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.
Ferdi: “Thus while the seasonal and year by year variability of temperature and CO2 is largest in the mid-to high latitudes, the net contribution of these latitudes to the increase in the atmosphere is negative.”
I don’t see where you think this ‘net sink’ argument leads. If the oceans could absorb everything we can throw out, within a year, then they would need to be net sinks. If they then have a degree of out-gassing due to increasing SST , there will appear to be some residual of emissions. Indeed, this can equally be viewed as increasing SST causing less than 100% absorption.
By linear superposition the two descriptions are equivalent.
You previously argued that 16 uatm could not make enough percentage difference, but we’ve seen that in temperate waters it easily can.,
So we have oceans that are ‘net negative’, absorbing something between half and all emissions.
We have huge expanses of mid-latitude waters were 16uatm can cause significant change even going from +ve to -ve. There is a huge overall flux in both directions from the poles and tropical up-welling.
Of course the oceans (and other sinks) are net negative otherwise we would see atm CO2 rising as fast or faster than emissions. However, this ‘net negative’ statement in itself is inconclusive and would still be true in the extreme case of 100% of human emissions being absorbed at the same time as there was a temperature driven out-gassing superimposed on it.
We need to look for further evidence to determine what proportion of the result is out-gassing.
“CO2 is a significantly stronger GHG than CH4…”
In bulk, not per unit. CH4 is much stronger per unit.
Anomalatys 1:53pm: “..the real farmers greenhouse (doesn’t get hotter than the solar forcing).”
Tmean inside farmer’s GH depends also on the farmer’s GH output side not changing.
Once real farmer’s greenhouse Tmean reaches equilibrium (energy in – energy out) = 0 including all 3 energy transfer modes with the surroundings, after equilibrium the surroundings being cooler they can no longer raise GH Tmean above that equilbrium w/o a change.
This is a key point. Change to equilibrium can of course happen. The outside breeze might pick up and energy out increase, farmer’s GH Tmean will lower to new equilibrium; the breeze stops, energy out decreases, farmer’s GH Tmean will rise to new equilibrium = 0, all given constant solar.
rgbatduke says: November 14, 2013 at 1:25 pm
“I’m not suggesting that the tropopause would disappear, only that it would descend without GHGs, so that the stratosphere would be much closer to the Earth except at locations where surface geometry perturbs it (but sticking up into it:-).
If you want to be really picky, the atmosphere is convectively stable if the potential temperature increases with height. Convective stability equals no spontaneous motion to maintain the DALR.”
Well, the lapse rate exists independently of the tropopause. The latter is a consequence of what happens when the heat pump weakens for lack of working fluid. More GHGs push the effective emission region to higher, cooler altitude, which then have to warm to keep up the flux. My understanding is that the inversion happens at the tropopause because ozone UV absorption above generates heat which has to be transported to the radiative sink region. Without SW absorption, I don’t think there would be an inversion.
“spontaneous motion to maintain the DALR”
Spontaneous motion, if possible, would reduce the lapse rate. And when the lapse rate exceeds DALR (instability) that is what it does. It is forced motion which does work and maintains the lapse rate.
“Are you asserting that GHGs have no influence on the height of the tropopause and nothing to do with atmospheric instability, or are you just pointing out that a tropopause will occur without GHGs”
I think that a tropopause becomes possible when air density is low enough; GHGs make it likely by creating a heat sink where they radiate to space, but the inversion requires a heat source higher up to maintain the downflux gradient. More GHGs create a higher emission region. They actually cause the TOA to radiate less heat, because they impede heat transport from the ground. That’s a major GHE effect – more heat has to go through the atmospheric window (total LW=SW), so the surface has to warm.
One loose end – is there a tropopause without GHG but with SW absorption (eg ozone)? Yes, I think so. In thin air the heat has to have a positive upward temp gradient to transport down, but once the heat pump kicks in, it can do the job with a near DALR lapse rate. Hence inversion.
GHGs don’t affect convective stability. They do cause leakage of heat down the gradient and make the heat pump work harder.
Anomalatys says:
You are just repeating the nonsense that P*stma has told you. The idea that there is a temperature-equivalent given the flux is one of the biggest lies that you are being fed. The equation he uses to deduce that assumes that the body radiates the energy as a blackbody out to surroundings that are at absolute zero. The steady-state temperature of an object is not determined only by the rate at which energy is coming in; it is determined by balancing the rate in with the rate out.
I can make the steady-state temperature virtually as large as I like if I am able to reduce the ability of the object to get rid of the energy that it receives. (I say “virtually” because there are some limits. For example, the temperature of the Earth could not get hotter than the temperature of the sun, no matter how strong a greenhouse effect occurs. It is instructive to consider how nature enforces this: The greenhouse effect relies on the spectral selectivity of the greenhouse gases, i.e., that they absorb outgoing radiation but not incoming radiation. If the temperature of the Earth were to approach that of the sun, the spectral curve of its emission would come closer and closer to that of the sun and such spectral selectivity would become impossible. I like to explain this because it points out that the way nature enforces the laws of thermodynamics is much more subtle and interesting than the stupid and unimaginative ways in which people like P*stma claim nature enforces them.)
Anomalatys,
I would hope that it would give you pause that there is a very broad consensus that the claims you are making are nonsense. You have managed to get at least three people who would agree on very little (myself, rgb, and bart) to agree that your claims are nonsense (and they are basically just parroting of P*stma’s claims…I read his blog regularly for the entertainment value, so I know exactly where your arguments are coming from.)
“I would hope that it would give you pause that there is a very broad consensus”
haha. No. Consensus, uh huh. Flash lights don’t get brighter when shone into a mirror, real greenhouses don’t get hotter than the solar forcing. Experimental tests to show the radiative postulate can’t. Sunshine isn’t -18C of forcing in the first place. We carry on. Please try to be polite.
Anomalatys says:
November 14, 2013 at 2:18 pm
“Patented designs and products have been on the market for years.”
Yes I have read those. Those patents discuss increasing the “luminous efficacy”…they don’t produce more total power (light and heat) than the power you put in. Efficiency can be increased, surely. But you can’t get more than you put it…as a farmer’s greenhouse shows etc.
The point is that the filament temperature increases as a result of the feedback of the IR giving higher output in the visible, just like feedback of IR in the atmosphere increases the surface temperature.
“The greenhouse effect at work in a greenhouse!”
Slowed cooling is not the radiant greenhouse postulate. That postulate requires the temperature to get hotter than the forcing, and this isn’t seen in a real greenhouse.
Bart: “More energy is coming in every instant. If it cannot be cleared out continuously, it will pool up. ”
Pile up? You cannot get something in if it cannot also equally get out. Depending on the thermal capacity eventually all flow will stop to flow. You seem to imply that you could pile up voltage above the source voltage or the net energy stored without an ever enlarging capacitor? When the capacitor is charged, it is caharged and flow hits zero. You seemed to lose me there.
Emissivity in an equivalent circuit operates as a resistance throttling the rate of transfer per the voltage, the current, in that case, right?
“The idea that there is a temperature-equivalent given the flux is one of the biggest lies ”
See: F = sigma*T^4.
Flash lights don’t get brighter when their radiation is trapped. Greenhouses don’t get hotter than the solar flux. Reducing radiant output at the surface only occurs due to emissivity…after that it doesn’t matter, and won’t increase temperature. It is not possible to construct a machine which will produce more heat without consuming the equivalent input flux to do so.
“I can make the steady-state temperature virtually as large as I like if I am able to reduce the ability of the object to get rid of the energy that it receives”
See: emissivity.
You can only get higher than the local flux temperature out of sunlight if you magnify it, to undue its 1/r^2 dilution.
No worries Joel, we certainly don’t need to continue this. I prefer it when it is lighter and more polite. Real greenhouses should show the radiant postulate but they don’t; “Wood’s box” experiments should show the radiant postulate but they don’t. A flash light against a mirror doesn’t, and the surface of the Earth doesn’t. Heat emitted by the surface can’t go “back in” to the surface to heat it up some more, and photons don’t pile up, they pass through each other.
“The point is that the filament temperature increases as a result of the feedback of the IR giving higher output in the visible, just like feedback of IR in the atmosphere increases the surface temperature.”
No I don’t think it is like that. In the radiant postulate, the surface emits more energy than it gets; with these more efficient light bulbs, they don’t emit more energy than they’re supplied.
Anomalatys says:
November 14, 2013 at 3:17 pm
“The point is that the filament temperature increases as a result of the feedback of the IR giving higher output in the visible, just like feedback of IR in the atmosphere increases the surface temperature.”
No I don’t think it is like that. In the radiant postulate, the surface emits more energy than it gets; with these more efficient light bulbs, they don’t emit more energy than they’re supplied.
Well what you think is wrong, due to recycle of the IR the filament is hotter than it gets by electric heating alone, therefore it does emit more energy than supplied.
“it does emit more energy than supplied”
We should engineer all power systems in the world to reproduce this effect. More energy out than in…neat idea.
Anomalatys says:
That equation only applies if the surroundings are at zero temperature (or, alternatively, if you consider just the gross emission, not the net emission. The equation for the net emissivity to surroundings at a temperature T_0 is
F = sigma*(T^4 – T_0^4).
Like I said, P*stma is feeding you lies and you are naively believing them.
F = sigma*(T^4 – T_0^4) is for heat transfer between a warm and cool body. It does not determine the temperature of the warm source. And in any case, the implication of that postulate is that the surface of the Earth and interior of a greenhouse should get hotter than the solar input. They don’t. It has never been demonstrated. F = sigma*T^4 does indeed determine the forcing temperature from sunlight on a surface; any subsequent thermal reemission from the surface does not add to further heating…since that emission can only be the temperature of the surface by definition. It just has never been demonstrated. Not even in a Wood’s Box or a real greenhouse.
Anomalatys:
That’s just nonsense. Equations have consequences. The consequence of this equation is that if the Earth has to emit the same amount of energy as it receives from the sun and the temperature T_0 of its surroundings changes, then T will have the change in order for F to be the same (i.e., the same amount of power as it supplied by the sun.
No. It does not. That is simply false. The sun is at 6000 K.
Re-asserting the falsehoods that have been fed to you as the truth does not make them any more truthful. P*stma has fed you a lie. There is no such thing as “the forcing temperature from sunlight”. It is complete garbage and nonsense.
“There is no such thing as “the forcing temperature from sunlight”. It is complete garbage and nonsense.”
F = sigma*T^4. You can directly calculate the temperature this induces on a surface, by that equation. Tests to check for additional heating from backradiation show it doesn’t occur, and the reason is basic thermodynamics. Wood’s Box and real greenhouses just don’t show the radiant postulate…it just hasn’t been demonstrated or observed.
The equation for the net emissivity to surroundings at a temperature T_0 is
F = sigma*(T^4 – T_0^4).
No, F is not emissivity. You know that Joel.
That is the an abbreviated Stefan-Boltzmann relation and is more like
F = σ · ε · ε_0 / ( ε + ε_0 − ε · ε_0 ) · ( T^4 − T_0^4 )
but you can solve through for one of the emissivities. There’s enough slop in what is being ignored to fill a trash can instead of describing how our atmosphere actually operates.
Anomalatys:
You don’t understand how conservation laws work. It works exactly the same way with money: If your boss pays you $10 per minute and you use it to pay me $20 per minute and then I pay $10 per minute back to you, this is a perfectly acceptable steady-state situation, even though you may think you are paying out more than you are getting from you boss (and I am just returning money that you gave to me, so it doesn’t count in P*stma-land). [Of course, in the first minute, you wouldn’t be able to do this, but there is no disagreement that it takes time for the Earth to heat up.]
A similar thing can happen with other conserved quantities. Let’s say that we reach a level where 90% of the aluminum we use gets recycled. then we could reach a steady-state where we are only mining enough bauxite to produce 1000 tons of Al but we are actually using 10000 tons of Al in products each year, with the other 9000 tons coming from recycling Al.
wayne says:
My writing is not perfect. Clearly, the word that I meant to put there was “emission” not “emissivity”.
Anomalatys says:
November 14, 2013 at 4:22 pm
“it does emit more energy than supplied”
We should engineer all power systems in the world to reproduce this effect. More energy out than in…neat idea.
It is indeed, the concept is called feedback and it’s used in many engineering systems.
Anomalatys says:
November 14, 2013 at 4:31 pm
F = sigma*(T^4 – T_0^4) is for heat transfer between a warm and cool body. It does not determine the temperature of the warm source.
Actually it does! Somebody is feeding you a bill of goods.
The classic demonstration is the use of thermocouples in flames, several reports on this by NACA in the 40s and 50s. A Th/c immersed in a flame reads a lower temperature than the flame itself due to the heat lost to the surroundings (T^4-T0^4), if the Th/c is surrounded by a quartz shield which is also immersed in the flame the loss is now (T^4-Tshield^4). Since the Tshield is greater than T0 the temperature is higher and closer to the actual flame temperature, thus the (T^4 – T_0^4) term does determine the temperature of the hot source! This can be found in any text on Radiation Heat transfer, H C Hottel is a good one.
And in any case, the implication of that postulate is that the surface of the Earth and interior of a greenhouse should get hotter than the solar input. They don’t. It has never been demonstrated.
Actually it has been, repeatedly! The surface temperature is greater than that due to the solar insolation.
Friends:
I write to inform onlookers that the denigrations of the late ‘Zeb’ Jaworowski are misplaced.
Zeb is the ‘father’ of ice core studies: he invented and developed most of the methods used to obtain and analyse ice cores. He was outraged at the misrepresentations by ‘climate scientists’ of what ice cores do and do not indicate. And that outrage is why he produced papers such as his submission to the US Congress cited above.
When the Chernobyl disaster happened the UN appointed him to investigate how the released material had dispersed around the globe. Zeb was an academic from a Warsaw Pact country and the disaster had happened in a Warsaw Pact country during the Cold War: but no country disputed his appointment because he was acknowledged as the outstandingly best scientist in the world for conduct of such a study. Much of that study included the collection of samples cored from glacial ice.
I had the honour of being associated with him for decades, and when his ailing health prevented his attending the Heartland 1 Conference he asked me to present his paper to that Conference for him (which I did).
But in this thread he has been denigrated because he wrote about limitations of ice core analyses and some people find what he wrote to be inconvenient truths. But he originated modern ice core studies so his knowledge of their limitations is certainly worthy of consideration, and the idea that his stating those limitations is a “rant” is ludicrous.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
November 14, 2013 at 6:11 pm
Too bad Zbigniew Jaworowski could not have taken pride of place on the stage with other CACA skeptics at the recent Polish Independence Day celebrations. A heroic figure in his own right, having risked his career for his vision of truth, although perhaps not his life as did Solidarity protestors for liberty in the 1980s.
Ok Joel, I see. Always willing for a look from new angle but… well, couldn’t grasp that one.
richardscourtney says:
I suppose it is too much to ask for citations to back up these claims? E.g., you could give us links to the papers that he published on this subject, or the statements of the scientific societies who noted his groundbreaking work and presumably presented him with awards for it.
You know, reasonable things that a skeptical person might ask to back up such a strong claim.
This does seem to be the area that was closer to his expertise as far as I can ascertain it. Still, if you are going to make a claim like “he was acknowledged as the outstandingly best scientist in the world for conduct of such a study”, you might not be surprised that a skeptical person might require actual evidence that this is true. I’m willing to believe it as a possibility, but some evidence that they acknowledged this would be useful.
wayne says:
November 14, 2013 at 3:12 pm
“You seem to imply that you could pile up voltage above the source voltage or the net energy stored without an ever enlarging capacitor?”
Never said it. But, it can charge up as high as the voltage. If the temperature of the Earth can charge up as high as the Sun, that’s pretty durn hot.
Anomalatys says:
November 14, 2013 at 3:14 pm
“Greenhouses don’t get hotter than the solar flux.”
That doesn’t even make any sense. Solar temporal flux is in Watts. Heat is measured in Joules. A Watt is a Joule per second. This is like saying a mountain can’t be higher than 60 miles an hour.
“No. It does not. That is simply false. The sun is at 6000 K. ”
Solar flux at the Earth is 1370 W/m^2 which if totally absorbed would be 121C on a surface. Solar flux can only do more than that at the Earth if the flux is magnified, to undo 1/r^2 dilution. Subsequent emission from that heating can’t heat itself up some more. Such a postulate has never been demonstrated.
“It works exactly the same way with money”
Photons don’t bunch up though like physical objects (bosons) do…they just pas through each other. They don’t add up and up and up and push against each other and make each other overflow out of things, etc. Again, it has never been demonstrated that a surface can get hotter than its insolation due to backradiation/trapping etc.
“The surface temperature is greater than that due to the solar insolation.”
It isn’t actually. Insolation can be as high as 121C on a surface and it has never been demonstrated that backradiation causes a positive feedback to produce a temperature higher than this. If there were such positive feedback it would runaway, and be easy to observe. It hasn’t been.