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.
Mind you,
I think, they are a bit confused about the results they are getting,
they seem to be finding one excuse upon the other as to why they think they “were wrong”
yet, (or “so that”) they (can) keep up reporting that CO2 is going up.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/trends_log.html
I am going to look if I can find at least one other good station reporting on CO2.
Any ideas from the floor here as to where to look?
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 9:12 am
However, since it has been cooling since 1995, one would expect to see CO2 falling as well….If my results are right, they are simply lying.
That would only be the case if the Earth was at equilibrium and then temperatures dropped, and if there were no extenuating circumstances. However man is more than compensating for the cooling. There are many things to disagree on with respect to climate science, but the CO2 concentration over the past few decades seems to be the thing that there is the least doubt about.
HenryP says:
The solubility of CO2 in the ocean depends also on the partial pressure of the CO2 above the ocean. Since that has been increasing due to our emissions, the oceans have been in net absorbing CO2, not releasing it. That is seen by the fact that the concentration of CO2 is rising only about half as rapidly as it would be if all the CO2 we emitted were staying in the atmosphere.
Actually, CO2 is monitored at a variety of sites around the world: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/ and they all show the same upward trend (albeit with somewhat different seasonal cycles)
Your results are not right and there is not some massive conspiracy among scientists. Nobody seems to believe your results but you.
Crispin in Waterloo,
Unfortunately, your latest posts don’t add anything to the discussion. You continue to ignore the actual facts regarding what disagreement does or does not exist between models and data, and ignore the possibility that the data for the long term trends is problematic despite the overwhelming evidence from the history of the UAH data set and the continued disagreement between different data sets (such as UAH and RSS or between different re-analyses of the radiosonde data).
You also continue to make statements like “the ‘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” which imply things that are simply not correct about the predicted “hot spot”, i.e., that it has something to do with the mechanism by which greenhouse gases trap heat. In fact, it has nothing whatsoever to do with that…Only “AGW skeptics” like you and Monckton believe (against all evidence to the contrary) that the temperature structure in the troposphere is dominated…or is predicted to be dominated…by such details. Scientists understand that the strong role of convection in the troposphere is what predominantly determines the temperature structure and that the prediction of tropical tropospheric amplification has to do with the temperature structure in the tropical atmosphere being determined by the moist adiabat.
@joeldshore
I do not find disagreements between data sets and between different analyses of the same data set to be ‘overwhelming evidence’. I find it quite underwhelming. For some reason you find this convincing. The model is not supported by the evidence is it? The evidence is self-contradictory, isn’t it? No agreement yet.
>”Only “AGW skeptics” like you …that the temperature structure in the troposphere is dominated…or is predicted to be dominated…by such details. ”
You are talking through your hat. Read Wikipedia, if you can stomach it.
You have clearly repeated above that there is a “prediction of tropical tropospheric amplification”. Good, we agree there is such a prediction. Whatever the cause of it, whatever the details, you are repeating the common prediction of the IPCC models the the heating should be there, n’est-pas?
Basically you assert that when the evidence agrees with the model, the evidence is correct and when it does not, the model is correct and the evidence is defective. Isn’t that your argument? I don’t want to misrepresent your view, I want you to make it clear.
On another note I take it from the message above that you agree water absorbs CO2 depending on the concentration in the atmosphere. Good, that is basic physics. Do you agree that fresh water from melting ice absorbs CO2? Fresh water runs into the ocean. Will it absorb CO2 when it melts or as soon as it is in the ocean? This ‘new’ water is a CO2 sink. If 1 cubic kilometer of ice melts, how much CO2 will it absorb when the atmospheric concentration is 390 ppm(v)?
Hint: it is more than 300 ppm(m)
How many cubic kilometers of ice would have to melt to absorb all the CO2 in the atmosphere (ignoring the logarithmic decrease as it drops). It is just a fun exercise to demonstrate another major impact on the atmosphere that is not included in the models.
Henry#Joel&@Werner
Well, thanks. Actually, it appears to me the results for CO2 at Barrow (as my sample for the lot) have been flat for quite a while. Remember that according to my results warming began just before the fifties, more or less, which was also more or less when CO2 monitoring started. Note the drop in maxima from my results> anyone who knows anything about sampling technigues and probability theory can figure out that such results are impossible “to manufacture”. So, cooling started around 1995. Obviously earth’s energy store is big and so far it has largely compensated for the drop in energy coming from the sun, but that WILL end. In fact, my results for the cooling , of, for example, Anchorage, Alaska are frightening. It already got about 1.5K colder there since 2000.
Obviously I don’t care much if nobody believes me – they will find out soon enough.
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 6:25 pm
So, cooling started around 1995.
This may well be the case for the cities you have studied, however RSS, UAH, Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2 all say 1998 was the warmest year. While anyone can find fault with any of these, the fact that all four of these say 1998 was the warmest, makes me doubt your claim for 1995. Now while it is possible to draw a slope line that is flat or negative from January 1997, it does not negate the fact that cooling started at the height of the El Nino of the century from February to April of 1998. Are you denying 1998 was much warmer than 1995? In the four data sets mentioned above, 1995 ranks 11th, 13th, 15th, and 17th respectively. And after 2012, I am expecting all of these to be another notch lower as 2012 will be warmer than 1995 unless a strong La Nina develops immediately.
Crispin,
Ignore joel shore, who says that “your latest posts don’t add anything to the discussion.” He is only engaging in psychological projection. After being soundly spanked by Lord Monckton, by you, and by others, joel shore once again exhibits his usual response.
Henry@Werner
It was the drop in maxima that revealed to me that the top of the warming episode was reached in 1995. It follows on a parabolic curve downward. I subsequently checked the data for means and minima as well, and sure as hell, it follows on similar parabolic curves, but…. there is a lag of course. Earth has a big store where it keeps its energy and it comes only out of that store much later. If you say the maximum (as seen by the average temps.on earth ) was 1998, I have no problem with that. There is too much noise in my dataset to come to an exact decision on when the maximum of the means was reached.
OTOH don’t forget that I have not seen the actual quoted accuracy and precision of your quoted datasets, neither do I have any insight as to how and how often calibration is performed. (I think I challenged Smokey on that as well, in this thread)
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 9:45 pm
….. There is too much noise in my dataset to come to an exact decision on when the maximum of the means was reached.
OTOH don’t forget that I have not seen the actual quoted accuracy and precision of your quoted datasets, neither do I have any insight as to how and how often calibration is performed. (I think I challenged Smokey on that as well, in this thread)
___________________________________
There is a problem with the data sets:
How the USA data was adjusted:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/giss/hansen-giss-1940-1980.gif
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
From article: Where did the decline go?
More data tampering
Hide the decline and rewrite history
Data Tampering: GISS Caught Red-handed Manipulating Data to Produce Arctic Climate History Revision
Scandinavia-gate
Other methods for “adjusting global temperature”
Graph of station dropout vs temperature
Did GISS Discover 30% More Land in the Northern-Hemisphere?
It seems they forgot to “adjust” this dataset…. Study finds stream temperatures don’t parallel warming climate trend
Do not forget to read AJ Strata’s look at the error in temperature measurements:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
And Jo Nova’s article on the Australian temperature record: http://joannenova.com.au/?s=shoddy+inaccurate
Frank Lanser’s website http://www.hidethedecline.eu/
@Gale
Thanks for the links – it is a good store of info there. 1995-98? Who cares. It is certainly not going up as it was for the 20 years previous to that. I agree that there was much fiddling with the numbers to present Nixonian plausible deniablity about an emerging cooling trend.
@Smokey
I was thinking last night about the psychology of those who show up the spit and piss on people pasting long quasi-scientific phrases purporting to show that this or that aspect of global warming canonical writings have been misunderstood, ‘need to be seen in context’ and all that diversionary crap. Did you notice that joel ended up exactly where I started, after all that dust and wind? Amazing. His main argument against calling for the right of reply for Monckton to be guaranteed is principally because it is Monckton who was attacked. In other words there are people with rights and then other people who do not deserve those rights. It brings to mind, as a long time resident of a country near South Africa, the ‘mark of Cain’ religious argument being invoked to deny the black population their basic human rights. “You are guilty of thinking wrong thoughts so you now bear the mark!” Orwellian thought-crime advocates dressed up in priestly robes. I observe that CAGW allows powerless, aspirant leaders to set theselves upon a pedastal a bit higher than a soap box and pontificate with impunity. If they have robes of the right colour, they can even get paid for it.
@EOS
You have blatantly attacked, and erroneously so, Lord Monckton. To refuse to publish his reply to your scurrilous attack is manifestly unjust. You have anointed you own head with the mantle, ‘political rag’. Shame on you.
HenryP says:
July 17, 2012 at 9:45 pm
OTOH don’t forget that I have not seen the actual quoted accuracy and precision of your quoted datasets
See the following for Hadcrut3 and note that the top of the 95% error bar for 1995 is below the bottom of the error bar for 1998.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
P.S. It is GISS that I really do not trust. Others may also have problems, but none that would make 1995 warmer than 1998.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
On the particular issue of the amplification of multidecadal surface temperature trends in the tropical troposphere, yes. … Which is why it is way premature to conclude that it represents a problem with the models.
Yeah…Right…You don’t want to misrepresent it? Well, why don’t you try by NOT misrepresenting it. I have explained in gory detail what my position is and it bears essentially no resemblance to what you say. Why don’t you go back and actually read what I wrote this time.
I have no idea where you are going with the melting water thing. If you think that this is actually a significant effect acting to decrease CO2 levels, why don’t you demonstrate that to us?
You are just making stuff up now about my position. Where have I even taken a position on whether Monckton has the right to reply or not, let alone having an argument as to why or why not? I was responding to your claim that Monckton does real science by demonstrating that your example shows that in fact Monckton just regularly misinterprets science.
And, this is not some isolated case…Most of his arguments are like this. I have shown in other threads that his argument for determining the climate sensitivity based on the strength of the natural greenhouse effect is completely bogus. I have shown that his argument for re-evaluating the no-feedback sensitivity on the basis of the results that Nikolov and Zeller have highlighted on the average temperature of the moon is completely bogus. Tim Lambert in a debate showed that Monckton was trumpeting the work of someone who told Lambert that Monckton was severely misinterpreting her results. The list goes on and on.
There is a good reason why Monckton is not taken seriously by the scientific community and it is not a massive conspiracy, it is a complete lack of scientific credibility.
Mr. Shore continues to argue against me vituperatively ad hominem rather than on any rational, scientific basis.
He is wrong in his off-topic remark about climate sensitivity but says I am; he is wrong in his off-topic point about the Planck parameter but says I am; he is wrong in his off-topic point about Dr. Pinker telling Mr. Lambert I had “severely misrepresented” her results, when in fact I had reported them in all respects accurately and, when she eventually saw the paper in which I had drawn conclusions from those results (rather than the gravely distorted account given to her by Lambert), she had very little to say by way of complaint either about how I had reported her results or about the conclusions I had drawn, which were in due course published both in a learned journal and in a book of essays on climate sensitivity. Lambert even used an actress to recite the comments he had inveigled Dr. Pinker into making by misrepresenting my paper to her.
Mr. Shore continues to be wrong on his off-topic point about the tropical mid-troposphere hot-spot. Whether he likes it or not, the IPCC published – large and in full colour – a graph from Santer (2003, not the 2005 paper that Mr. Shore now cites) which plainly and clearly shows the vertical distribution of warming rates in the troposphere as markedly different under manmade global warming than under four distinct natural influences with which it is compared: so much so that the manmade contribution shows through with very great clarity even when it is combined with all four of the other forcings. That is how just about everyone except Mr. Shore has interpreted the IPCC’s admittedly sibylline text, taken with the illustrations; and that is why there has been such a considerable – and still unresolved, if Mr. Shore were honest enough to admit it – debate about why the model-predicted tropical mid-troposphere “hot spot” does not appear in observed reality. One notes Mr. Shore’s conclusion that if the short-term indications given by temperature measurements are correct then perhaps the long-run measurements will one day be found to correspond with the models; but that conclusion would be less profoundly unimpressive if Mr. Shore had not also said that one should prefer long-run results to short-run results.
Mr. Shore continues to be wrong when he says that my argument about the implausibly large closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s interval of climate sensitivities is unmeritorious. It is derived from process engineering theory, which, whether he likes it or not, is indeed the science from which the feedback methodology of the IPCC is taken, as he could have verified for himself if he had bothered to check the references at the end of my head posting before shooting his mouth off. His argument that my argument is based on too many uncertainties is ridiculous, given that it is the IPCC’s estimates of very high net-positive feedbacks that are wildly uncertain, because no feedback can be directly measured. Insofar as measurements can tell us anything, they suggest that feedbacks are somewhat net-negative, as theory would lead us to expect, rather than extravagantly and implausibly net-positive. Indeed, yet another recent paper has found that the much-vaunted water-vapor feedback exercises a mere shadow of the very strongly net positive influence imagined by the IPCC.
Whether Mr. Shore likes it or not, it is in the estimation of the contribution of feedbacks to overall forcing and consequent temperature change that the keenest distinction between the skeptics and the true-believers is to be found. The skeptics point out, rightly, that no feedback can be either directly measured observationally or definitively determined by theoretical methods, and that, since there are powerful reasons to suppose that this will remain the case for some time, the prudent course of action is to wait and see: for, in the long run, waiting and seeing will give us a better handle on climate sensitivity than the expensive guesswork of the models today. In the meantime, there is no case for doing anything at all about global warming except to enjoy the sunshine. If the planet begins to warm in a sustained and dangerous way, as it has failed to do throughout the past 60 years, we shall have plenty of time to put matters to rights, After all, there has been no global warming for about 15 years, so there is no hurry.
Frankly, it is the arrogant assumption of certainty by Mr. Shore and his ilk that has, in the end, proven so deeply and consistently unpersuasive, notwithstanding the billions that his associates have been able to spend on climate propaganda. The voters have smelt a rat: and Mr. Shore’s continued viciousness and unscientific hate-speech when debating these matters has played its own admittedly insignificant part in persuading the public that there is something very wrong with the official position. He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself for conducting himself in so unbecomingly hostile a fashion despite numerous warnings from me and others here. He must learn to moderate his language, cut out the hate speech and concentrate exclusively on science. Once he has learned to do that, perhaps we shall be able to take him seriously as a scientist rather than as an ill-informed, loud-mouthed propagandist.
We are quite accustomed to Mr. Shore being continuously wrong… around here, anyway. GK
@joeldshore
“I have no idea where you are going with the melting water thing. If you think that this is actually a significant effect acting to decrease CO2 levels, why don’t you demonstrate that to us?”
Melt some ice. Measure the CO2 immediately. Wait an hour, measure it again. You will find that melted ice (known in scientific circles as fresh water) absorbs CO2 in a predictable fashion. As teh tundra and glaciers and ice cape melt, huge amounts of CO2 are absorbed. I have put numbers regarding Greenland to this subject on other threads which you can find by searching this site.
“Where have I even taken a position on whether Monckton has the right to reply or not, let alone having an argument as to why or why not?”
As the subject of this thread is exactly that, why do you post such voluble babble without bothering to address the principal issue?
Regarding the (as usual) nail-on-the-head post by Monckton immediately above, you are once again thoroughly pwned. Your reputation is, like Hansen’s, one of literally never being right. Quite an accomplishment in this internet age of readily available information.
@chris, thanks as usual for not letting joel’s venal and mean-spirited misinformation go uncorrected.
I look forward with anticipation to any dissection you might make of AR5’s treatment of this central GHG issue – they are bound to address it because you have quite rightfully put it on the front burner.
Let’s review what has been shown here:
(1) I have shown that the GISS climate model predicts a pattern of warming in the troposphere that is practically identical whether the warming is due to solar forcing or GHGs ( http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/ ) Lord Monckton has offered no response.
(2) I have explained in detail exactly how Lord Monckton apparently misinterpreted the IPCC figure to conclude that the pattern of warming in the tropical troposphere is very different for GHGs than other forcings like solar. In fact, I have discussed mathematically how the plot for solar forcing, which Lord Monckton interprets as lacking the sort of pattern of amplification seen for GHGs, actually shows an amplification factor which could be anywhere from 1 to infinity. Lord Monckton’s only response has been to vociferously claim that the figure “plainly and clearly shows the vertical distribution of warming rates in the troposphere as markedly different under manmade global warming than under four distinct natural influences with which it is compared” without actually addressing the points I have made. [He has now added the strange argument that “the manmade contribution shows through with very great clarity even when it is combined with all four of the other forcings”, which is of course simply due to the fact that the manmade contribution to the warming is much larger than the other contributions.]
(3) I have noted that the sort of amplification that Lord Monckton claims to be missing in the data is actually seen clearly for the temperature fluctuations on monthly to yearly timescales where the data is very reliable. Lord Monckton has stated in response: “One notes Mr. Shore’s conclusion that if the short-term indications given by temperature measurements are correct then perhaps the long-run measurements will one day be found to correspond with the models; but that conclusion would be less profoundly unimpressive if Mr. Shore had not also said that one should prefer long-run results to short-run results.” However, he has gotten it exactly backwards: It is the fluctuations in the shorter term that can be accurately measured…and it is the underlying multidecadal trends that are unfortunately subject to artifacts such as changes in satellites or in radiosonde instrumentation. (Perhaps he is confused here because it is often explained that one has to look over the long times to most accurately determine the underlying trend in a system that has a long term underlying trend plus short term fluctuations; if one looks over the short term, one doesn’t get an accurate measure of the underlying long term trend. However, that is not what we are talking about here: We are talking about looking at amplification of any kind of warming or cooling, which might be due to a long term effect like GHGs or might be due to shorter term fluctuations like those due to ENSO. Apparently, such distinctions, easily understood by scientists, are alas not so well-understood by Lord Monckton.)
I think we will leave it there. There are other things that seem dubious, such as the unsupported claim that Dr. Pinker has undergone some sort of conversion and now no longer believes that Lord Monckton is misinterpreting the data. (And, I am left wondering what “learned journal and and “book of essays on climate sensitivity” has published Lord Monckton’s work!)
It is interesting that Lord Monckton, while avoiding addressing my scientific points, has nonetheless made wild unsubstantiated claims that I am engaging in “hate speech” and, apparently with no sense of irony has made the claim that my arguments are “vituperatively ad hominem rather than on any rational, scientific basis” in the same post that he describes me as an “ill-informed, loud-mouthed propagandist”!
Models are wrong as usual; the tropospheric ‘hotspot’, the so-called “fingerprint of global warming” fails the empirical evidence test.☹
Who to believe? Models, or the Real World?
Hnery@Werner
Thanks Werner. I understand the confusion now, and following that, I re-wrote the relevant sections on my blog a bit, i.e.
begin quote
………
For those of you who think that earth is still warming: you are wrong. From a sample of 45 weather stations taken randomly from all over the world, I find that a turning point was reached around 1995. Note that the sample of weather stations is well balanced by latitude and 70/30 sea – inland
……..
We note from my 3 tables below that Maxima, Means and Minima have all turned negative between 12 and 22 years ago. The change in signal is best observed in that of the Maxima where we can see a gradual decline of the maximum temperatures from +0.036 degrees C per annum (over the last 38 years) to -0.015 (when taken over the last 12 years).
If we plot the global measurements for the change in Maxima, Means and Minima against the relevant time periods, it can be shown that the best fit for each of the curves is given by a polynominal of the 2nd order (parabolic fit).
Namely, for maxima it is
y= -0.00006 X2+ 0.00480X -0.06393
r²= 0.997
For means, it is
y= -0.0001 X2 +0.0064X – 0.0778
r²= 0.959
For minima, it i
y= -0.00008 X2 + 0.00408X – 0.04178
r²= 0.985
Using the maxima plot, we note that at 0 (zero) when there was a turning point, i.e. no warming or cooling, we find x=17 years. From this sample of weather stations I can therefore estimate with reasonable accuracy that earth received its maximum energy input from the sun via the atmosphere during 2012-17=1995.
(if we are tempted to look at the root of same binominal on the other side, i.e. when global warming started, we find 68, suggesting that the global warming cycle started officially somewhere in 2012-68=1944. Remember that this latter result is speculative, and could be out by a year or so, as I do not have any real measurements from 1944-1973 but we are using an approximation from a probable plot).
It can also be shown that the nature of the graph for means is one that lags a bit on the graph for maxima: earth has a store where it keeps its energy and a lot of that energy only comes out bit later. Although the plot for means with rsquare 0.959 is still impressive, showing there is a definite relationship, I would not use it to determine the roots to give me the actual time when earth reached its maximum energy output (when it was the “warmest”). However, I would generally agree with the available datasets like RSS, UAH, Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2 that that must have been a few years after 1995.
………..
end quote
I am still puzzled that nobody that I asked here on WUWT ever picked up on the significance of an apparent 50 (+/- 1 yr) year sun cycle. Does 7 x 7 + 1 Jubilee year ring a bell? It was very important in the Jewish traditions. I am sure Moses took that significant period/ tradition from the Egyptians, the pyramid builders, who were experts in anything and everything that happened on the sun. I am sitting here, realizing how smart they really must have been and how dumb all our learned climate scientists all are.
How interesting it is that Mr. Shore continues to concentrate on various off-topic matters. He has had little to say on the substance of my head posting, but has chosen instead to attempt to derail discussion by going on and on and on about the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot”. He continues disingenuously to maintain that the graph from Santer (2003: not the 2005 paper that Mr. Shore cites) does not plainly show what just about everyone else who has looked at it considers that it does show: namely, a very distinct pattern of altitude-vs.-latitude warming showing an exceptional concentration of warming in the tropical mid-troposphere – a pattern that is not observed in reality in any of the published datasets (with the single exception of one that has formidable problems, which Santer (2008) sought to rely upon in justification of his original conclusion that the hot-spot was present and, by implication, that we are the cause. He contends that the solar plot in Santer’s figure coiuld be interpreted as showing any amplification of tropical mid-troposphere warming rates compared with the surface from 1 to infinity. But that is absurd: the plain intent of the graph is to show that the distribution of the warming differential is far more concentrated in the mid-troposphere under anthropogenic warming than under not merely solar but also three other natural warmings about which Mr. Shore is silent.
It is regrettable that I am unable to post the figure here: readers would get the point as soon as they saw it.
Mr. Shore is also silent upon the fact that many scientists and scientific bodies have interpreted the Santer graph in the same way as I have. In the circumstances, it is regrettable that the IPCC, in being characteristically obscurantist, caused precisely the confusion of which Mr. Shore, in his original hate-speech attack on me in this thread, falsely attributed to me.
It is irrelevant whether the GISS climate model predicts what Mr. Shore shows it predicts: my original discussion of the hot-spot, published at scienceandpublicpolicy.org, was a discussion of the IPCC’s presentation, specifically including the Santer graph, and not a discussion of the GISS model.
I have already made it clear earlier in this thread that the IPCC may indeed have been wrong in suggesting that there is a distinction between a clearly-discernible hot-spot if the cause of warming is anthropogenic and the absence of so distinct a hot-spot if it is natural: however, that is the clear impression that not only I but many others drew from the IPCC’s publication of Santer’s graph, and the IPCC has only itself to blame if – as Mr. Shore himself confesses earlier in this thread – it did not explain its use of the Santer graph more clearly.
Mr. Shore also snidely implies that the paper in which he had falsely claimed I had “misrepresented” the results of Dr. Pinker had not been published, as I had said it had. First and foremost, since Mr. Shore does not know that the paper has been published, he has plainly not read it, and, therefore, has not the slightest scientific justification for saying what it does and does not misrepresent. Whether he likes it or not, the paper was published in the Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Seminars on Planetary Emergencies of the World Federation of Scientists, at which it was presented, and was also subsequently included in a book of essays on climate sensitivity edited by Dr. Don Easterbrook.
Here as elsewhere, Mr. Shore has been guilty of an unscientific and venomously ad-hominem approach: he implied that my paper had not been published in either of the two places where it has in fact been published, without bothering to check as a scientist should, because it suited him to do so. He is not a true scientist.
HenryP says:
July 19, 2012 at 12:21 am
It is certainly an improvement when you allow the major data sets to be true and to not imply you knew the cooling started years before all other data sets showed it. Otherwise people may have a tendency to not even read what else you have to say. We are all presumably ‘busy’ and we have to decide which entries to devote time to and if you start off contradicting all major data sets, well that is no way to encourage people to read the rest of your piece.
(if we are tempted to look at the root of same binominal on the other side, i.e. when global warming started, we find 68, suggesting that the global warming cycle started officially somewhere in 2012-68=1944.
You completely lost me there. That is when the earlier warm streak that started around 1910 ended. Then almost nothing happened for 30 years. See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1944/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:1976/trend
@joeldshore
I do not wish you any ill but seriously, you are bringing humiliation upon yourself with your shortsighted and pointless aggression. No one has anything to gain from your loss of face, just as we have nothing to gain should any of your mud-slinging efforts find a target.
You have been caught grossly misrepresenting Lord Monckton, nd it looks deliberate or at best, incompetent. Your pants are down and you are getting spanked. When you are in a deep, public hole, you just gotta stop digging.
If you think people who have been personally attacked in a publication like EOS should have a published right of reply, this is the place to say so, then depart for your next venture. I encourage you to do both.
joeldshore says:
The first statement you make here is wrong for the following reason: The absorption lines of CO2 have a certain shape and while they may be saturated in the center of the line, they are not far enough out in the wings.
I calculate that the absorption bands of CO2 are saturated after 3600m of traverse through the atmosphere. You say that the bands are not saturated in the wings or on the shoulders, would this situation change after further traverse in your view or would the bands or lines remain unsaturated no matter how far the traverse was?
l
werner says
You completely lost me there.
Henry says
Look only at the unadjusted data since 1944 to 2011
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1944/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:1976/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1944/to:2011/trend/plot/none
Clearly you see a maximum reached at around 1997?
from 1995 we are on a cycle going down for 50 years. Theoretically I say that in 2045 it will be as cold as it was in 1944.
I don’t trust the data before 1944. They did not have good calibrated thermometers. They did not have temp. recorders. The “employee” had to read every few hours to get a mean. Forget about that. If you had maxima data from before the war I would trust it more, because the employee could not make a mistake with that.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
No…That was not the intent at all. Here is a link to the figure, by the way: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-9-1.html I can understand that someone who hasn’t had great experience reading contour plots might initially be led to believe that the pattern in the troposphere (the part of the atmosphere with pressures larger than ~100-150 hPa) is very different for the GHGs vs solar. However, a more careful look at the values shows that the problem is that the structure of the solar forcing is not well-resolved on this plot because the contour spacing of 0.2 C is not much smaller than the largest magnitude of the forcing in the tropical troposphere. [One can “simulate” in one’s mind how this resolution issue works by thinking about what the GHG contour plot would look like if the contour spacing were, say, 0.6 or 0.8 C rather than 0.2 C.]
However, what I find puzzling is why one would persist in the error after having it carefully explained to them and furthermore having the close equivalence of the patterns for solar vs GHG forcing demonstrated for a case where the forcings are of similar strength: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/
As for the other natural forcings, they generally suffer from the same issue as the solar of having their structure not very well resolved by the 0.2 C contour interval. The largest, and thus best resolved, of the natural forcings is the direct sulfate aerosol forcing and indeed it shows the amplification the best of the natural forcings. (In this case, since the forcing is negative, the amplification leads to a greater cooling at altitude than at the surface, which makes sense particular when you consider that if the aerosols had decreased rather than increased over time, it would show warming with greater warming at altitude than at the surface.)
I don’t know of any outside of the “AGW skeptic” community that have misinterpreted the graph in this way.
People need to take responsibility for their own errors. So, no, it is not the IPCC’s fault that you misinterpreted the graph. They wanted to produce a graph where the color scale was not different for each forcing and thus their plot necessarily better-resolves the spatial structure of the larger forcings than the smaller ones. Perhaps they might have anticipated that it could be misinterpreted, but it is difficult to anticipate the ways in which people can creatively misinterpret things.
The amplification results from very basic physics of the tropical atmosphere that is shared by all the models, so one would expect different models to show very similar results for this structure.
No…You inferred that; I didn’t imply it. What I had meant to imply when I said “I am left wondering what “’learned journal and and ‘book of essays on climate sensitivity” has published Lord Monckton’s work” was just what I said, that I was wondering who would publish such stuff. In particular, I doubted that it would be published in a very rigorous peer-reviewed journal or in a book that had contributions from respected scientists in the field. And, indeed, we see that it was published in some conference proceedings (whether there was any sort of peer-review of the contributions to that proceedings I do not know) and in a book that is basically just a collection of essays by the “usual suspects” ( http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/easterbrook_evidence-based-climate-science.pdf ), Joseph D’Aleo, Steve Goddard, David Archibald, etc. So, indeed, we now know where it was published and it confirms my suspicions of where such a piece could conceivably get published.