. Since that has been increasing due to our emissions, the oceans have been in net absorbing CO2, not releasing it. That is seen by the fact that the concentration of CO2 is rising only about half as rapidly as it would be if all the CO2 we emitted were staying in the atmosphere.
Actually, CO2 is monitored at a variety of sites around the world: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/ and they all show the same upward trend (albeit with somewhat different seasonal cycles)
Your results are not right and there is not some massive conspiracy among scientists. Nobody seems to believe your results but you.
Crispin in Waterloo,
Unfortunately, your latest posts don’t add anything to the discussion. You continue to ignore the actual facts regarding what disagreement does or does not exist between models and data, and ignore the possibility that the data for the long term trends is problematic despite the overwhelming evidence from the history of the UAH data set and the continued disagreement between different data sets (such as UAH and RSS or between different re-analyses of the radiosonde data).
You also continue to make statements like “the āgreenhouse effectā is supposed to increase the heat retained by the Earth by trapping more of it at a predictable altitude, at a predictable rate, with a predictable consequent temperature increase” which imply things that are simply not correct about the predicted “hot spot”, i.e., that it has something to do with the mechanism by which greenhouse gases trap heat. In fact, it has nothing whatsoever to do with that…Only “AGW skeptics” like you and Monckton believe (against all evidence to the contrary) that the temperature structure in the troposphere is dominated…or is predicted to be dominated…by such details. Scientists understand that the strong role of convection in the troposphere is what predominantly determines the temperature structure and that the prediction of tropical tropospheric amplification has to do with the temperature structure in the tropical atmosphere being determined by the moist adiabat.
@joeldshore
I do not find disagreements between data sets and between different analyses of the same data set to be ‘overwhelming evidence’. I find it quite underwhelming. For some reason you find this convincing. The model is not supported by the evidence is it? The evidence is self-contradictory, isn’t it? No agreement yet.
>”Only āAGW skepticsā like you …that the temperature structure in the troposphere is dominatedā¦or is predicted to be dominatedā¦by such details. ”
You are talking through your hat. Read Wikipedia, if you can stomach it.
You have clearly repeated above that there is a “prediction of tropical tropospheric amplification”. Good, we agree there is such a prediction. Whatever the cause of it, whatever the details, you are repeating the common prediction of the IPCC models the the heating should be there, n’est-pas?
Basically you assert that when the evidence agrees with the model, the evidence is correct and when it does not, the model is correct and the evidence is defective. Isn’t that your argument? I don’t want to misrepresent your view, I want you to make it clear.
On another note I take it from the message above that you agree water absorbs CO2 depending on the concentration in the atmosphere. Good, that is basic physics. Do you agree that fresh water from melting ice absorbs CO2? Fresh water runs into the ocean. Will it absorb CO2 when it melts or as soon as it is in the ocean? This ‘new’ water is a CO2 sink. If 1 cubic kilometer of ice melts, how much CO2 will it absorb when the atmospheric concentration is 390 ppm(v)?
Hint: it is more than 300 ppm(m)
How many cubic kilometers of ice would have to melt to absorb all the CO2 in the atmosphere (ignoring the logarithmic decrease as it drops). It is just a fun exercise to demonstrate another major impact on the atmosphere that is not included in the models.
Henry#Joel&@Werner
Well, thanks. Actually, it appears to me the results for CO2 at Barrow (as my sample for the lot) have been flat for quite a while. Remember that according to my results warming began just before the fifties, more or less, which was also more or less when CO2 monitoring started. Note the drop in maxima from my results> anyone who knows anything about sampling technigues and probability theory can figure out that such results are impossible “to manufacture”. So, cooling started around 1995. Obviously earth’s energy store is big and so far it has largely compensated for the drop in energy coming from the sun, but that WILL end. In fact, my results for the cooling , of, for example, Anchorage, Alaska are frightening. It already got about 1.5K colder there since 2000.
Obviously I don’t care much if nobody believes me – they will find out soon enough.
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 6:25 pm
So, cooling started around 1995.
This may well be the case for the cities you have studied, however RSS, UAH, Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2 all say 1998 was the warmest year. While anyone can find fault with any of these, the fact that all four of these say 1998 was the warmest, makes me doubt your claim for 1995. Now while it is possible to draw a slope line that is flat or negative from January 1997, it does not negate the fact that cooling started at the height of the El Nino of the century from February to April of 1998. Are you denying 1998 was much warmer than 1995? In the four data sets mentioned above, 1995 ranks 11th, 13th, 15th, and 17th respectively. And after 2012, I am expecting all of these to be another notch lower as 2012 will be warmer than 1995 unless a strong La Nina develops immediately.
Crispin,
Ignore joel shore, who says that “your latest posts donāt add anything to the discussion.” He is only engaging in psychological projection. After being soundly spanked by Lord Monckton, by you, and by others, joel shore once again exhibits his usual response.
Henry@Werner
It was the drop in maxima that revealed to me that the top of the warming episode was reached in 1995. It follows on a parabolic curve downward. I subsequently checked the data for means and minima as well, and sure as hell, it follows on similar parabolic curves, but…. there is a lag of course. Earth has a big store where it keeps its energy and it comes only out of that store much later. If you say the maximum (as seen by the average temps.on earth ) was 1998, I have no problem with that. There is too much noise in my dataset to come to an exact decision on when the maximum of the means was reached.
OTOH don’t forget that I have not seen the actual quoted accuracy and precision of your quoted datasets, neither do I have any insight as to how and how often calibration is performed. (I think I challenged Smokey on that as well, in this thread)
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 9:45 pm
….. There is too much noise in my dataset to come to an exact decision on when the maximum of the means was reached.
OTOH donāt forget that I have not seen the actual quoted accuracy and precision of your quoted datasets, neither do I have any insight as to how and how often calibration is performed. (I think I challenged Smokey on that as well, in this thread)
___________________________________
There is a problem with the data sets:
How the USA data was adjusted:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/giss/hansen-giss-1940-1980.gif
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
From article: Where did the decline go?
More data tampering
Hide the decline and rewrite history
Data Tampering: GISS Caught Red-handed Manipulating Data to Produce Arctic Climate History Revision
Scandinavia-gate
Other methods for “adjusting global temperature”
Graph of station dropout vs temperature
Did GISS Discover 30% More Land in the Northern-Hemisphere?
It seems they forgot to “adjust” this dataset…. Study finds stream temperatures don’t parallel warming climate trend
Do not forget to read AJ Strata’s look at the error in temperature measurements:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
And Jo Nova’s article on the Australian temperature record: http://joannenova.com.au/?s=shoddy+inaccurate
Frank Lanser’s website http://www.hidethedecline.eu/
@Gale
Thanks for the links – it is a good store of info there. 1995-98? Who cares. It is certainly not going up as it was for the 20 years previous to that. I agree that there was much fiddling with the numbers to present Nixonian plausible deniablity about an emerging cooling trend.
@Smokey
I was thinking last night about the psychology of those who show up the spit and piss on people pasting long quasi-scientific phrases purporting to show that this or that aspect of global warming canonical writings have been misunderstood, ‘need to be seen in context’ and all that diversionary crap. Did you notice that joel ended up exactly where I started, after all that dust and wind? Amazing. His main argument against calling for the right of reply for Monckton to be guaranteed is principally because it is Monckton who was attacked. In other words there are people with rights and then other people who do not deserve those rights. It brings to mind, as a long time resident of a country near South Africa, the ‘mark of Cain’ religious argument being invoked to deny the black population their basic human rights. “You are guilty of thinking wrong thoughts so you now bear the mark!” Orwellian thought-crime advocates dressed up in priestly robes. I observe that CAGW allows powerless, aspirant leaders to set theselves upon a pedastal a bit higher than a soap box and pontificate with impunity. If they have robes of the right colour, they can even get paid for it.
@EOS
You have blatantly attacked, and erroneously so, Lord Monckton. To refuse to publish his reply to your scurrilous attack is manifestly unjust. You have anointed you own head with the mantle, ‘political rag’. Shame on you.
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 9:45 pm
OTOH donāt forget that I have not seen the actual quoted accuracy and precision of your quoted datasets
See the following for Hadcrut3 and note that the top of the 95% error bar for 1995 is below the bottom of the error bar for 1998.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
P.S. It is GISS that I really do not trust. Others may also have problems, but none that would make 1995 warmer than 1998.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
On the particular issue of the amplification of multidecadal surface temperature trends in the tropical troposphere, yes. … Which is why it is way premature to conclude that it represents a problem with the models.
Yeah…Right…You don’t want to misrepresent it? Well, why don’t you try by NOT misrepresenting it. I have explained in gory detail what my position is and it bears essentially no resemblance to what you say. Why don’t you go back and actually read what I wrote this time.
I have no idea where you are going with the melting water thing. If you think that this is actually a significant effect acting to decrease CO2 levels, why don’t you demonstrate that to us?
You are just making stuff up now about my position. Where have I even taken a position on whether Monckton has the right to reply or not, let alone having an argument as to why or why not? I was responding to your claim that Monckton does real science by demonstrating that your example shows that in fact Monckton just regularly misinterprets science.
And, this is not some isolated case…Most of his arguments are like this. I have shown in other threads that his argument for determining the climate sensitivity based on the strength of the natural greenhouse effect is completely bogus. I have shown that his argument for re-evaluating the no-feedback sensitivity on the basis of the results that Nikolov and Zeller have highlighted on the average temperature of the moon is completely bogus. Tim Lambert in a debate showed that Monckton was trumpeting the work of someone who told Lambert that Monckton was severely misinterpreting her results. The list goes on and on.
There is a good reason why Monckton is not taken seriously by the scientific community and it is not a massive conspiracy, it is a complete lack of scientific credibility.
Mr. Shore continues to argue against me vituperatively ad hominem rather than on any rational, scientific basis.
He is wrong in his off-topic remark about climate sensitivity but says I am; he is wrong in his off-topic point about the Planck parameter but says I am; he is wrong in his off-topic point about Dr. Pinker telling Mr. Lambert I had “severely misrepresented” her results, when in fact I had reported them in all respects accurately and, when she eventually saw the paper in which I had drawn conclusions from those results (rather than the gravely distorted account given to her by Lambert), she had very little to say by way of complaint either about how I had reported her results or about the conclusions I had drawn, which were in due course published both in a learned journal and in a book of essays on climate sensitivity. Lambert even used an actress to recite the comments he had inveigled Dr. Pinker into making by misrepresenting my paper to her.
Mr. Shore continues to be wrong on his off-topic point about the tropical mid-troposphere hot-spot. Whether he likes it or not, the IPCC published – large and in full colour – a graph from Santer (2003, not the 2005 paper that Mr. Shore now cites) which plainly and clearly shows the vertical distribution of warming rates in the troposphere as markedly different under manmade global warming than under four distinct natural influences with which it is compared: so much so that the manmade contribution shows through with very great clarity even when it is combined with all four of the other forcings. That is how just about everyone except Mr. Shore has interpreted the IPCC’s admittedly sibylline text, taken with the illustrations; and that is why there has been such a considerable – and still unresolved, if Mr. Shore were honest enough to admit it – debate about why the model-predicted tropical mid-troposphere “hot spot” does not appear in observed reality. One notes Mr. Shore’s conclusion that if the short-term indications given by temperature measurements are correct then perhaps the long-run measurements will one day be found to correspond with the models; but that conclusion would be less profoundly unimpressive if Mr. Shore had not also said that one should prefer long-run results to short-run results.
Mr. Shore continues to be wrong when he says that my argument about the implausibly large closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s interval of climate sensitivities is unmeritorious. It is derived from process engineering theory, which, whether he likes it or not, is indeed the science from which the feedback methodology of the IPCC is taken, as he could have verified for himself if he had bothered to check the references at the end of my head posting before shooting his mouth off. His argument that my argument is based on too many uncertainties is ridiculous, given that it is the IPCC’s estimates of very high net-positive feedbacks that are wildly uncertain, because no feedback can be directly measured. Insofar as measurements can tell us anything, they suggest that feedbacks are somewhat net-negative, as theory would lead us to expect, rather than extravagantly and implausibly net-positive. Indeed, yet another recent paper has found that the much-vaunted water-vapor feedback exercises a mere shadow of the very strongly net positive influence imagined by the IPCC.
Whether Mr. Shore likes it or not, it is in the estimation of the contribution of feedbacks to overall forcing and consequent temperature change that the keenest distinction between the skeptics and the true-believers is to be found. The skeptics point out, rightly, that no feedback can be either directly measured observationally or definitively determined by theoretical methods, and that, since there are powerful reasons to suppose that this will remain the case for some time, the prudent course of action is to wait and see: for, in the long run, waiting and seeing will give us a better handle on climate sensitivity than the expensive guesswork of the models today. In the meantime, there is no case for doing anything at all about global warming except to enjoy the sunshine. If the planet begins to warm in a sustained and dangerous way, as it has failed to do throughout the past 60 years, we shall have plenty of time to put matters to rights, After all, there has been no global warming for about 15 years, so there is no hurry.
Frankly, it is the arrogant assumption of certainty by Mr. Shore and his ilk that has, in the end, proven so deeply and consistently unpersuasive, notwithstanding the billions that his associates have been able to spend on climate propaganda. The voters have smelt a rat: and Mr. Shore’s continued viciousness and unscientific hate-speech when debating these matters has played its own admittedly insignificant part in persuading the public that there is something very wrong with the official position. He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself for conducting himself in so unbecomingly hostile a fashion despite numerous warnings from me and others here. He must learn to moderate his language, cut out the hate speech and concentrate exclusively on science. Once he has learned to do that, perhaps we shall be able to take him seriously as a scientist rather than as an ill-informed, loud-mouthed propagandist.
We are quite accustomed to Mr. Shore being continuously wrong… around here, anyway. GK
@joeldshore
“I have no idea where you are going with the melting water thing. If you think that this is actually a significant effect acting to decrease CO2 levels, why donāt you demonstrate that to us?”
Melt some ice. Measure the CO2 immediately. Wait an hour, measure it again. You will find that melted ice (known in scientific circles as fresh water) absorbs CO2 in a predictable fashion. As teh tundra and glaciers and ice cape melt, huge amounts of CO2 are absorbed. I have put numbers regarding Greenland to this subject on other threads which you can find by searching this site.
“Where have I even taken a position on whether Monckton has the right to reply or not, let alone having an argument as to why or why not?”
As the subject of this thread is exactly that, why do you post such voluble babble without bothering to address the principal issue?
Regarding the (as usual) nail-on-the-head post by Monckton immediately above, you are once again thoroughly pwned. Your reputation is, like Hansen’s, one of literally never being right. Quite an accomplishment in this internet age of readily available information.
@chris, thanks as usual for not letting joel’s venal and mean-spirited misinformation go uncorrected.
I look forward with anticipation to any dissection you might make of AR5’s treatment of this central GHG issue – they are bound to address it because you have quite rightfully put it on the front burner.
Let’s review what has been shown here:
(1) I have shown that the GISS climate model predicts a pattern of warming in the troposphere that is practically identical whether the warming is due to solar forcing or GHGs ( http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ ) Lord Monckton has offered no response.
(2) I have explained in detail exactly how Lord Monckton apparently misinterpreted the IPCC figure to conclude that the pattern of warming in the tropical troposphere is very different for GHGs than other forcings like solar. In fact, I have discussed mathematically how the plot for solar forcing, which Lord Monckton interprets as lacking the sort of pattern of amplification seen for GHGs, actually shows an amplification factor which could be anywhere from 1 to infinity. Lord Monckton’s only response has been to vociferously claim that the figure “plainly and clearly shows the vertical distribution of warming rates in the troposphere as markedly different under manmade global warming than under four distinct natural influences with which it is compared” without actually addressing the points I have made. [He has now added the strange argument that “the manmade contribution shows through with very great clarity even when it is combined with all four of the other forcings”, which is of course simply due to the fact that the manmade contribution to the warming is much larger than the other contributions.]
(3) I have noted that the sort of amplification that Lord Monckton claims to be missing in the data is actually seen clearly for the temperature fluctuations on monthly to yearly timescales where the data is very reliable. Lord Monckton has stated in response: “One notes Mr. Shoreās conclusion that if the short-term indications given by temperature measurements are correct then perhaps the long-run measurements will one day be found to correspond with the models; but that conclusion would be less profoundly unimpressive if Mr. Shore had not also said that one should prefer long-run results to short-run results.” However, he has gotten it exactly backwards: It is the fluctuations in the shorter term that can be accurately measured…and it is the underlying multidecadal trends that are unfortunately subject to artifacts such as changes in satellites or in radiosonde instrumentation. (Perhaps he is confused here because it is often explained that one has to look over the long times to most accurately determine the underlying trend in a system that has a long term underlying trend plus short term fluctuations; if one looks over the short term, one doesn’t get an accurate measure of the underlying long term trend. However, that is not what we are talking about here: We are talking about looking at amplification of any kind of warming or cooling, which might be due to a long term effect like GHGs or might be due to shorter term fluctuations like those due to ENSO. Apparently, such distinctions, easily understood by scientists, are alas not so well-understood by Lord Monckton.)
I think we will leave it there. There are other things that seem dubious, such as the unsupported claim that Dr. Pinker has undergone some sort of conversion and now no longer believes that Lord Monckton is misinterpreting the data. (And, I am left wondering what “learned journal and and “book of essays on climate sensitivity” has published Lord Monckton’s work!)
It is interesting that Lord Monckton, while avoiding addressing my scientific points, has nonetheless made wild unsubstantiated claims that I am engaging in “hate speech” and, apparently with no sense of irony has made the claim that my arguments are “vituperatively ad hominem rather than on any rational, scientific basis” in the same post that he describes me as an “ill-informed, loud-mouthed propagandist”!
Models are wrong as usual; the tropospheric ‘hotspot’, the so-called “fingerprint of global warming” fails the empirical evidence test.ā¹
Who to believe? Models, or the Real World?
Hnery@Werner
Thanks Werner. I understand the confusion now, and following that, I re-wrote the relevant sections on my blog a bit, i.e.
begin quote
………
For those of you who think that earth is still warming: you are wrong. From a sample of 45 weather stations taken randomly from all over the world, I find that a turning point was reached around 1995. Note that the sample of weather stations is well balanced by latitude and 70/30 sea ā inland
……..
We note from my 3 tables below that Maxima, Means and Minima have all turned negative between 12 and 22 years ago. The change in signal is best observed in that of the Maxima where we can see a gradual decline of the maximum temperatures from +0.036 degrees C per annum (over the last 38 years) to -0.015 (when taken over the last 12 years).
If we plot the global measurements for the change in Maxima, Means and Minima against the relevant time periods, it can be shown that the best fit for each of the curves is given by a polynominal of the 2nd order (parabolic fit).
Namely, for maxima it is
y= -0.00006 X2+ 0.00480X -0.06393
rĀ²= 0.997
For means, it is
y= -0.0001 X2 +0.0064X – 0.0778
rĀ²= 0.959
For minima, it i
y= -0.00008 X2 + 0.00408X – 0.04178
rĀ²= 0.985
Using the maxima plot, we note that at 0 (zero) when there was a turning point, i.e. no warming or cooling, we find x=17 years. From this sample of weather stations I can therefore estimate with reasonable accuracy that earth received its maximum energy input from the sun via the atmosphere during 2012-17=1995.
(if we are tempted to look at the root of same binominal on the other side, i.e. when global warming started, we find 68, suggesting that the global warming cycle started officially somewhere in 2012-68=1944. Remember that this latter result is speculative, and could be out by a year or so, as I do not have any real measurements from 1944-1973 but we are using an approximation from a probable plot).
It can also be shown that the nature of the graph for means is one that lags a bit on the graph for maxima: earth has a store where it keeps its energy and a lot of that energy only comes out bit later. Although the plot for means with rsquare 0.959 is still impressive, showing there is a definite relationship, I would not use it to determine the roots to give me the actual time when earth reached its maximum energy output (when it was the “warmest”). However, I would generally agree with the available datasets like RSS, UAH, Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2 that that must have been a few years after 1995.
………..
end quote
I am still puzzled that nobody that I asked here on WUWT ever picked up on the significance of an apparent 50 (+/- 1 yr) year sun cycle. Does 7 x 7 + 1 Jubilee year ring a bell? It was very important in the Jewish traditions. I am sure Moses took that significant period/ tradition from the Egyptians, the pyramid builders, who were experts in anything and everything that happened on the sun. I am sitting here, realizing how smart they really must have been and how dumb all our learned climate scientists all are.
How interesting it is that Mr. Shore continues to concentrate on various off-topic matters. He has had little to say on the substance of my head posting, but has chosen instead to attempt to derail discussion by going on and on and on about the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot”. He continues disingenuously to maintain that the graph from Santer (2003: not the 2005 paper that Mr. Shore cites) does not plainly show what just about everyone else who has looked at it considers that it does show: namely, a very distinct pattern of altitude-vs.-latitude warming showing an exceptional concentration of warming in the tropical mid-troposphere – a pattern that is not observed in reality in any of the published datasets (with the single exception of one that has formidable problems, which Santer (2008) sought to rely upon in justification of his original conclusion that the hot-spot was present and, by implication, that we are the cause. He contends that the solar plot in Santer’s figure coiuld be interpreted as showing any amplification of tropical mid-troposphere warming rates compared with the surface from 1 to infinity. But that is absurd: the plain intent of the graph is to show that the distribution of the warming differential is far more concentrated in the mid-troposphere under anthropogenic warming than under not merely solar but also three other natural warmings about which Mr. Shore is silent.
It is regrettable that I am unable to post the figure here: readers would get the point as soon as they saw it.
Mr. Shore is also silent upon the fact that many scientists and scientific bodies have interpreted the Santer graph in the same way as I have. In the circumstances, it is regrettable that the IPCC, in being characteristically obscurantist, caused precisely the confusion of which Mr. Shore, in his original hate-speech attack on me in this thread, falsely attributed to me.
It is irrelevant whether the GISS climate model predicts what Mr. Shore shows it predicts: my original discussion of the hot-spot, published at scienceandpublicpolicy.org, was a discussion of the IPCC’s presentation, specifically including the Santer graph, and not a discussion of the GISS model.
I have already made it clear earlier in this thread that the IPCC may indeed have been wrong in suggesting that there is a distinction between a clearly-discernible hot-spot if the cause of warming is anthropogenic and the absence of so distinct a hot-spot if it is natural: however, that is the clear impression that not only I but many others drew from the IPCC’s publication of Santer’s graph, and the IPCC has only itself to blame if – as Mr. Shore himself confesses earlier in this thread – it did not explain its use of the Santer graph more clearly.
Mr. Shore also snidely implies that the paper in which he had falsely claimed I had “misrepresented” the results of Dr. Pinker had not been published, as I had said it had. First and foremost, since Mr. Shore does not know that the paper has been published, he has plainly not read it, and, therefore, has not the slightest scientific justification for saying what it does and does not misrepresent. Whether he likes it or not, the paper was published in the Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Seminars on Planetary Emergencies of the World Federation of Scientists, at which it was presented, and was also subsequently included in a book of essays on climate sensitivity edited by Dr. Don Easterbrook.
Here as elsewhere, Mr. Shore has been guilty of an unscientific and venomously ad-hominem approach: he implied that my paper had not been published in either of the two places where it has in fact been published, without bothering to check as a scientist should, because it suited him to do so. He is not a true scientist.
HenryP says:
July 19, 2012 at 12:21 am
It is certainly an improvement when you allow the major data sets to be true and to not imply you knew the cooling started years before all other data sets showed it. Otherwise people may have a tendency to not even read what else you have to say. We are all presumably ‘busy’ and we have to decide which entries to devote time to and if you start off contradicting all major data sets, well that is no way to encourage people to read the rest of your piece.
(if we are tempted to look at the root of same binominal on the other side, i.e. when global warming started, we find 68, suggesting that the global warming cycle started officially somewhere in 2012-68=1944.
You completely lost me there. That is when the earlier warm streak that started around 1910 ended. Then almost nothing happened for 30 years. See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1944/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:1976/trend
@joeldshore
I do not wish you any ill but seriously, you are bringing humiliation upon yourself with your shortsighted and pointless aggression. No one has anything to gain from your loss of face, just as we have nothing to gain should any of your mud-slinging efforts find a target.
You have been caught grossly misrepresenting Lord Monckton, nd it looks deliberate or at best, incompetent. Your pants are down and you are getting spanked. When you are in a deep, public hole, you just gotta stop digging.
If you think people who have been personally attacked in a publication like EOS should have a published right of reply, this is the place to say so, then depart for your next venture. I encourage you to do both.
joeldshore says:
The first statement you make here is wrong for the following reason: The absorption lines of CO2 have a certain shape and while they may be saturated in the center of the line, they are not far enough out in the wings.
I calculate that the absorption bands of CO2 are saturated after 3600m of traverse through the atmosphere. You say that the bands are not saturated in the wings or on the shoulders, would this situation change after further traverse in your view or would the bands or lines remain unsaturated no matter how far the traverse was?
l
werner says
You completely lost me there.
Henry says
Look only at the unadjusted data since 1944 to 2011
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1944/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:1976/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:2011/trend/plot/none
Clearly you see a maximum reached at around 1997?
from 1995 we are on a cycle going down for 50 years. Theoretically I say that in 2045 it will be as cold as it was in 1944.
I don’t trust the data before 1944. They did not have good calibrated thermometers. They did not have temp. recorders. The “employee” had to read every few hours to get a mean. Forget about that. If you had maxima data from before the war I would trust it more, because the employee could not make a mistake with that.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
No…That was not the intent at all. Here is a link to the figure, by the way: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-9-1.html I can understand that someone who hasn’t had great experience reading contour plots might initially be led to believe that the pattern in the troposphere (the part of the atmosphere with pressures larger than ~100-150 hPa) is very different for the GHGs vs solar. However, a more careful look at the values shows that the problem is that the structure of the solar forcing is not well-resolved on this plot because the contour spacing of 0.2 C is not much smaller than the largest magnitude of the forcing in the tropical troposphere. [One can “simulate” in one’s mind how this resolution issue works by thinking about what the GHG contour plot would look like if the contour spacing were, say, 0.6 or 0.8 C rather than 0.2 C.]
However, what I find puzzling is why one would persist in the error after having it carefully explained to them and furthermore having the close equivalence of the patterns for solar vs GHG forcing demonstrated for a case where the forcings are of similar strength: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/
As for the other natural forcings, they generally suffer from the same issue as the solar of having their structure not very well resolved by the 0.2 C contour interval. The largest, and thus best resolved, of the natural forcings is the direct sulfate aerosol forcing and indeed it shows the amplification the best of the natural forcings. (In this case, since the forcing is negative, the amplification leads to a greater cooling at altitude than at the surface, which makes sense particular when you consider that if the aerosols had decreased rather than increased over time, it would show warming with greater warming at altitude than at the surface.)
I don’t know of any outside of the “AGW skeptic” community that have misinterpreted the graph in this way.
People need to take responsibility for their own errors. So, no, it is not the IPCC’s fault that you misinterpreted the graph. They wanted to produce a graph where the color scale was not different for each forcing and thus their plot necessarily better-resolves the spatial structure of the larger forcings than the smaller ones. Perhaps they might have anticipated that it could be misinterpreted, but it is difficult to anticipate the ways in which people can creatively misinterpret things.
The amplification results from very basic physics of the tropical atmosphere that is shared by all the models, so one would expect different models to show very similar results for this structure.
No…You inferred that; I didn’t imply it. What I had meant to imply when I said “I am left wondering what ā’learned journal and and ‘book of essays on climate sensitivity” has published Lord Moncktonās work” was just what I said, that I was wondering who would publish such stuff. In particular, I doubted that it would be published in a very rigorous peer-reviewed journal or in a book that had contributions from respected scientists in the field. And, indeed, we see that it was published in some conference proceedings (whether there was any sort of peer-review of the contributions to that proceedings I do not know) and in a book that is basically just a collection of essays by the “usual suspects” ( http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/easterbrook_evidence-based-climate-science.pdf ), Joseph D’Aleo, Steve Goddard, David Archibald, etc. So, indeed, we now know where it was published and it confirms my suspicions of where such a piece could conceivably get published.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
On the contrary, in this and other threads, I have shown how Lord Monckton serially misinterprets things in climate science. This is why he is not taken seriously in the scientific community, but only in a small community of admirers who share his beliefs and apparently don’t know any better. If you actually want to have some impact on the scientific discussion (rather than just trying to confuse the greater public), then you need to stop worshiping people who have zero credibility within the scientific community. Your imaginations that Lord Monckton’s discussion of the “hot spot” has had or will have any significant impact on the scientific thinking is extremely misguided. At best, it will serve as a cautionary tail of how science gets misinterpreted by non-scientists with an agenda.
Crispin in Waterloo has it right. Mr. Shore, distracted by an unreasonable and unreasoning hatred, frequently expressed in the most childishly unscientific terms in these threads, has repeatedly misrepresented me and has made unscientific and inaccurate assumptions and statements. For this and other reasons, he is not taken seriously either here or in the wider scientific community.
He now accuses me of having “an agenda” – once again, without any evidence. What “agenda”? It is now obvious that the exaggerated predictions in the Holy Books of IPeCaC have largely not come to pass, and that, even if they were to occur, it would be orders of magnitude more cost-effective to allow the warming to take place and to adapt to any adverse consequences than to attempt any mitigation of CO2 emissions today. Is it not permissible for a layman to draw attention to these manifest and growing discrepancies between extremist prediction and unspectacular reality?
He continues to insist upon his misinterpretation of the graph in Santer (2003) that clearly shows a far greater concentration of warming in the mid-troposphere as a result of anthropogenic influences than as a result of several individual natural influences. He says the resolution of the graph is insufficient to show the “hot-spot” in the plots of natural influences. If that were so, the IPCC should have either required better resolution or should not have used the graph, which, as shown, is misleading. And – even if we assume per impossibile that Mr. Shore’s interpretation is correct, my interpretation has been widely shared by others on both sides of the climate divide. He continues to be disingenuous about the offending figure in IPCC (2007).
At the very least, the discrepancy between what the models predict and what is observed in the real climate suggests either that the models are incorrect on this (as they are on much else) or that the real-world climate-science data on which the models and the IPCC rely are incorrect on this (as they are on much else). Though Mr. Shore seems strangely reluctant to admit it, this particular discrepancy has attracted considerable attention among the scientific bodies and also in the peer-reviewed literature. He may object to this, preferring to accept everything that the Holy Books hand down, but – whether he likes it or not – it is so. Whether it is the data or the models or both that are at fault, the discrepancy between them is real and one can have very little confidence in the certainty of future catastrophe to which Mr. Shore and his fellow climate-extremists are so profitably wedded. It is not for him to criticize me for pointing out the existence and potential significance of that discrepancy.
It is indeed likely that the climate will cause much difficulty in future: for it has done so for 4,567 million years. The central question, however, is whether Man’s influence will make for more difficulty or less difficulty. On that question, precisely because the resolution of the data and of the models is entirely insufficient, predictions of climatic catastrophe are misconceived and, scientifically speaking, baseless.
In his characteristically surly fashion, he now concedes that the paper by me that he had claimed (without any evidence) had not been published has indeed been published, first in a respected annual collection of scientific papers by the World Federation of Scientists and secondly in a book edited by Dr. Don Easterbrook. He snidely objects to the latter publication on the ground that the book contains entries by others who have dared to question whether Man’s influence on the climate is or ever could be significant enough to prove dangers, and he dismisses the book, without having read it, upon that prejudiced ground alone. With equally poor justification, I might point out that the climate extremists tend to publish in journals favorable to them. Mr. Shore had been foolish and wrong to imply that my paper had not been published as I had said it had: and a true scientist, instead of continuing to snipe snidely about it, would have accepted that he had acted unscientifically, irraltionally, and without any evidence. A true scientist might even have apologized, but not Mr. Shore. Must try harder!
REPLY: Maybe some “shore leave” is in order. – Anthony
@joeldshore says:
“On the contrary, in this and other threads, I have shown how Lord Monckton serially misinterprets things in climate science.”
I take this to mean you have libelled and slandered the good Lord in other venues with impunity, perhaps? Not so comfortable here, I presume, where the right of reply prevails. This is not EOS.
>This is why he is not taken seriously in the scientific community,
I take him very seriously and I am ‘in the scientific community’ be several definitions of it. I think you wish he were not taken so seriously, as do many others who have crossed pens with him to their regret.
>If you actually want to have some impact on the scientific discussion … then you need to stop worshiping people who have zero credibility within the scientific community.
First I do not worship people and second it is arguments and theses that have credibilty. Logic is no respecter of persons, much as others would have it be different.
>Your imaginations that Lord Moncktonās discussion of the āhot spotā has had or will have any significant impact on the scientific thinking is extremely misguided.
Let’s put your thesis to the test: Monckton’s demolition of the putative hot spot in 2007 is the best explanation of the effect and analysis of the data I have seen to date. It is constructed upon the physical models and physics known to the IPCC authors and is known to appear in the outputs of climate models. There is a report (AR5) coming soon in which this will have to be addressed because it represents the first opportunity for the collected wisdom of the IPCC authors to be on display and to show us that the increase in the temperature at that altitude conforms to modeled predictions. We await with bated breath. Many thousands of readers want to see Monckton’s calculations refuted – and not without reason! His paper is a stake through the heart of AGW, a clutch of garlic yoked to the neck of the CO2 Vampire.
>At best, it will serve as a cautionary tail of how science gets misinterpreted by non-scientists with an agenda.
That, Mr Shore, is exactly how we will view your enthusiastic engagement, unarmed, in a battle of wits, with your ‘cautionary tail’ pinned to the CAGW donkey.
HenryP says:
July 19, 2012 at 8:54 am
See my addition. I could just as truthfully say warming started in 1910. As we know, it all depends on start and end points. As for the turn around, that would be at the beginning of 1998. The raw data verifies this better than eyeballing the graph.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1944/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:1976/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:2011/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1910/trend
Theoretically I say that in 2045 it will be as cold as it was in 1944.
If the cycle is 60 years, then 2028 could be the lowest.
There is a lot of open questions – and NONE have been addressed by the so-called “climate science” industry trying its best now to “pay friends and kill people” as they work to destroy the world’s economy and health.
But, if one regards the historic and proxy records of the cyclical temperatures through the warm Roman Warm Period, cooler – more deadly Dark Ages, the warmer-than-present Medieval Warming Period, then the cooler Little Age through today’s Modern Warming Period … you HAVE to wonder who will dare try to find a cause for the long-term earth temperature cycle.
And, actually, the “cause” of the Long Term Temperature Cycle is not as important as the duration (actual curve of its period) and its maximum/minimum temperatures. Remarkably, no one can specifically say WHEN it was previously hotter than now: Estimates and hand-waving, no date. The Little Ice Age is a little more clear, but really? 1650? 1600? 1600-1700?
When was the low point?
What was the temperature?
What is the Period of the long term cycle, and thus – when will it peak in the Modern Period?
Add to this question the 60 year short cycle of temperature – again the theoretical WHY (Why is there a short term cycle at all) is irrelevant until the WHAT is the short term cycle and HOW BIG is the short term cycle?
So, when will the temperature peak?
This cycle? 2002? 1998? 2010? The 2000-2010 flat period? Have we already passed what will be remembered fondly as the “good ole days of warmth and long growing periods”?
Will the peak come at the next cycle? 2010 + 60 years?
At the cycle after that? 2010 + 60 + 60 years?
Henry@Werner
for the moment forget about before 1935. They barely had cars then let alone calibrated thermometers. Where would they calibrate against? Note that you can draw a hyperbolic curve with the data from 1935, reaching the coldest point just before the fifties. This is exactly as expected by my theory.That also means it was warmest around 1897 or 1898.
So my theory of a 50 year warming and a 50 year cooling cycle still holds reasonably well, as suggested by my dataset and at least one official dataset..
It is a pity that climate scientists decided to look at average temps only.Maxima has much less weather noise.
BTW
Werner, I think have already established an ozone connection in the UV-O2-O3 cycle that seems to be causing this. Less ozone means more UV and energy coming in. The scare about the ozone getting thinner and the hole bigger was very real in the nineties, when ozone was the lowest. In the new millennium it is recovering significantly.