The central climate fallacy is that the unknowns are known

Don’t forget that we also do not know whether several degrees C of warming would, on balance, be good or bad for humanity. Remember, most of the predicted warming takes place near the poles, the daily highs are not expected to change much, only the daily lows increased to get an overall average daily temperature. Hence longer growing seasons, more food — and as the ice retreats, more land to colonize as well as more ocean to fish. How bad can that be? Dig deep into the assumptions behind any flavor of environmentalism and you find that change of any sort is automatically assumed to be bad. This plays to the buried fears of late-middle-aged individuals with lots of spare money to contribute to political causes and crusades (and who are just beginning to recognize and dread their own all-too-rapidly approaching old age and death) but has little else to recommend it.

We now make the assumption, for the sake of beginning somewhere, that all of the global warming over this 30-year period was attributable to us.

but if we were NOT responsible for all of it how would that affect the rest of the computations?
Its always seemed to me (just an opinion) that so many of the issues MAY stem directly from this.
By assuming this is is correct, for the reasons you stated, are we possibly also enabling bad data?

However, the honest answer to Stacey’s question about what climate sensitivity is indicated by the temperature record of the past 30 years is, “We do not know”.

I think this succinctly wraps it all up. I think way to many are afraid to just say they do not know.
thanks.
[1. You must use “angled brackets” – NOT rectangle “[]” brackets around your html coding.
[2. By convention, on this site, only the moderators use [] brackets. They indicate editing.
[3. It is best to “test” html entries on the “Test” thread. See the site, top-level header for the link. .mod]

Thank you, Lord Monckton, for providing the supporting analysis for my assertion here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/27/the-ddp-conference/#comment-1699585
Why this important point remains well below the radar I don’t know.

For blockquoting don’t use square brackets around the tag.

ok this one uses {} and not [] now?
thanks
[1. You must use “angled brackets” – NOT rectangle “[]” brackets around your html coding.
[2. By convention, on this site, only the moderators use [] brackets. They indicate editing.
[3. It is best to “test” html entries on the “Test” thread. See the site, top-level header for the link. .mod]

@ dmacleo
Less Than and Greater Than
see:
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/index.html
Scroll down to: Formatting in comments.

“Then there are the major non-radiative transports: evaporation and convection up, advection across, and precipitation and subsidence down.”
That, sir, is the proverbial elephant in the proverbial room. Heat transfer has routinely been neglected by alarmist and skeptic alike.

The IPCC will never accept a 1C doubling sensitivity. It is too low for setting the prices of carbon offsets. More, the IPCC is an arm of the UN which takes a direct 2% skim off it carbon development mechanism (CDM) game, basically a phony “authentication” of emissions “reductions.”
You can bother with all the science you want. It’s about the money.

These are not errors and mistakes, the claims of certainty by the warmistas. This is intentional obfuscation. They are not innocent misguided lambs, they are wolves.

Unfortunately we no longer live in a society which operates on the basis of fact and reason. We live in a society that operates more like George Orwell’s 1984. It is a society where 2+2=5 because the government says so. If you don’t agree you will be tortured until you do agree. The government routinely changes history to support their agenda. They can make the record colder in the past as well as warmer in the present to exaggerate the warming trend. If you don’t agree with the claims of the alarmists you are written off as a quack. The torture hasn’t started yet, but some of the alarmists have suggested that those who don’t subscribe to CAGW be sent to re-education camps. The torture may start soon enough.

This may be M’Lord’s best post ever. The quality of the comments proves the point.

“My own best estimate, for what little it is worth, is that a doubling of CO2 concentration would warm the world by about 1 Cº, if that.”
I think that’s a pretty darn good guess, but let’s not forget that while it is generally accepted that TCR is less than ECS that is not necessarily the case. Feedbacks over the long haul could still turn out to be net negative such that even if TCR ends up being greater than 1 K, ECS could still end up being less than 1 K.

Patience, the Paris conference at the end of 2015 will be an unexpected cracker.

milodonharlani says:
August 3, 2014 at 12:13 pm
“Such a small increase is negligible, as indeed is 100 ppm, when considered against the 40,000 ppm of water vapor in the tropics.”
——————
Right you are, milodonharlani .
Likewise, the “warming” effect of the current 400 ppm of CO2 is negligible when considered against the average 15,000 to 30,000 ppm of H2O vapor (humidity) that is per se resident in the near-surface atmosphere of the temperate zones.

Simple analytics and curve fitting aside, fact is that the bulk of scientific studies (not just modeling, but analysis of past climates) suggest climate sensitivity in the range of 2-5 C:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htm
Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty, and Monckton is entitled to his opinion of 1 C or less (based on some oversimplified math), but it is a gamble at this point, and I don’t think it’s prudent to wishfully hope for the low end.

But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
==========
the history of science shows that with every answer, we get two new questions. eventually, as you learn more about a subject, you discover how little you actually know.
climate science has so few questions because they have discovered so few answers. in time, as answers are discovered, there will be many questions raised.

I want to reiterate Lord Monckton’s final point that all this lucrative deceit is in pursuit of world government in the sense of political coordination, not some sort of world legislature. Invisible for the most part since we do not tend to get invited to the relevant meetings. I do love that Lord Monckton does tend to show up and occasionally sky dive in.
The reason education in the common law oriented Anglosphere countries all over the world is now geared to what I call (based on the Russian term behind it) the obuchenie mindset is so that the facts will no longer be allowed to disrupt the desired belief system. Constructivism in math and science that ignited the math and reading wars was never about how to teach the subjects as we were told. It is because an analytical mind full of facts is hard to get to act on the basis of these cultivated false beliefs.
UNESCO simply shorthands all this now as media education so that it can usefully pitch how to control what gets disseminated now as knowledge. Unless we begin to recognize where the actual playing field is–education and its focus on altering values, attitudes and beliefs in order to guide future perception and behavior–the Statists will win.
And then we all lose.

Paul,
Look at the sidebars at the right where the various climate blogs are listed. Note that Skeptical Science is in a category by itself: unreliable. Now pause just a minute and reflect on the sort of impression that you make here by citing Skeptical Science as a reference. Now I will drive my point home: if you do not wish to appear foolish here, then do not cite Skeptical Science.

My own best estimate, for what little it is worth, is that a doubling of CO2 concentration would warm the world by about 1 Cº, if that.
If I dump my cup of coffee into the ocean, that will raise sea level. It is, after all, adding fluid to a fluid body. It certainly wouldn’t lower sea level. And it would not be a meaningful increase.
I don’t dispute CO2’s IR absorption. But my curiosity makes me wonder, if a doubling (400 ppm to 800 ppm?) would warm the world by even 0.5C, why would doubling it more than three times over (400 ppm to 4400 ppm) chill the world by 10C — from the 25C of Earth-normal conditions to the 15C (if not less) of the Andean-Saharan ice age?

analysis of past climates) suggest climate sensitivity in the range of 2-5 C:
==================
“suggests” is different than “shows”. Paleo data shows that warming causes CO2.

Climate prediction on the Great Pause needs to take several thousand years of climate
evolution into account. To conclude that from an up-movement of temps over 150
years only that further global warming will occur is outright ridiculous. There are 5 major
climate drivers, demonstrated for over 20,000 years, and those drivers demand the
continuation of the Great Pause. This is not speculation but the result of solid calculations.

Steve in SC says:
August 3, 2014 at 1:04 pm
“Then there are the major non-radiative transports: evaporation and convection up, advection across, and precipitation and subsidence down.”
That, sir, is the proverbial elephant in the proverbial room. Heat transfer has routinely been neglected by alarmist and skeptic alike.
——————————————————–
Steve, I would further this by saying it is a very, very old elephant.
When Callendar tried to revive the global warming scare in 1938, Sir George Simpson of the Royal Meteorological society pointed out –
“..but he would like to mention a few points which Mr. Callendar might wish to reconsider. In the first place he thought it was not sufficiently realised by non-meteorologists who came for the first time to help the Society in its study, that it was impossible to solve the problem of the temperature distribution in the atmosphere by working out the radiation. The atmosphere was not in a state of radiative equilibrium, and it also received heat by transfer from one part to another. In the second place, one had to remember that the temperature distribution in the atmosphere was determined almost entirely by the movement of the air up and down. This forced the atmosphere into a temperature distribution which was quite out of balance with the radiation. One could not, therefore, calculate the effect of changing any one factor in the atmosphere..”
It was true in 1938, it is still true today.

Reblogged this on sainsfilteknologi and commented:
Climate Fallacy

Paul, assuming you are a reasonable player in a real debate, consider that it took string theory physicist Lubos Motl a single post to reveal a pattern of deception and bias on the web site you link to, including this criticism of its high sensitivity presentation:
“Climate sensitivity is low: That’s a typical headline of some of my talks. Cook says that it’s 3 °C because of many reasons. The fact is that the direct calculation gives 1.2 °C and all balanced analyses of the Earth’s history, including very old geological data, suggest that this is about right, i.e. the net feedbacks are small, with an unknown sign. All papers or claims going to 3 °C or higher are fabricated and cherry-pick something to “hype” this number that almost certainly can’t reach 3 °C. The promoted positive feedbacks may be viewed as a quantification of the hype, exaggeration, and fraud: 70 percent of the IPCC figure for the climate sensitivity is fabricated because a higher value is favored by the “big picture” of the political process.”
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/john-cook-skeptical-science.html
Another hundred skeptical arguments being called “myths” are skewered in that post. Though many are superficial it is the overall pattern of the serious rebuttals that makes your post hit a nerve here. Many of us became skeptics in part due to the unfair abuse we were subjected to on that site in a way that raised red flags that reason was not invited there whatsoever.
Evangelical “climate justice” Christian Cook pretends to reasonably survey the climate sensitivity literature while actually presenting a purely biased one, leaving out any sense of doubt on hundreds of pages of his site, indeed as Monckton here suggests reflects climate “science” in general. Cook omits papers that in fact simply measure sensitivity and find it to be low such as this recent paper:
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979214500957
“The anthropogenic CO2 additional warming extrapolated in 2100 is found lower than 0.1°C in the absence of feedbacks.”
Cook only offers presents two options: models or the distant past, omitting the recent past, as a way to estimate sensitivity! Yet models have not been updated to match the recent past and in the distant past temperature leads CO2 spikes instead of follows them so sensitivity to it based on cause and effect is a false calculation when all it may be is a positive feedback rather than a driver.

Paul, your skeptical science link says this right at the top: Net positive feedback is confirmed by many different lines of evidence.
That statement is literally true, but the full case of the matter is that net positive feedback is also “disconfirmed by many different lines of evidence”. Whether the net feedback is + or – is one of the major known unknowns, and the topic of review articles in the major journals, such as Science and Nature. Biases like that are among the reasons that SkS is disparaged by Anthony Watt.
Here is a better link for the topic of climate sensitivity. http://www.climatedialogue.org/
Note well that the article by Nic Lewis shows how the higher estimates depend on Bayesian techniques that assign unrealistically (i.e. totally non-supportable) high amounts of prior probability to the region 4-8, 4-12, etc; and on other unrealistic assumptions. The more focused on actual data the methods are, the lower are the resultant estimates. The statistician F. J. Samaniego has shown in his book “A comparison of frequentist and Bayesian methods of estimation” that Bayesian estimates are better than frequentist estimates only if the prior distribution is sufficiently accurate. The uniform priors with 50% – 75% of probability above 4C are indefensible and do not meet his criterion.
There is at present no good evidence that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentration is likely above 2C, which SkS puts as its lower bound.

The slayers seem to be out in farce again. Mr Verney asks what proof exists that greenhouse gases cause warming. I refer him to any elementary textbook of heat transfer.
In other words, you referred him to more theory, which allows you to skirt the real-world absence of warming following CO2 increases. Usually, we check our theories against the real world.
Before you get snarky again on me, though, consider this analogy: someone who understands gravity superbly well, but who has never — YET, a very important “yet” — encountered the concept of buoyancy. He is going to insist, based on magnificent, excellent and true theory, that my grandson’s balloon will fall down once it is released.
Buoyancy is, of course, a gravitational effect. It’s just that my hypothetical gravity expert has not — YET — reasoned his way to the buoyancy principle. If he clings to what he already knows, and refuses to look at balloons that fly up and away from careless little boys, he never will.
I say your theory is perfectly fine (for what my little opinion is worth). I also see perfectly well, thank you, that (apologies to Inigo Montoya) it does not seem to do what you think it does.
It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It means there is something a damned sight more interesting going on here. CO2 “should” warm an atmosphere. Venus says it doesn’t, the Ordovician ice age says it doesn’t, the last 17.833 years say it doesn’t. Gravity (at first blush) says the balloon “should” fall down; the balloon floating away into the clouds says, go figure.
Where is your curiosity, Sv Monckton?

Konrad! That’s the sort of “damned sight more interesting” I could wish for! Thank you ever so.
(Should I roof my house with aluminum panels instead of galvanized steel ones, for a cooler home in the summer, then?)

mellyrn says:
August 3, 2014 at 5:51 pm
————————————-
I would actually recommend a coating of white titanium oxide paint. This is also a “selective surface”, but has the unusual property of having an IR emissivity grater than its UV/SW absorptivity.
Have a look at photos of the old apollo service module. Those white ribbed panels are actually radiators for the cryogenic systems. In sunlight they preform better than matt black.

milodonharlani says:
August 3, 2014 at 5:59 pm
————————————-
You raise a number of valid points concerning the oceans.
“Their depths & optical properties vary.”
This is particularly important as it effects depth of UV/SW absorption. Transparency and depth of absorption is one of the critical selective surface effects that means the oceans can be heated far above theoretical blackbody temperature by the sun alone. This simple experiment you can build for yourself demonstrates this effect –
http://oi62.tinypic.com/zn7a4y.jpg
Both samples have equal UV/SW absorption and equal IR emissivity yet sample A reaches the higher temperature when exposed to sunlight. The only difference is the depth of UV/SW absorption.
This paper concerning ocean turbidity and temperature effects of varying depth of absorption was written by scientists who clearly understood selective surface effects (ie: not your average climastrologists) –
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~csweeney/papers/SWpen_Sweeney.pdf
“Not to mention the effect of latitude, ie angle of incidence of incoming radiation.”
This does effect UV/SW absorption as can be seen by the sun glare of the oceans when viewed from space. But the interesting point here is that viewing angle and surface roughness of the oceans also effects apparent emissivity. This was the big “clue” that climastrologists missed. Materials that change emissivity with viewing angle and surface roughness could not possibly be a “near blackbody”.

Nice article. As you have correctly pointed out there are still several unknowns, especially when it comes to feedbacks. However, as our planet appear to have a very stable climate system, it much more likely than not, has net NEGATIVE feedbacks or it almost surely would have either frozen solid or become inhospitably hgot long ago. To make the initial assumptions that all of the important feedbacks were positive from the Get-Go,.. is pretty much proof that these people pushing this had an agenda from day one.

mellyrn says, August 3, 2014 at 5:36 pm:
“I say your theory is perfectly fine (for what my little opinion is worth).”
It works fine inside a closed glass box in a laboratory experiment. It doesn’t work fine out in the real, open, large-scale surface/atmosphere system. Not even in theory. Because that’s a completely different situation. The two are not analogous. For instance, there is no rigid lid. What works on the blackboard doesn’t necessarily work in nature.

“Thermageddonites”
I like this.

mellyrn says:
August 3, 2014 at 5:36 pm
//////////////////
Don’t bracket me as you did in your first paragraph. I am not alligned to that group.
I am a sceptic. That means that I am sceptical of each and every argument in facvour of AGW, and sceptical of each and every argument against AGW.. I don’t take anything for granted without proof. Obviously, I consider that some things are more likely correct than other things, but that is as far as I would go; without proof nothing should be assumed to be fact. According to the theory of the half life of facts, about 50% of things that we consider today to be fact, will in about 10 years time, not be considered as fact.
I fully accept the laboratory physical properties of CO2. The issue here is not its laboratory characteristics, but rather how those characteristics play out in the real world environment of planet Earth. And that was what my post was getting at.
Increasing CO2 has one of three possibilities. It may warm the planet, it may have such an insignificant effect that it is so small that we cannot measure what it does. It may cool the planet. We have yet to work out which of these eventualities occurs in real world conditions.
What one can say is that there are a lot of problems with the AGW theory, notably, it appears that CO2 lags temperature on every time scale, thereby appearing to be a response and not a driver. There is no first order correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures in any data set (admittedly the temperature data sets are very poor and not fit for purpose). CO2 cannot sometimes heat the atmoshere and not heat the oceans, and at other times heat the oceans and not the atmosphere; whatever its properties are, in the real world environment, these properties do not switch like that. There has never been runnaway warming when in the past there have been high levels of CO2 and/or high temperatures (notwithstanding that when there were high temperatures there was almost certainly high levels of water vapour given the much warmer ocean conditions which according to GHW theory should have led to further warming).
I agree with you, that a proper evaluation of Venus also suggests that there is a problem with CO2 GH warming because the surface of Venus does not appear to be warmed by reflected Solar from the surface of the planet being ‘trapped’ and then re-radiated downwards by all the GHGs in the atmosphere because little if any Solar actually reaches the surface to be reflected from it – the vast majority of incoming Solar is simply reflected at or towards the TOA. The isothermal charcteristics where there is no significant diurnal difference (notwithstanding that night on Venus is some 122 Earth days which is a long time to go without ‘daylight’), nor eqitorial/polar difference (unlike that seen on planet Earth) suggest that some other operation is at play in producing the high temperatures seen on Venus. CO2 does not appear to be adding anything to the the apples to apples comparison that you give. Of course the atmosphere on Venus has a lot of thermal inertia, which may partly explain matters, but so do the oceans on planet Earth, and one can see a diurnal response in the oceans even though ‘nightime’ on Earth is only 12 hours, not about the 122 Earth days as seen on Venus. The thermal inertia of the Venusian atmosphere is therefore unlikely to explain the isothermal characteristics of that planet.
As Konrad often comments the oceans are a real problem for AGW, because of their selcective surface nature, one aspect of which is their absorption characterics of LWIR. Given that DWLWIR is omnidirectional about 80% of all DWLWIR is fuly absorbed in just 3 microns of the ocean, and so far no one is able to explain how the energy absorbed in the top few micron layer can be diluted and disipated to depth (and thereby spread over a large volume) at a speed quicker than the theoretical energy absorbed within the first few micron layer would power evaporation. IF DWLWIR has sensible energy in the real world environs of planet Earth it would likely result in copious quantities of evaporation of the oceans (which would tend to boil off from the top down), which copious quantities of evaporation are not detected. Solar does not present this problem since the energy from Solar is not absorbed within just a few microns but for the main part over a depth of at least 1 metre thereby greatly diluting the energy so that the oceans can be kept warm without boil off.
If DWLWIR has sensible energy capable of performing sensible work in the real world environs of planet Earth, it is astounding that there are no large scale projects seeking to harness that energy. Which energineer would opt for Solar as a power source, when according to K&T, DWLWIR has about 100% more power and is a constant available 24/7 come rain or shine? The appeal of DWLWIR as a constant power source would favour this, and yet there appears to be no significant research into harnessing it, thereby suggesting that it is viewed as nothing more than a signal incapable of performing sensible work in the real world environs in which it finds itself here at the surface (or near surface) of planet Earth .
My earlier comment was more directed at the iconsistency with the quoted sentence and the thrust of the article, namely that we do not know things, that we think that we know things which we do not know, and that we should not accept things as correct without proof that they are correct. I accpet the thrust of the article, but I consider the sentence “Yes, liberating greenhouse gases by combustion will cause some warming – all other things being equal.” to be inconsistent with the thrust of the article. The article would have read better without that sentence.
No one doubts that burning fossil fuels is releasing CO2 (whether that is the cause of the rise in the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere is moot, but a prima facie case is made out that it at least in part explains the increase seen since the late 1950s). The isue is the effect of this, and the article could simply concentrate on the evidence of response.
Personally (as I frequently comment), I do not consider that one can derive a figure for climate sensitivity from observational data until such time as absolutely everything there is to know about natural variation is known and fully understood; until such time as we are able to identify each and every constituent forciing that is encompassed within natural variation, and the upper and lower bounds of each and evbvery constituent forcing. The reason for this obvious, until we can say to what extent natural variation explains the temperature change (and we cannot do that until we can identify all the forcings and to what extent they are in play at any given time), we cannot seperate and identify the signal (if any) from CO2. Put simply we cannot say that CO2 has caused this change or that change until natural variation is removed from the equation.
Climate Sensitivity is not something capable of some theoretcial calculation devoid of observational basis since it is looking at the real world response to CO2 in our atmosphere, which real world response can only be ascertained bu actual observation. Presently discussions suggesting that we can assess Climate Sensitivity are a disengenuous exageration of our abilities and understndings, and, of course, are based upon data that is not fit for purpose. .

“In 2001 the IPCC said it was 66% confident we had caused most of the warming since 1950; in 2001, 90% confident; in 2013, 95-99% confident. All of these confidence values are direct lies”
I think you will find that in bureaucratic speak, ‘confidence values’ really mean how much the organisation wants to believe it, how much they need to believe it, how long they have believed it, and how much good it gives to the organisation to continue to believe it, not how confident they should be in something based on actual data. It’s a form of projection.
What they are essentially saying is they are 95-99% sure the organisation would like this to be true. Otherwise what the hell have they been doing all this time?. A bureaucrat has to look back and see progress, which often means more surety in the absence of anything tangible.
One could write a book on how bureaucracies often become more sure of themselves over time. It doesn’t have anything to do with data or reality, but how organisations often evolve to be more sure of themselves. Which is partly why we invented democracy, destroying surety which isn’t justified.

@Monkton of Brenchley
Thanks for your feedback. Yes I do go too far – for rhetoric effect – to say climate is determined only in the ocean. Of course there are other factors. However deep vertical mixing in the oceans, by various mechanisms and integrated globally is an important part of the climate equation which should not be overlooked, as it routinely is.
if we consider ocean (bilayer) circulation to be a nonlinear chaotic process characterised intermittently by turbulence, then like many known nonlinear systems it could be periodically forced by external factors such as solar derived variation in heat input or variation in cloud cover. While there are several plausible astrophysical climate forcings, the difficulty in finding convincing correlations with climate could be because these cyclical inputs are not acting directly on climate but indirectly by for instance weak and complex periodic forcing of oceanic oscillations.

Richard Verney:
You are right. A laboratory vessel is not the earth’s atmosphere and cannot duplicate natural processes yet most of those who call themselves skeptics accept the flawed assumption that the results of the vessel can be straightforwardly applied to the real thing. Hence the idea that the absorbency spectrum of CO2 will somehow assert an effect on climate, sooner or later.
Monckton is one such skeptic. His comment about Pythagorian absoluteness shows that he understands

Fumble fingers me back to finish my comment.
Monckton shows his awareness of the pitfalls of treating theory as absolutes, as in his very apt Pythagorean allusion. Yet he is not yet at the point where he is ready to question the theoretical application of the absorbency spectrum of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere. In other words, he hangs on the lip of his understanding.
I think eventually he will remember that Arrhenius was not Pythagoras and come to see the fruitlessness of pitting theory against observations in the case of CO2.

richard verney says:
August 4, 2014 at 12:44 am

Monckton of Brenchley says:
August 3, 2014 at 3:49 pm
The sl**ers seem to be out in farce again. Mr Verney asks what proof exists that greenhouse gases cause warming. I refer him to any elementary textbook of heat transfer.
////////////////////////

… I would go on to suggest that the reason for that is that we simply do not know what other things are, nor to what extent each of these other things is in play at any given moment of time, and we are therefore unable to establish whether in the real world environs of the atmosphere of planet Earth, CO2 has any measurable input on temperature. Given that it appears that CO2, on all time scales, lags temperature, it does not look that promising that the release of CO2 drives warming as you assert. i am not going as far as saying that the lag proves that it does not, since the data sets are unfit for purpose and do not lead to informed knowledge or understanding.
…
You state “Then there are the major non-radiative transports: evaporation and convection up, advection across, and precipitation and subsidence down.” and this may lie at the crux of the issue since it may well be the case, in say 30 or 40 years time, when we have a better state of knowledge and understanding of things, that it is shown that the climate is governed almost exclusively by non-radiative transports and that radiative transports play an all but insignificant role.
I do not make any prediction of the future climate, but even die hard warmists such as Julia Slingo are suggesting that there may be no resumption to warming before 2030. If that is how matters pan out, by that time about 80% of all manmade CO2 emissions will have been released during which period no warming will have taken place, such that I predict that in 2030 not only will there be a significant reassessment of Climate Sensitivity suggesting a low sensitivity), but also a reassessment of the very foundations on which GHG theory is based. One reason behind a low sensitivity may be that there are fundamental flaws with the very theory itself.

I was taught approximately 40 years ago that “… there are the major non-radiative transports: evaporation and convection up, advection across, and precipitation and subsidence down.” In fact, I was taught in college that these transports plus the density of the atmosphere caused by gravity were the “main drivers” of our climate. I am saddened to discover that some here would call anyone who is skeptical of today’s dominate theory of climate a “Sl**yer” and asked that they be banned or closely watched. If (a big if I hope) we reach the point where Richard Verney’s very scientific skepticism is seen as disruptive to this site — then I see no reason for the site to pretend to be scientific.
I echo a point made today. The fact we know that CO2 has an absorption ban and can demonstrate that in a high school level experiment does not in any way tell us what CO2 does in our Earth’s atmosphere on NET. What is the net effect of going from 350 ppm to 400 ppm? I don’t know but all evidence suggests that whatever the effect is it is darned small. Vanishingly small.
Note: I held my beliefs decades before this very site made me aware that there was a group of people who are called “sl**yers”. I don’t think any post that mentions that name should be automatically tossed into the moderation bin. I hope Lord Monckton was exempt from that whey he wrote the word without the stars in it.

Lord Monckton,
A point or two…
Like the IPCC you fail to consider energy conversions, energies absorbed in conversion of heat and light to motion ( especially wind and rain ) , chemical bonds (as in photosynthesis), lightning, sound, water waves, entropy through melted ice, weathered stone, every grain of sand moved by a thermally driven wind, even vitamin D in our skin produced by the interactions of cholesterol and sunlight.
Sometimes these are neglected because the energy conversion losses are considered to be small, but I ask you to consider that a 2m swell contains 36 KW per square meter of wavefront, almost 30 times the total incident sunlight at midday and fully 60,000 times the supposed imbalance of energy of 0.6W per square meter driving global warming. Unless one knows the fraction of water waves/motion that is thermally driven, I don’t see how any conclusion can be drawn about energy balance and therefore sensitivity. It not just about temperature, it’s about energy. These are potentially huge unknowns that you don’t mention.
Secondly, I would respectfully ask you to consider the following.
It is known that the absorbtion bands at which CO2 operates are 85 odd percent saturated, IE that they are 85% opaque, and though disputed, scientists tell us that the earths surface is about 33 degrees above that for a theoretical blackbody at 1 AU.
From this we can make a relation, if we ascribe all the 33 degree warming to CO2 (and of course ignore the gas law and half of physics in doing so) We can say that ( assuming a linear relationship – I think worst case ) CO2 would cause 33/85 = 0.38 degrees of warming per %energy intercepted, and further that no more than 15 x (33 / 85) or 5.8 degrees could be expected even if we had a CO2 atmosphere. If we allow for real physics and therefore greenhouse gasses to only provide say 10 degrees of the 33 degrees then that projection is reduced to say 2 degrees of warming, for the last 15% of energy available to cause warming. Given the number of doublings required to reach that sort of saturation, one must conclude that sensitivity to C02 has to be much less than 1 degree per doubling.
While this has a lot of flaws ( for example energy to temperature is NOT a simple linear relationship , it would be expected that more warming would occur at low saturations and less at high) I think however that this simple analysis OVERSTATES sensitivity to energy at this point. It’s a bounds test I use. A sensitivity higher than about 0.5 degrees per doubling is inconsistent with the effect of greenhouse gasses overall in insulating our world. This simple boundary test also establishes a hard limit to CO2 warming or no more than 5.8 degrees – ever.
Could I ask you to dwell on this a bit.
Thank you
Bob.

Its been well over 30 years now since we first attempted to quantify climate sensitivity. Billions and Billions of dollars later, untold amounts of computing power used, literally tens of millions of man-hours consumed, we don’t have any more of a clue what the climate’s sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is than we did when we started.
We got to the moon in less time once we got serious about it.

H Grouse says:
August 3, 2014 at 2:57 pm
“Wait a minute (or 17+ years) , how about these “instruments?””
—————
What instruments? Are you losing it ….. or already lost it?
I did not see any instruments on that graph that you provided a link to ….. nor did I see any mention of any instrument on said.
HA, in 17 years you should be able to learn how to use a dictionary …. iffen you get started today.

Rereading the title, I realize you were talking about something we need to keep in mind.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/27/many-climate-reconstructions-incorrectly-attributed-to-temperature-change/#comment-1515224
“And there are unknown knowns, the things we think we know, but actually don’t…. Aren’t we discussing a great collective lie, and a great crumbling example of an unknown known?”
It’s an important extension of Rumsfelds list (from the same post):

“… there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.”

Monckton the main point of my 3:59pm comment was to try to get you and everyone else to widen your perspectives and include consideration of the quasi- millennial cycle in your calculations- see the resulting cooling forecasts at :
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html

Lord Monckton
You say:
including the ocean waves, which are caused not by global warming but by the wind and the tides.
But what causes the wind that causes the waves?
Energy can’t simultaneously exist as both thermal energy and motion, either waves due to thermally induced wind or currents due to thermal differences in the ocean, these energies are removed from the thermal/radiant energy budget, so presumably increases in retained energy, increases all these little losses, since the losses of energy through transformations are unchacterised, ignored and (in the case of ocean motion – )potentially very large they are a completely unquantified and possibly non trivial loss with a magnitude quite probably much greater that Trenbeth’s energy imbalance – no imbalance, no global warming.
I quite agree that the main paths are as you say, but as an Engineer I always acknowledge the loss term. For example one can’t characterise a pendulum without friction even though the friction is very small, the clock eventually winds down – there are ALWAYS losses, and to completely characterise a system you must know the magnitude of the losses. Don’t make the same mistake as Trenbeth, acknowledge the “completely unknown” energy transformation losses.
Yes, much tidal energy is gravitational, but some unknown portion is due to temperature, I stress the word – unknown. Let’s say it’s only 1 in 1000, well that still represents 40W / square meter. Conversely of the gravitationally and momentum driven winds and waves, how much does friction add to the atmospheric temperature – another unknown? These are not small numbers.
Your post is about the unknowns, the uncertainties – the ignored system losses (and gains through friction) are I think, the most blatant unknowns of them all.

““Dan” appears confused.”
Not so, but thanks for taking the time to provide a response.
“One cannot simply subtract the 17 years and 10 months of no warming at the end of the 30-year period and thus obtain a trend of 3.7 C.”
But to not do so would highlight that there must have been warming during the 17 years and 10 month period, as indeed your graph shows.

Bobl (August 4, 2014 at 6:55 am)
There are no losses. Not in the long term.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. This is the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. Energy may temporarily be in different forms, winds tides etc. but that is a distraction. It will likely end up as heat, just like the friction in your pendulum clock which eventually appears as heat; the energy is not ‘lost’.
It is not necessary to consider all these intermediate forms of energy (which would be prohibitive anyway) to understand the climate system in macroscopic terms. It is sufficient to know only the incoming and outgoing energy at the surface to explain the effects of greenhouse gases.
The first law of thermodynamics makes it easy for us : energy cannot be created or destroyed.

richard verney says:
August 3, 2014 at 11:13 pm
“Increasing CO2 has one of three possibilities. It may warm the planet, it may have such an insignificant effect that it is so small that we cannot measure what it does. It may cool the planet. We have yet to work out which of these eventualities occurs in real world conditions.”
—————-
Well now, sorry bout that, cause all 3 have been “worked out” and all 3 “do occur” in real world conditions.
============
“I agree with you, that a proper evaluation of Venus also suggests that there is a problem with CO2 GH warming because the surface of Venus does not appear to be warmed by reflected Solar from the ……………”
—————-
It is utterly silly for anyone, man or beast, to even think about comparing the planet Venus to the planet Earth relative to surface temperatures and/or atmospheric temperature & composition.
Mimicry is OK until one is told differently, but to do so after being told would be as idiotic as would be the comparing of “mountain oysters” to “jet fuel”.
And following are 5 facts about the planet Venus that substantiates my above sarcasm, … with #2 & #3 probably being the most important ones.
1. The atmosphere of Venus is 96% carbon dioxide (CO2).
2. The distance of Venus from the Sun is 68 million miles (1/3 rd closer than Earth)
3. It takes 242 Earth days for Venus to rotate on its axis
4. The clouds surrounding Venus are comprised mostly of sulfuric acid.
5. Venus has an atmospheric pressure (1,352 psi) that is 92 times that of planet Earth
Now, given Earth’s current atmospheric status, ….. just how frigging “HOT” do you suppose it would get in say Miami, FL, iffen the residents there had to withstand …. 100+ continuous 24 hour periods (2,400 hours) of bright Sunshine? Or, continuous bright Sunshine from mid-May to the end of August?
The temperature of Venus is determined by its close proximity to the Sun and the mass density (1,352 psi) of its atmosphere …. and not to the composition (CO2) of its atmosphere.

H Grouse says:
August 4, 2014 at 6:58 am
how much water do you have?
1 + 1 + 1 = 3 lt correct
How many degrees do you have?
10 + 20 + 30 = 60 IN correct
How much heat energy (joules per second) do you inject into each container to reach each temperature? Well, it depends upon the starting temperature of each container.

Monckton of Brenchley:
Sir, a slayer I am not, not by your earlier definition as one who denies the greenhouse effect. I consider the greenhouse effect as something as obvious to anyone sensible. No need to apologize for mis-labeling me as one of those whom you regard as “a vexatious and unwelcome distraction”.
My comment above was fragmented at 2:40am & 3:04 am. Perhaps it was that which led you to misapprehend its meaning while you were in the midst of slaying the slayers. If you read it again, more carefully, I think that you will take away a different meaning and remove me from the bill of mortality, or so I should hope. I am not comfortable with such a pejorative (and untrue) tag on me.

H Grouse says:
August 4, 2014 at 6:58 am
“I’m a betting man, and will bet on 20 degrees C.”
Now, assume you are mixing different fluids with different heat capacities. Do all regions of the Earth have the same effective heat capacity? Does the Amazon have the same heat capacity as the Sahara?

Teerry Oldburg: Monckton of Brenchley:
Are you asserting that when the change in the equilibrium surface temperature is divided by the change in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration the result is a constant? If so, please support this hypothesis..

What he has written is that, if it is a constant (as assumed by IPCC among others), then it is a small constant (smaller than alramists have been warning us of.)

Monckton of Brenchley: Since absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation, we know that the stochasticity of the temperature changes is not caused by the monotonically-changing CO2 concentration.
oops. You have forgotten that with (deterministic) high dimensional non-linear dissipative systems (such as the Earth climate system) the steady input can produce apparent step-changes in output at irregular intervals. A brief reference is the text book Modern Thermodynamics by Kondepudi and Prigogine, the later chapters.

Samuel C Cogar says:
August 4, 2014 at 9:20 am
….
:”satellites do not measure temperature directly”
…
Grab a mercury thermometer.
The device does not measure temperature.
There is some liquid mercury in the bulb, with a stem and markings. The Mercury inside the device expands and contracts, yet it does not measure temperature directly With the correct positioning of the markings on the stem via calibration, temperature can be inferred from thermometer readings.
Not really all that different than the instruments aboard a satellite????
..

Matthew R Marler says, August 4, 2014 at 10:26 am:
“oops. You have forgotten that with (deterministic) high dimensional non-linear dissipative systems (such as the Earth climate system) the steady input can produce apparent step-changes in output at irregular intervals. A brief reference is the text book Modern Thermodynamics by Kondepudi and Prigogine, the later chapters.”
The point here is that those sudden upward shifts that I pointed to (the very same shifts that Bob Tisdale has now been pointing out and explained for the last five years, but no one seems to listen or care), are not ‘stochastic’ at all. They are very distinct, time-specific and process-related. The process in question? ENSO.
The ocean cycle caused the modern global warming between the 70s and the 00s. Nothing else. The ENTIRE rise in global temps since 1970 is contained within three abrupt and significant steps each established within the course of a year or less: in 1979, in 1988 and 1998. All the steps lift global temperatures 0.15-0.2 degrees up and away from the otherwise tight correlation to NINO3.4. But it ONLY happens on those three occasions. Not at any other time.
And the fully natural processes behind the steps are all easy to track in the data.
http://okulaer.wordpress.com/2014/06/17/how-the-world-really-warmed-between-the-70s-and-the-00s-part-i/
http://okulaer.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/how-the-world-really-warmed-part-ii-step-1/
http://okulaer.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/how-the-world-really-warmed-part-iii-steps-2-3/

Monckton corrected me with
“Steve Oregon” is incorrect to say that man-made CO2 is little more than 3% of atmospheric CO2. It is more like 40%.”
I’m not sure what to make of that. Seems inconsistent with much.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/03/02/most-of-the-rise-in-co2-likely-comes-from-natural-sources/
“The natural CO2 flux to and from oceans and land plants amounts to approximately 210 gigatons of carbon annually. Man currently causes about 8 gigatons of carbon to be injected into the atmosphere, about 4% of the natural annual flux.”
Jeff Id “The atmosphere contains 720 billion tons of CO2 and humans contribute only 6 GT additional load on this balance.”
I had misstated what I had intended to say.
The figures were % of total man-made contributions to the greenhouse effect as it relates to CO2.
From here http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
My point on August 3, 2014 at 5:25 pm was to emphasize how miniscule the total human CO2 contribution to the greenhouse effect is in order to make by greater point.
That being with only 0.117% of the greenhouse effect due to atmospheric CO2 from human activity it is preposterous for the Climate team to claim they can measure any human warming impact at all let alone what fraction of supposed warming is attributable to us and our CO2 emissions.
Worse yet this miniscule contribution to the greenhouse effect by man cannot possibly
be the catalyst that triggers the atmospheric water vapor increases which AGW/global warming requires. There is no means to even measure such an effect or impact.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WaterVapor/water_vapor2.php
“Warming due to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion evaporates even more water, increasing the thickness of the blanket, which leads to more heating, which leads to more water vapor… The loop is called the water vapor feedback, and it has the potential to be a serious problem.”
Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the “Greenhouse
Effect,” expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)
Based on concentrations (ppb)
adjusted for heat
retention characteristics % of Greenhouse Effect % Natural % Man-made
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 3.618% 3.502% 0.117%
Water vapor 95.000% 94.999% 0.001%
Bottom line is there is no measured human CO2 catalyst that has ever been measured.
It is nothing but a conjecturous con job. (Is that a word)

milodonharlani says:
August 4, 2014 at 12:43 pm
Steve Oregon says:
August 4, 2014 at 11:57 am
Steve Oregon should be made aware that the debate about attribution is widely considered a fringe topic, with most people even on the skeptic side accepting that human inputs have accumulated to the point where they represent some 30% of the observed atmospheric concentration. In many quarters, it is a quick ticket to oblivion to gainsay what is considered by many to be a self-evident truth.
Those people accepting human attribution are, however, wrong. It is very clear, if one actually takes the time to study the data, and is qualified to do so, that human inputs have little effect on the atmospheric concentration. But, I do not expect it will be broadly accepted before the primary hypothesis, that atmospheric CO2 is driving surface temperatures, is well and truly buried for good.
At that point, the lonely band of clear-eyed thinkers, who can read the tea leaves and see the reality for what it is, may gain a wedge to force a rigorous accounting by pointing out that, if the soi-disant experts got the primary hypothesis dead wrong, what else did they get wrong?

Kristian: I’m sorry, but then you are not looking at the data. And I’m not just talking about the global data. You need to look at the different regions of the world. And the timing of these steps. Where and when did they take place? You can track it all. How it developed. No problem. But you need to look. Actually look.
This is not considered “known” only because no one wants to acknowledge it. People are too busy ignoring what the data is clearly saying.
We know. Because the data shows.
You missed my point, so I shall repeat it: the dynamical systems theory shows that you can have step changes and regional changes and regional step changes with continuous input; consequently, the step changes in the global and regional indices do not imply that the changes can not be related to continuous CO2 increases. Examples are provided in the thermodynamics text by Kondepudi and Prigogine, experimental and computational examples.

Thank you Bart.
I guess I am dangerously close to becoming fringe. 🙂 But my arrival will not be without plenty of regular input from a number of science pals, known by many, who share my frustration.
I have found my recent curiosity and search for what is truly the known human contribution to the atmospheric greenhouse effect to be rather disturbing. Especially when trying to find what has actually been scientifically measured vs what is no more than embellished IPCC presumption.
Of course all of much smarter people here have nailed the IPCC’s theory with exceptional display of the “discrepancy between the absurd predictions of the IPCC and the models on the one hand and real-world observations and measurements on the other grows wider by the month” as Monckton says just above.
But I am nearly convinced that the most bare bones display of how little has been actually scientifically measured and what science is capable of measuring may be the genesis to finally suffocating the AGW farce.
If the human contribution to the overall atmospheric greenhouse effect is truly infinitesimal….
“Total human greenhouse gas contributions add up to about 0.28% of the greenhouse effect”.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
…..then it cannot have done or do what has been claimed it has or will.
And climate science is not capable of measuring the effects of this infinitesimal amount.
And no one anywhere has any scientific measurements of any human CO2 emission influences or impacts at all.
And the hypothesized notion that mankind’s minuscule contribution to the atmosphere has triggered an increase in atmospheric water vapor also has no scientific measurements at all, anywhere, to back up that thoroughly implausible assertion.
Measuring atmospheric human/CO2 emissions does nothing to measure the proportionate share it it represents or what that tiny share has, is or is capable doing.
Of course there have been many layers of additional assertions over the years but IMO AGW collapse will come from peeling the onion back to the core fallacious contention.
The impact of human CO2 is not measurable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal
Infinitesimals have been used to express the idea of objects so small that there is no way to see them or to measure them.
In common speech, an infinitesimal object is an object which is smaller than any feasible measurement, but not zero in size; or, so small that it cannot be distinguished from zero by any available means. Hence, when used as an adjective, “infinitesimal” means “extremely small”. In order to give it a meaning it usually has to be compared to another infinitesimal object in the same context (as in a derivative).

Steve Oregon says:
August 4, 2014 at 2:22 pm
You’ve come to the right place, Steve. I am the resident, what I’m sure many here believe, crackpot explaining to everyone who will listen why the evidence indicates that humans are not driving CO2. You might be interested in the exchanges on this recent page. Every so often, this topic gets revived and I do battle with the resident champion of the human attribution camp, Ferdinand Englebeen. This post in particular gives a brief summation of my argument.

My apologies for my persistence, but I’m simply seeking simplification.
My own shortest version of the central fallacy.
Scientists have never been able to measured the human role in the greenhouse effect.
Because the human contribution is infinitesimal the effect cannot be measured.
During all of my searches I’ve noticed that all of the government and alarmist sites avoid any mention of proportions. They speak about tonnes of CO2 etc. but not the EPA, NASA or any other I could find mention the percentages.
This allows the alarmists to cite the alarming tonnage of human CO2 being pumped into the
atmosphere and presumably absorbed by the oceans.
Whereas if they cited “human greenhouse gas contributions add up to about 0.28% of the greenhouse effect” who would care?
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Climate Science has been surmising what they cannot measure.
The entire heap they piled up to hide this central fallacy is meaningles
Again, because the human contribution is so small it is impossible to measure, or know, the impact of such a tiny influence.
If I pee in an Olympic size swimming pool I could only surmise that I am warming the water.
I can measure the pool temperature trend all I want and pile up a heap of surmising conclusions about buoyancy, swimmers, water level, pool life, swimwear, drain lines, lifeguards etc and still I will never know what my pee did.
AGW is Climate Surmising. Not science.
1sur·mise noun \sər-ˈmīz, ˈsər-ˌ\
Definition of SURMISE
: a thought or idea based on scanty evidence : conjecture

Dan says:
August 4, 2014 at 3:18 pm
I hope this helps!
See all 4 lines in the graphic below. In particular, note that the green line goes up only 0.23 degrees in 12.2 years and not 0.48 degrees.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1984.55/plot/rss/from:1984.55/to:1996.75/trend/plot/rss/from:1984.55/trend/plot/rss/from:1996.75/trend

Steve Oregon says:
August 4, 2014 at 4:37 pm
Whereas if they cited “human greenhouse gas contributions add up to about 0.28% of the greenhouse effect” who would care?
And earlier:
Monckton corrected me with
“Steve Oregon” is incorrect to say that man-made CO2 is little more than 3% of atmospheric CO2. It is more like 40%.”
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 3.618%
Many people assume that on an annual basis, humans contribute 3% of the CO2 and nature contributes 97%. Of course our annual contribution was much less than 3% in 1800. However the change from 1750 of a presumed 280 ppm to 400 ppm today is a 40% increase that many attribute to man. Now if we assume that CO2 contributes 3.6% of the greenhouse affect, and if we assume man added 40%, then man’s part would be 1.44% and not 0.28%.

I’m fairly sure I know nothing.
After following discussions over some topical issues, I noticed both sides referring to facts and truths. I’m sure you have all heard the expressions, “the fact of the mater is ….blah …. blah”, or, “the truth is … blah … blah”, the discussions often get heated and rarely do they find common ground.
I decided to research what a fact is, and basically it is something you believe to be true. So I researched truth, and found that philosophers have been discussing this for thousands of years, and there is no clear definitive answer. Most of it goes over my head, and they discuss such concepts of consensus, esoteric, observational, etc, etc.
This got me thinking. Why do so many people get so emotional about their truths, which seems to be their belief in what is true? My suggestion is that it really comes down to what each individual believes, and what that individual accepts to be truth to them. This is at the core of what a person is, and when challenged, it becomes personal, and then emotional, because the people involved see it as an attack of the very essence of who and what they are.
This led me to examine my own personal truths, and I had to ask my self, what am I basing my personal beliefs on? I came to realize that most of my beliefs were based on what I learnt, either through my family, my education, my social interaction, or personal research. I started asking myself many “What if …” questions. What if what I learnt wasn’t completely true, how could I sort out fact from fiction?
It became obvious to me I had to find a reliable truth filter, to properly assess my own truths, so I needed to distinguish between what I really know, from a belief. This is a continual work in progress, but at this stage (it took a while) I’ve discovered that my entire set of truths are beliefs, and I actually do “know”, very little, or maybe, nothing.
This realization bruised my ego somewhat, but I have developed an interesting theory that I would like to share with you. “The ultimate truth is to accept that we don’t know everything”. This is not to say that it is impossible to know everything, just at this stage, we don’t. I reckon this may be true for each individual and collectively for the human race today.
What a beautiful world it would be if we could discuss any subject with any person, and recognize that both parties are only exploring what their own belief is, and are testing this belief, to see if it is true or not, or maybe needs modification. It would take a huge amount of humility and love, but to me, it is worth striving for.

BTW evaporation has a cooling effect but when the water vapor condenses, it’s an exothermic process. A heating effect. Notice the air feels warm before it rains. That’s high humidity and latent heat released in the clouds.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
August 4, 2014 at 6:27 am
——————————————-
Viscount Monckton,
I find your lack of faith in the scientific method….disturbing.
You shriek to present and future readers that my empirical experiments have not been pal reviewed, and that this justifies your epic failure to replicate or verify.
There are a few little problems with that. My selective surface experiments are just a replication of work from Texas A&M peer reviewed in 1965, and my 2011 experiments into incident LWIR on water that is fee to evaporatively cool were published in an engineering journal by proxy by an author who simply cut and pasted my work and experiment photos from Talkshop.
“Konrad waves his arms, but fails to provide a quantitative value for his proposed amendment to the 255 K emission temperature for Earth that theory would lead us to expect. What proposed alternative value for mean terrestrial emissivity in the near infrared would he propose, and how has he determined it?”
The relevant value is “well above 15C for 71% of the planets surface”, and you too could understand this if you replicated my experiments ( come on, I provide full build instruction…)
“And in which reviewed publication has his work appeared? We are not told.”
You what? I need pal review for replicable empirical experiment to be science? Do I need a pal reviewed consensus to be right? Is that the level you have descended to?
“Otherwise, one should be as skeptical of “Konrad’s” claim as of all other such claims. If a new hypothesis is incapable of withstanding scientific scrutiny, then why should I or anyone give it credence?”
To what actual scientific scrutiny did you subject my empirical claims? None. You made a call to authority argument. You cannot fight an empiricist and win, after all you are but a mathematician. Is it out of your depth on a wet pavement, or so far out of your depth the fish have lights on their noses?
“There is plenty of that in the climate science debate, but I am not impressed by it, and nor should anyone else be.”
You’re not impressed? Therefore no one else should be? You are the guy on permanent record who accepted the climastrologists 255K assumption. Call to authority arguments don’t work in these circumstances….
Ultimately if all you’ve got is “it’s not pal reviewed”, then you have nothing.
I checked Christopher, You assumed. What does assume make…?

Matthew R Marler says, August 4, 2014 at 11:04 am:
“I think it is a serious research question: where the DWLWIR impinges on the non-dry surfaces of the Earth, how much evaporation does it cause?”
No need to waste money on such a project. The answer to your question is very simple: 0.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/03/the-central-climate-fallacy-is-that-the-unknowns-are-known/#comment-1701396
“There isn’t enough to “boil off” the oceans, but there is no reason to believe, or to assert, that there is no evaporation caused by the DWLWIR.”
Yes there is. Because it couldn’t cause any evaporation. It is not a separate, thermodynamically working flow of energy.
“(…) if DWLWIR isn’t energy carrying, then it can’t result from electrons changing from higher energy orbits declining into lower energy orbits. You are better off saying that an important energy transfer process has been too little studied.”
DWLWIR is not an ‘energy transfer process’. It is one conceptual part of an integrated thermal radiative energy exchange through a continuous radiation field between two systems at different temperatures. The radiative heat going from surface UP, moving through that radiation field, is a real (as in detectable) ‘energy transfer process’. It is the net of the mathematically derived (potential) DWLWIR and UWLWIR ‘fluxes’. You cannot separate the one from the other within the exchange. The radiative heat is the only actual transfer of radiative energy between surface and atmosphere.
Again, this has been pointed out so many times to those of you who actually believe DWLWIR (‘atmospheric back radiation’) to be a real, separate working flow of energy to the surface (an extra (and equal) input of energy next to the solar heat flux): If this were really the case, then why aren’t we harnessing this energy flux? It is seemingly twice as intense as the solar flux, evened out globally and across the diurnal cycle. Why aren’t we seeing ‘back radiation’ power plants all over the world?

Christopher,
I agree, in a practical sense it probably doesn’t matter whether the sensitivity is zero, or one or two degrees. It wouldn’t be a problem, some warming is a benefit. History repeatedly shows that mankind prospered during the warm periods, and suffered during the cold periods.
But in another sense it is important, because it’s one of the great scientific questions, a bit like the age of the universe. Not necessarily of practical use, but nevertheless very important.
I’m certainly not an expert on climate science, but here are several reasons why I think the sensitivity is probably unmeasurably small:
1. Nearly half of the modern warming occurred before there was sufficient CO2, so clearly something else is at work.
2. As far as I’m aware, there is no empirical scientific data that shows a change in CO2 followed by a corresponding change in temperature. Surely, if the sensitivity is one degree, it should show up repeatedly in the ice core data? Of course, the CO2 follows the temperature, and not the other way around.
3. There have been four major warming periods over the last few thousand years: 1500BC, the Roman and Medieval periods and the modern warming. Based on ice core data, each warming period was a bit smaller than the previous one. Most likely they all had the same cause, whether it was solar or something else. But in the most recent warming, there should have been additional and fairly significant warming from the extra CO2. But there is no sign of it: the modern warming is no warmer than the previous three, and may well be slightly less warm. Surely, this strongly suggests that CO2 had essentially no warming effect at all.
4. AGW theory makes a number of specific forecasts: the equatorial hot spot, forecast warming, and the trend of Earth’s infra red emissions. The emissions are predicted by AGW to be getting smaller, but Lindzen showed that, not only is the size of the trend wrong, it has the wrong sign!
All these predictions based on AGW have turned out wrong. If science were working properly, AGW would have been scrapped years ago.
5. Much of climate science is corrupt almost beyond belief. If AGW were true, why is the most prominent paper supporting it (MBH98, the dreaded hockey stick) provably fraudulent?
And yet you do actually believe in a theory that looks to be completely discredited!
Finally, if the sensitivity is one degree, where is the empirical evidence to support that? Where are the examples of a step change in CO2 being followed by a corresponding step change in temperature?
Best regards,
Chris

H Grouse says:
August 4, 2014 at 10:38 am
“Grab a mercury thermometer.
The device does not measure temperature.
Not really all that different than the instruments aboard a satellite????”
——————-
You can keep on citing examples “until the cows come home” …. but they will not serve your purpose.
All thermocouples and thermometers are thermal “heat” energy measuring devices that rely on the “conduction” of said energy, …. directly from whatever molecular entity they are designed to measure, …… for their correct functioning regardless of what their “medium-of-exchange” is, ….. be it mercury, alcohol, water, a coiled spring, etc.
Satellites, IR cameras, rattlesnakes, insects, pythons, other pit vipers, etc. rely on the detection of specific wavelengths of “radiation” in the Infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum …. for their correct functioning regardless of what the source of the IR is.
And like satellites, ….. insects and rattlesnakes can not measure temperature. Pit vipers have evolved the ability to “detect” a specific frequency of IR radiation which is emitted from their various “warm-blooded” prey animals.
An “air” thermometer is used to measure the temperature of ALL of the gas molecules in the near-surface air surrounding said thermometer, ….. and not just a specific gas molecule such as CO2 or whatever.
And don’t be forgettin, …. the majority of all increases in near-surface air temperatures are the direct result of “conduction” from the surface.

That sort of comment does not go down well with his lordship. He called me a SL***r for expressing the same notion on this thread.

Steve Oregon says:
August 4, 2014 at 4:37 pm
“During all of my searches I’ve noticed that all of the government and alarmist sites avoid any mention of proportions. They speak about tonnes of CO2 etc. but not the EPA, NASA or any other I could find mention the percentages. ”
—————
Steve O, there is a primary “reason for their madness” that they speak about “tonnes of CO2” which has its origin in the work conducted by Charles Keeling that began producing more accurate and reliable results in 1958. And I cite the Keeling Curve Graph and/or Mauna Loa CO2 ppm measurements in conformation of the above.
In the early 1980’s the proponents of CAGW, …. and James Hansen et el specifically, needed some form of physical evidence to prove and/or justify their “junk science” claims that human emissions of their claimed “greenhouse” gas CO2 was the culprit directly responsible for their “fuzzy math” calculated increases in/of Average Surface Temperatures (Global Warming) via the highly questionable Surface Temperature Records being maintained by the NWS. See: History of the NWS – 1870 to present @ http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/evolution.php
Anyway, the Mauna Loa data has steadily and consistently shown an average 1 to 2 ppm annual increase in atmospheric CO2 from 1958 thru the 1980’s …. which was proof enough for Hansen et el that human emissions were partly or totally responsible for. (And ps, that steady and consistent increase of CO2 ppm continued on thru to present, 2014 )
And if the average mass of the atmosphere had been calculated to be about 5 quadrillion (5,000,000,000,000,000) metric tons, ….. then atmospheric CO2 in the 300+ ppm (0.03+%) range would mean that every one (1) ppm of CO2 would be equal to about 5 billion tons of CO2.
Therefore, Hansen et el now had the “magic number” of ….. 5bt/1ppm CO2 ….. for converting ….. “calculated temperature increases directly to increases in atmospheric CO2 ppm”.
And thus, …. all Hansen et el had to do then was to insure that the highly questionable estimations of total yearly human emissions of CO2 were stated in “tons of CO2” of sufficient quantities that would correspond to the aforesaid ….. average 1 to 2 ppm annual increase in atmospheric CO2 as defined by the Mauna Loa record.
But, when their “calculated temperature increases stalled” …… with “the pause”, …… but the annual average increase in atmospheric CO2 ppm” ….. did not “stall” with “the pause”, ….. then there was “BIG trouble in River City”.

TimNitOz says:
August 4, 2014 at 7:02 pm
“This is a continual work in progress, but at this stage (it took a while) I’ve discovered that my entire set of truths are beliefs, and I actually do “know”, very little, or maybe, nothing.”
—————–
Well now, … congratulations TimNitOz, …. me thinks you have just discovered the literal truth …. of the absolute fact that …… “You are what your environment nurtured you to be”.

Now, the problem with the theorem of Pythagoras is that it is unquestionably true. For those who agree with the philosopher Schopenhauer that Euclid’s demonstration is “a triumph of perversity”, here is the admirably clear proof by dissection attributed to the fifth-century Hindu mathematican Aryabhatta.
Am I the only one here willing to point out that is not admirably clear? The extra design frippery makes it much more confusing. Lord knows I’ve seen enough optical illusions to question what deception the coloration and possibly variable widths of the extraneous border pieces are hiding. For example, two opposing triangles maintain their orientation and border color cues between panes, but the other opposing set is apparently mirrored yet with different color cues when it is passed off as the same in the second pane. Why?
Interestingly, Googling for “pythagoras proof Aryabhatta” shows that graphic used in a 2010 Bob Arthy interview of Monckton. Which is packaged next to “… and Monckton’s proof by inclusion” which is also too cutesy but without consistent use of bordering, and messy, and not clear.
Further, I have seen more than enough previous claims of cherrypicking to find that it shows anything but a clever combination of lengths that just happen to work, it is not to be taken as a general proof. It lacks enough descriptive detail to show otherwise.
In addition, my spellchecker says “mathematician” was misspelled, while Wikipedia says “Aryabhata” was also misspelled, with “every astronomical text” spelling it as indicated.
And while Monckton says this proof is attributed to Aryabhata, I cannot find such. But I can find this proof by dissection (aka proof by rearrangement) attributed to Pythagoras himself, as given here, and notably without the mirrored set of triangles.
With Pythagoras living circa 570-495 BC, and Aryabhata 476-550 AD, the attribution of the proof to Pythagoras takes precedence until demonstrated otherwise.
And now that I’ve vented about that cluster-coupled frou-frou plopped in my path that prevented me from getting into the flow of piece, that artsy child’s wooden puzzle allegedly containing an “admirably clear proof”, maybe I can finally read it through, if I can find the time!

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says, August 5, 2014 at 12:40 pm:
“Except it doesn’t. You propose filling two identical structures with differing concentrations of CO2, as if CO2 was insulation. But the CO2 that provides the greenhouse effect is ABOVE the surface, not AT the surface.
Thus your little boxes would not work. Thus all your proposed experiment can demonstrate is you don’t understand enough about how greenhouse gases work to begin to test how well they work.”
Meaning there has never been an experiment in the history of humanity really showing us what effect increased CO2 in the atmosphere will have on the surface temperature. So far it’s all been purely theoretical conjecture.
So how do we test your proposed CO2 warming mechanism in the lab? How do we begin to test how well it supposedly works?

From Monckton of Brenchley on August 5, 2014 at 3:30 pm:

Then he says he can’t understand Aryabhatta’s proof and doesn’t think it rigorous.

The proof shown by the graphic is indeed rigorous, especially when properly notated and drawn, and is more properly attributed to Pythagoras. If you had indeed read my words then you shouldn’t be so obviously misrepresenting what I had said.

He also implies that I had said Pythagoras’ proof was in fact first demonstrated by Aryabhatta, when I had manifestly said no such thing.

I noted an apparent error in attribution, with reference. Such attribution errors can be mundane matters given the fragmentary histories.
But at a depth clearly greater than what he bothered to comprehend of my writings, as such a proof is normally attributed to the first one to present it, by attributing that proof to Aryabhata he did indeed claim it as first demonstrated by Aryabhata, rather than make the better attribution to Pythagoras.

And let him not, in future, sneer to the effect that something he does not understand is likely to be incorrect.

Meanwhile Monckton has clearly done his sneering without understanding what I wrote. Apparently his time is so valuable he finds it efficacious to spew falsehoods based on a quick glance rather than attempt comprehension.
Since Monckton did not provide countering evidence that the proof is better attributed to Aryabhata than Pythagoras, the attribution thus stands as better belonging to Pythagoras.
Of course, indicative of the negligible attention he gave to my comment, he did say:

Well, since his idea of doing homework is to trawl the internet, where he seems to be saying he was unable to find the spelling Aryabhatta…

When I clearly stated in my comment, presented here with bold added to make it obvious:

Interestingly, Googling for “pythagoras proof Aryabhatta” shows that graphic used in a 2010 Bob Arthy interview of Monckton.

I show something I found on the internet using his spelling, he thinks I’m saying I was unable to find that spelling on the internet.
And indeed, I found many things using his spelling, as it is a common misspelling, thus such findings are expected.
This is saddening. I had expected better of Christopher Monckton, now a decidedly ex-journalist.