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.
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Bart says:
November 10, 2013 at 11:38 am
Andrew McRae says:
November 10, 2013 at 11:27 am
Must depart for a time. If you post something while I am away, I will respond when I return.
Attacking the speaker does not an argument make. The usual epithets used by left-wing believers/deniers, that are responsible for this ridiculous scare-mongering are lost whenever they are required to argue facts and always resort to verbal and personal abuse as noted above. One would rather be a rational, thinking, functioning “right-wing” conservative than a mealy-mouthed, lunatic that all CAGW followers have clearly demonstrated themselves to be. Move along and find a site where your abuse is the standard method of communication.
Greg Goodman says:
November 10, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Filtering with a finite impulse response, and shifting the data to the midpoint, gives a zero-phase response. I’m sure you know this. The WFT site does this shifting automatically for its averages.
Off topic I know.. but I hope everyone has seen Jo Nova’s lead article this morning.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/11/australia-says-no-to-un-wish-list-of-billions-will-not-support-socialism-masquerading-as-environmentalism/
Filtering with a symmetric finite impulse response…
ps.. at the moment.. the Cheshire cat has nothing on me :-)))
On 18th April this year, Prof. Salby gave an excellent presentation in Hamburg, Germany. The full video can be accessed on YouTube via our climate blog ‘Die kalte Sonne’:
http://www.kaltesonne.de/?p=10877
Numptorium in Holyrood
Can’t think of something that sounds much more English than that.
Would it also not be the case that an increase in CO2 should actually decrease the level and even the starting of fires when one follows the hysteria about CO2 being now to be overwhelming the planet ?
It is not the case that CO2 is not “fire friendly” and will actually reduce fires from starting or spreading or producing such intensities as recent fires have shown, especially when there is plenty of fuel laying on the forest floor that people are not able to touch due to green hysteria ?
To work toward a scientific theory of climate is a splendid idea. This theory would have to be built upon the events underlying the theory. Currently, global warming climatology holds no such events. Thus, step 1 in the design of the associated study is to identify them.
Andrew McRae says to me at November 1, 2013 at 9:39 am…
Well, you misunderstand my analogy and then claim I misunderstand yours.
So forget the analogies.
Look, if you have three buckets with very flows in and out that are known without certainty (as you say, we don’t monitor the whole ocean or every forest) you can’t know the amount of each flow that is anthropogenic or due to termites or just outflows form undersea volcanoes or…
You can know that total flowing in to the sky bucket because we measure the total and assume perfect mixing. You can estimate the loss from the coal and gas bucket by burning from monitoring our industrial output. But that doesn’t mean you know how much if the latter goers into the former.
But – for illustration (OK, analogy): If all the flows into and out of the Ocean bucket were 10 billion billion tomes larger than the flows from industry would you argue that the Ocean flows are perfectly balanced and can be overwhelmed by the gnat’s flatulence that is man? Of course not, if that were the case.
But without knowing the all the inputs and outputs from the reservoirs you can’t be sure the two balance anyway. And even though man’s output is real (my first reply to you assumed so to begin with) and even though man’s output may be the cause of the rise in the atmosphere (my first reply to you said so to begin with…
Even though man has an effect, we do not know what effect unless we make assumptions about reservoirs that are unjustified.
Bart and Ferdinanad Engelbeen are experts on this. Look out for them and their on-going debate.
Gareth,
Monckton does not have power over our lives.
Lord Monckton (and several commenters) –
You may not (yet) find a reliable quantitative discussion of marine CO2. Anyone insisting on Henry’s Law as central to this is ill-informed.
Some points from my skim so far:
> Any description of ocean CO2 that ignores marine life is incomplete.
Paleoclimatologists and such refer to the *biogeochemical* cycle, as they have had to infer a persistent active role for life in the geological record.
Some plankton apparently actively transport and accumulate shell-building materials.
Active photosynthesis can raise pH to surprising alkalinity locally. The fixed CO2 is (semi-)permanently removed from the system, making steady-state assumptions unsafe.
> Sources and sinks of CO2 are not yet well-characterised.
The ocean may be a (small net) CO2 source. If so, that CO2 is from deep water, which is mostly formed in remote polar regions.
A ½% change in marine shell (or limestone) chemistry suffices to double (or null) the 20th-C atmospheric CO2 increase. Whether it may have appears open.
Henry’s Law provides a simple, neat model (and no more).
“Finally, I am intrigued with the parallel that considerations of time-integrals of temperature (warming or cooling) offer with the classical Ziegler-Nichols process control theory. ”
Ah , the PID controller. That implies a second order ODE model. Someone suggested that for the regulatory effect of tropical storms, where I’d already shown evidence of the degree.day integral being held constant.
I don’t know whether that is necessary for CO2 (simpler the better in principal, at least for my brain).
However, I don’t think temp is enough on it’s own. Atmospheric pressure (as revealed by arctic oscillation) seems to correlate better during recent ‘hiatus’ of temperature:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=259
During post ’75 warming temperature seemed to dominate. That suggest that a combination of the two may be needed.
Bart says:
November 10, 2013 at 10:37 am
Physical basis right here.
No, that is mathematical fitting of a curve, not based on any law of physics and violating about all known observations…
As shown at the link, Henry’s law dictates a temperature dependent integral just as observed.
You are completely wrong at that point: Henry’s Law shows an increase of 16 μatm in seawater for 1 K temperature increase. That increases the pCO2 difference between seawater and atmosphere which (linearly) increases the influx of CO2 into the atmosphere with a few %, until the CO2 in the atmosphere also increased with 16 μatm (~16 ppmv). That happens with an asymptote over time until the new equilibrium, restoring the previous fluxes, is reached. Nothing to do with integration of temperature: a fixed increase in temperature gives a fixed increase in CO2 in the atmosphere to equilibrium. That is what Henry’s law says and nothing else.
There is no match to the bumps and wiggles in the rate of change of CO2. Temperature, however, matches both the bumps and wiggles and the trend.
Temperature doesn’t match the trend (or it gives a too low amplitude of the wiggles) or it does match the wiggles, but then the trend is too high. The rate of change of emissions is double the trend while the temperature wiggles match the wiggles around the trend…
[Any substantial release of CO2 from the oceans would increase the 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere.]
You think. This is narrative, not evidence.
No matter what you think, you can’t decrease the 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere by adding CO2 with a higher 13C/12C ratio from any source. This effectively rejects your theory of a huge source of CO2 from the (deep) oceans. No way to reject that on any physical ground.
If you reject every single evidence that your theory is wrong only on the ground that it doesn’t fit your theory, then your theory never can be disproven…
Bart says:
November 10, 2013 at 11:08 am
there is a marked divergence between them now which is growing with time.
As repeatedly said to Bart: by using different units for similar variables, he creates a false impression. Here is the real ratio between human emissions and the growth rate in the atmosphere, where halve the human emissions still completely fit within the natural variability:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em3.jpg
In reality it is not the yearly human emissions that regulate the sink rate, but the total of the residual increase in the atmosphere above equilibrium. That is caused by a relative slow decay rate (~53 years), which doesn’t cope with human emissions. Thus far above the near instant decay as Bart assumes and far below what the IPCC assumes…
Bart says:
“this site does not have an advanced search function…”
Ahh, this is hilarious already, not only do you deny that the chemistry principle of mass balance applies to the atmosphere, but you deny that Google applies to wattsupwiththat.com.
Which is why you will never be able to find this comment of yours, in which you show only that you don’t understand the carbon accounting argument where you say:
Well I cannot comment on “Ferdinand” or his arguments, but the only mass balance argument I have ever heard, and the argument I put forth, does not assume anything about the size of the sourcing/sinking for any repositories that we don’t actually have measurements for already.
Since Google does not apply to WUWT, you will also never be able to find this other comment of yours last year, again arguing against Ferdinand’s mass balance arguments, where you say:
No it doesn’t, Bart! The warmer the oceans are the slower they absorb our CO2 and so the quicker it accumulates in the air. Having a correlation in the short term between delta Temperature and delta CO2 is completely expected, but that is fine-grained dynamics of the situation. It does not conflict at all with the requirement for mass balance, which means no matter how quickly or slowly the carbon is increasing in the atmosphere, the sum of carbon derivatives of all repositories must equal zero.
Since Google does not apply to WUWT you will also be unable to recall this comment of yours where you said:
So firstly you assume correlation is always causation, because “accidents do not happen in Nature”. Then you use what appears to be a strawman argument about all aCO2 going into the air and ocean and none of it going into plants, which is not part of the carbon accounting argument and certainly not part of the general chemistry principle of mass balance.
In that same thread you also say:
So many errors packed into such a short comment.
How is a balance of the rate of change of carbon in linked repositories a “static” analysis?? A dynamic analysis is the only type possible because we cannot count how many carbon atoms are in the ocean at a snapshot in time.
As for precision, the required precision to resolve the issue depends on what the analysis shows. As it turns out the measured d.Air/dt is half the d.Anthro/dt, so an error of at least 50% is needed in one of those measurements to put any doubt over the result, and our annual emissions would have to have been exaggerated by a factor of 4x for the real data to support your preferred belief of majority CO2 rise being natural.
Further you again show you do not understand the carbon accounting argument when you invoke uncertainty on natural fluxes, because natural fluxes do not need to be measured in this argument at all, indeed I’d say they are impossible to measure, that’s the advantage of the Carbon Accounting Argument; It requires knowing only the things we have actually measured.
Finally you trot out the tired red herring of annual anthropogenic “flux” being only 3% of annual natural “fluxes”, which has nothing to do with the carbon accounting argument. I have answered that already on NoTricksZone here (where Alfonso was smart enough to see how he was mistaken and that I was right about that). Basically the only important thing for the argument is how much each repository gains or loses year-on-year, the actual path that individual carbon atoms take is not relevant.
It again looks like the only way to disbelieve the carbon accounting argument is to misunderstand and mischaracterise it.
Again I ask, is there a comment or post, just one, where you have shown you actually understand the mass balance principle as applied to the carbon accounting argument for the origin of current rise in CO2, and have then precisely “shown” how it is false?
I know what measurements I would have to see to disprove the conclusions of this carbon accounting argument, as I explained in that same comment on NoTricksZone, and we did not see net rises in atmospheric CO2 of over 8ppm per year during 2004/2005. My hypothesis is tested by the measurements and it passes.
“I sympathise with the alchemists because unlike engineers like me, they were misled by MODTRAN.”
Spot on! it must take an engineer to see this.
I am so glad at least one other person is also seeing this is where the real misunderstanding lies, in the IR spectrums that change as you move from surfaces toward the TOAs. You cannot isolate co2 lines as some invariant entity in the spectrums, for every different ghg brings in its own degrees of freedom at different frequencies through opaque absorptions and equipartition, and a change in just one, such as just a co2 line, changes all other lines across the entire spectrum outside the window frequencies per the local temperatures. You cannot merely take a one or two slab view of the transfers within an entire atmosphere and get it to make sense in multiple different atmospheres and work for them all, using at least one hundred levels or slabs will get you closer to the ballpark. This becomes perfectly clear when you look into two or more different atmospheres in our solar system for the same physics has to apply simultaneously to them all.
Distance does not matter to radiation at a velocity of c, you get the same absorption from one meter through a concentration of one as a path through ten meters through a concentration of one-tenth and that is where lapse rates which rely on distance will mislead you out of the physics involved, but by lapse rates alone, you would swear there is a difference where none exists. An already opaque atmosphere at given lines and bands is concentration invariant, add the equipartition and you see what actually is happening in all atmopsheres with a mixture of different ghgs.
I’m not at the very bottom of this line of thought but it is getting clearer as I follow it along.
Lord Monckton advances the Svensmark’s hypothesis while Dr. Brown advises about the importance of various time constants.
Here is an alternative view:
The N. Hemisphere’s long term temperature variability is well reflected in Loehle’s temperature reconstruction. It is known fact that N. H’s. long term temperature variability is decisively affected by the N. Atlantic circulation. Its the large currents circulatory systems is known as N. A. Subpolar gyre (SPG), where overflow of the cold Arctic currents is mixed with the warm Gulf Stream’s waters. The circulatory period of the SPG is variable, mainly in range 20-30 years.
WHOI: “The North Icelandic Jet is a deep-reaching current that flows along the continental slope of Iceland. North Icelandic Jet (NIJ), contributes to a key component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as the “great ocean conveyor belt,” which is critically important for regulating Earth’s climate. As part of the planet’s reciprocal relationship between ocean circulation and climate, this conveyor belt transports warm surface water to high latitudes where the water warms the air, then cools, sinks, and returns towards the equator as a deep flow.”
Continental slope of the North Iceland is tectonically vary active; however this is not an easy variable to reconstruct, but the surface magnetic records are a reasonable even if not very accurate proxy either in the intensity or timing.
Calculated 20 and 30 years delta for magnetic field change along the continental slope of North Iceland and the Leohle’s temperature anomaly reconstruction are shown here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CT.htm
This may be or not a coincidence, but if not, may not wise to dismiss, even if a direct operating mechanism is not readily recognised.
If in the unlikely event either Lord Monckton or Dr. Brown consider above worth of a further attention I would be glad to forward the annual magnetic data for the 1650-2000 period. extracted from the global geomagnetic data base.
Bart I have replied above (at #comment-1471312) but the text is long and has several hyperlinks so it may be stuck in moderation for a while. Until then…
Your understanding the particular dynamics of the components will be useful for predicting the speed of future changes, but that is not necessary for determining what has already happened in the past, and whether nature (ocean+biosphere) had a net gain or loss of carbon (i.e. was it a source or sink and by how much).
The sum of changes in all carbon repositories must equal zero. Define the repositories in whatever way allows real progress on the question, which means leaving only one repository with “unknown” rate of change. Do the algebra and plug in the measurements. It does not need to be any more complicated than that.
Whatmenare… — “It is not the case that CO2 is not “fire friendly” and will actually reduce fires from starting or spreading or producing such intensities as recent fires have shown, ”
It’s certainly possible if you had enough CO2. But on the idea that temp leads CO2, then high temps are generally considered to lead to drier conditions and so it’s hardly out of line to expect more fires, or fires to spread more. And from there to greater CO2. Though, if you’re into the runaway feedback, then more temp = more humidity. And so the converse would be the expected case would be less or smaller fires and so less CO2. In any ad-hoc partition or combination of the two, it’s anyone’s guess and so angels on pins.
Andrew McRae says:
November 10, 2013 at 1:33 pm
The theory of Bart is somewhat different of what Dr. Salby says:
According to Bart, there is a huge increase in emissions (probably caused by an increase in upwelling from the deep oceans) which leads to a huge and fast increase in sinks too. This increase is so huge and the response of the sinks is so fast that it dwarfs the human contribution to near zero and leads to the increase seen in the atmosphere, but still doesn’t violate the mass balance with a slightly higher natural sink than natural source.
But that theory does violate all known observations:
To be right, the increase of the natural emissions must mimic the increase in human emissions at exactly the same ratio in exactly the same time frame, because there is no difference in chemical/physical behavior between human and natural CO2 emissions.
That means that the app. 150 GtC natural in/out the atmosphere in 1960 must have increased near a threefold over the past 50 years to 400 GtC/year in/out, of which all increase comes out of the deep oceans (from an estimated 40 GtC/year in/out to 290 GtC in/out). The biosphere is a proven sink and the ocean surface has a limited capacity.
But that also reduces the residence time a threefold. Which isn’t seen in any recent estimates of the residence time: that slightly increased over time in accordance to a rather stable throughput in an increasing mass of CO2 in the atmosphere.
That also means that the 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere should go the wrong way out:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/deep_ocean_air_increase_290.jpg
Bart’s theory is only based on the relative nice fit between the short-term variability of temperature and CO2 rate of change (with an arbitrary offset and factor), similar to Dr. Salby’s theory between CO2 increase and the integral of temperature at a higher level, but that says nothing about the cause of the trend and it violates all known observations.
But he doesn’t accept any observation that proves his theory wrong…
It’s the cfcs what did it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24874060
[Please use a valid email address. — mod.]
Hmm.
Bart, Engelbeen, Wilde, Gray, Monckton (talking about Salby), Tonyb and Vukcevic; all here on this thread.
We’re only missing Svalgard and Stokes (please excuse filial disloyalty).
This is the pinnacle of all scientific threads of all the WUWT threads that I can remember recently.
Worth noting for editorial purposes (IMHO).
More please.
The monarch (to his ancestor).
– – – – – – –
Ferdinand Engelbeen,
Can you provide some context for your fundamental position on the carbon cycle? Is your position basically that of AR5 and possibly inclusive of AR4?
I would appreciate knowing your thinking on what is the best treatment of the carbon cycle.
John