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.
Has no one else noticed the following snippet from Corbin and Katz’s note:
specifically the phrase, “climate researchers most actively publishing”?
They’re quoting from that dubious Master’s Thesis project, which started with 10,000 or so requests, which were progressively whittled down to 77 out of 79 scientists with “more than half their papers in climatology” or something to that effect. This in itself says a lot about the sort of people we’re dealing with here.The difference between these guys and the typical warmista posting a comment on a thread such as this is that they are careful to include the qualifying phrase I’ve noted. But that doesn’t make their statement any less dubious, which I suspect they know – it just makes it ‘correct’ in some legalistic sense.
It’s as if these people can never avoid being duplicitous; it’s like a tic that they can’t suppress.
According to AGW theory, CO2 should have been warming us up as soon as the Earth’s orbit around the Sun signaled Spring to begin. Didn’t happen in Oregon. CO2 must be on vacation. Snow can still be seen on the mountain peaks. It was too cold for morels this year, grasshoppers are again the size of gnats, bats are still delaying birth, and wolverines are finding plenty of cold places to store their food. Don’t get me wrong, I can tell you why we are cold this decade compared to previous decades (oceanic and atmospheric oscillations). If AGW theory is valid, its effects are so small they are buried in natural oscillations.
Henry@rw
Don!t worry too much. Truth has a habit of showing up at some time. A good scientist isb onne who is able to predict the future. Those types of people are really only a few in 100
To return to the problem of EOS denying the right of reply, I think the rot set in when “Scientific American” denied Bjorn Lomborg his rights. At about that point “Scientific American” became more like “Popular Mechanics” and soon after that became part of the “Nature” group – and look what has happened to “Nature”. Rot will spread if not cut out.
Addendum to my previous comment:
I should have said that putting in that qualifying phrase makes the statement more accurate. But given the provenance of the statistic, it’s no less dubious.
Come to think of it, this 97% figure that is bandied about so often has a weird resemblance to voting tallies in countries with totalitarian regimes. It may be that in both situations the same vulgar mentality is revealed, that can be reassured by excessive proportions like these without realizing that it is this very excessiveness that makes them hard to credit.
Pam says
It is getting colder in Oregon too.
Henry says
Which is your nearest big airport there and I will probably be able to figure out by how much it got cooler there.
OFF TOPIC
I wonder why Lucy Skywalker’s ‘account’ at http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Curious.htm has been suspended.
It was working a few days ago. How odd.
@rw
You are right about the survey story %, though it was 75 of 77, actually. In other words it was worse than you thought!
joeldshore says:
July 15, 2012 at 6:28 am
The issue is one of where the last absorption occurs…i.e., at what height in the atmosphere the LWIR is emitted that can escape to space without being absorbed again. Because this occurs higher in the atmosphere, where it is colder (because of the lapse rate in the atmosphere), the surface will be at a higher temperature than it would be if all the IR emitted from the surface escaped to space.
====================================================
This notion is absolutely absurd.
@joeldshore:
You cherry pick points of convenience to obfucate the total. Firstly it doesn’t matter a damn whether CO2 warming has a different signature in the hot spot if the hot spot doesn’t appear. What this does is falsify the hypothesis that a near impossible magnification of 3 occurs due to increase in absolute humidity as the temperature rises. Lord Monckton has supported his argument by showing that the water feedback magnification claimed by the climate lobby requires a feedback loop gain of +0.64 which is close to being impossible in a stable system. I go further because this gain requires surviving a feedforward loop gain of almost +0.95 if the amplitude and/or lags due to the negative and positive feedbacks are independent. You don’t even mention this in your responses. So you are arguing semantics. To refute his claim you must restore the hotspot demonstrating that Water feedback is positive (at all) AND you must show that the climate could be as stable as it is with a net loop gain of +0.64 and a positive feedback component of +0.95, and must also show that the negative and positive feedbacks are not independent.
I await your proof?
This round would seem to go to Monckton.
Bobl says:
No it doesn’t. Do you care to let us in on your chain of logic that leads you to conclude that?
It’s just a bunch of vague assertions from analogies to electrical systems where I don’t even think the terms are necessarily defined in the same way. (We have had systems control people swear that net positive feedback in the context of that field means instability. However, this is only true in the climate science case if you define the zeroth order effect to be the radiative forcing and define Planck response to be a feedback, which is a not-unreasonable way to do things but in climate science they have traditionally defined the zeroth-order effect to be the temperature rise you get once you consider the Planck response but no other effects of the rise in temperature like the water vapor feedback. So, the whole argument comes down to ones of different definitions and correctly understanding how terminology is used in each field.) In order to be critiqued, it has to be actually fleshed out into a coherent argument rather than a vague assertion.
Furthermore, it must be explained why the models themselves, which have significant feedback loop gains don’t then exhibit such an instability. What are they missing that keeps them stable with such gains when the climate system would not be?
@joeldshore
“However, this is only true in the climate science case if you define the zeroth order effect to be the radiative forcing and define Planck response to be a feedback, which is a not-unreasonable way to do things but in climate science they have traditionally defined the zeroth-order effect to be the temperature rise you get once you consider the Planck response but no other effects of the rise in temperature like the water vapor feedback.”
That, sir, is the hallmark of ‘a vague assertion’. You do not seem to consider the possiblity, which many find convincing, that the watr vapour feedback leading to more cloudiness is negative which explains the remarkably balanced climate we have despite fluctuations in CO2 of 200-7000 ppm. No tipping points, no run-away. No crisis, no funding to study it, no dismantling of the economic system to ‘avert a crisis’. We have far larger problems, one of which is the corruption of scientific endeavour by anointed cliques.
The models do not have feedback instability because they are programmed not to, unlike real systems. Your expression of the idea that mathematical models do not have feedback instability so the climate must also not have instability is bizarre. If you don’t know anything about feedback instability (you have not said anything so far that indicates you do) perhaps consulting with some knowledgeable people who do will raise your understanding. It does not come down to different definitions, it comes down to the fact that the climate is virtually unaffected by a change in CO2 concentration once it has exceeded 200 ppm. It is a short and uninspiring story.
Spot on Crispin. Shore’s blah blah supposition based on his models discounts the real world and measurements. That’s what I meant in my earlier post as fact free rambling. The models have proved bugger all when compared to reality and have nothing to do with reality, They reflect the convoluted thinking of blind faith based on CO2 espoused by the RC crowd and Joel himself.
One more example of the models being useless and exaggerating is seen in today’s new thread at WUWT
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/15/texas-tall-tales-and-global-warming/#comments
joeldshore says:
July 15, 2012 at 6:28 am
Robert S says:
There is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb to extinction the absorbable LWIR; addition of more CO2 would not add to atmospheric warming.
The first statement you make here is wrong for the following reason: The absorption lines of CO2 have a certain shape and while they may be saturated in the center of the line, they are not far enough out in the wings.
The second statement is wrong both because the first statement is wrong and because the first statement is somewhat of a “red herring”. The issue is not a binary one of whether the LWIR from the surface gets absorbed or not. The issue is one of where the last absorption occurs…i.e., at what height in the atmosphere the LWIR is emitted that can escape to space without being absorbed again. Because this occurs higher in the atmosphere, where it is colder (because of the lapse rate in the atmosphere), the surface will be at a higher temperature than it would be if all the IR emitted from the surface escaped to space.
There is zero controversy about this within the scientific community. Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, and Willis Eschenbach, as far as I have seen, all support this basic picture. I believe that Monckton would subscribe to it to.
Most contributors agree that your models are useless Joel so why should my carefully worked out conclusion concerning the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere be incorrect compared with your mere supposition.
Caragea says:
July 13, 2012 at 7:41 am
Christopher Monckton is not a scientist, and his ‘theory’ has many flaws. I’m still waiting to see the alternative theory that explains what CO2 emissions are supposed to do if not trapping infra red radiation into the atmosphere (which cause warming).
Yes CO2 does absorb long wave infra red radiation but only in certain wavelengths that are soon absorbed to extinction after a relatively short traverse through the atmosphere. Addition of more CO2 would not absorb any further LWIR as the absorbable wavebands are ’empty’ and therefore not cause further warming.
The hypothesis stands on increased water vapor (some say relative, some say absolute) as a result of the initial increase in warming from CO2 re-radiated IR. The increased warming from the water vapor causes an increase in outgassing of CO2 from oceans, bacteria, and insect blooms, which warms us more, causing more water vapor from the oceans. It is the water vapor that takes over after CO2 is saturated. No one knows for sure what the maths are for this cycle so they include a fudge factor increase in the models partially based on the observed warming in the temp data sets.
Clearly, this is still an infant hypothesis with crappy nappies in need of changing.
@Pamela
I have no problem with people changing their models as new information and understandings surface. I do have a problem with them being taken as realistic forecasters. Note the structure of the pro-model arguments. “They are based on well-understood physics”. Well, that is probably true in that most people try to do a good job. But if the understanding is partial, clouds being a good example, then the models are not much more than toys.
I have to provide 3D drawings of parts that are used in CFD modelling – occupying my whole week. They are used to create projections of gas and heat flows in those parts. The physics of heat transfer and convection and gas flow through the parts is really well understood. But if you see the results from runs of the CFD programme, you rapidly realise that it is a tuning tool, not a predictor of performance. Even a really skilled modeller will only get improved results and good indications and guidance, not perfection. And we are speaking about things assumed to be in equilibrium when the printout comes.
Even the basic things I use it for are difficult to render perfectly. I use the these model outputs to guide my design process, not as a definitive statements of ‘what will happen’ when I change a port size or use thicker material or radius a joint. They do not show ‘the truth’ they indicate changes from a previous best guess.
The climate models are just extremely complex CFD models and have legitimate use for examining things that are already well understood, and for use as a guide to tuning some real system. As has often been noted on WUWT, people have started to believe their models, as if they are more real and comprehensive than the outside world. They treat the numbers spitting out as ‘data’. It is the dose of reality that actual measurements bring which should make them snap out of it. It is not working, mostly.
A good example of failed modelling is the trophospheric hot spot. The physics look great, but the model is incomplete. Until it is complete, the output is not valuable, and certainly not predictive of the consequences of a changed variable. A buncha people guessed in 1995 based on what they knew that CO2 would be proven to be very important to global temperature. They guessed wrong. That’s all. No big deal. Let’s move on.
Pam says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/12/moncktons-reply-to-eos-on-climate-denial/#comment-1033864
Henry says
I found humidity actually decreasing,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
at a rate of about -0.02% RH per annum since 1975
(and I am not the only one reporting this, somewhere some time ago WUWT also reported about
-0.01% RH per annum for the USA)
In hindsight, this makes sense to me, with maxima gradually dropping and therefore the total input of energy into earth also gradually dropping, this obviously causes more precipitation of water vapor in the atmosphere and less humidity.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Crispin in Waterloo says:
(1) Very few scientists working in the field find the evidence for such a negative feedback to be convincing. Lots of non-scientists who want to believe that AGW is not a problem find it convincing most likely because they find it convenient.
(2) Actually, the paleoclimate record shows that the climate is not remarkably balanced. In fact, it becomes quite difficult to explain things like the glacial-interglacial oscillations with such a negative feedback. Scientists studying paleoclimate have generally concluded that the climate sensitivities are likely in the range that the IPCC estimates, if not higher ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5697/821.summary )
Really? Could you explain to me how they are programmed not to?
Pamela Gray says:
No…The fact is that the CO2 effect does not saturate in the way that people like Robert S think it does. In the concentration range of interest, the forcing depends approximately logarithmically on CO2 concentration. That means that the forcing vs concentration curve has downward curvature…but it does not saturate. A log dependence means the amount of forcing change when you go from, say, 280 ppm to 560 ppm is the same as that to go from 140 ppm to 280 ppm.
No they don’t. The water vapor feedback is included in the models mechanistically…and its strength is now quite well-verified. The feedback due to clouds is more uncertain although it still isn’t put in using a fudge factor but uses various parametrizations of clouds that differ from model to model and account for most of the difference in climate sensitivity between different models.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
No it’s not. It is an example of disagreement between the models and some data sets. You have no justification for concluding definitively that it is a failure in the modeling. It is like saying, “The experiment where they measured faster-than-light neutrinos is a good example of the failure of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”
In fact, the history so far has been that the data sets have been the ones that seem to have the most problems with the multidecadal temperature trend in the tropical troposphere. Even since the Santer 2005 paper ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5740/1551.short ) was published, it has been found that UAH’s LT trend estimate for the tropics was highly erroneous. And, while the corrected trend is still not in agreement with the models (although RSS’s essentially is), the correction to the UAH data set went a long way (about half way, I think) toward resolving that discrepancy. And, this was not the first major correction that was needed to the UAH data set.
And, you are conveniently ignoring the other facts that undermine your hypothesis that it is the models that are wrong. For example, you ignore the fact that all the data sets and models are in basic agreement on tropical tropospheric amplification for fluctuations in temperature that occur on monthly to yearly time scales where the data is most reliable. Where the models and some of the data sets part company is on the multidecadal trends, exactly the aspect of the data that is most susceptible to known artifacts from changes in instrumentation, stitching together of data from different satellites, etc.
You also have failed to provide any sort of credible hypothesis as to how the models could get the amplification right on the monthly to yearly timescales but fail on the multidecadal ones. Since the principle leading to the prediction is the basic physics of convection in the tropical atmosphere, a process measured roughly on timescales of hours, it is rather difficult to come up with plausible scenarios. For example, some people have desperately tried to connect the “hotspot” issue with ideas of Lindzen and Spencer involving the cloud feedback, suggesting that the two are somehow related. However, this won’t work because the timescale over which Lindzen and Spencer have analyzed the cloud feedback correspond more to the monthly to yearly timescales, over which the models correctly predict the behavior.
@joeldshore
“(1) Very few scientists working in the field find the evidence for such a negative feedback to be convincing. Lots of non-scientists who want to believe that AGW is not a problem find it convincing most likely because they find it convenient.”
Would you accept that if the CO2 keeps rising and the Earth cools for 30 year, that the AGW theory is invalidated?
How about 15 years?
Crispin in Waterloo says
Would you accept that if the CO2 keeps rising and the Earth cools for 30 year, that the AGW theory is invalidated?
Henry says
I hope you people are aware of the fact that a lot of CO2 is dissolved in cold water and comes out when the oceans get warmer. Any chemistry student knows that the first smoke from the (warmed) water in a kettle is the CO2 being released. So, quite a number of scientists have reported that the increases of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past lagged the warming periods by quite a few hundred years. e.g. see here:http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
Cause and effect, get it? Smoking causes cancer but cancer does not cause smoking.
However, since it has been cooling since 1995, one would expect to see CO2 falling as well.
Unfortunately we seem to have only one station in Honululu reporting on (‘global”) CO2 and obviously it looks like those people have all been bought into trying to show that CO2 is still increasing.
If my results are right, they are simply lying.
@joeldshore says:
>>A good example of failed modelling is the trophospheric hot spot.
>No it’s not. It is an example of disagreement between the models and some data sets. You have no justification for concluding definitively that it is a failure in the modeling. It is like saying, “The experiment where they measured faster-than-light neutrinos is a good example of the failure of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”
Wow. Einstein’s (General?) Theory of Relativity is not a model in the sense that a GCM is a model. There are a great many tests that have been done showing that the calculations inspired by Relativity have value in making accurate predictions. It may be superseded by a future theory that addresses some problems Relativity has (and has had for a long time). But that is not my point.
Any climate model that has never been validated is a very different kettle of fish from the works of Einstein, wouldn’t you agree? A climate model, or dozens of them, that predicts a trophespheric hot spot that heats up at about 3 times the surface temperature increase, but which is undetectable, is not ‘valid until invalidated’. It remains unvalidated computer code. A computer programme with that many constrained variables is a ‘just-so story’ until it receives substantial validation. What is the GCM prediction of global temperature for the next 5 years?
Monckton’s 2007 paper sets forth the predictions of the models pretty well. The ‘greenhouse effect’ is supposed to increase the heat retained by the Earth by trapping more of it at a predictable altitude, at a predictable rate, with a predictable consequent temperature increase. You may have noticed that after his paper AGW warmist emphasis switched from that ‘hot spot’ heating to ‘Arctic heating’. I noticed. Suddenly the models predicted no hot spot as before, but hot poles! So, no GHG effect after all then?
According to GISS and HADCRUT there has been a detectable temperature increase at the surface. Maybe they are pulling our legs, maybe not. I have not read about any temperature rises or falls that are outside historical norms. Canada and its Arctic were much warmer 5000 years ago. The proof is littered across the now-frozen landscape. The CO2 concentration seems to have had nothing to do with it then, or now. No carbon taxes from me, thanks.
@joeldshore
“Returning to the logics of scientific theories, it ought to be generally accepted that for a logical construction to be a scientific theory it has to be falsifiable. Otherwise predictions are not possible and the construction would not allow useful calculations.”
Cited in http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=AS12005.pdf
The trophospheric hot spot is a falsifiable prediction. Even in a world with a constant temperature and increasing CO2, the hot spot should still be detectable because that is how GHG’s are supposed to work. The surface temperature is detectable. The hot spot is not. Either there is something wrong with the model, or CO2 in a mixed, wet, dynamic atmosphere does not trap as much heat as was thought. It speaks to the claim for H2O vapour feedback with additional heating as well.