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.
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:08 pm
“Does that mean that you agree that total annual emissions from all natural sources is less than total annual uptake by all natural sinks and has been since at least the start of the Mauna Loa records of atmospheric CO2? An unambiguous “yes” or “no” would be appreciated, just for the record.”
Yes. So what? It does not establish attribution. The uptake by natural sinks is dependent on anthropogenic forcing.
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
At November 11, 2013 at 11:50 am you say
Argument by assertion seems popular in this thread.
This is yet another subject which you and I have debated interminably.
The ice core data show low atmospheric CO2 concentrations while the stomata data show much higher and more variable CO2 concentrations. There are reasons to dispute the ice core data and the stomata data, but there are more reasons to doubt the ice core data.
For example, ice cores trap air when the ice solidifies. It takes several years to solidify (the IPCC says Vostock ice takes 83 years) and is porous firn until it does solidify. Air is pumped in and out of the porous surface layer by variations in atmospheric pressure, and this mixes the air in the firn. The effect is to smooth the observations of trapped atmospheric CO2 concentration with an effect similar to conducting a running mean on CO2 concentrations measured from ice which sealed in a year. Rises in CO2 such as those recorded at Mauna Loa since 1958 would not be observable in the Vostok ice core which takes 83 years to seal.
The leaves of plants form stomata in response to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Leaves which fall into e.g. peat bogs can be retrieved and their ages determined by carbon dating. The relationship of stomata formation to atmospheric CO2 concentration is calibrated by laboratory experiment and is used to determine CO2 concentration from the stomata of leaves retrieved from e.g. peat bogs. The leaves form and fall in individual years so the stomata data are obtained for individual years with no smoothing.
Sadly, people tend to ‘champion’ the ice core or the stomata data according to what they think past CO2 concentrations ‘must’ have been. In reality, both ice core and stomata data are indicative and provide useful information, but neither should be taken as a clear and reliable quantitative indication of past atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Richard
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:08 pm
Do the math.
Bart says “do the math”
Sadly again a direct question recieves an evasive response that took up more characters than a simple “yes” or “no” that would have unambiguously settled the question. Sorry, I am happy to discuss science, but life is just to short to waste on rhetorical games such as this.
Bart says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:04 pm
No. Backwards in time to the beginning. Or, after steady state has been achieved, if you prefer. No reliance on transient response.
As you’ve pointed out so many times, the natural sources and sinks of CO2 change with respect to time, human emissions, and god knows what else. There are certainly no constant, long-term values for the sources and sinks, or otherwise CO2 would never change naturally (and we know it does, from the ice core records).
While it will be useful and interesting to study the carbon cycle and the long-term sources and sinks of CO2, these aren’t necessarily relevant to today’s situation. For instance, we know there’s at least one important sink – ocean absorption – that operates on relatively long timescales compared to how quickly we’re emitting it today.
In other words, it’s the transient response that we’re interested in, since we’re talking about what is to blame for today’s increase in CO2. You can’t say “well, ____ mechanisms are relevant at long timescales, so humans aren’t to blame today”; it’d be a non-sequitur, equating the long-term and short-term effects.
“And, after that “while”? I think your subconscious is trying to tell you something.”
Well, it’s trivially obvious that at some point, atmospheric CO2 will stop dropping, or be dropping so slowly as to not matter – it can’t go lower than zero. But more likely, it will oscillate as the Earth goes into and out of interglacial periods, as shown by the ice core records, though rarely if ever attaining the highs it has attained under human emissions.
Wind: “Otherwise – why would the atmospheric CO2 be increasing?”
Bart: You are begging the question. Stephen Wilde has given you a scenario in which this occurs.
Not at all. No one, yourself and Stephen included, has explained how the net total contribution can be both positive and negative over a given period of time. You can’t really say that the sinks are totally up to the task of taking out all the CO2 in no time at all, but also claim that they aren’t doing so, and are in fact emitting CO2. All together, the natural system has to be in net either absorbing or emitting CO2 – it can’t be doing both.
“All together, the natural system has to be in net either absorbing or emitting CO2 – it can’t be doing both.”
The natural system is currently in net emitting mode due to warming oceans or possibly CO2 rich water surfacing from the thermohaline circulation. but most if not all of the the separate human sources are quickly absorbed by energising of the local and regional biosphere.
What else do you need?
windchasers says
Not at all. No one, yourself and Stephen included, has explained how the net total contribution can be both positive and negative over a given period of time
henry says
I did
dikranmarsupial says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:19 pm
Apparently, you cannot do the math. OK.
Windchasers says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:23 pm
“In other words, it’s the transient response that we’re interested in, since we’re talking about what is to blame for today’s increase in CO2.”
Incorrect. The question is simply, would CO2 be rising anyway if humans were not here? If it would, then we are not responsible for the observed rise.
“All together, the natural system has to be in net either absorbing or emitting CO2 – it can’t be doing both.
It seems you have not actually considered Stephen’s scenario.
Do the math.
Windchasers:
At November 11, 2013 at 11:54 am you ask me
Clearly, if you did read my post then you failed to understand it.
The atmospheric CO2 is increasing because the equilibrium of the carbon cycle is changing and has changed.
Some mechanisms of the carbon cycle are very fast and provide the seasonal variation; see
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
As I explained in my post at November 11, 2013 at 5:52 am the saw-tooth nature of the seasonal variation does NOT fit with sequestration processes saturating so being incapable of sequestering all the emissions (both natural and anthropogenic).
Other mechanisms of the carbon cycle are very slow and have rate constants of years and decades so the carbon cycle takes decades to establish a new equilibrium. The slow and seemingly inexorable rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration from year-to-year is an effect of the system adjusting towards that new equilibrium.
At issue is NOT what individual sinks do or do not do. At issue is what has caused the equilibrium of the carbon cycle to change.
Perhaps the cause of the equilibrium change is the anthropogenic emission, or perhaps it is the intermittent temperature rise from the LIA, or perhaps it was sulphur release from undersea volcanism, or perhaps it was one or more of several other things.
But you ignore all the observations and say the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is merely that the anthropogenic emission is overloading the sinks although it clearly is not. Incredible!
Richard
The natural system is currently in net emitting mode due to warming oceans or possibly CO2 rich water surfacing from the thermohaline circulation. but most if not all of the the separate human sources are quickly absorbed by energising of the local and regional biosphere.
What else do you need?
I can’t see how that makes sense. Humans are going to emit about 26 Gt of CO2 this year, and the atmospheric is going to increase by about 15 Gt CO2 (if this year is like recent years).
Where does the rest of the CO2 go, if the natural system is also a net emitter?
Hmm. I’d say based on the above numbers, it would sure seem like the natural system is going to be a net sink of CO2 this year, by the amount of ~11 Gt CO2.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that the “natural” system responds to the artificial forcing, and is therefore no longer strictly natural?
Windchasers says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:37 pm
You are dealing with a dynamic feedback system. It does not behave intuitively. You have to do the math.
Professor Salby’s presentation was very interesting. In regards of the C12 and C13 ratio. He accepted the consensus figures, displayed them, and then questioned them, using the consensus’s own logic. By this means he found the accepted interpretations are wrong, or at least not supported by the consensus’s own figures.
He used the same method with the global energy budgets and showed they only allow CO2 to change temperature, which he also showed to be not the case, again using the consensus’s own figures.
Neat, simple, understandable, logic and questioning.
However, we know the consensus figures for the modern global CO2 atmospheric concentration (ie, MLO) are questionable, if not completely wrong, as per Beck. We know the proxy record for CO2 atmospheric concentration (ice cores in this case) are questionable, if not completely wrong, as per Drake. We know the method by which they were spliced together is also questionable. Indeed, temperature reconstructions from ice cores are questionable (for the same reasons as CO2 reconstructions), ocean temperatures are questionable, if not just wrong, etc, etc, etc.
Is there a single reliable, unquestionable global metric in climate science? Almost certainly not. Yet, Professor Salby produces plots with a scale of 0.1 parts per million for global CO2 atmospheric concentration, without error bars. I would suggest that the noise is far, far larger than the signal. So, although excellent, it probably proves nothing, except the consensus does not have any reliable figures.
His questioning of the global energy budgets does stand up though in my opinion. He showed they must be wrong, and at a very basic level, again, only by using the consensus’s own logic / figures.
All in all, his presentation was brilliant and a correct way to go about matters. I take my hat off to the good Professor. Thank you Murray Salby.
Towards a new theory of climate though, NOT without including realistic thermodynamics, and that Professor Salby did not need to cover, because the consensus does not, and niether do most others. Mores the pitty.
richardscourtney says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:15 pm
The ice core data show low atmospheric CO2 concentrations while the stomata data show much higher and more variable CO2 concentrations.
Richard, indeed we have been there before.
The ice core data are accurate measurements (+/- 1.3 ppmv 1 sigma) of a mix of several years of CO2 data. The number of years (the resolution) depends of the accumulation speed and is between 10 years (Law Dome) and 600 years (Vostok).
Fast changes, shorter than the resolution in the ice core for a full cycle can’t be detected. But even the current increase in CO2 over the past 160 years (if it was part of a cycle) would be detected in the Vostok ice core.
An important point is that while the resolution does blind faster changes, the resolution doesn’t change the average of the CO2 levels over the period of the resolution. Neither does migration after bubble closing (which is undetectable).
Stomata data have much more problems than ice core data:
The stomata (index – SI) data are a rough proxy (+/- 10 ppmv) for the average CO2 level during the previous growing season. The CO2 levels are local CO2 levels over land where the plants did grow. That already causes a positive bias against the bulk of the atmosphere. The bias is compensated for by calibrating the SI against direct measurements, firn and ice over the past century. But there is not the slightest knowledge how the local/regional bias changed over previous centuries caused by climate changes, land use changes, landscape changes, etc.
Anyway, if the stomata data show not the same average level of CO2 over the same time frame as the ice cores, then the stomata data are certainly wrong…
Friends:
Perhaps some of the confusion in this thread is the repeated but untrue assertion that the natural system is consistently sequestering about half of the anthropogenic emission. This is NOT true.
In some years almost all the anthropogenic emission seems to be sequestered and in other years almost none. Thus, there is NOT a consistent failure of the sinks to sequester the anthropogenic emission of each year. The IPCC overcomes this problem by using the completely unjustifiable tactic of applying 4-year smoothing of the data to obtain a fit between the data and its Bern model.
Richard
Bart says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:35 pm
Incorrect. The question is simply, would CO2 be rising anyway if humans were not here? If it would, then we are not responsible for the observed rise.
I disagree, for two reasons:
1) “would be rising” is not at all equivalent to “would have risen this far”. Maybe CO2 would be rising a little, but there’s no reason at all to think that it would have risen to where it has under human influence.
2) You can’t say this makes us not responsible for the rise. Say I go shoot a guy with cancer, and he dies. “Well, he would have died anyway!” I respond. See the problem with that? But really, the importance of that comes back to point #1, that the two events are dissimilar enough to matter (rising CO2 with or without humans, or being killed by cancer vs gunshot).
Do the math.
Well, #2 seems quite wrong. Natural uptakes are going to be much more dependent on C than on (Ea + En). This is why Un has increased as C has increased; it’s why we see the Earth greening and the oceans acidifying as atmospheric CO2 increases. Not that Un doesn’t depend on other things, too…
richardscourtney says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Windchasers:
Clearly, if you did read my post then you failed to understand it.
Hey, just because I disagreed with it, that doesn’t mean I didn’t understand it. =p
As I explained in my post at November 11, 2013 at 5:52 am the saw-tooth nature of the seasonal variation does NOT fit with sequestration processes saturating so being incapable of sequestering all the emissions (both natural and anthropogenic).
Okay, that part I didn’t get, yes. I do not agree that the seasonal variation points to the sequestration being unsaturated, and you haven’t made much of a case that it has — unless you’re saying that all we have to do to get the CO2 sequestered is to get rid of winter, in which case I’ll agree. =)
In other words, the seasonal variation just suggests that CO2 sequestration is hindered by lack of sunlight or warmth during NH winter. Maybe that’s right and maybe it’s wrong, but what you did was “argument by assertion”.
But you ignore all the observations and say the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is merely that the anthropogenic emission is overloading the sinks although it clearly is not.
I’m really just arguing the math. Humans are emitting quite a bit, atmospheric CO2 is also going up, though more slowly, and CO2 is a well-mixed gas (meaning, sources are fungible) —> humans are causing the increase.
Henryp
Thanks for your various comments.
Snow is quite rare in Britain. I do not think we could have any material effect on its impacts due to this infrequency.I do Remember putting soot on our path during the 1962/3 winter. In my opinion soot in the arctic is possibly a major factor in its melt.
I wrote about the frequency of snow during dickens life here
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/bah-humbug/
It was he who was partly responsible for this notion that Britain always had snowy winters.
However, there is no doubt that there has been a general upturn in winter warmth over the last century but having said that most notable examples of this warmth happened from 1700 to 1739 and ironically there were some very mild winters during dickens life especially the year he published ‘A Christmas Carol’
Tonyb
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
In my post at November 11, 2013 at 12:15 pm I wrote
And I cited one example of why the stomata data can be argued to be superior to the ice core data before concluding
At November 11, 2013 at 12:47 pm you have replied by championing the ice core data then concluding
<blockquote Anyway, if the stomata data show not the same average level of CO2 over the same time frame as the ice cores, then the stomata data are certainly wrong…
QED
Richard
Ferdinand:
My last post addressed tio you had a formatting error. Sorry.
This is a repost.
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
In my post at November 11, 2013 at 12:15 pm I wrote
And I cited one example of why the stomata data can be argued to be superior to the ice core data before concluding
At November 11, 2013 at 12:47 pm you have replied by addressing what you claim to be superior performance of the ice core data then concluding
QED
Richard
Windchasers:
I am replying to your post addressed to me at November 11, 2013 at 12:55 pm as a courtesy so you can see I have not ignored it.
In reply to my having written
you write
and you immediately follow that with a critical point I had made and say
Hmmm.
I will reply to further posts from you only (a) if and when they say something worthy of a response, or (b) if you again say something ridiculous which needs refutation for the benefit of onlookers.
Richard
Windchasers says:
November 11, 2013 at 12:55 pm
“Maybe CO2 would be rising a little, but there’s no reason at all to think that it would have risen to where it has under human influence.”
It is a separate argument as to whether there is a reason or not. There is, but that is a separate argument. The argument before us here is, is the “mass balance” argument dispositive in assigning attribution for the rise to humans? It is not.
“You can’t say this makes us not responsible for the rise.”
Again, this is a separate debate. The “mass balance” argument does not constrain us to have been the cause.
“Well, #2 seems quite wrong. Natural uptakes are going to be much more dependent on C than on (Ea + En).”
They are going to take out in proportion to what is being put in. But, if you want to go the full differential equation route, you can. It leads to the same place. If the sinks are powerful, then humans have little influence on CO2 levels, regardless of the “mass balance” argument. The “mass balance” argument is trivial and meaningless.
Well, real greenhouses function because there is no radiative greenhouse effect. And isn’t that a convenient hijack of definitions and concepts. A real greenhouse gets warm because it traps hot air, it prevents air which has been heated by the surfaces inside the greenhouse which have themselves been heated by sunshine, from convecting away (hot air rises, the glass roof stops this) and being replaced by cool air from above. That is the physical mechanism of a real greenhouse and it has nothing to do with the supposed radiative greenhouse effect in our atmosphere. The underlying physical mechanisms are completely different, and so the term “greenhouse effect” which should correspond to a factual physical greenhouse and the physical trapping of warm air, gets hijacked and contorted and ambiguated with this other atmospheric radiative conception for the atmosphere. It’s a total disaster for clarity, definitions, conceptualization, logic, language, etc. But the most ironic thing about this is, is that the supposed radiative greenhouse effect (which is postulated for the atmosphere) should actually be found and exist in a real physical greenhouse too, because the physics should translate over – but it isn’t. We also have 200 years of thermal power systems that operate independently of any radiative greenhouse effect, even though the radiative greenhouse effect should be found in these cycles too. The Carnot Heat Engine and Rankine Cycle are thermal power system that function specifically because there is no “radiative greenhouse effect”. All this worry about the source of CO2, but since empirical data and basic thermal theory shows that CO2 doesn’t affect temperature, and all CO2 does in the atmosphere is feed plants, then we can begin to develop a theory of climate based on thermodynamics, and identify the original mathematical flaw. This thread is growing by leaps and bounds, but there’s a bigger underlying point to understand.
“If the sinks are powerful, then humans have little influence on CO2 levels, regardless of the “mass balance” argument. “
It is easy to see this in the reductio. Assume the sinks are so powerful that human inputs are very rapidly removed. Now, natural forcing has to be responsible for the observed rise. Since the natural forcing is an unknown quantity, it can be whatever it needs to be to make up the discrepancy with observations.
richardscourtney says:
November 11, 2013 at 1:14 pm
Indeed, and I then went on to explain why I didn’t think your explanation was very good; why it seemed like an argument from assertion.
If you can explain in more detail how the seasonal response to CO2 means anything about the non-seasonal response to CO2, that might help your case. As it is, I don’t think that it’s appropriate to compare the sequestration during spring/summer with the multi-year, average sequestration. Plants are going to be limited in growth by many factors (like sunlight, fertilizers, precipitation, and warmth).
So how quickly carbon is sequestered during spring and summer should not be assumed to be representative of potential year-round sequestration. (Again, unless you can manage to get rid of winter, and even then foliage growth will still slow in most areas after some period of non-winter conditions).
I also wouldn’t mind a response to the basic argument, that:
This is irrespective of yearly fluctuations in CO2 levels, obviously. We’re talking about how quickly the natural system can respond to a repeated annual forcing of ~6ppm here, and everything we see seems to say “not fast enough”.
Bart:
At November 11, 2013 at 12:40 pm you ask
I answer because there is no evidence – none, zilch, nada – that the “natural” system is responding to anything other than natural variations so it probably was, is and will remain “strictly natural”. And people who wish to make the extraordinary assertion that humans are affecting it with an “artificial forcing” need to provide some evidence to support their assertion.
The number of arguments by assertion in this thread is also extraordinary.
Richard