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.
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. 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.
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?☺
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 “rigth to reply” in making this into an essay on global warming…Also his latin is more impressive than his use of English. “attack on Dr. Giaever and me ” should be “Dr. Giaever and myself”.
No, ‘myself’ is reflexive, and Monckton has it right. You, Solar, are wrong.
“invective and illogic” , my dictionary is having trouble finding the word “illogic”.
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”.
🙂
Let’s not confuse them with Normal Science terminology.
Phil Clarke says:
“I think ‘fact-free’ is a better description of Monckton’s 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 🙂
[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 [] ‘real science’” 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: @ur momisugly 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. Shore’s first (and very much off-topic) comment above on my Eos article he wrote:
“The predicted “hotspot” … 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.”
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:
“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.”
Mr. Shore says the “punchline” is that “the two different forcings are predicted to have virtually identical effect throughout the troposphere”. No, they’re not. The punchline is in the paragraph itself, which makes plain: “IN 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.”
What I neglected to point out in my reply to Mr. Shore’s comment is that the paragraph he now disputes is taken verbatim (for non-Latinists, that means “word for word”) from Chapter 9 of the IPCC’s 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 “confusion” in my account of the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot”. 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 “confusion” over whether the mid-troposphere hot-spot is a fingerprint of manmade “global warming”.
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. “one by one”):
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 “warming island” 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 “global warming” will bring. Except that there has not been any statistically-significant “global warming” for a decade and a half. An event cannot have been caused by “global warming” that has not in fact occurred – and has certainly not occurred at anything like the predicted rate.
He challenges my statement that the IPCC’s 1990 predictions of the warming that should have occurred by now have been proven to be wild exaggerations by praising – I kid you not – the predictions in the IPCC’s 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 models’ 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 – 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 – 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 “global warming” 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 – 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 “global warming” will bring. Except that there has not been any statistically-significant “global warming” 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]