By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I have just had the honor of listening to Professor Murry Salby giving a lecture on climate. He had addressed the Numptorium in Holyrood earlier in the day, to the bafflement of the fourteenth-raters who populate Edinburgh’s daft wee parliament. In the evening, among friends, he gave one of the most outstanding talks I have heard.
Professor Salby has also addressed the Parliament of Eunuchs in Westminster. Unfortunately he did not get the opportunity to talk to our real masters, the unelected Kommissars of the European tyranny-by-clerk.
The Faceless Ones whose trembling, liver-spotted hands guide the European hulk of state unerringly towards the bottom were among the first and most naively enthusiastic true-believers in the New Superstition that is global warming. They could have benefited from a scientific education from the Professor.
His lecture, a simplified version of his earlier talk in Hamburg that was the real reason why spiteful profiteers of doom at Macquarie “University” maliciously canceled his non-refundable ticket home so that he could not attend the kangaroo court that dismissed him, was a first-class exercise in logical deduction.
He had written every word of it, elegantly. He delivered it at a measured pace so that everyone could follow. He unfolded his central case step by step, verifying each step by showing how his theoretical conclusions matched the real-world evidence.
In a normal world with mainstream news media devoted to looking at all subjects from every direction (as Confucius used to put it), Murry Salby’s explosive conclusion that temperature change drives CO2 concentration change and not the other way about would have made headlines. As it is, scarce a word has been published anywhere.
You may well ask what I might have asked: given that the RSS satellite data now show a zero global warming trend for 17 full years, and yet CO2 concentration has been rising almost in a straight line throughout, is it any more justifiable to say that temperature change causes CO2 change than it is to say that CO2 change causes temperature change?
The Professor headed that one off at the pass. During his talk he said it was not global temperature simpliciter but the time-integral of global temperature that determined CO2 concentration change, and did so to a correlation coefficient of around 0.9.
I had first heard of Murry Salby’s work from Dick Lindzen over a drink at a regional government conference we were addressing in Colombia three years ago. I readily agreed with Dick’s conclusion that if we were causing neither temperature change nor even CO2 concentration change the global warming scare was finished.
I began then to wonder whether the world could now throw off the absurdities of climate extremism and develop a sensible theory of climate.
In pursuit of this possibility, I told Professor Salby I was going to ask two questions. He said I could ask just one. So I asked one question in two parts.
First, I asked whether the rapid, exponential decay in carbon-14 over the six decades following the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests had any bearing on his research. He said that the decay curve for carbon-14 indicated a mean CO2 atmospheric residence time far below the several hundred years assumed in certain quarters. It supports Dick Lindzen’s estimate of a 40-year residence time, not the IPCC’s imagined 50-200 years.
Secondly, I asked whether Professor Salby had studied what drove global temperature change. He said he had not gotten to that part of the story yet.
In the past year, I said, four separate groups haf contacted me to say they were able to reproduce global temperature change to a high correlation coefficient by considering it as a function of – and, accordingly, dependent upon – the time-integral of total solar irradiance.
If these four groups are correct, and if Professor Salby is also correct, one can begin to sketch out a respectable theory of climate.
The time-integral of total solar irradiance determines changes in global mean surface temperature. Henrik Svensmark’s cosmic-ray amplification, which now has considerable support in the literature, may help to explain the mechanism.
In turn, the time integral of absolute global mean temperature determines the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Here, the mechanism will owe much to Henry’s Law, which mandates that a warmer ocean can carry less CO2 than a colder ocean. I have never seen an attempt at a quantitative analysis of that relationship in this debate, and should be grateful if any of Anthony’s readers can point me to one.
The increased CO2 concentration as the world warms may well act as a feedback amplifying the warming, and perhaps our own CO2 emissions make a small contribution. But we are not the main cause of warmer weather, and certainly not the sole cause.
For the climate, all the world’s a stage. But, if the theory of climate that is emerging in samizdat lectures such as that of Professor Salby is correct, we are mere bit-part players, who strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then are heard no more.
The shrieking hype with which the mainstream news media bigged up Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, ruthlessly exploiting lost lives in their increasingly desperate search for evidence – any evidence – as ex-post-facto justification for their decades of fawning, head-banging acquiescence in the greatest fraud in history shows that they have begun to realize that their attempt at politicizing science itself is failing.
Whether they like it or not, typhoons are acts of God, not of Man.
I asked Professor Salby whether there was enough information in the temperature record to allow him to predict the future evolution of atmospheric CO2 concentration. He said he could not do that.
However, one of the groups working on the dependence of global temperature change on the time-integral of total solar irradiance makes a startling prediction: that we are in for a drop of half a Celsius degree in the next five years.
When I made a glancing reference to that research in an earlier posting, the propagandist John Abraham sneeringly offered me a $1000 bet that the fall in global temperature would not happen.
I did not respond to this characteristically jejune offer. A theory of climate is a hypothesis yet to be verified by observation, experiment and measurement. It is not yet a theorem definitively demonstrated. Explaining the difference to climate communists is likely to prove impossible. To them the Party Line, whatever it is, must be right even if it be wrong.
The group that dares to say it expects an imminent fall in global mean surface temperature does so with great courage, and in the Einsteinian spirit of describing at the outset a test by which its hypothesis may be verified.
Whether that group proves right or wrong, its approach is as consistent with the scientific method as the offering of childish bets is inconsistent with it. In science, all bets are off. As al-Haytham used to say, check and check and check again. He was not talking about checks in settlement of silly wagers.
In due course Professor Salby will publish in the reviewed literature his research on the time-integral of temperature as the driver of CO2 concentration change. So, too, I hope, will the groups working on the time-integral of total solar irradiance as the driver of temperature change.
In the meantime, I hope that those who predict a sharp, near-term fall in global temperature are wrong. Cold is a far bigger killer than warmth. Not that the climate communists of the mainstream media will ever tell you that.
Let us make it simpler: Salby’s parameterization bypasses the greenhouse effect, and works. Salby’s work does not have temperature feedback from CO2, and it works. This is consistent with 20 years of CO2 increases and no change in temperature. So, therefore, you kind of have to abandon the idea that CO2 causes temperature change, and if you abandon that, you abandon the “theory” which goes along with it, and the thermal physics reasons why you would do so become obvious, particularly if you consider existing practical thermal physics.
@climate reason
following my comment earlier up this thread
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/10/towards-a-theory-of-climate/#comment-1471268
I would expect that winter months are becoming warmer [there] due to the removal of snow which is a form of human interference with “nature”
Do your CET stations confirm this?
barry’s remark implies
there is no God
henry says
read the book of Job
He put the stars up in the sky and ‘not one of them is missing”
if, with your comment, you want to say or imply there is no God,
how do you explain that something [intelligent] came forth out of absolutely nothing?
that it is an impossibility?
OTOH, if it is your time to go, according to His time,
make sure you have signed your ticket to heaven
Jesus said: “anyone who comes to me, I will in no way cast out”
just saying
Bart says:
November 10, 2013 at 7:22 pm
“If the sinks are very active, then human forcing cannot account for the rise.”
===============
What has always struck me as very odd, is that every year 50% of the new human emissions are absorbed (assuming that nature’s net contribution is zero.) And that this ratio has remained reasonably constant year to year as human emissions have increased.
The 50% figure is way to co-incidental to be simply accidental. Perhaps what we are seeing can be explained by a simple geometric exercise. Consider that each increase in CO2 is a step function, an infinitesimally small rectangle over time. Nature responds by expanding the sink, in effect drawing an infinitesimally small triangle within the rectangle that is always 50% of the area. Add the rectangles and triangles up and you have 50% of new emissions absorbed each year.
Which suggests that the model of water filling and draining a tub of water is incorrect. What we have is a sink that is dynamically changing the size of the drain in response to the pressure of water in the tub.
In effect, life (the drain) expands and contracts in response to the water pressure (CO2 concentration). When CO2 is low, life (the drain) contracts to preserve CO2 (water pressure). When CO2 is plentiful life (the drain) expands to make use of CO2 (water pressure).
rgbatduke: “The plain old non-radiatively coupled NS equation is already so difficult to solve that mathematicians cannot even prove that solutions always (in general) exist. One can always try to discretize the medium and solve it numerically (and this is precisely what GCMs are [sic, do?]) but there are countless problems with the numerical solutions reflecting the essentially chaotic nature of the motion, the tendency for neglected fluctuations at all length scales to grow and lead to widely divergent future states.”
For the benefit of those of us unfamiliar with the general circulation models that the climate-science establishment runs on its supercomputers: Are you saying that those models really attempt numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for the atmosphere as a whole? At what time and spatial resolutions? (I’m speaking from total ignorance of fluid mechanics–which I’ve resigned myself to having become too old to learn–so I would not at all be surprised that my gut reaction is totally wrong. But it sounds preposterous that resolutions fine enough to yield creditable results for the atmosphere as a whole over any appreciably long time scales are seriously being attempted, even with supercomputers.)
rgb,
Again thank you for your efforts but I must continue to disagree.
In particular, in the absence of GHGs a radiatively inert atmosphere around a rotating sphere will experience uneven surface heating and thus density differentials will arise together with a convective circulation that would prevent an isothermal atmosphere such as you describe.
The rest of your response doesn’t seem to contradict my view that radiative gases will simply rise higher than non radiative gases of the same weight and will stop rising when the energy they radiate directly out to space equalises with the radiation they send directly back to the surface and at that height they no longer warm the surface because that which they send down is offset by that which is sent out of the atmosphere to space.
In reality they don’t act alone but in conjunction with non radiative gases to which they conduct energy but the outcome is the same.
I tried to use your suggestion that the Gas Laws could incorporate the effect of non radiative characteristics of non ideal gases over and above their mass when I conversed with Phil on another thread but he convinced me that there was no scope for that since the gas constant is dependent on mass and nothing else both for ideal and non ideal gases.
I don’t think you can get out of your bind that way.
In fact I can show that my hypothesis is quantitatively correct and it is really simple.
The energy exchange employed in keeping the weight of atmospheric gas off the surface i.e. the energy exchange between surface and atmosphere nets out to zero over time.
The energy exchange between top of atmosphere and space also nets out to zero over time.
Thus if anything other than mass causes a molecule to acquire more energy than needed to lift it off the ground to a height determined by mass gravity and insolation then the only thing it can do in response is rise higher and cool rather than warming the surface.
If it were to warm the surface then there would be more kinetic energy at the surface than needed to maintain atmospheric height and ToA energy balance with the result that S-B would be breached.
The only physical process that can cause surface temperature to exceed that predicted by S-B is the diversion of energy to holding the mass of the atmosphere off the surface.
That is a mechanical process and not a radiative process.
The surface is no warmer than S-B predicts once one deducts the energy tied up in the surface / atmosphere exchange
It is incorrect to assert that the surface temperature differs from the S-B prediction because of DWIR.
It does so only because of the diversion of kinetic energy to supporting atmospheric mass off the ground.
Humans are want to explain and thus predict and even control chaotic systems. Why? We still fear the unknown, the terrible monster that lies outside the cave at night. Many here have replaced the greenhouse gas-based CO2 theory with equally predictive theories.
What if the system we call Earth’s “climate slash weather pattern variation” is indeed entirely intrinsic to our planet, and is random with unpredictable various swings between cold and hot, dry and drought, plenty and starvation? What if the “theory” is to take advantage of productive climate and weather while storing up for and always being ready for the worst it can throw at us?
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 5:15 am
Thanks for the clear explanation. What is the conclusion to be drawn? It seems to be that the difference between all natural emissions and uptakes is equal to the difference between C’ and human emissions, if I understand you correctly. Yet is that not an algebraic tautology?
Isn’t the question “is C’ the sole result of Ea alone?” I can imagine that if the ratio En/Un changed then you could have something like the C’ we observe today, even with Ea of zero.
Not saying that is what is happening, just that it is a mathematical possibility. I only bring it up because a previous poster asserted that it is mathematically impossible for this to be the case.
david:
I am replying to your post at November 11, 2013 at 7:13 am.
You had said
I asked you to define what you meant by “huge” when nature emits 34 molecules of CO2 for each CO2 molecule emitted from human activities. Your reply addressed to me – which I am answering – ignores my request and changes the subject.
OK. So, we can add another name to the list of trolls infesting this thread with intent to sidetrack discussion of the thread’s subject.
However, although I did not mention effect of atmospheric CO2 concentration on global temperature, for the record I state that I do not think increased atmospheric CO2 concentration above present levels can have sufficient effect on climate for the effect to be discernible.
Richard
Greg says:
November 11, 2013 at 4:28 am
Ferdi, what is the basis for your graph. Once again, you just throw stuff out , without any explanation and expect it to be accepted as fact.
The emissions from the oceans are in direct ratio to the partial pressure difference between the ocean’s pCO2 and the atmospheric pCO2. A step increase of 1 K gives an instantaneous step increase of 16 μatm in pCO2(aq) without a direct response of the atmospheric pCO2. The maximum pCO2(aq) found at the equatorial upwelling places is ~750 μatm (see: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml ). An increase of 16 μatm of pCO2(aq) will increase the pCO2 difference between oceans and atmosphere from 350 μatm to 366 μatm and the (estimated) CO2 influx from the oceans into the atmosphere from 40 GtC/year to 41.8 GtC/year. That gives an increase of the CO2 level in the atmosphere of ~0.9 ppmv, as the sink part of the atmosphere is hardly increasing.
That happens in the following years: as the pCO2 in the atmosphere increases, the pressure difference at the source decreases and so does the influx, while at another part of the globe, the pressure difference between the atmosphere and the cold polar waters increases, thus pushing more CO2 into the deep oceans.
When the atmospheric pressure increased with 16 μatm, the fluxes of before the temperature step are restored and everything is back in equilibrium at a higher CO2 level.
Thus a step change in ocean temperature gives a asymptote in CO2 increase of 16 ppmv/K, not an eternal increase of x ppmv/yr…
Further, the short term variability of the rate of change is as good explained by dT/dt as by T of any derivative level, see Wood for Trees.
Andrew McRae says:
November 11, 2013 at 1:48 am
“No it doesn’t, because nature does not know or care where the CO2 came from and does not distinguish between them when absorbing it.”
You have two unknowns, the expansion sensitivity of the sinks, and the input from nature.
I broke it down for you as simply as could be. Suppose the sinks are infinitely expansive. Then they immediately expand to take out everything put in. They are the immovable object. The only thing which can change the position of the immovable object is an irresistible force. Since natural forcing is arbitrary, in this scenario, it must play the role of the irresistible force, and be responsible for any observed movement.
If you still do not understand this, I do not see how I can help you any further.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 11, 2013 at 2:21 am
“The essential error you and Bart make is that you suppose that a sustained step change in temperature causes a continuous increase in CO2. For the oceans, that is not what Henry’s law says…”
Yes, it is, when the oceans are outgassing from CO2 enriched upwelling waters.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 11, 2013 at 3:35 am
“Your curvature needs a coincidence of three independent variables: a steady increase in concentration (or volume) of the upwelling waters in the equatorial oceans and an increasing temperature, which combination matches human emissions in increase rate and timing.”
This seems an argument from incredulity. I could as easily say your notion requires the same coincidences in reverse, a halving of the emissions, and an unphysical filtration of the temperature dependent rise. The observations are what they are, and they indicate what they indicate. If I deal out a specific hand of poker, you can say it is an amazing coincidence that you got 4 kings. Yet, the deal is what it is after the fact, and the a priori probability function has collapsed.
“The maximum enrichment of upwelling waters (from e.g. the cold LIA) is about 3%, far from the sevenfold increase you need to dwarf the human emissions…”
An assertion without foundation. The maximum increase from human inputs is 3%, which is the currently accepted fraction of anthropogenic inputs to total inputs.
“Here is Bart’s plot using different units for the two variables and here is the same plot using the same…”
No, it is not the same. Your fit is for the whole data set, mine for the first half. And, even yours is diverging. CO2 rate is steady, for the last decade. Emissions are climbing.
“the natural sources must have increased a threefold in the same period to show the same behavior as seen in the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and to dwarf the influence of human emissions. That is how feedback systems work…”
That is precisely how they do not work. A feedback loop attenuates the impact of disturbances. That is why we employ them so extensively. Systems without feedback tend to wander without limit. The notion of weak feedback which is required for human causality is inconsistent with rock steady CO2 levels for centuries before.
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 5:15 am
This is a static analysis.
C’ – Ea = En – Un
Un must be broken up into two components, Una and Unn. Unn is natural uptake of natural input, and Una is natural uptake of anthropogenic input.
Una would not exist without Ea. It is driven by anthropogenic emission. It is, for all practical purposes, an artificial sink. This is a dynamic system, and the sinks expand in response to all forcings. Now, you have one equation, and two unknowns. It cannot be solved uniquely.
“Now Bart will claim that the above argument assumes source and sinks are constant. This is clearly not true…
It is clearly true. You have lumped two separate dynamics into a single variable. Your sinks do not expand in response to anthropogenic input. That is wrong on a very elementary level.
Stephen wilde wrote: “Work it out for yourself dk.”
Sorry, this is just evasion. You know that your position is untenable if you answer the question either “yes” or “no”, so you refuse to answer. Sadly this sort of thing is rife in discussion of climate, if you were genuinely interested in the science you would be keen to make your position clear and would have given a direct answer, rathe than prevaricating.
dikranmarsupial – THINK! Consider the scenario I gave to Andrew MacRae above. In that scenario, the sink response is arbitrarily large, so that it immediately takes out any human inputs. Then, whatever the cause of change is has to be coming from something other than human inputs. That addition can be as small or large as you like. It can be precisely enough to match 1/2 of the virtual accumulation of human inputs. The fact that it is less than the virtual accumulation of human inputs changes nothing.
Joe Born says:
November 11, 2013 at 8:40 am
“Are you saying that those models really attempt numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for the atmosphere as a whole?”
I do not think so, and yes, I agree that would be a monumental task. As Willis Eisenbach has shown numerous times, the models all behave like a simple one-box model with CO2 as driving input. I think they are really rudimentary.
Richard S Courtney, I am sorry if I misunderstood your position, however the quote to which I was responding was
“…But people who think about it know it is meaningless because “total annual emission from all sources (whatever they may be) and total annual uptake by all sources (whatever they may be)” cannot be quantified AND THEY ARE NOT CONSTANT FROM YEAR TO YEAR”” [EMPHASIS mine]
The part written in capitals in my opinion can be reasonably summarised as “The mass balance analysis assumes that the sources and sinks are constant from year to year”, hence my response.
As it happens the mass balance analysis makes no assumption whatsoever about the mechanisms of the natural sources and sinks or about their behaviour or that they can be quantified (the mass balance argument does not require us to know what En and Un actually are, but it does place a constraint on En – Un). The only assumption made is that they exist and that the carbon cycle obeys the principle of conservation of mass.
Slacko:
Monckton referred to my “culpable silence.” That is, silence which is culpable for something. It requires a huge stretch of the imagination to take an adjective applied to “silence” as applying to “Brandon,” especially when that doesn’t fit any of the context of the paragraph.
Pat:
Thanks. I find it interesting to note who agrees with me about Monckton and who doesn’t. I’m not used to siding with SkS contributors, yet I just did on Twitter regarding Monckton. Très bizarre.
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 9:23 am
“The only assumption made is that they exist and that the carbon cycle obeys the principle of conservation of mass.”
And that the sinks do not expand in response to anthropogenic inputs, but continue taking out only the natural inputs.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley writes:
“In the meantime, I hope that those who predict a sharp, near-term fall in global temperature are wrong. Cold is a far bigger killer than warmth. Not that the climate communists of the mainstream media will ever tell you that.”
Global mean temperature is immaterial, the depth of cold shots into the temperate zone are purely dependent on short term solar forcing of Arctic air pressure. Given the very high incidence of strongly negative North Atlantic Oscillation episodes through late Maunder, Dalton, the 1880/90’s. and since 2010 in this also very weak solar cycle, it’s a matter of when and not if more deep cold shots occur. The most damaging time for them to occur is through the the growing seasons. A few summers in a row like, or worse than 2012, would decimate UK farmers businesses.
Bart wrote:
“It is clearly true [that the above mass balance argument assumes source and sinks are constant]. You have lumped two separate dynamics into a single variable. Your sinks do not expand in response to anthropogenic input. That is wrong on a very elementary level.”
In which case, how is it that the consequence of the mass balance argument (shown in the figure referenced in the post) shows that En – Un varies from year to year if the mass balance argument assumes that En and Un are constant?
Note also that the figure shows that En – Un has been becoming increasingly negative over time, and this is precisely because the “sinks have expanded” (although the mass balance argument itself doesn’t tell us that, just that either the natural sources have shrunk, natural sinks have expanded, or both, or both natural sources and sinks have expanded, but sinks more so than sources. The last of those four options is the mainstream scientific view – see e.g. the IPCC WG1 report.).
You are still making the same mistake – the mass balance argument is not a model of the carbon cycle, it is merely a statement of a constraint on En and Un that must be true if the cabon cycle obeys the principle of conservation of mass.
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 9:36 am
Look at it this way.
C – Ea = En – Un
Supose Un takes out a proportion p of the inputs, Un = p*(Ea + En). Then,
C = (1-p) * (En + Ea)
You now have to solve for En and p. You cannot do it with one equation.
Suppose, for example, that we observe C = 0.5*Ea.
0.5*Ea = (1-p)*(En + Ea)
En = ((0.5+p)/(1-p))*Ea
En can then vary anywhere from 1/2 to approaching infinity times Ea. If it is 1/2, then p = 0, and Ea accounts for precisely 1/2 of the rise. If it is approaching infinity, then p is approaching 1, and Ea accounts for approaching zero to the rise of C.
I am making no mistakes, you are. You are implicitly treating this as a static system, even though you are unaware of how you are doing so.
It is not a static system.
“If it is 1/2, then p = 0, and Ea accounts for the entire rise.”
Dammit. In too much of a hurry.
En = ((p – 0.5)/(1-p))*Ea.
p can vary between 1/2 and 1.
But, the same conclusion holds. As p approaches 1, the portion of C due to Ea approaches zero.
Vince Causey wrote “Isn’t the question “is C’ the sole result of Ea alone?” I can imagine that if the ratio En/Un changed then you could have something like the C’ we observe today, even with Ea of zero.”
The mass balance tells us that if C’ is less than Ea then En must be less than Un, which is what we actually observe. Now if En is less than Un, then we know the ratio En/Un is less than one, however that is just another way of expressing the fact that we know the natural environment is a net carbon sink (emitting less than it takes up). There are no (positive) values of En and Un for which the ratio En/Un is less than one (which we know to be the case) that would give us the observed C’ if Ea is zero.
I challenged Bart to explain how the the mass balance argument can show that En – Un varies from year to year (the green line in this diagram http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/3_mass_balance.png ) if the analysis assumes that En and Un are constant (as he asserts).
You will notice that his response does not mention the results shown in the figure at all, and instead he just repeats his mistake of trying to interpret the mass balance equation as a model of the carbon cycle and asserts yet again that it is a static analysis. This is why there is no point in continuing to discuss the mass balance analysis with Bart, he simply isn’t listening.