Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Once upon a time, the meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos were gatherings of free-market economists and entrepreneurs. Not any more. Predatory corporatism and pietistic étatisme have moved in and captured the Davos event. Their dismal handmaiden, the Thermageddon cult, was not slow to follow.
This year’s WEF annual “insight report” on global risks bizarrely rates “climate change” and “extreme weather events” as two of the three global threats with the greatest combined impact and likelihood (Fig. 1).
Figure 1: As the “climate crisis” fades to a record low, the imagined threats from “climate change” and “extreme weather” have soared to a record high (top right) among the profiteers of doom in Davos.
As climate science becomes frozen in record Antarctic ice, as The Pause grows ever longer, and as the IPCC (another international bunch of crooks for which the racketeer-influenced criminal organization that is modern Switzerland provides a jurisdiction-free safe haven) slashes its near-term predictions of global warming to a record low, the Thermageddon cult has silently captured the World Economic Forum.
Remarkably, the date of the capture is highly visible (Fig. 2). Before 2011, environmental “threats” did not figure among the WEF’s top five global risks by impact (top) and likelihood (bottom). From 2011 onward, the green panels marking supposed environmental “risks” startlingly proliferate.
Figure 2. The WEF’s top five global risks by impact (top) and by likelihood (bottom) have been dominated by imagined environmental catastrophes (green panels) since 2011. Diagram based on the WEF’s 2014 Global Risks report.
Yet there was no particular reason for alarm about our effect on the climate in 2011. What had happened? Perhaps the usual suspects, having failed in their big push for a total shutdown of the West at Copenhagen in 2009, looked around for new international bodies to capture and eventually lit upon the politically-naïve World Economic Forum.
I use the word “naïve” advisedly. For the Davos risk report, even by the low standards set by climate-change bed-wetters everywhere, is an exceptionally hysterical and overblown document. The WEF has gone full stupid.
Its pompous global-risks report says: “Environmental risks also feature prominently in this year’s list, appearing as three of the top 10 global risks of greatest concern.
“Water crises, for instance, rank as the third highest concern. This illustrates a continued and growing awareness of the global water crisis as a result of mismanagement and increased competition for already scarce water resources from economic activity and population growth. Coupled with extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, which appears sixth on the list, the potential impacts are real and happening today.
“Climate change, ranked fifth on the list, is the key driver of such uncertain and changing weather patterns, causing an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.”
Now, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report makes it quite plain that one cannot yet attribute any extreme-weather event to “global warming”. It specifically states that there is no discernible additional risk of cyclones, storms, droughts, and floods. And analyses such as Dr. Ryan Maue’s Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index confirm this. Yet the report wails, “Typhoon Haiyan took a heavy toll on the Philippines, even as global leaders debated climate change in Warsaw in November 2013.”
It moans on: “Climate change features among the five most likely and most impactful risks. Among other environmental risks, extreme weather events are considered the second most likely, and water crises also appear high on the list.”
And the solution? “This suggests a pressing need for better public information about the potential consequences of environmental threats, given that collective action will need to be based on common understanding.”
Here we go again. The Davos Thermageddonites blame the continuing failure of the West to shut itself down on insufficient propaganda to convince the public that global warming that has not happened caused extreme weather that has.
The fashionable nonsense continues with a whine about third-world countries being most at risk: “Drought and flood could increasingly ravage the economies of poorer countries, locking them more deeply into cycles of poverty.”
The report winds itself up into the usual mannered frenzy with a panel luridly entitled “An Emerging Spectrum of Catastrophic Risks: Existential Threats”, contributed by the “Global Agenda Council on Catastrophic Risks”, of which more in a moment
“Climate change”, says the Global Armageddon Commissariat, “could tip into a self-reinforcing, runaway phase of rising temperatures.”
Er, no, it can’t. I’m not sure that even the holy books of IPeCaC have ever suggested that runaway temperature feedback is even a possibility. In any event, elementary considerations in the mathematics of feedback amplification make runaway feedback an impossibility.
Figure 3 shows the plot of the IPCC’s 2007 estimates of climate sensitivity at CO2 doubling: y axis) against loop gain γ (x axis). The IPCC’s 3.26 [2.0, 4.5] K interval of estimated sensitivities is marked, showing its implicit loop gain values 0.64 [0.42, 0.74].
Figure 3. Climate sensitivity at CO2 doubling (y axis) against feedback loop gains γ = λ0f on the interval [–1, 3] (x axis), where λ0 is the Planck sensitivity parameter 0.31 K W–1 m2 and f is the sum in W m–2 K–1 of all unamplified temperature feedbacks. The interval of climate sensitivities given in IPCC (2007) is shown as a red-bounded region; a more physically realistic interval, consistent with Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2011) is bounded in green. In electronic circuitry, the singularity at γ = +1 has a physical meaning: in the climate, it has none. In the climate, therefore, the feedback-amplification equation requires a damping term that is absent in the models.
Process engineers designing electronic circuits intended not to oscillate adopt a maximum value γ = 0.1 for the loop gain (and usually an order of magnitude below this). Thus, in a stable circuit, everything to the right of the blue line is designed out.
For the past 750 million years, the climate has behaved as a stable circuit. The temperature-feedback loop gain cannot much have exceeded +0.1, for throughout that time, according to Scotese (1999) (and see Zachos, 2005), global mean surface temperature has varied by only 8 K, or 3%, either side of the long-run mean.
In the past 420,000 years the near-constancy of global temperature has been still more impressive (Fig. 4). Absolute global temperature reconstructed from the Vostok ice cores fluctuated by less than 3 K, or 1%, either side of the mean.
Figure 4. Global temperature reconstruction over the past 420,000 years derived from δ18O anomalies in air trapped in ice strata at Vostok station, Antarctica. To render the anomalies global, the values of the reconstructed anomalies (y axis) have been divided by the customary factor 2 to allow for polar amplification. Diagram based on Petit et al. (1999). Note that all four previous interglacial warm periods, at intervals of 80,000-125,000 years, were at least as warm as the current warm period. Data source: Petit et al. (1999).
Indeed, the feedback-amplification may be the wrong equation altogether. For in an electronic circuitry the striking singularity at γ = +1 describes a physical reality. At that point, the voltage – which had been striving to reach positive inifinity – flicks from the positive to the negative rail. In the climate, however, no such transition is possible. Temperature feedbacks that have been as strongly net-positive as the IPCC fancifully imagines they are cannot suddenly drive global temperature down rather than up. Besides, there is such a thing as negative voltage, but there is no such thing as negative temperature.
In short, a damping term is necessary to permit the Bode feedback-amplification equation to be applied to the climate at all. But any value sufficient to keep the loop gain well shy of the singularity would limit climate sensitivity to the interval marked “Probable” in green on Fig. 3, implying little more than 1 K global warming per CO2 doubling. There is, therefore, no climate problem: and, even if there were, the runaway feedback eagerly imagined by the WEF cannot exist, does not exist, and has shown not the slightest sign of having existed in the past 750 million years.
The WEF rants on to blame the war in Syria on global warming: “For example, while there is no doubt a number of reasons caused the devastating civil war, recent research is unearthing the hidden role that climate change, extreme weather events and a water crisis also played in Syria. Between 2006 and 2011, up to 60% of Syria’s land experienced one of the worst long-term droughts in modern history. Together with the mismanagement of water resources, this drought led to total crop failure for 75% of farmers, forcing their migration and increasing tensions in urban cities that were already experiencing economic insecurity and instability.”
That passage nicely illustrates the problem posed by the lack of anything that our ancestors from the late Middle Ages to the Second World War would have recognized as an education on the part of the “world leaders” who flatter themselves by attending the Davos junket.
For if every drought is blamed on global warming, and every flood is blamed on global warming, and every heatwave is blamed on global warming, and every circumpolar-vortex cold snap is blamed on global warming, two conclusions follow. First, that global warming has been relentlessly increasing for 4567 million years, entirely accounting for every climatic event that has ever occurred, is now occurring, or will ever occur. Yet if global warming has been increasing for that long, how can we tell whether the small warming that ceased 17 years 4 months ago was anything much to do with us?
Secondly, if every change in the weather is held to be our fault, how can the hypothesis that manmade warming is a problem be falsified? A hypothesis that cannot be falsified is little more than a curiosity. It is not science, and no policy action may legitimately be taken on the basis of unless and until it is first modified to make it testable and is then tested and not disproven.
At least the Davos dirge admits, albeit in a roundabout way, that its take on climate science goes beyond even that of the generally extremist IPCC: “The risk multiplier that climate change presents to water shortages, biodiversity loss, ocean damage and deforestation also creates a complex ‘heterarchy’, rather than a simple hierarchy, of environmental risks, often with non-linear patterns of change and self-fuelling feedback mechanisms. This heterarchy is not contained within IPCC models, but could encompass the greatest economic risk of all from climate change.” Runaway feedbacks again.
The report maunders on: “Climate change could tip into a self-reinforcing, runaway phase of rising temperatures”. Runaway feedbacks for the third time. It ain’t gonna happen. Back to Process Engineering 101, boys!
But the Wild Extremists and Fanatics are not done yet. They go on to talk of climate change as threatening “to make the Earth increasingly uninhabitable”. Oh, pur-leaze! Some 90% of the world’s species of flora and fauna live in the tropics, where the last time I looked (on a recent visit to the avian paradise that is Colombia) the weather is somewhat warmer than at the poles, where around 1% of the world’s species live.
An elementary knowledge of high-school geography ought to have been enough to make the Davos dunderheads think twice before musing that the Earth would become “increasingly uninhabitable” as it warmed.
The “Global Agenda Council on Climate Change” contributes a second box to the report, this time entitled “Poor Countries Are Losing Ground in the Race to Adapt to a Changing Climate”
It says: “The year 2014 is likely to be crucial for addressing climate risks, a point made by United Nations (UN) climate chief Christiana Figueres at the Warsaw Climate Change Conference. Countries made only limited progress on issues such as emissions reduction, loss and damage compensation, and adaptation. Greater progress is urgently needed to create incentives and mechanisms to finance action against climate change while efforts are made to keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.”
There is no scientific basis for the notion that global temperature in 1750 was ideal and that anything more than 2 Celsius degrees above that temperature is less than ideal. What is the ideal global temperature interval, and on what scientific basis is that interval determined? The WEF fails to enlighten us on either question.
Who has captured the World Economic Forum? One clue lies in the membership of the “Global Agenda Council on Climate Change”, a title that sounds uncannily like one of the thousands of KGB-funded front groups furtively set up throughout the West by the Soviet Union as its sock-puppets to peddle disinformation in the bad old days.
The members of the Commissariat are Swiss Re (a reinsurance broker as notorious as Lloyds of London for exploiting non-existent global warming to talk up premiums); Notre Dame Global Adaptation Institute (taxpayer-funded me-too academic rent-seekers); Yvo De Boer, KPMG International Cooperative (he once ran the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change); Yara International (“sustainable agriculture”); Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (taxpayer-funded); Carnegie Institution for Science (me-too); Christiana Figueres, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (’nuff said); Connie Hedegaard, European Commission (’nuff said); Tokyo Institute of Technology (taxpayer-funded); HSBC Asia Pacific (me-too); Deutsche Bank (long-term global-warming fanatics); Aecom Technology Corporation (architects and builders “Dedicated To Making The World A Better Place”); Qatar Foundation (they hosted the 2012 UN climate summit at which I inadvertently represented Burma); Ministry of Water and Environmental Affairs, South Africa (taxpayer-funded); Federal Ministry of Germany for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (taxpayer-funded); Baker & McKenzie (“Global Corporate Sustainability” law firm); World Bank (unelected international racket profiteering from every fashionable scare); and Climate Group (the usual suspects, including New York State).
This rogues’ gallery is a revealing illustration of the convergence of large corporations and taxpayer-funded groups who have adopted an extremist stance on the climate question not because it is scientific but because it is fashionable.
Finally, Fig. 5 gives the list of the Top Ten Global Risks as imagined by the World Economic Forum.
Figure 5. The WEF’s Top Ten Global Risks. Its report says: “Climate change, ranked fifth on the list (see Box 1.4), is the key driver of such uncertain and changing weather patterns, causing an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. It is important to consider the combined implications of these environmental risks on key development and security issues, such as food security, and political and social instability, ranked eighth and 10th respectively.”
It is difficult to decide whether the authors of this childishly extreme document genuinely believe the anti-scientific fantasies and fatuities they peddle or whether the global classe politique has at last realized that global warming is never going to occur at anything like the previously-predicted rate. If CO2 goes on rising and the temperature goes on not rising, everyone will know the governing class was wrong when it told us it was 95% confident it was right. So its best escape route is to bully scientifically-illiterate governments into vastly reducing global CO2 emissions and then to claim that the continuing failure of the world to warm is their noble achievement rather than what would have happened anyway.
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re timetochooseagain.
“””””…..re timetochooseagain
“””””…..But putting that aside, there is no reason to think *all* clouds would respond the same way to a temperature change, *or* that said effect would necessarily involve increases. It is certainly true that the total cloud forcing for *all* clouds negative, though. So that, *if* one presumed that clouds would increase with warming, and basically maintain their various proportional properties, that would, in fact, constitute a cooling effect and a negative feedback…….”””””
July 7 2007 Science Wentz et al; “How much more rain will global warming bring.”
From actual remote sensing satellite measurements.
A 1 deg C increase in global surface / lower troposphere temperature gave a measured increase in total global evaporation of 7% . Also the GCMs agree with this measurement. Apparently the Clausius Clapeyron equation is behind this.
Also the total global precipitation increases by 7%. The GCMs agree.
Precipitation must equal evaporation, so that we don’t end up with the oceans overhead.
The total global atmospheric water content increases by 7%. For some reason, the integral of a linear function increases by the same amount as the slope. Fancy that !
BUT the GCMs claim the total atmospheric water content only increases by from 1 to 3%; NOT 7%
So computer models disagree with measured facts by as much as a factor of 7.
Not mentioned in the Wentz paper; but postulated as a likelihood (by me), was and still is, a suggestion, that in most civilized places, it is traditional to have atmospheric precipitation, be accompanied by the simultaneous presence of clouds. NO, not optically thin cirrus clouds, but “precipitable” clouds that generally are NOT optically thin. And a seat of the pants guess would be that those clouds would increase also by; say about 7% (in area, optical density, or persistence time)
When I look at the typical remote satellite global photos of earth, similar to the lunar earth rise photo, I don’t see much in the way of optically thin cirrus clouds; through which, I would be able to see either the ground, or the blue sky that hides the black ocean. I see mostly bright highly reflective (80% at solar spectrum frequencies) precipitable clouds. NASA/NOAA claim that global cloud cover averages about 62%. Only Al Gore has ever seen a daylight photo of the earth that is completely devoid of clouds (which he published). Nobody else has ever observed such a phenomenon.
Now I realize that if the higher and more ethereal clouds are the ones that the text books claim warm the surface; that would make noctilucent clouds, the worst offenders. Doesn’t seem to me that the lowest density coldest clouds can be the greatest absorbers of outgoing radiation from the surface.
But I’m quite happy to amend my ALL clouds statement, and restrict it to precipitable clouds, and exclude optically thin cirrus clouds.
But that still leaves the clouds (and water vapor) that absorb or reflect incoming solar spectrum radiant energy, and block it from reaching the deep ocean storage pool, DO increase (by 7% per degree C rise), which results in negative feedback cooling of the earth surface.
Now I also agree that this warming increased atmospheric H2O , that absorbs more incoming solar energy DOES warm the atmosphere, which causes it to radiate more (isotropic LWIR ).
Only half of that is directed earthwards; it’s still a net energy loss to the surface.
Even in clear air cloudless skies, the TSI irradiance of 1,362 W/m^2, becomes about 1,000 W/m^2 at the surface. That loss is a combination of the diffuse blue scattering (isotropic) and the H2O, O3, CO2 and other GHG components of the atmosphere, as well as whatever O2 and N2 absorb.
So even without clouds, water vapor gives a large negative feedback coupling directly to the incoming sunlight. Your cirrus cloud radiation to the surface, is not where the energy change is happening; it is directly at the solar input end.
Your optically thin cirrus clouds, are just as leaky for LWIR, as they are for solar spectrum frequencies; but they are a small component of the 62% global cloud cover
@Lewis P Buckingham
In a financial war against my tiny country the US IRS has the upper hand.
If fraud is made against the US IRS it is done by US citizens, US residents, and Green card holders.
The assistance, active or passive, of banks does not change this primary fact.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. Matthieu 7:5
Village Idiot:
At January 24, 2014 at 11:56 pm you ask Lord Monckton
Of course not!
Only an idiot could entertain such a thought about Lord Monckton.
Perhaps you could do everybody a favour and stop wasting space on WUWT with your idiocy?
Richard
This reminds me of the recent and now dying effort to get flat earthers onto school boards so that curriculum adoptions were weighted towards creationistic text books. The global Watermelon agenda has been for like-minded entities to invade world scientific, policy, and governing bodies in order to weight decisions towards their version of a new world order. It is a house built of cards and will fall upon itself at the slightest breeze. Problem is, when the fall happens, many will lose and hard-fought faith in these groups will disappear. Collateral damage will even be felt by groups not involved at all in these shenanigans. The text books now replete with images of kids cleaning up rivers and streams will seem like children playing in their cribs. My kids and grandchildren will be left with this global financial mess. And they thought all they had to do was clean up the environment a bit.
Dear Richard,
Thank you for your sarcastic comment:
“Only an idiot could entertain such a thought about Lord Monckton.” 😉
Space doesn’t seem to be at a premium here on the Village notice board. Just consider the fact that I add to the number of comments the Master can crow about at the end of the year 🙂
And this site does have a certain beguiling entertainment value (“What will they dream up next?”)
I’m surprised “global governance” was so far down the list. Clearly it is their primary goal. They’re a little slow on the uptake of using !!!Thermageddon!!! to achieve it though.
The NCSE is one at-risk organization:
Village Idiot says:
January 24, 2014 at 11:56 pm
“Well, what a revelation from Sir Christopher! There’s corruption in the world’s institutions! Shock!!”
Wait, so you hold it as self-evident that UN and UNIPCC are corrupt. Yet, you sound like a warmist. Somehow this doesn’t rhyme; as for warmists the IPCC is gospel.
So you claim to believe in the pontifications of a corrupt organisation. Obviously this makes you a dishonest person; one who uses lies to advance his agenda. Are you a rent-seeker in climate alarmism? Does your livelihood depend on a continuation of the scam?
Lord M says:
The answer is No. The type of oscillation caused by the loop gain transiently exceeding unity is mandated by the feedback-amplification equation. The overall feedback gain factor is the reciprocal of the difference between unity and the closed-loop gain
This is wrong, in the absence of a time lag a amplifier will indeed just pin to a rail. The mechanism is described in my previous post. Any small perturbance will drive the amplifier in one direction until it hits the limit defined by the input power (power supply current and voltage limits) the amplifier saturates and its effective gain is near zero, It takes a rather large forcing to reverse that saturation.
There are two preconditions for oscillation, a loop gain of 1 and a time lag between the output and the feedback input both of which the climate has. Dr David Evans can help you with this if you don’t want to talk to me
Contraception key in climate change fight: Gore and Gates
Stopping overpopulation is one way the dangers of climate change can be mitigated, according to two of the most prominent believers in global warming.
Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that contraception is a key in controlling the proliferation of unusual weather they say is endangering the world.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101361600
“Michel” says governmental institutions like the IPCC cannot be prosecuted for crimes. Governmental institutions can be prosecuted, for they are legal persons. In civilized jurisdictions (which in this respect notoriously do not include Switzerland), governmental entities are not immune from prosecution as legal persons for sufficiently serious crimes, such as the IPCC’s serious fraud.
However, the IPCC is not a “governmental institution”. As its name states, it is intergovernmental and, therefore, answerable to no national jurisdiction, and especially not to the indulgent Swiss jurisdiction in which it is headquartered. Switzerland regrettably harbors, indulges, and protects many such institutions that would be subject to prosecution were they headquartered elsewhere.
I note that “Michel” is not willing to try to get the useless appendage that is the Swiss Bureau de l’Escroquerie to investigate the IPCC’s frauds, such as its flagrantly bogus but very influential diagram of 2007 falsely purporting to show that the rate of global warming is accelerating when the method it used demonstrated no such thing. The method was deliberately wrong, was persisted in when complained of, and was accordingly a serious crime aggravated by the IPCC’s refusal to redress it.
No doubt “Michel” is unwilling to make any complaint to the Bureau de l’Escroquerie because he knows perfectly well that it is just as corrupt as the rest of the Swiss financial and investigative system. He knows full well that it will not lift a finger to pursue any organization from whose presence Switzerland profits in return for giving that organization effective protection from any crimes it commits, regardless of how many are made to suffer by – for instance – the very large and very unnecessary increases in fuel and power prices that the IPCC so relentlessly and baselessly advocates.
“Michel” also says one cannot jail an institution. Actually one can, by freezing all its assets in Switzerland and then expelling it, having incarcerated those of its personnel who were directly involved in deliberate deception of governments for profit.
“Michel” whines that I have repeated my assertions about Switzerland. On the contrary, this is the only time I have complained publicly about the corruption in the Swiss bank that allowed a false account to be opened in my name without even the most elementary checks; the further corruption by which it refused to hand over details of the bogus account it had created to the authorities when I asked it to do so; the still further corruption by which the Swiss authorities failed to do anything about the bank’s crimes; and the yet further corruption by which the Swiss government failed to require the police and the prosecuting authorities to do what in any civilized jurisdiction would have been their job.
Switzerland’s unsavoury reputation as a racketeer-influenced criminal organization rather than a proper nation is, therefore, thoroughly justified, and it is further confirmed by Switzerland’s harboring the corrupt, profiteering IPCC and the refusal either of its fraud office or of its IPCC point of contact to do anything when a plain instance of fraud that would have any company director behind bars is drawn to their attention.
“Michel’s” own indifference to the IPCC’s crimes illustrates precisely the Swiss mentality that allows the IPCC to go on damaging the economies of the West by fraudulently misrepresenting climate science to governments.
“Michel”, who seems to have a penchant for bromides, trots out one of the oldest: “Calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose”. The mud sticks on Switzerland because that benighted nation is an accessory before, during, and after the fact of criminal activities not only by its banks, as I know to my cost, but also by the corrupt IPCC, which it improperly permits to be exempt from its jurisdiction – to the world’s cost not only in treasure but in lives.
@ur momisugly george e. smith-Okay, lots to comment on here. To begin:
First, I believe you have mixed up your discription of Wentz’s paper. The models are *not* correct, according to it, on the magnitude of precipitation/evaporation change with warming.
Second, that a precipitation increase implies a cloudcover increase, or at least an increase in clouds associated with precipitation, *might* be true. It might even be nicely proportional. I don’t think I know enough to know for sure.
I do think clouds probably act as a negative feedback. But I think your picture of how that happens is excessively simplified.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
Christopher Monckton,
Your essay was provocative. Within the opening paragraph of your essay, which I quote above, is the story which you should have told; it is one that fundamentally addresses the intellectual issue of the modern world; which is also the key issue for the last 2500++ years of Western Civilization.
Why? If there was a radically fundamental transition, which to me is still reasonably arguable, then why the transition within the WEP and in broader society? In the ideas of intellectuals during the timespan, there had to have been an intellectually fundament kind of prime mover type of idea that lost against another opposing intellectually prime mover type of idea. Examining the ideas and their premises back to the most basic fundamental of concepts . . . . why did one win and the other lose . . . . lose so far that is, because the intellectual dialog isn’t over . . it is never over.
Why? Why the transition? That is important compared with your essay story.
NOTE: I think the why is to be found in the many thousand year duel intellectually between the idea of observed reality as a basis of metaphysics / epistemology versus ideas of dual realities as a basis of metaphysics / epistemology.
John
I wish the bossily pseudonymous “bobl” would get its process engineering right. Whether it likes it or not, the Bode feedback-amplification equation is as I have described it, and it is the equation specifically cited by the IPCC, and by James Hansen, and it is the reason for the singularity that causes the type of oscillation caused by the loop gain transiently exceeding unity. Bobl’s introduction of the question of time-lag is all very interesting and dully standard (though of great relevance to the determination of climate sensitivity, as a forthcoming paper by me will show), but it is beyond the scope of the head posting, which merely made the point that runaway feedback of the type thrice referred to in the head posting cannot arise in the climate – a point that “bobl’s” own analysis tends to confirm.
In reality, “bobl” is not criticizing me: it is criticizing the IPCC, which – to take just one of the many points at which its analysis differs from “bobl’s” – determines the climate sensitivity parameter as a function of the feedback-sum, without taking account of negative feedbacks first and positive feedbacks second as “bobl” would prefer.
I do wish that the likes of “bobl”, whoever or whatever it is, would stop bossily telling me I don’t understand the relevant science when I merely outline the IPCC’s version of that science and then point out that it is wrong. Since I have cited the IPCC’s science merely to point out that it is wrong, “bobl” ought not to take me to task for describing it.
If “bobl” wishes to learn more about process engineering as the IPCC understands it, it may like to start with the admittedly Sibylline footnote on p. 631 of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), where it will learn that the IPCC’s understanding of how to handle the feedback sum differs from its understanding.
And, if it would like to understand how process engineering really works (as opposed to the IPCC’s messed-up version), it may like to sit at the feet of Dr. David Evans.
Finally, a polite word to the moderators. It is not really satisfactory that pseudonymous posters like “bobl” to direct personal criticisms at those of us who have the guts to say who we are. If “bobl” is so spineless as not to reveal its true identity, then let it not criticize me personally, and bossily, and inappropriately, for misunderstanding how process engineering works. One suspects that “bobl” and countless other cowards like it would be considerably less smug if they had the backbone to reveal who they are.
In future, comments from behind cringing pseudonyms should be snipped wherever they make personal (and, in the present instance, inept and inapt) attacks on named individuals.
[Reply: What say you, “bobl”? Do you wish to raise your credibility by identifying yourself? ~ mod.]
“””””…..timetochooseagain says:
January 25, 2014 at 3:35 pm
@ur momisugly george e. smith-Okay, lots to comment on here. To begin:
First, I believe you have mixed up your discription of Wentz’s paper. The models are *not* correct, according to it, on the magnitude of precipitation/evaporation change with warming.
Second, that a precipitation increase implies a cloudcover increase, or at least an increase in clouds associated with precipitation, *might* be true. It might even be nicely proportional. I don’t think I know enough to know for sure……”””””
Well yes , time to chooseagain, I did mix them up.
As I recall, Wentz said that a 1 deg C rise, resulted in a 7% increase, in global evaporation, a 7% increase in atmospheric moisture, and a 7% increase in global precipitation; well I might have reversed the last two; but they obey the commutative rule of typing. Switching the order in which statements are typed, does not alter their meaning or validity.
Then Wentz said that the GCMs agreed on the evap-precip pair, at 7%, but claimed only a 1 to 3% increase in total atmospheric water; maybe I got that reversed. I can’t recall if Wentz et al mentioned that evap and precip have to match; it’s been maybe five years since I last read it. I first read the paper in the week of July 7 2007, when it appeared in SCIENCE. I am no longer a subscriber.
So in my post above, I did interleave (“mixup”) my citation of the claims; but as I said; they obey the commutative rule, so mox nix if I mixed them up.
And I don’t recall the paper citing the Clausius-Clapeyron eqation, as the basis for the theoretical modeling of evap. That is simply a conjecture of mine. I know less than zero about the physical models of the GCMs. With 13 (or is it 17) competing models; I presume they range from “Simpson’s Rule” all the way to Quantum Chromo-dynamics.
As for the cloud increase; another wild arse guess of mine. But I’m an open minded guy.
I’m quite happy to believe that global cloud cover, can remain at exactly the same 62% or whatever of the global area; and that the optical density of them remains completely unchanged, and the clouds persist (in existence) for exactly the same period of time; but they precipitate 7% more rain, snow, sleet, and hail. I just need some cloud expert to explain the physics of how that happens. It just seemed to me those factors collectively might increase by around 7% in the sum of their effects.
As for my conjecture being simple; I seem to recall, that Albert Einstein told us, that physical theories, should be as simple as possible ; but no simpler !
What sort of augmentation flourishes, would you like me to add ??
Well gee whizz, I did flip them.
7% increase in total atmospheric moisture; same as Wentz measured; but only 1-3% increase in evap-precip rate.
Now there’s a pretty kettle of fish. The evap sposed to increase by 1% but the amount in the atmosphere goes up by 7%; yet the precip stays the same as the evap.
So what would happen if this was all linear, and you start it off from zero water in the atmosphere ?
In any case; Wentz et al observed as much as seven times the evap, that the GCMs claim can happen. I tend to go with what happened, rather than what is supposed to happen.
But I’m dying to hear how one gets more precipitation, from the same amount of clouds; and its warmer, so the moisture should be happier staying up there.
And I got the date wrong too, it was July 13 issue, not July 7. Every five years, you should go and re-read everything you ever read, so you don’t forget it.
DirkH 1:22 pm:
What a black and white word you live in! You should try to get out of this little isolated Village a bit more and widen your horizons.
Name for me an institution in the world that does not have some level of dishonesty. Even the barbers in our town fix the price of a short-back-and-sides between them – but I still get a haircut 😉
(Part-time warehouse worker – so my snout’s in a different trough!)
@ur momisugly@Monckton of Brenchley
Charte des Nations Unies
Article 105
1 L’Organisation jouit, sur le territoire de chacun de ses Membres, des privilèges et immunités qui lui sont nécessaires pour atteindre ses buts.
2 Les représentants des Membres des Nations Unies et les fonctionnaires de l’Organisation jouissent également des privilèges et immunités qui leur sont nécessaires pour exercer en toute indépendance leurs fonctions en rapport avec l’Organisation.
3 L’Assemblée générale peut faire des recommandations en vue de fixer les détails d’application des paragraphes 1 et 2 du présent Article ou proposer aux Membres des Nations Unies des conventions à cet effet.
Village Idiot:
At January 25, 2014 at 5:36 am I wrote to you saying in total
At January 25, 2014 at 9:55 am you have replied to me saying
Only an idiot could think my comment was sarcastic.
Given that you proclaim yourself to be an idiot, I will refrain from demanding an apology.
Richard
george e. smith:
At January 25, 2014 at 11:02 pm you say
Well, it is good that you admit your ignorance and inability to think the matter through. Perhaps you would have suffered less embarrassment in this thread had you been similarly reflective before posting all the errors, misunderstandings and things you failed to remember which you admit.
It is not relevant if the “moisture should be happier staying up there”.
The issue is the rate of the cycle. The amount of rain clouds is constant when the rate of their formation equals the rate of their loss. And they are lost by creation of precipitation. If the two rates adjust by the same amount then the precipitation rate also changes but the amount of cloud does not.
It is your assertion that this is not possible, but your only stated reason for this is your assertion concerning the happiness of moisture. I doubt the possibility of moisture being “happier”, and wonder if it has a party when it gets happy enough.
Richard
“Michel”, finding yet another pretext for not inviting the Swiss authorities to investigate the IPCC’s crimes rather than furnishing official-looking cover for them, cites the Charter of the United Nations as granting immunity to its officials.
However, the IPCC is not a UN organization, though one of its joint founders, UNEP, is part of the UN system. Though the UN General Assembly, in December 1988, resolved to endorse the founding of the IPCC, it did not incorporate the IPCC into what it calls its “system”.
Accordingly, the IPCC enjoys no immunities under the UN Charter, and its officials in Switzerland enjoy only those immunities that the Swiss authorities have so unwisely granted.
Now that “Michel’s” persistence in resistance to the idea of asking Switzerland to start cleaning up its act by addressing the crimes of the IPCC has reminded me of how little can be expected from the Swiss government or, it seems, from its people, I have decided to bring forward a project that I have long had in mind: to invite the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court – by which Switzerland is bound – to investigate not only the crimes of the IPCC but also of the nation that gives its crimes such impenetrable cover.
The IPCC, in being reckless as to whether that fraction of its scientific proclamations that is bogus may kill millions by pushing up the prices of fuel and power beyond what they can afford, may well be guilty of what the Court’s founding document describes as “extermination”. If it is guilty, then the Swiss authorities that have given it cover and have refused to investigate even the plainest instance of its criminality are also guilty as accessories after the fact of extermination.
And, before “Michel” pleads that the Swiss Government is immune, it is not. Under the Court’s founding document, every such immunity is set aside (except, of course, the immunities enjoyed by the judges and officials of the Court itself).
Some 31,000 excess deaths were recorded in the United Kingdom in the cold winter of 2012/13, a 30% increase on the mean excess in the previous five years. During those five years, prices of fuel and power rose by almost half in the UK. A substantial fraction of the price hike arose from policies to deter people from using fossil fuels to heat their homes – policies that the UK Government justifies, over and over again, by citing the documents of the IPCC.
I shall submit to the Prosecutor (as any Peer may do) that there is a statable case that the IPCC’s refusal to correct a serious and influential error was made in the knowledge that one consequence might be premature mass deaths. Before devoting time and treasure to submitting the full case, I shall naturally have discussions with the Prosecutor’s office to ensure that he would dare to act against so once-fashionable and once-powerful an organization, and that none of the get-out-of-jail-free clauses in the Court’s founding document will exempt the IPCC and the handful of its individual pseudo-scientists who have wilfully bent and distorted and misrepresented data and results, as well as its aider and abettor the Swiss Government,.from facing the massive financial and custodial penalties that will be in order if the case be found proven.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
January 26, 2014 at 7:13 am
Good luck with that. How about pursuing the fraudsters as individuals, too?
There has been much nonsense promulgated about positive feedbacks in climate mechanisms. An example is that “positive feedback systems are unstable”, which is commonly parroted by IPCC-believers. I do think, however, that the counterarguments presented in the present Posting could be much improved. I think that the arguments made by reference and analogy to electronics are not needed, sometimes are incorrect, and weaken the main argument.
I am a PhD scientist who has designed and operated feedback systems, many electronic with intentional net positive feedbacks. I have not studied writings about climate feedbacks by James Hansen, but if he did predict that the climate could break into oscillation or be driven to negative temperature changes by positive feedbacks applied to warming, then he was wrong.
As some previous replies, e.g. Bobl at 04:37 on the 24th, have noted, it is difficult to discuss feedback systems without including the time-dependent aspects that are described as “damping” or “leads and lags”. Analysis describing frequency content and transients requires Fourier, Laplace or differential equation techniques, and we cannot go into their mathematics in a Replies list. Nevertheless, some reasonable generalities can be made from a discussion using only real numbers and only conclusions about final states, rather than transients.
I start with Figure 3 in the Posting. The usual equation describing the IPCC curve is 1/(1-γ), as was used by Lord Monkton. If γ >1, then the prediction is for a negative gain, and the gain flips from + to – infinity as γ traverses zero. The problem is that the equation breaks down as a description of the physics at γ =1 because at that value the derivation “divided by zero”. It is not unusual for the domain of a physical derivation to be limited. The IPCC graph is meaningless at γ>=1.
In electronics, 1/(1-γ) becomes irrelevant when an otherwise linear system “saturates” or “rails” at the largest possible voltage of either sign. In climate, the system as a whole will breakdown at some point short of infinite temperature! Lord Monkton’s assertion “Temperature feedbacks that have been as strongly net-positive as the IPCC … imagines …. cannot suddenly drive global temperature down rather than up” is correct. His assertion that an electronic circuit “flicks from the positive to the negative rail” at γ = 1 is, however, incorrect. Particular gain and phase shifts in the loop equation are required for such flipping, and in general they do not happen. An electronic circuit generally will fail by railing at one polarity or the other and staying there. Joe Born made this point at 03:35 on the 24th. This is not to say that there are not failures in nominally negative feedback systems with where loop lags sum to 180⁰ of phase shift, thus making γ=1 at some frequency, and the system oscillates.
The non-physicality of negative end-point gains at γ>1 can be illustrated by a discrete-time series model. This model is fairly descriptive of a system with a dominant single first-order lag rate-constant (as is common). Suppose that a system with unity gain (λ in the IPCC language) feeds back γ (=f in this case) of its output for many discrete feedback cycles. Suppose that the input and output begin at some value X. After one feedback cycle the output is (1+ γ)X; after two cycles it is (1+ γ+ γ 2)X; after three it is (1+ γ+ γ 2+ γ 3)X, and so on. This result is the well-known geometric series, and it converges to X/(1- γ) for γ=1. The convergence equation for the geometric series has the same form as the IPCC feedback expression, and its origin is similar. The IPCC equation and erroneous application of the geometric series convergence equation both falsely predict a negative final output for γ>1 and positive drives.
The statement in the posting “Process engineers designing electronic circuits intended not to oscillate adopt a maximum value γ = 0.1 for the loop gain” is incorrect. Stable and useful systems with γ in the range of 0.6 to 0.7 at a designed frequency point abound. One can Google the design coefficients for Butterworth and Chebychev filters, for instance. One can see (via translation the different languages involving “Q” and “s”) that stable, useful and common filter stages have γ-values in the range of 0.65.
Another device with billions of applications, the Schmitt trigger, clearly shows that electronic amplifiers do not generally oscillate with strong positive feedback. The Schmitt trigger employs a high gain amplifier (called a “comparator” in this application) with heavy positive, frequency-independent feedback. The output switches from one “rail” to the other at separated switching points of the input. If the device did oscillate between the rails, it would fail totally as a trigger. If one writes the differential equation for the trigger with a usual amplifier having a transfer function with one dominant pole, one sees that the time derivative of the output has only one sign if γ>1. The output voltage changes unidirectionally until it goes as far as possible in one direction, and then it sticks there. This common, simple positive feedback system with γ>1 does not flick back and forth.
The original posting says, incorrectly, “For the past 750 million years, the climate has behaved as a stable circuit. The temperature-feedback loop gain cannot much have exceeded +0.1….” This assertion is based on the rule-of-thumb given by a consulted process engineer that 0.1 is a reasonable γ cutoff for stable designs. Maybe that rule is useful for what the consultant does, but it is not broadly true. The previous two paragraphs provide concrete counter-examples. It is not true that a stable climate must have had γ<=0.1. Therefore, the IPCC estimate of γ near 0.62 is not refuted by the existence of a fairly stable paleotemperature record.
Just how “unstable” with fluctuating net feedback are the scalar positive feedback systems that IPCC showed on their figure? Analysis using derivatives of logarithms shows that the fractional change in output of the fed-back system varies with the change in net γ in the same manner as does the fed-back gain, i.e., 1/(1- γ). So, a change in net warming feedback of 0.01 would result in a 2.6% change in warming at the IPCC value of γ = 0.62. This change is significant, but it by no means implies instability.