Matt Ridley: A Lukewarmer's Ten Tests

Guest post by Matt Ridley: “That the climate has changed because of man-made carbon dioxide I fully accept. … 1. I need persuading that the urban heat island effect has been fully purged from the surface temperature record. … I also need to be convinced that the adjustments made by those who compile the global temperature records are justified. … 2. Despite these two contaminating factors, …”
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I am afraid I can sense an internal contradiction here. How can you “fully accept” this “global warming” thing despite “these two contaminating factors” you are aware of?
Another thing is, being aware of “these two contaminating factors” should have prompted you to look deeper in the very methods of calculations of the “global warming”. I doubt that you have ever done that. They assign temperatures or temperature trends to large areas and “reconstruct” temperatures for periods of time without measurements, how do you like that?

I would add another point.
Any large scale project requires effective management to achieve the planned objectives. Even if there was a demonstrable enormous potential problem and and a set of appropriate policies implemented that is theoretically capable of combating that problem, without detailed project management huge amounts of money can be expended without getting any desired results.
Matt Ridley’s allusion to the medical sphere – of taking chemotherapy for a cold – can be extended further. There is a diagnosis of the early stages of an entirely new disease. We only have a vague idea of how severe this disease might develop, with little attempt to revise downwards the initial diagnosis following a distinct lack of distinctive strong signs of progress of the disease. The symptoms are faint, and evidence that they might belong to the normal variations of life is ignored. The treatments are untested, possibly ineffective, and have emerging debilitating and painful side effects. Yet the professionals ignore these signals. Furthermore the prescribers have scant regard for dosage, and do not monitor the progress of the patient.

“The one trend that has been worse than expected – Arctic sea ice – is plausibly explained by black carbon (soot), not carbon dioxide.”
Also, in August 2012 there was The Great Arctic Cyclone, which tore across the sea ice and smashed it up & shifted it about pretty good – for over a week.
I know there are other forces at work over the long-term, but I’m jus’ sayin’!

Phillip Bratby says:
January 28, 2013 at 2:26 pm
“Are you sure it doesn’t speed up the escape of infrared? Perhaps by colliding with N and O molecules, CO2 can take some of their energy and radiate it to space?”
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What?! The ability of CO2 to intercept surface IR is in inverse logarithmic function of its concentration in the atmosphere? The ability of CO2 to radiate any energy acquired by the atmosphere is a linear function of its concentration in the atmosphere?? CO2 cools???
Heresy! Silence!! Silence unbeliever!!!
/sarc

At the risk of boring people I would like to point out yet again the serious mistakes in the physics of Climate Alchemy. These people have constructed a scientific cock and bull story. The main error is to fail to understand that the signal from a single pyrgeometer is the potential energy per unit time per unit area that the emitter could transfer to the Vacuum Energy, the zero point energy of space. This is a fancy way of saying it would have to be an isolated emitter in a vacuum..
Ramanathan uses the clear sky atmospheric greenhouse factor, the difference between the temperature radiation field of the Earth’s surface and the OLR = 157.5 W/m^2. 134.5 W/m^2 of this is imaginary, the artefact of incorrect boundary conditions, so must be discounted. Thus the rate of accumulation of heat energy in the lower atmosphere is multiplied by a factor of 5.1.leading to the imaginary positive feedback.
Because heating rate is near zero, they have had to invent a cooling factor from polluted clouds. They do this by cheating yet again, using doubled real low level cloud optical depth in the hind casting.

Since temperatures according to even Dr Hansen himself the alarmists have switched to extreme weather for their FEAR !
Simply stated there is no indication of a trend toward extreme weather.
in fact according to thermodynamics CO2 spreads the heat making storms MILDER !
I see little ention of this in skeptical literature ! Why is that ?

In some ways he reminds me of Bjørn Lomborg – they both see the wrongs perpetrated by the global warming movement yet stubbornly refuse to stop believing that carbon dioxide is warming up the world. During Stalin’s purges there were communist sympathizers in America who knew about them yet did not give up their belief in the superiority of communism over capitalism. Clearly talking to Ridley or Lomborg about the irrationality of global warming policies is not going to change their minds. They think the science is there and only disagree about what should be done about it. I will demonstrate two things below. First, that there is not now and there never has been any anthropogenic greenhouse warming. And second, that the theory of greenhouse warming that is imputed to have caused warming is completely false. To demonstrate the first thesis we must know the current and recent temperature history of the world. In researching this for some years now I have determined that temperature records given to us have been falsified in various ways to make us believe in a non-existent warming. There has been much talk about the distortion caused by the Urban Heat Island effect but in the big picture it pales into insignificance when you realize that an eighteen year standstill in warming is papered over by a non-existent “Late Twentieth Century Warming.” This has worked itself into temperature curves from the hockey stick to Müller’s BEST temperatures. It shows a steep rise in the eighties and nineties that does not exist. But let’s start from the situation now and work our way back. First, according to the Met Office, there has not been any warming at all for the last 16 years. That has made people like Hansen unhappy and they have come out with lies to question it. His claim is that the years 2005 and 2010 share the honor of being the warmest years in history. Checking satellite data I find this claim to be a complete lie. The year 2005 is indistinguishable from other years of the first decade of this century. The year 2010 is an El Nino peak year but it still is not as high as the super El Nino of 1998 which remains highest. The twenty-first century began with a seven year flat temperature platform, the twenty-first century high. This platform exists because the huge amount of warm water the super El Nino of 1998 had carried across the ocean. It has became the new normal for the twenty-first century. The next La Nina after it appeared in 2008 and was followed by the 2010 El Nino. For an ENSO oscillation the mean temperature is determined by the center point between an El Nino peak and the bottom of its neighboring La Nina valley. And the center point between the 2008 La Nina and the 2010 El Nino lines up exactly with the level of the twenty-first century high. Which means that the alleged warming from 2005 and 2010 has not had any influence on global temperature as Hansen would have us believe. While global temperature stalled for 16 years carbon dioxide kept on going up. It is quite obvious that it is not causing any warming. In 2007 IPCC AR4 had predicted from greenhouse theory that warming in the twenty-first century shall proceed at the rate of 0.2 degrees per decade. We are now in the second decade of this century and there is no sign of this predicted warming. This alone is sufficient to consign the greenhouse theory to the scrap heap of history. But there is more. The satellite temperature record shows that from 1979 to early 1997 there was nothing but a series of ENSO oscillations, El Ninos with La Ninas in between. There were five El Nino peaks in this interval. If you put dots in the middle of each line connecting an El Nino peak and its neighboring La Nina valley these dots line up in a straight horizontal line, eighteen years long. This determines the mean temperature of the ENSO oscillation. And tells us that for eighteen years, from 1979 to 1997, there was no warming at all. It was followed by the super El Nino of 1998. That super El Nino brought so much warm water across the ocean with it that it caused a step warming. In four years global temperature rose by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. There has been no warming since then and there was none before it as we saw. And since it is completely impossible for greenhouse warming to generate any step warming we can say with confidence that there has been no greenhouse warming at all during the 33 years of satellite observations. But what about the years before satellites? Records show that there was no warming for at least 26 years in the fifties, sixties and seventies. And people then were not worried about warming but feared another ice age, and magazines had articles about it. But say this to Hansen and he will tell you that it really was a warming period except that aerosols from war production must have blocked out the sun! The short stretch of 1976 to 1979 connects it to satellite observations. It is taken up by another step warming, this time caused by the Great Pacific Climate Shift which is said to have raised global temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius. But there was actual steady warming in the early part of the century which is mostly neglected. It started suddenly in 1910 and stopped even more suddenly in 1940. Laws of physics dictate that if you want ro start greenhouse warming suddenly you must increase the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide equally suddenly. That is because the infrared absorbance of carbon dioxide is a property of the gas and cannot be changed. We know for sure that there was no sudden increase of carbon dioxide in 1910 which rules out greenhouse warming as a cause. It is also impossible for a greenhouse warming to stop as suddenly as happened in 1940. That is when World War II cooling appeared out of nowhere. If you lived then you would have known that the Finnish Winter War of 1939/1940 was fought at minus forty Celsius and that German tanks in front of Moscow were frozen in their tracks. We almost have the twentieth century covered. The first ten years of the century were cooling, not warming. And World War II cooling gradually warmed up by 1950. In the forties there were still blizzards around and one of them, the blizzard of 1947, completely shut down the City of New York. If your global temperature chart shows a heat wave there you should demand a refund. Everything I said about temperature above is a matter of public record that you can check out yourself. It all adds up to this conclusion: there has been no greenhouse warming for the last 100 years. And probably there was none at any time. How is this possible? you may ask. Ferenc Miskolczi has the answer. In 2010 he used NOAA weather balloon database to measure the absorption of long-wave radiation by the atmosphere and determined that it had been constant for 61 years. At the same time the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increased by 21.6 percent. According to the greenhouse theory of warming the addition of this substantial amount of CO2 to the atmosphere should have shown up as absorption but nothing happened. I hope I don’t need to remind you that the absorption is necessary to produce that warming. With this, the greenhouse theory of global warming is dead. And the anthropogenic theory of global warming is likewise dead. But there is one more detail that you should know to make things clear. All those predictions of dangerous greenhouse warming from IPCC did not come from the original theory of Arrhenius. That is because if you follow Arrhenius and calculate the sensitivity of carbon dioxide to doubling you find it is 1.1 degrees Celsius. This is not enough to frighten anybody so IPCC decided to bring in water vapor as a helper. The argument is as follows. First, carbon dioxide warms the air. Warm air can hold more water vapor and the greenhouse effect of this additional water vapor gets added to the original warming from carbon dioxide. They call this positive water vapor feedback. Their computers tell us that it can triple or more the original warming from carbon dioxide. And that is how these dangerous warming predictions orig
inate. But Miskolczi theory maintains that the opposite is true: that water vapor, instead of boosting the warming from carbon dioxide, actually retards it. In other words, water vapor feedback is negative, not positive. That is why they hate Miskolczi so much and keep telling everyone that his theory is wrong. Well, his theory is not wrong as proven by data collected by NOAA over the years. This is empirical science and it overrides any conclusions derived from pure theory that don’t agree with it. Most specifically, it overrides predictions of warming used as justification for passing emission control laws. These laws have been passed under false premises and must be voided.