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 there’s 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 mélange or smørgasbord 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 “intend to muddy the waters with respect to climate science” (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 “climate change deniers” (ad hom.) – 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 “strategies” to counter us – including “public displays” and “social media” – 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. Greenland’s 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 Man’s 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 – 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 CO2’s 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 – allowing for great uncertainties –indicates 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 Earth’s formidable temperature stability, the IPCC’s 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 m–2; 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 Earth’s 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 Earth’s radiant-energy balance, Remote Sensing 3, 1603-1613, doi:10.3390/rs3081603.
Trenberth, K.E., J.T. Fasullo, C. O’Dell, 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.
─ CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY, Chief Policy Advisor, Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington, DC, USA; monckton@mail.com.
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 Monckton’s discussion of the “hot spot” 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.