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.
Fred : “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).”
Thanks, I was puzzling about this earlier. In fact the percentage of emissions that remain has been steadily dropping (by a few %) since early 90’s at least. I was trying to find data to plot this earlier, having seem someone post it recently.
I was thinking that this must indicate the system was getting ever further from equilibrium and hence absorbing a larger fraction. This seems at odds with other indications.
Your pointing out that the biosphere will react to higher CO2 and higher surface temps by eating progressively more could probably easily account for this few % drop and explains the contradiction.
thx
@dikranmarsiupal
Are you so blind as to not seeing the facts staring you straight in the eyes in the graph that starts this post??
there is no warming effect by more CO2
never mind the fact that you never even produced the balance sheet that I had asked you for when I was not yet banned from your SS site?
here it is again:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011
I hope you will take the trouble to provide me with that balance sheet that I had been asking for?
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:08 am
“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).”
Not what I stated. I am not saying the variables are static. I am saying that you are implicitly assuming there is no response to anthropogenic forcing.
Deal with the math.
1) C – Ea = En – Un
2) Un = p*(Ea + En)
3) C = (1-p) * (En + Ea)
4) 0.5*Ea = (1-p)*(En + Ea)
5) En = ((p – 0.5)/(1-p))*Ea.
p = 1/2 implies the entire rise is due to Ea. p = 1 implies the entire rise is due to En.
You cannot get around it. Equation 4 states that the rise is 1/2 of Ea, yet as p approaches 1, Ea has less and less actual impact.
Your “mass balance” argument is falsified. QED.
Ferdi, thanks for the explanation, I’ll give it some futher thought before commenting.
“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 http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/derivative/mean:12/from:1979/plot/rss/from:1979/scale:0.19/offset:0.14/plot/rss/from:1979/mean:12/derivative
Now there you have just proved you own statement wrong.
It is blatantly obvious that the red and green lines ( temp and dCO2) do show a good degree of correlation. It is equally obvious that the blue line does not. Pay particular attention to the 1998 El Nino , the lower blue line has a peak followed by a trough. If WTF.org was capable of putting an grid on the graph you could verify that the zero crossing of the blue line aligns with the peak of the other two.
This was looked at in great detail in Ole Humlum’s paper. see:
William Astley’s comment for link to paper.
November 10, 2013 at 9:17 am
Trying to suggest that dT matches dCO2 just as well a T(t) does , you demonstrate that you can see whatever you want to see in the data.
Ulric Lyons: “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.”
I’m inclined to that way of thinking , at least as a significant factor. Can you point to proof of that statement?
Bart, “Not what I stated. I am not saying the variables are static. I am saying that you are implicitly assuming there is no response to anthropogenic forcing.”
Again this is not correct, the mass balance analysis IS NOT A MODEL OF THE CARBON CYCLE (how many times to I have to say that) and makes no assumptions at all about the behaviour of the natural sources and sinks. It just says that if you could measure En and Un, whatever the physical mechanism that gave rise to them, then if C’ were less than Ea then you would find that En would be less than Un.
Greg says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:25 am
Bravo! I’ve been trying to get that through to Ferdinand forever. He thinks he can just arbitrarily ignore phasing.
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:32 am
“It just says that if you could measure En and Un, whatever the physical mechanism that gave rise to them, then if C’ were less than Ea then you would find that En would be less than Un.”
But, that does not answer the question of attribution, which is supposed to be the whole point of the conversation.
So, En is less than Un. So what? Un has a part of it due to Ea. Take that out, and En will no longer necessarily be less than Un with the anthropogenically induced part taken out.
richardscourtney says:
November 11, 2013 at 5:52 am
If the CO2 upwelling from deep ocean reduces surface layer pH (e.g. because it contains sulphur or nutrients from undersea volcanism) then that would alter the equilibrium to CAUSE the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Any reduction in pH form (deep) oceanic origin will release CO2 from the ocean surface into the atmosphere, but at the same time that will reduce the total carbon (CO2 + bicarbonate + carbonate) in the ocean surface. But we see the reverse: the total carbon increases.
Moreover, the 13C/12C ratio of the ocean surface decreases in lockstep with the decrease in the atmosphere and the area weighted CO2 partial pressure difference between the atmosphere and oceans is 7 microatm higher in the atmosphere. Which shows that more CO2 is going from the atmosphere into the ocean surfaces than reverse…
Bart says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:37 am
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:32 am
“Take that out, and En will no longer necessarily be less than Un with the anthropogenically induced part taken out.”
This is the whole point of why you analysis is static. You think the part of Un due to Ea is merely a displacement of Un due to En. But, it isn’t. The sinks grow in response to forcing. The part taking out Ea is a wholly additional part which made the sink larger than it was.
The mass balance argument is interesting, but I am still not sure what conclusions can be drawn.
viz: The increase in atmospheric C is less than anthropogenic emissions, therefore all of C is a result of these anthropogenic emissions.
Yes, this is algebraically true, but is tautologous. If C was > Ea, then Ea would be responsible for part of the increase. If C was < 0, then Ea would be responsible for lessening the decline. Whatever the value of C, it would be to some extent the consequence of Ea. It doesn't tell us what the atmospheric levels would be in the absence of Ea.
Look, take the observation that En – Un is negative. Yet that implies that C would have been declining without the effect of Ea, which is a state of affairs that could not exist for very long without catastrophic results. Somehow, Ea appears to have initiated a net sink effect. We do not know whether this is the result of decreased En or increased Un.
Doesn't it appear there is some sort of synergy going on, some interactive or coupled effects between Co2 emissions and sinks? Can we even make any predictions about the future ratios of En to Un or their absolute magnitudes or about future projections of Co2 levels?
Incidentally, it is worth looking at the last step of Bart’s analysis
5) En = ((p – 0.5)/(1-p))*Ea.
which is saying that natural emissions are a constant multiple ((p – 0.5)/(1-p)) of anthropogenic emissions. One wonders how the natural environment somehow knows how much CO2 we emit each year from fossil fuel emissions and land use changes? It also means that if Ea were zero, natural emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere would also be zero, so before mankind evolved, the oceans and terrestrial biosphere emitted no carbon into the atmosphere whatsoever! Sounds somewhat unlikely to me.
Bart wrote “So, En is less than Un. So what? ”
if En is less than Un, it means that the natural environment is a net carbon sink, i.e. it has been consistently taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere that it has been putting in. So how can the natural environment be causing atmospheric CO2 to increase by taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it is putting in?
Bart says:
November 11, 2013 at 9:30 am
And that the sinks do not expand in response to anthropogenic inputs, but continue taking out only the natural inputs.
No, it really doesn’t say that at all. All it says is “hey, let’s add all the natural sources for a given year and label it ‘En’, and let’s add all the natural sinks for a given year and label it ‘Un'”. This is *all* it does. It doesn’t say that the size of the natural sources or sinks doesn’t change from year-to-year or moment-to-moment.
It’s really very simple math. You don’t need anything more complex in order to show that the *total* natural emissions is less than total natural sinks, and humans have contributed the difference. And this won’t change if you split it up regionally or monthly or any other way, since those regional natural sources/sinks will always add up to create the total (i.e., global) natural source/sink.
Basically, Murray Salby denies arithmetic.
Vince Causey says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:41 am
“Look, take the observation that En – Un is negative. Yet that implies that C would have been declining without the effect of Ea…”
But, it doesn’t imply that. If you take away Ea, then Un shrinks. They are coupled together. You cannot change one while holding the other steady. That is the mistake the “mass-balancists” make.
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:41 am
“…which is saying that natural emissions are a constant multiple ((p – 0.5)/(1-p)) of anthropogenic emissions.”
Good grief! That’s the observation! I set the observed concentration to 1/2 of anthropogenic emissions to get that equation. It’s not a physical law. It’s your observation!
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:45 am
“So how can the natural environment be causing atmospheric CO2 to increase by taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it is putting in?”
Because part of what it is taking out is the anthropogenic input. If you cease the anthropogenic input, that part of the sink goes away.
This is my whole point! You are doing a static analysis. You are assuming the anthropogenic input and the sinks are uncoupled. They are not.
Windchasers says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:52 am
“It doesn’t say that the size of the natural sources or sinks doesn’t change from year-to-year or moment-to-moment. “
It says that Un will be the same, whether you have Ea or not. That is incorrect.
“It’s really very simple math.”
Yes, much too simple. It is simple arithmetic for a problem which demands the calculus of feedbacks.
Vince Causey wrote “Look, take the observation that En – Un is negative. Yet that implies that C would have been declining without the effect of Ea,”
yes, exactly
“which is a state of affairs that could not exist for very long without catastrophic results.
Somehow, Ea appears to have initiated a net sink effect. We do not know whether this is the result of decreased En or increased Un.”
The point that you are missing is that the reason that En is less than Un is because of anthropogenic emissions. Prior to the industrial revolution, Ea was more or less zero and atmospheric CO2 was reasonably constant at about 280ppmv, which means that En and Un must have been in approximate equilibrium. The reason that there was a reasonably stable equilibrium is due to the carbon cycle having various feedback mechansims (such as the temperature dependent solubility of CO2 in the oceans), and the equilibrium is the result of a balance between these feedbacks.
Now once we start emitting CO2 from fossil fuels, we disturb this equilibrium and the feedback mechansims kick in. One of these is Henry’s law which says that the solubility of a gas is proportional to the difference of partial pressure in the water and in the atmosphere. So if you increase the partial pressure in the atmosphere, solubility in the oceans increases due to Henry;s law and hence Un increases.
The mass balance equation doesn’t explain why En is less than Un, the point is that if En is less than Un then the natural environment is actively opposing the rise in atmospheric CO2 and is acting to bring it back towards it equilibrium value.
To understand why the natural environment is a net sink you need a full quantative model of the carbon cycle, the mass balance analysis just establishes that the natural environment IS a net carbon sink, but doesn’t explain why.
Bart writes “Because part of what it is taking out is the anthropogenic input. If you cease the anthropogenic input, that part of the sink goes away.”
So how does this sink differentiate between molecules of CO2 from anthropogenic emissions (Ea) and molecules of CO2 from natural emissions (En)? There is no physically plausible mechanism by which that could take place.
It’s really that simple, guys. Un is a function of En as well as Ea. You cannot speculate on what the mass balance would be in the absence of Ea without also changing Un.
This is a feedback sink. Un adjusts to both En AND Ea.
Greg says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:25 am
Greg, if you have a short term variability (sinusoid) in temperature, CO2 levels will follow with a pi/2 shift. If you take the derivative, you shift dT/dt and dCO2/dt backwards again pi/2. That makes that T and dCO2/dt are perfectly aligned. But that has not the slightest physical meaning.
It is T that drives CO2 with a lag and thus dT/dt that drives the variability of dCO2/dt with a lag (but not the trend…).
Some theoretical background:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/10/21/diary-date-murry-salby.html?currentPage=2#comments
comment by Paul_K at Oct 26, 2013 at 8:19 AM
Lots of sound, fury and equations signifying nothing.
Address my earlier contention. Further attempts at diversion not welcome.
Suppose human emissions are quickly sequestered by energised local and regional biosphere sinks whilst at the same time the oceanic ability to absorb is being reduced by increasing sunlight on subtropical ocean surfaces and soil moisture with the latter effect being around two times greater than the former effect.
We would observe exactly what we do observe namely a rise in global atmospheric CO2 whilst all our emissions are absorbed.but it would appear that half our emissions were not being absorbed.
Back to the isotope ratio but that is deeply flawed because there has been no reliable inventory of the isotope varieties produced by the plethora of biological and geological processes.
Bart says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:55 am
Yes, much too simple. It is simple arithmetic for a problem which demands the calculus of feedbacks.
Nope. It’s an observation of recent past years, not a prediction of future years, which as you say, would require a very complex model. IOW, all this tells us is that the atmospheric CO2 increase has been due to human activity. It doesn’t say anything about future CO2 changes, since we don’t know what C or Ea or Un or En will be in the future.
It also doesn’t say this:
It says that Un will be the same, whether you have Ea or not. That is incorrect.
For the same reasons. It describes a relationship between the atmospheric concentration, human emissions, and the net natural source/sink. That relationship will hold true, even as the individual parts change.
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:59 am
“So how does this sink differentiate between molecules of CO2 from anthropogenic emissions (Ea) and molecules of CO2 from natural emissions (En)?”
IT DOESN’T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is the WHOLE POINT!!!
It is only by assuming it does that you uncouple Un from Ea.
Windchasers says:
November 11, 2013 at 11:00 am
“That relationship will hold true, even as the individual parts change.i>
Nope. Un will decrease when you take away Ea. They are inextricably coupled.
Stephen Wilde says:
November 11, 2013 at 11:00 am
YES!
It is so simple. How can these guys not be getting it?
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 11, 2013 at 10:59 am
Mathematical gibberish. You cannot shift the phase willy nilly. If you lag it 90 degreees, you must be integrating. This requirement holds for any natural, minimum phase system.