By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
What is science for? Its end and object is to stretch out a fumbling hand for the truth by a humble and eternally-unsatisfied attempt to constrain uncertainties.
The scientific method is hungry curiosity, followed by acute observation, followed by careful measurement, followed by the meticulous application of pre-existing theory to the results, followed by the detailed drafting and reviewed publication of a hypothesis, followed by other scientists’ attempts to overturn the hypothesis, which is either discarded or slowly accorded credence to the extent that it has survived the process of error elimination.
In the physical sciences, absolute proof – which mathematicians call demonstration – is very seldom available. In mathematics, the art that is the language and the queen of the sciences, demonstration is more often available, particularly in number theory, the branch of discrete mathematics that concerns itself chiefly with the integers. Die ganze Zahl schuf der liebe Gott, said Kronecker. Alles übrige ist Menschenwerk.
One of the reasons why the Thermageddonite superstition has been so successful until recently is that just about the only formal demonstration that nine-tenths of the population recall – and even then hazily – is that in the Euclidean and hyperbolic planes the square (or semicircle) on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares (or semicircles) on the other two sides.
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.
However one looks at the theorem, the wretched thing is objectively true. There are hundreds of distinct demonstrations of it. It is true whether or not you or I or anyone else wants it to be true or believes it to be true or knows it to be true. In the language of theology, it is intrinsice honestum. It is right in itself.
I submit that it is the theorem of Pythagoras that has allowed the Thermageddonites to succeed when, scientifically speaking, they should simply have been laughed at.
For the truth of that venerable theorem has misled generations who have been given some acquaintance with the sciences but little or none with the philosophy of science into believing that every scientific finding is definitive, unalterable, unchallengeable and unquestionable.
Yes, liberating greenhouse gases by combustion will cause some warming – all other things being equal. Yes, we are liberating greenhouse gases by combustion. These things have been established beyond reasonable doubt. But what has not been established is the crucial quantitative question how much warming we may cause.
That simple fact has been relentlessly and artfully concealed from the population, who have been sedulously deluded into believing that “the science is certain” and that anyone who questions how much warming we may cause is by implication also challenging the well-established experimental results showing that greenhouse gases cause warming.
It is worth briefly considering the how much question – or, as the climate scientists call it, the question of climate sensitivity.
In response to my recent posting pointing out that on the RSS satellite record there has been no global warming for 17 years 10 months, a commenter, one Stacey, asked:
“Please could you … demonstrate the actual climate sensitivity in respect of the last 30 years due the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere? My guess is that it’s zero. :-)”
“Stacey” is adopting a sound, scientific approach, beginning with that vital first step: curiosity. Socrates used to say that the first step on the road to knowledge was an awareness of one’s own ignorance. And what is curiosity, the wellspring of the sciences, if not an awareness of one’s own ignorance coupled with a determination to do something about it?
“Stacey” offers the hypothesis, that climate sensitivity to CO2 over the past 30 years has been zero, and asks whether she is right.
So let us examine the hypothesis. We begin with the observation that in the climate there appear to be quasi-periodicities of about 60 years in global temperature – roughly 30 years’ tendency to warm followed by 30 years’ tendency to cool – and that these cycles are tied to, and may be caused by, the great ocean oscillations, of which the most influential seems to be the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Therefore, in order to cancel these naturally-occurring cycles, it is necessary either to take periods that are multiples of 60 years in length or to take periods that straddle a phase-transition from one 30-year phase of the PDO to another.
Usefully, the most recent phase-transition in the PDO was in about the year 2000, so that the past 30 years will have been about equally influenced first by a warming phase of the PDO and then by a cooling phase. That removes the most obvious potential natural distortion of our attempt to determine climate sensitivity from what has actually occurred.
Next, measurement. How much global warming was there in the past 30 years? For this, we shall take the mean of the global mean surface temperature anomalies on all five principal datasets – GISS, HadCRUT4, NCDC, RSS, and UAH.
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.
As the CO2 record on the chart shows, CO2 concentration rose by 54 ppmv over the 30-year period. We shall assume that all that increase in concentration was anthropogenic. If so, official theory suggests it caused 0.78 Watts per square meter of radiative forcing.
We shall also assume that over the period CO2 represented 70% of all anthropogenic forcings, so that the total anthropogenic forcing was 1.11 Watts per square meter. This assumption is derived from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report.
We shall further assume that none of the warming was committed but unrealized warming from before 1984, or that, if there was some, it was approximately balanced by uncommitted warming generated over the 30-year period but not yet apparent in the temperature record.
Now we can divide the measured temperature change of 0.48 Cº by the total anthropogenic forcing of 1.11 Watts per square meter to obtain the transient-sensitivity parameter λt where t = 30 years, which is 0.43 Cº per Watt per square meter.
However, the instantaneous, Planck or zero-feedback sensitivity parameter λ0, which is the mean of the first derivatives across all latitudes of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer at the characteristic-emission altitude, where incoming and outgoing radiative fluxes balance, is just 0.31 Cº per Watt per square meter (IPCC, 2007, p. 631 fn.).
Next, some handy equations, that you will not find in most textbooks, will help us to determine the system gain Gt, the closed-loop feedback gain gt, and the feedback-sum ft directly from the Planck sensitivity parameter λ0 and the transient-sensitivity parameter λt:
The transient system gain Gt, which is the factor by which the direct warming from anthropogenic forcings is multiplied to allow for the action of feedbacks over the 30-year period, is simply 0.43 / 0.31, or 1.39, showing that short-acting feedbacks have increased the direct warming by almost two-fifths.
The loop gain gt, which is the product of the sum of the short-acting feedbacks and the Planck parameter, is 1 – 0.31/0.43, or 0.28.
Then the feedback sum ft, the sum of all short-acting feedbacks over the period, is 1/0.31 – 1/0.43, or 0.9 Watts per square meter per Celsius degree of warming over the period.
The IPCC’s current central estimate is that at equilibrium, when all short-acting and long-acting feedbacks have acted, the feedback sum is just 1.5 Watts per square meter per Cº (IPCC, 2013, table 9.43, red dot at top right). This is a substantial reduction from the 2.1 Watts per square meter per Cº (blue dot at top right) central estimate implicit in IPCC (2007).
From that current estimate of the equilibrium feedback-sum f∞, which is the sum of all feedbacks acting over the thousands of years till the climate has established a new equilibrium following perturbation by a forcing, the equilibrium system gain G∞ may be determined, using the Bode system-gain equation:
From the Bode equation, the equilibrium system gain G∞ is [1 – 0.31(1.5)]–1, or 1.87. In short, the IPCC’s current implicit central estimate is that feedbacks increase the direct forcing-driven warming by seven-eighths.
The central estimate of Charney sensitivity implicit in the IPCC’s current central estimate of the feedback sum is given by
Thus, the IPCC’s current central estimate of Charney sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentration ought to be (5.35 ln 2)(0.31)(1.87), or 2.1 Cº. So the 3.2 Cº that is the current central estimate of the CMIP5 model ensemble is too big by at least half.
The eventual warming as a result of the anthropogenic forcings of the past 30 years will be (1.11)(0.31)(1.87) = 0.64 Cº, of which 0.48 Cº, or three-quarters, has already occurred, leaving just 0.16 Cº warming committed but unrealized over the period. Yet the IPCC says there is about four times that amount of committed but unrealized warming in the pipeline.
Now, all that is set out above is mainstream climate science. It is possible that we caused some of the warming of the past 30 years. It is possible, though by no means certain, that we caused at least half of it.
Why, then, can we not be more precise in deriving a climate-sensitivity estimate from the temperature change and CO2 concentration change we have seen over the past 20 years?
The answer – though you will very seldom hear it from the Church of Thermageddon – is that there are far too many unknowns. The biggest outright lie in the IPCC’s 2013, 2007, and 2001 reports is the notion that we can determine with any confidence the fraction of global warming over recent decades that is attributable to us.
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. For there is no dataset from whose values any such supposed confidence levels can be determined by any recognizable statistical process.
It is a measure of the contempt in which today’s scientific elite holds the rest of the population that the IPCC, as the elite’s soi-disant spokesman on climate change, could have made and persisted in and doubled down upon these particular lies. It knows it can get away with them, for scientists have abdicated, forfeiting their high priesthood to far-left politicians and profiteering environmental protection rackets.
We do not know enough about the climate to say in what direction, let alone by how much, the climate would be changing in the absence of any anthropogenic influence. We do not know the forcing from CO2 or any other greenhouse gas to a sufficient precision. The official value of the CO2 forcing was cut by a massive 15% in 2001.
We do not know the value of the Planck parameter to any great precision. We thought we did: then the actual mean surface temperature of the Moon was measured, and was found to be 40% adrift from the official value that had been determined on the basis of the lunar sensitivity parameter, and had been confidently published on official government websites.
We do not know what fraction of manmade warming is attributable to each of the greenhouse gases. We do not know the magnitude or even the sign of the forcing from our emissions of soot to the atmosphere.
We certainly do not know the values of the individual temperature feedbacks to anything like the narrow error bars falsely claimed by the IPCC. We do not even know the sign of the cloud feedback, and the IPCC has recently been forced to reduce the value of that feedback drastically.
Then there are the major non-radiative transports: evaporation and convection up, advection across, and precipitation and subsidence down.
We cannot predict the behavior of the oceans – indeed, we cannot even measure changes in their heat content with sufficient resolution to give a meaningful result.
We cannot predict el Niño and la Niña events. Look how many enviro-left news media predicted a record-busting event this year. They predicted it because they wanted it.
They needed it, desperately, to bring the Great Pause to an end and reduce the humiliation that the less dishonest among them are beginning to feel now that the laymen like me at whom they have viciously snapped and sneered for so long are – so far, at any rate – closer to the mark than they and their expensive but useless models.
For it would take only a very small reduction in each of the assumed values on the basis of which the IPCC makes its predictions to reach a climate sensitivity far less than the models’ currently-claimed central estimate of 3.2 Cº per CO2 doubling. And there are powerful theoretical reasons why some of those values must have been greatly overstated, though there is no space to consider them here.
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. The IPCC is heading – albeit far too slowly – towards the same answer. It has cut the CO2 forcing; it has accepted that the next-biggest anthropogenic forcing, from methane, has been vastly overestimated; it has slashed the feedback-sum and consequently the equilibrium system gain; it has all but halved its near-term predictions of global warming.
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”.
But you will never hear that honesty on the lips of the Thermageddonites, as they furtively and profitably cement in place the last of the thousand interlinked supranational bureaucracies that are the silent sinews of what – if they get their way in Paris in December next year – will be an all-powerful world government founded upon the greatest lie ever told, the lie of certainty in a cloud of unknowing, elected by none, loved by few, feared by all, and answerable only to itself.
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mellyrn says:
August 3, 2014 at 5:36 pm
The Ordovician ice age might have lasted longer & been colder with CO2 at 400 ppm instead of 4000 ppm or more. The glaciation was brief but fairly intense, thanks to so much land over the South Pole. What can be said is that CO2 is not the “major driver of climate change”. Its level is more of an effect than a cause.
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?)
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..
Konrad says:
August 3, 2014 at 5:10 pm
Valuable comments, but please consider that oceans are not just water. Their surfaces are often turbulent or covered in ice. They contain many dissolved salts & minerals & perhaps most important of all, living things. Their currents & tides are affected by islands & continents. Their depths & optical properties vary. Nutrients upwell & surface salinity & temperature fluctuate. All these factors affect their absorption & reflection profiles as opposed to pure water. Not to mention the effect of latitude, ie angle of incidence of incoming radiation.
@ur momisugly mellyrn.
Here’s some background music, minus the balloons, full of misery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODHhWcEdrvg
mellyrn says:
August 3, 2014 at 5:51 pm
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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.
The Ordovician ice age might have lasted longer & been colder with CO2 at 400 ppm instead of 4000 ppm or more.
Thank you, milodonharlani, but with Venus at 960,000 ppm CO2 and no hotter than simple proximity allows (at one atm pressure — apples to apples), I have to doubt it.
I can say that pouring a cup of water into the ocean will raise sea level — but a swimmer in Japan getting out of the water just as I do will more than negate it. CO2 apparently heats gas in a chamber in a lab. It doesn’t heat a planet, not even when it’s nearly pure (barring a weird, coincidentally-perfect albedo effect that is more effective when there is less of it). The theory is clearly missing something.
Clinging to the theory-as-it-is serves no one.
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”.
mellyrn says:
August 3, 2014 at 6:22 pm
Venus lacks water vapor & its hotter upwelling photons (with different mix of energies than the LW IR from the surface of Earth) have to fight through a much thicker mass of molecules to get to the one atmosphere level. The example is IMO instructive, but can’t make more of it than justified, given all the differences between the two planets.
Mars after all also has a mainly CO2 atmosphere.
But I agree that lab measurements of CO2 IR absorption don’t translate directly into the real world, in which in some environments it might be that more CO2 has a cooling effect, as perhaps in the warmest parts of the moist tropics.
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.
Albert Einstein was right when he said, “We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”
Sadly, those promoting the dangerous human-caused global warming supposition think Einstein was wrong. Even worse, individuals like President Obama and Prince Charles actually believe the science is settled when it comes to climate change. How can such ignorance be explained?
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.
I love your posts, they are a pleasure to read.
I am wondering if this particular sentence contains an error:
“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.”
Should the second part “in 2001, 90% confident;” be 2007 instead of 2001?
Again, thanks for the excellent post.
“Thermageddonites”
I like this.
Paul says:
August 3, 2014 at 2:57 pm
As others have pointed out SkS is hardly a credible source to reference, however, your link to it in the comments of a WUWT post probably increased traffic to that site by an order of magnitude today…
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 answer to “Justthinkin”, special characters such as Greek letters and mathematical symbols are available in Word in two ways. The first and simplest is to hit control-I followed by S. That displays a table of symbols. The second is to use the clunky, ugly, error-prone equation writer, which will be found on the Insert tab. To toggle in and out of subscripts in ordinary text-writing mode, use control-O then F then B. For superscripts, control-OFP. The Word interface was designed by an idiot.
I agree with “latecommer2014” that some scientists have abused their white coats with leaky biros sticking out of the front pockets. It is time for the same law to apply to them as to everyone else.
“Kristian” is right that that the stochastic changes in global temperature do not sit well with the monotonic changes in CO2 concentration. 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. Therefore, the sudden temperature changes to which “Kristian” refers are caused by something else; and, until we have identified clearly what that something else is, and quantified it, and subtracted it from the temperature trend, determining the fraction of temperature change attributable to CO2 concentration change is impossible.
Mr “Grouse” has choisen to take a qualifier from one part of what I wrote and apply it inappropriately to another. On a separate point, he says there are “three cases” (whatever that may mean) of Euclid’s fifth or parallel postulate, which, though it be equivalent to the Pythagorean theorem, applies unmodified only in the Euclidean plane. It is necessary to modify that postulate to apply it in the elliptic and the hyperbolic planes.
“Mellyrn”, yet another slayer, continues to sow confusion, this time by suggesting on the basis of paleoclimate evidence that CO2 concentration increase causes cooling, not warming. In the Neoproterozoic era 750 million years ago, there was at least 30% CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, yet glaciers came and went, twice, at the Equator. Such evidence does not tell us CO2 has no warming influence; but it tells us that, all other things being equal, it is likely to be small.
“Dr Deanster” has failed to read the head posting carefully. To cancel the cyclical temperature effects of the PDO, one may take either periods that are multiples of 60 years in length or periods centered about a phase-transition from the warming to the cooling phase of the PDO or vice-versa.
Mr Seifert makes the important point that one should keep the influence of Man’s small perturbation in atmospheric composition in proportion to the larger influence of major climate drivers such as the sun, the oceans, clouds, and non-radiative transports.
Dr Page says I have “finally decided to notice” the 60-year cycle of the PDO. I have, however, referred to it frequently in previous postings going back many years, have frequently discussed in detail its influence on the global temperature record, and have also discussed it with the authors of the leading scientific papers on the subject.
I am grateful to “Konrad” for having unearthed Sir George Simpson’s quotation. He was right in 1938 and remains right today. However, he is incorrect about the elementary physics that determines the effective radiating temperature of the Earth. If the Earth’s albedo were kept at its present value of 0.3, an Earth without an atmosphere (or with an atmosphere but without greenhouse gases) would have an effective radiating temperature of 255 Kelvin. Particularly with respect to the long-wave radiation with which we are chiefly concerned in studying the greenhouse effect, the Earth is a blackbody or very nearly so. The emissivity of nearly all of the Earth’s major surfaces, including that of the ocean, is sufficiently close to unity that very little error arises by assuming that it is unity.
“Phlogiston” says one need look only to the oceans to explain climate change. One should certainly not ignore them: there are, for instance, some 3.5 million subsea volcanoes, none of which is routinely monitored for its heat output. However, there are other major influences other than greenhouse gases: the sun, the clouds, and the non-radiative transports, for instance.
“Steve Oregon” is incorrect to say that man-made CO2 is little more than 3% of atmospheric CO2. It is more like 40%. He is right, though, that the climate is stable: it has shown itself near-thermostatic for at least 810,000 years. Therefore, there is no imminent danger of instability arising from our having altered the composition of the atmosphere by 1 part in 2500, which we may achieve by the end of this century if CO2 concentration continues to rise on the business-as-usual scenario.
“Mellyrn”, a serially tedious slayer, says that my referring yet another tedious slayer to an elementary textbook on heat transfer I am referring him to what he calls “mere theory”. However, the relevant theory, like all theories in physics, is of course rooted in observation followed by experiment, as the head posting explains, and there are plenty of experiments demonstrating that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect, though quantifying its application in the real climate is difficult – which, after all, is what the head posting was about.
“Mellyrn” also continues to be wrong about Venus. I have already given the relevant value for the effective temperature of Venus, and it is plain that that temperature is considerably below the temperature at a pressure-altitude equivalent to that of Earth, demonstrating yet again the reality of the greenhouse effect. Moderators, please refer this particular commenter to Anthony, who has a strict policy of not giving space to slayers who question the basic science of the greenhouse effect.
Mr Oldberg asks whether I am asserting that when the change in equilibrium surface temperature change is divided by the change in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration change the resulting climate-sensitivity parameter is constant. Sigh. Since surface temperature change at equilibrium is an unknown variable, and since future CO2 concentration change is also a variable, the climate-sensitivity parameter that is the ratio of the two can scarcely be constant, now, can it? The head posting made it plain that it is not possible to determine climate sensitivity on the information now to hand: therefore, it is not possible to determine the equilibrium climate-sensitivity parameter; therefore, I cannot have given the slightest ground for anyone to suspect that I regarded it as constant.
Robert of Texas has indeed noticed an error in the head posting: “in 2001, 90% confident” should read “in 2007, 90% confident”. The IPCC’s “90% confidence” that recent warming was mostly manmade was reached by show of hands among scientifically-illiterate government representatives. China had (correctly) wanted no such estimate; most of the rest of the world wanted 95%, as that would keep the gravy-train rolling for another few years; so 90% was settled upon. All such estimates are, statistically speaking, nonsense.
richard verney says:
I am a sceptic.
I think that is correct. Richard Verney has always appeared to me to be a very reasonable scientific skeptic and a good analyst. I would not classify him as any kind of Slayer. Just MHO.
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.
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Lord Monckton
I have noticed a distict change in your style these past 3 or 4 years, one of which is a tendency towards ad homs, and another is adopting a supercilious attitude towards others. If you are going to level accustaions at others or otherwise disparage them, make sure you have evidence supporting your position; I am not aligned to that groug and I have read elementary textbooks on heat transfer (many of which do not discuss GHGs). However, I do not take something as fact simply because I read it in a book (or online), without appropriate supporting proof.
For one who prides themselves on logic, your article is a logical fail to the extent that the sentence that I quoted is one of the many things that we think that we know, but may in reality be a thing that is incorrect; arising from an over extrapolation of other facts that we know. Over extrapolation of facts and data, unfortunately, is not an uncommon failing, especially in climate science. Your article (correctly) argues that we should not simply assume but instead we should look for actual proof, and yet the assertion in the sentence that I quoted is a matter on which there is no proof, and one on which no one has offered any credible proof; whilst the laboratory characteristics of CO2 have been observed and tested and evaluated, it is not known how the release of CO2 plays out in the real world environs of the atmosphere of planet Earth at about 280ppm and more.
The sentence that I quoted is in itself logically inconsistent, since whenever you effect change, by the very nature of change, things do not remain equal; although I understand what you meant by your sloppy language, but nonetheless the sentence possesses an inherent inconsistency such that it is a logical fail.
Of course you could have sought to set out the proof backing up your assertion. You could have sought to demonstate the entire temperature profile of the Holocene and the warming caused by variations in CO2 in the light of all other things, but you did not. I would suggest that the reason that you did not do this is because you are unable to do so.
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.
i would suggest that your article would have read better without that sentence, which in practice is otiose. Unfortunately, the more one repeats an unknown ‘fact’ as if it is a true fact, the more entrenched and the more difficult it becomes to see the light of truth.
You state (correctly in my opinion) “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 would suggest the reason you came to such conclusion is because we do not know whether “…liberating greenhouse gases by combustion…cause some warming – all other things being equal.” The former (correct) assertion, reveals the problem with the latter (unproven) assertion.
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 9suggesting a low sensitivituy), 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.
They probably were subjected to indoctrination sessions with seemingly know-it-all warmist scientists and activists. They didn’t exercise due diligence and give the other side a hearing. They thought that SkS’s list of straw man refutations was conclusive. I suspect this is what happened to the bigshots now sounding off as part of the Risky Business campaign.
rogerknights:
At August 4, 2014 at 12:55 am you say of President Obama and Prince Charles
Please remember that it is not their job to “exercise due diligence”.
Politicians are required to assess and to balance information of every kind from every possible source: that is their job when they are elected. And they cannot know everything about everything.
Information is supplied to elected politicians by their personal advisers and their civil services. When their information suppliers become biased then the information they get is biased with probable result that their decisions are flawed, and there are many examples of this (e.g. WMD in Iraq).
Good politicians always remember the possibility that their information may be wrong and/or incomplete so they always “consider that ye may be wrong”. Those who forget to “consider that ye may be wrong” get decapitated either literally or metaphorically.
Richard
“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.
Lord Christopher, regarding “the thousand interlinked supranational bureaucracies” you mention. Do you have any thoughts on how these entities might be rendered subject to our control, or, ideally, removed?
@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.
Christopher
Thank you for the response and by the way the last time I looked I was a man 🙂