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.
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Scores:
Monckton – unum bunchum
Shore, Clarke, et al – 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 ………. –1
THUD!
Tee hee.
Hey, it’s gone very quiet. 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: “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.]
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 path…..
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 ‘not statistically significant’. 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 ‘science’ 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 don’t 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 …. 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….
🙂
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?
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