What went wrong?
A major peer-reviewed climate physics paper in the first issue (January 2015: vol. 60 no. 1) of the prestigious Science Bulletin (formerly Chinese Science Bulletin), the journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, as the Orient’s equivalent of Science or Nature, one of the world’s top six learned journals of science, exposes elementary but serious errors in the general-circulation models relied on by the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC. The errors were the reason for concern about Man’s effect on climate. Without them, there is no climate crisis.
Thanks to the generosity of the Heartland Institute, the paper is open-access. It may be downloaded free from http://www.scibull.com:8080/EN/abstract/abstract509579.shtml. Click on “PDF” just above the abstract.
The IPCC has long predicted that doubling the CO2 in the air might eventually warm the Earth by 3.3 C°. However, the new, simple model presented in the Science Bulletin predicts no more than 1 C° warming instead – and possibly much less. The model, developed over eight years, is so easy to use that a high-school math teacher or undergrad student can get credible results in minutes running it on a pocket scientific calculator.
The paper, Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model, by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon, David Legates and Matt Briggs, survived three rounds of tough peer review in which two of the reviewers had at first opposed the paper on the ground that it questioned the IPCC’s predictions.
When the paper’s four authors first tested the finished model’s global-warming predictions against those of the complex computer models and against observed real-world temperature change, their simple model was closer to the measured rate of global warming than all the projections of the complex “general-circulation” models:
Next, the four researchers applied the model to studying why the official models concur in over-predicting global warming. In 1990, the UN’s climate panel predicted with “substantial confidence” that the world would warm at twice the rate that has been observed since.
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The very greatly exaggerated predictions (orange region) of atmospheric global warming in the IPCC’s 1990 First Assessment Report, compared with the mean anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue straight line) of three terrestrial and two satellite monthly global mean temperature datasets since 1990.The measured, real-world rate of global warming over the past 25 years, equivalent to less than 1.4 C° per century, is about half the IPCC’s central prediction in 1990.
The new, simple climate model helps to expose the errors in the complex models the IPCC and governments rely upon. Those errors caused the over-predictions on which concern about Man’s influence on the climate was needlessly built. |
Among the errors of the complex climate models that the simple model exposes are the following –
- The assumption that “temperature feedbacks” would double or triple direct manmade greenhouse warming is the largest error made by the complex climate models. Feedbacks may well reduce warming, not amplify it.
- The Bode system-gain equation models mutual amplification of feedbacks in electronic circuits, but, when complex models erroneously apply it to the climate on the IPCC’s false assumption of strongly net-amplifying feedbacks, it greatly over-predicts global warming. They are using the wrong equation.
- Modellers have failed to cut their central estimate of global warming in line with a new, lower feedback estimate from the IPCC. They still predict 3.3 C° of warming per CO2 doubling, when on this ground alone they should only be predicting 2.2 C° – about half from direct warming and half from amplifying feedbacks.
- Though the complex models say there is 0.6 C° manmade warming “in the pipeline” even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases, the simple model – confirmed by almost two decades without any significant global warming – shows there is no committed but unrealized manmade warming still to come.
- There is no scientific justification for the IPCC’s extreme RCP 8.5 global warming scenario that predicts up to 12 Cº global warming as a result of our industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.
Once errors like these are corrected, the most likely global warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration is not 3.3 Cº but 1 Cº or less. Even if all available fossil fuels were burned, less than 2.2 C° warming would result.
Lord Monckton, the paper’s lead author, created the new model on the basis of earlier research by him published in journals such as Physics and Society, UK Quarterly Economic Bulletin, Annual Proceedings of the World Federation of Scientists’ Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, and Energy & Environment. He said: “Our irreducibly simple climate model does not replace more complex models, but it does expose major errors and exaggerations in those models, such as the over-emphasis on positive or amplifying temperature feedbacks. For instance, take away the erroneous assumption that strongly net-positive feedback triples the rate of manmade global warming and the imagined climate crisis vanishes.”
Dr Willie Soon, an eminent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said: “Our work suggests that Man’s influence on climate may have been much overstated. The role of the Sun has been undervalued. Our model helps to present a more balanced view.”
Dr David Legates, Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware and formerly the State Climatologist, said: “This simple model is an invaluable teaching aid. Our paper is, in effect, the manual for the model, discussing appropriate values for the input parameters and demonstrating by examples how the model works.”
Dr Matt Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars”, said: “A high-school student with a pocket scientific calculator can now use this remarkable model and obtain credible estimates of global warming simply and quickly, as well as acquiring a better understanding of how climate sensitivity is determined. As a statistician, I know the value of keeping things simple and the dangers in thinking that more complex models are necessarily better. Once people can understand how climate sensitivity is determined, they will realize how little evidence for alarm there is.”
Mods, Planetary Physics is just the old lunatic D C under a different moniker. His rants are basically the same including his favourite term ” valid physics “.
Venter,
I question your assessment. DC has never previously shown an understanding of the difference between a SW selective surface and a near blackbody. “Planetary Physics” seems to have a vague understanding, which is more that can be said for Viscount Monckton.
Konrad has failed to understand the important differences between the radiative characteristics of the Earth’s actual and characteristic-emission surfaces.
The sceptic community should be thankful to Lord Monckton et al for showing a simple way to gain knowledge. Call it a model, a formula, an equation or method, it doesn’t really matter. It shows that “less is more” may well be true in science as well. I hope, “The Monckton Model” will give sufficient impetus so that the traditional keepers of false wisdom, unless they are in a complete state of mental disarray(or under frustrating pecuniary embarrassment allowing fabricated results only), start thinking their “models” over. I still believe in the good in man, with one exception: I do not believe in the good in Mann and people of that ilk.
The ‘Monckton Model’ is utterly unconvincing curve fitting and will have no significant ‘impetus’ [like homeopathy: less is more and nothing at all is best]. It is telling that Monckton does not show a graph of the ‘modeled’ temperature year by year since 1850 [or 1940 or whatever] comparing it to the observations.
As Mr Svalgaard understands perfectly well, a model is not a curve – fitting exercise. It will accept whatever values the operator chooses.
One realizes that climate sensitivity is not his specialty. Perhaps, therefore, he does not understand the paper.
It would be refreshing if you would produce the graphs that I asked for, instead of baseless ad-hom drivel.
The paper clearly states that the parameters were chosen to fit IPCC models and ‘observations since 1850’.
As I suspected, Mr Svalgaard has not understood the paper. He has even misquoted it. He says “the paper clearly states that the parameters were chosen to fit IPCC models and ‘observations since 1850’.” What the paper actually says is this: “The model is calibrated against the climate-sensitivity interval projected by the CMIP3 suite of models, and against global warming since 1850.”
If Mr Svalgaard had actually read the paper and understood it, he would have realized that the model was calibrated using IPCC’s values for various parameters, so as to ensure that IPCC’s sensitivity was obtained when those values were input to it. Mr Svalgaard, of course, is not of English origin and may have difficulty with the language. If so, he should not sneer until he has made sure he understands what he is reading.
You seem to labor under a misconception: the equations are, of course, not examples of curve fitting, the choice of parameters and your conclusion therefrom are curve fitting in the usual sense of that concept. Now, there is nothing wrong with curve fitting as long as it is labeled as such. In fact, one way of calibrating a model is precisely to fit its output to the curve given by the data, as you did. That you interpret my comments as ‘sneering’ just shows that you are paranoid and not used to scientific discourse and displays a deep sense of uncertainty and doubt about the road you have taken. You have still not produced the graph I asked for. You claim the paper was rigorously peer-reviewed. Given your often economical relationship with the truth, it would be of considerable interest to see those reviews. So, produce them.
I understand the English language quite well, Lord Monckton, and, until you amend it, your comment of 12:11pm today (directed at Dr. Svalgaard) communicates only a disingenuous distinction without a significant difference.
And, a bit of friendly advice: your audience-alienating, sneering, condescension toward a scientist of Dr. Svalgaard’s widely-known calibre will win you no arguments.
Isn’t winning the battle for truth about human CO2 what this is all about?
(Dr.Svalgaard, today at 11:07am)
I have no idea whether Dr. Svalgaard’s request is reasonable, but, if your goal, Lord Monckton, is to persuade those brainwashed by the AGWers, it would be wise to either:
1. Provide the graphs
or
2. Provide a reasonable explanation for not doing so.
Mr Svalgaard continues not to understand our paper. To calibrate our model we used IPCC’s parameter values to ensure that our result and that of IPCC were close under the particular conditions studied. At no stage did we start with a curve and then tweak the model until it’s results fitted the curve, And in answer to those who whine tha I have been too blunt with Mr Svalgaard, he has adopted a sneering tone throughout and his vexatiously-repeated allegation that we have indulged in curve-fitting was based on what I must now assume was a deliberate misquotation from the press release. Such deliberate misquotations are immoral and are not how a true scientist would behave. Mr Svakgaard should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
What you did is the very definition of curve fitting. There does not need to be an actual curve, the numbers are enough. Now you have not defined which observational data you used in your fit, you have not show us any metrics of the goodness of the fit, you have not produced the graph of modeled temperatures year by year, you have not produced the reviewers’ reports. You have not done what an honest scientist would not be afraid of doing. That invalidated your paper right there.
From your paper: “The model is calibrated against the climate-sensitivity interval projected by the CMIP3 suite of models and against global warming since 1850”.
Describe how the fitting to ‘global warming since 1850’ was performed. Which data set? Which metric for goodness of fit? What were the error bars? You might not know the usual standards for such fitting or calibration, but you can start by answering the above questions. And try to post a comment without venom.
Process control engineers rarely design electronic circuits.
Electronic engineers design the circuits, the process control engineers oversee the manufacture of the designed circuits.
…
You really need to fix that issue in the paper.
[Reply: You are free to submit your own article. ~ mod.]
Mr Svakgaard asks for some unspecified graphs. I refer him to our paper, which he should surely now take the trouble to read before criticising it.
Nonsense. You claim that the model ‘tracked’ the observations. Show the graph that supports that. Perhaps you don’t have any and that is why you call it ‘unspecified’.
¨Model¨ means different things in science:
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/models-science/
The Copernican Model, Bohr´s Model of the Atom, the Standard Model of Fundamental Particles, etc, are decidedly different from a GCM run on a computer, IMO.
Does it matter if the Monckton, et al Model counts as a model under one definition or another, if it says worthwhile things about the GIGO climate models, so called, which have failed so miserably?
Mr Svalgaard continues to ask questions all of which he would find answered if he could only bring himself actually to read the paper he whines about. A true scientist, rather than a sneering bearer of grudges, would have read the paper first, and thought about it, and perhaps made some enquiries to shore up his understanding of matters that are not his specialism. Mr Svalgaard, however, continues to demand information that is plainly set forth in the paper, which, therefore, he has plainly not read. He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself. Read. The. Paper. Then think. Then check. Then, and only then, whine.
Read my comments and comply.
Comply with what?
Non Nomen said;
Let’s say it matters whether the paper is influential or not.
The question would matter less, had it not been claimed to be a “model”, and to be suitable for a computer program. (A program is not need for the formula for eg parallelepiped-volume.)
Monckton et al address themselves to a number of stakeholders in the climate-industry, and whether those cohorts think the paper describes an important model or a merely descriptive formula will affect its reception & application … ranging potentially from nil to a watershed.
It matters less what you or I think, and more what the working audience-communities think … and their probable definitions of formulas & models (as best we can reckon) are what counts.
If we were what counts, it would have just been published on WUWT.
For non- mathematicians and non-logicians such as Mr Clayton, a mathematical model is an equation or set of equations (in the present instance a set of equations) that describes an object. Thus a formula is a model.
For a more formal definition of a model, one must go to general mathematical logic. But the above definition will do for present purposes. Not one of our three reviewers at any time queried whether our model was a model. For anyone with an elementary knowledge of math or of general logic, our model is of course a model.
Our paper will be judged not on futile questions of semantics but on whether our model has indeed identified errors in the official approach to determining climate sensitivity that have led to the over prediction of the global warming rate that has occurred.
Bottom line, I hope that you, Soon, Legates and Briggs are successfully at opening doors and taking a meaningful place in vested climate-discourse. I understand that you have further work in the wings, and will wish you all the best with it, and a growing profile, as well.
That you are engaged, and peer reviewed, is a big accomplishment & the main thing.
Congratulations!
Non Nomen rightly takes the trolls to task for nit-picking. Looking at this thread, it is clear that the has been practically no attempt by any of them to look closely enough at the science in the paper to produce anything recognisable as scientific criticism of it. Their comments are mostly vapid and often intellectually dishonest yah-boo. We shall have to wait and see whether the reviewed literature can do better.
The leftosphere elsewhere has also been remarkably childish and unscientific. One commenter wilfully misrepresents our point that in view of the thermostatic behaviour of the climate over the past 810,000 years the feedback closed-loop gain in modern conditions is unlikely much to exceed 9.1. Another accuses us of plagiarism and then admits we had, after all, acknowledged the origin of every part of the model that came from earlier papers. But no attempt by either of these two climate Communists actually to challenge the scientific conclusions.
Perhaps we have them all worried.
Monckton of Brenchley: Looking at this thread, it is clear that the has been practically no attempt by any of them to look closely enough at the science in the paper to produce anything recognisable as scientific criticism of it.
I have read all of the comments and your rejoinders. I [thank] all. I agree with that assessment. I am surprised at the number of people who believe that all of your parameters were “tuned”, or that you promote any assumption that you made to see what its consequences would be. imho. I am only 1 reader.
Mr Marler has been more than usually diligent in reading this unusually long thread with – alas – very little in the way of scientific criticism in it. The trolls have been out in force, which indicates that they and their paymasters are worried, but I think it is fair to say that none of them has landed a blow. And Mr Marler is correct in his assessment that we did not tune any of the parameters to achieve any particular result. Our interest was in reaching the truth, and one cannot do that by fudging either the equations or the values of their terms.
On a climate-Communist blog elsewhere, the best the sneering classes could do was to say that we had not acknowledged the role of James Hansen in introducing the Bode system-gain equation to the models. We had in fact cited IPCC (2007), from which we had originally obtained the system-gain equation, and we had then gone back to the source and cited Bode himself, whose magisterial book of 1945 provides a discussion of it. It is reasonably clear that, if temperature feedbacks are truly as high as IPCC thinks they are, the Bode relation is inapplicable to the climate object. That will be the subject of a further paper that has been accepted after peer review but not yet allocated to an issue of the journal where it will be printed.
I do not recall the trolls ever having been in such childishly spiteful and unconstructive form ever before on these threads. Not a single useful scientific point has been advanced by them. It may be that they are beginning, at last, to realize that scientifically speaking the game is up. It will take a little longer, alas, for the politicians to catch up.
I’ve watched this thread unfold with some amusement. “Trolls” – sure, I’ll own that. But “climate Communists”? “Paymasters are worried”? If you want to be taken seriously you need to stop talking like Conspiracy Dude who sleeps on the steam grate across the street.
Many thanks to Non Nomen for having gotten the point of the simple model. We have provided a highly compressed but, I hope, very clear account of how the complex models determine climate sensitivity, so that it is no longer a secret reserved to the priests of the machines. Now everyone can see for themselves the self-evident defects in the official approach to the determination of climate sensitivity, to say nothing of the uncertainties in what we had been falsely told was the “settled science”.
You have to keep grinding away against the consensus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/health/11docs.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0
attn: Anthony Watts and MOD
Doug Cotton
[Thanks, deleted. ~mod.]
A Doug Cotton in any other language is till a Doug Cotton.
“… more junk from… ”
See Anthony’s NO TRESPASSING warning here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/16/peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator-climate-model-exposes-serious-errors-in-complex-computer-models-and-reveals-that-mans-influence-on-the-climate-is-negligible/#comment-1837061
A Dug Cottn in any other language is still a Dug Cottn.
Mr svalgaard continues otiosely, vexatiously and incorrectly to repeat that we had indulged in curve-fitting. He bases this malevolent and untruthful allegation on a deliberate misquotation from the press release accompanying our paper. Such misquotations, in which he has been caught out before, are the conduct not of a scientist but of one who bears a grudge, A more adult approach would have been preferable.
Nature is not an electronic circuit. Your assumption that g < .0.1 is invalid.
An electronic circuit is a physical construct of objects that still obey the laws of nature.
Note, I spent 10 years full time drawing electric circuit diagrams for high tech companies.
You are 100% correct to say that an electronic circuit is a physical construct of objects that still obey the laws of nature. However, nature is not an electronic circuit. To compare the two is not valid, as there are too many differences of note.
That’s true; but the best modelling-base is the electronic circuit.
Analog computers, based on opamps, could indeed outperform digital climate models, both in sophistication and sheer computational power.
The advantage of digital is not that it’s better, or faster than analog. It is neither. Rather, that it is repeatable, that the program can be rewritten rather than rewired, and it’s amenable to lossless and non-degrading data storage and retrieval.
The word “analog” derives from “analogy”, which is the essence of a model. Analog computers are intrinsically (electronic circuit) modelling-machines.
Eh, Gary?
Ted……you seem to be mentioning three separate items.
1) Analog computer
2) Digital computer
3) Electronic circuit.
Nature is none of the above.
..
Lets just say that I am afraid to plug in my analog, tube based radio, cause I got a shock last time I did that.
Ah, I see the problem. You do not know what nature is. Hint, gravity is nature. You can sit in a closet and experience nature.
Mr Socrates, as ever, is hopelessly out of his depth. It would have been wiser if he had read the paper before criticizing it. It is not we but official climate science that has misappropriated an equation from process engineering that does not apply to the climate. It is nevertheless appropriate for us to draw attention to the fact that the climate has remained near-perfectly thermostatic for almost a million years and that, therefore, a loop gain much above the process engineers’ upper bound is implausible in the real climate. Read and then think before commenting.
Electronic circuits and ‘nature’ frequently obey equations of the same form and therefore obey the same mathematical rules. The assumption that g < .0.1 is indeed invalid, it is not a requirement for stability.
An electronic circuit, such as the Wien bridge oscillator, has both a positive feedback loop and a negative feedback loop with delay, for stability the requirement is that the net gain be less than 1.0, if greater than 1.0 then oscillation occurs. Jeff Hasty has designed a biological oscillator based on the same principles: "Here we describe an engineered genetic oscillator in Escherichia coli that is fast, robust and persistent, with tunable oscillatory periods as fast as 13 min. The oscillator was designed using a previously modeled network architecture comprising linked positive and negative feedback loops.”
Jesse Stricker, Scott Cookson, Matthew R. Bennett, William H. Mather, Lev S. Tsimring &
Jeff Hasty, Nature 456, 516-519(27 November 2008)
Socks: “Nature is not an electronic circuit.”
Nature is full of electronic, thermodynamic, and mechanical systems. Many of these share the same mathematical forms and variables. The variables can be viewed as analogs, which do not necessarily denote entities and phenomena in each system, but otherwise share identical mathematical properties:
http://lpsa.swarthmore.edu/Analogs/ElectricalMechanicalAnalogs.html
We often say “Nature ‘obeys’ such-and-such Model”. But we have no way of knowing that as absolute truth. What we really mean is “we believe, with some confidence, that phenomenon X, which is observed in Nature, obeys such-and-such Model”.
Mathematical models are not part of nature, but are merely symbolic relationships elaborated in our minds (i.e. man-made) to help us understand and explain nature. All models tend to be wrong (G. Box), but some are useful.
One of the most useful model equations, used to describe natural systems, is the Laplace/Poisson equation: div(grad(X))=f, where X can be a scalar (e.g. electrical potential, temperature or density) or a vector (e.g. electric field, heat flow or diffusion flux) and where f denotes some kind of source, possibly nothing, or perhaps an electrical charge density, heat source or fluid source.
So, it would be incorrect, IMHO, to state that “Nature obeys Bode’s Law”, but this law may be useful as an abstract model to better understand or explain natural feedback systems. Useful even if it ultimately some other other model explains it better, because we learn. Even from models which fail to explain nature perfectly.
Johanas
So, it would be incorrect, IMHO, to state that “Nature obeys Bode’s Law”, but this law may be useful as an abstract model to better understand or explain natural feedback systems. Useful even if it ultimately some other other model explains it better, because we learn. Even from models which fail to explain nature perfectly.
Far better, actually, to say “Bode’s Law describes how Nature theoretically would behave in a mathematically perfect universe, if Nature followed all of perfect theoretical assumptions in physics.”
(Aside: … why are we allowed to capitalize and personify (and deify) Nature’s random actions as they follow the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, but cannot mention an Intelligent Designer? ..)
But since the only “theoretical assumptions in physics” are the ones made by humans, wouldn’t that imply that Nature must do what we assume it should do in a perfect world? Rather presumptuous I think.
Yes, Laws are sometimes deified and worshiped, but they all come from that law-making animal called Man.
But Man didn’t make his own Mind, which makes our law-making possible. And I don’t believe it evolved through random permutations of molecules either. I believe science will some day understand the Life Principle, which will explain consciousness and the robustness and intelligence of living systems.
In response to “Phil.”, who appears to know no more about electronic circuits than about the climate object, the reason why process engineers hold the loop gain at a maximum of 0.01, or in well-controlled conditions 0.1, is to ensure that defective components and environmental factors will not combine to generate an oscillation under certain conditions. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to the climate. Such is the variability at every point in the system that in a million years the Earth might well on several occasions have had to endure the extreme oscillations that the Bode singularity foreshadows. That is why a feedback loop gain <0.1 is to be expected – and, indeed, is found in the literature (e.g. by Lindzen & Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer & Braswell, 2010, 2011).
And hand-waving about how some equations apply to most dynamical systems does not cut it. In numerous respects, electronic circuits and the climate are in different classes of dynamical systems, and the Bode relation applies only to a narrow class of dynamical objects that does not include the climate. This is briefly explained in the paper, and more fully explained in a further paper to be published in another journal (it has just passed peer review and been accepted).
You continue to evade the science issues, and indulge instead in blather about my person. What do your lawyers say about such behavior?
Be specific. At Scots law, your persistently repeated and false allegation that we had indulged in the dishonest practice of curve-fitting would be regarded as a grave libel, to which a vigorous reply would be regarded as fair comment. So try to be less malevolent and more like a scientist in future. Your third-rate contributions to this thread reek of a small mind bearing a grudge.
Is Svalgaard saying that for example the derived value of say that Planck constant was from curve fitting ?
Absolutely, yes. It was so when Planck derived the value by fitting to the observed black-body radiation http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/history/historic-papers/1901_309_553-563.pdf
Exactly Svalgaard. So what is your beef with Monckton ?
For example, that he claims he is not doing curve fitting. He is, as all calibration fits are. And, of course, his despicable behavior when criticized.
I should add that the first guess at estimating the Planck constant was inaccurate until a mathematical model was finally devised that resolved things.
Note, I am going by memory of what I read recently, as I am extremely busy with two lifetimes worth of work backlog.
Planck found 6.55E-27 cgs; the modern value is 6.63E-27 cgs, so Planck’s first stab was pretty accurate [only 1.2% wrong]
Mr Svalgaard continues to be vexatious. If he now concedes that he has been condemning our model because we calibrated it (which on a dozen occasions he has described pejoratively as curve fitting) then he should be thoroughly ashamed of himself. Once we had calibrated the model to establish that it was working correctly, we the, chose what we considered to be scientifically justifiable parameter values and ran the model once more. The results conformed to observation first time around.
Mr Scalgaard now seems to be saying that any model is a curve fitting exercise, in that event, why does he sneeringly and repeatedly single out our model for criticism on this ground rather than being scientific enough and intellectually honest enough to admit that he considers all models, not just ours, to be valueless in that on his definition thy are mere curve fitting exercises? Mr Svakgaard forfeits all claim to be regarded as any sort of scientist.
You are still evading the real issues. Let me try another tack. With five ‘tunable’ parameters you have a 5-dimensional parameter space. For each point in this space you can define a goodness-function that expresses how well the particular set ‘tracked’ the observations. For another point in parameter space, you have a [most likely] different value of the goodness-function. A good parameter set is that point which maximizes the goodness-function. You say that you found that point in your first try, but without further exploring in parameter space you don’t know if that point is the best. There could be many other points that are as good or better. So you don’t even know if the solution is unique. Nowhere in your paper does it mention any such exploration, which is the barest minimum that must be carried out for a meaningful conclusion. Your ‘time will tell’ is simply not good enough. One can say that about any wild speculation, a la Scafetta’s, Evans’, or even IPCC’s.
Once we had calibrated the model to establish that it was working correctly, we the, chose what we considered to be scientifically justifiable parameter values and ran the model once more. The results conformed to observation first time around.
How did you establish that the model was ‘working correctly’? Because it gave you the result you were looking for? So you ran it once more, i.e. you have run it many times before that, so this was not a ‘first try’.
Then finally you say that the model conformed to observations first time around. Don’t you see the contradiction here. Your statements are woolly and vague. The procedure you have to go through to validate the model is at the crux of the matter. Everything hinges on you doing this right. There are no indications in the paper that you did. Your puerile protestations don’t cut it.
I think Mr Mount may have intended to refer to the Planck sensitivity parameter, not to Planck’s constant. For the record, we did not derive that parameter by any kind of curve-fitting. We obtained 30 years of latitudinal mid-troposphere temperature data and by a feat of spherical geometry, determined the value of the Planck parameter. Our result was in accord with that of IPCC, to 3decimal places.
Don’t be silly. If Mr Svalgaard had actually read the paper before sneering at it , he would see that we put official parameter values into the calibration runs, then chose our own parameter values that we considered more appropriate, and ran the model to see what result it produced. It broadly coincided with observation. Do stop being childish, read the paper, think, and then try to comment in a manner that at least attempts to be scientific.
You are still spouting personal attacks [what else is new?] instead of addressing the scientific issue which I laid out up-thread. Why don’t you make a contribution and respond substantively to that. To repeat [as is my wont] you have not made a case for meaningful exploration of the parameter space. I posed a number of specific questions. Answer them in order to gain at least some respect.
What “specific questions” has Mr Svalgaard raised? And, in asking them, is he genuinely interested in receiving answers, or is he merely trying to sneer interrogatively? He has not approached this matter with an open mind but with an open mouth.
If Mr Svalgaard wishes to write a different model, or to perform parameter-space tests on mine, he should feel free to do so. Our model has the limited purpose of illuminating the official method of determining climate sensitivity: accordingly, the parameter values we were using for the calibrations were those that the CMIP models and the IPCC used, just so that we could confirm the model delivered results within their interval. We ran several calibration tests, all of them successful. Only when we had done those tests using what I shall call the “official” parameter values, achieving much the same results as the more complex models, did we move on to alter the values of some of those parameters to identify the effect on climate sensitivity.
In particular, we were interested in the value of the closed-loop gain, which is absolutely dependent on the feedback sum and the Planck parameter. We did not need to perform sensitivity tests to establish that this was the most influential quantity. After reviewing the growing literature on net-negative climate feedbacks (e.g. Lindzen and Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer & Braswell, 2010, 2011), we also consulted feedback specialists known to be supporters of the official position, to obtain their views. To our surprise, they were also moving in the direction of reconsidering the strong net-positivity of the feedback sum that is really the sole reason for high climate-sensitivity predictions in the current generation of models.
We also studied some of the earlier literature, from the ground-breaking papers by Manabe and Wetherald to Hansen’s 1984 paper on the influence of feedbacks on climate sensitivity. Indeed, in our forthcoming paper for another journal on the Bode question, we made explicit the derivation of the Bode equation from first principles at which he hints in his paper. However, It remains plain to us that the Bode equation is applicable only to a quite narrow class of dynamical systems, and the climate does not fall into that class. Though our forthcoming paper does not presume to offer a new equation to replace Bode, we are coming to the provisional opinion that the relevant equation is that of an epidemic curve bounded by upper and lower asymptotic limits. The asymptotes are, broadly speaking, those that yield the maximum and minimum inferred temperature values of the past 810,000 years.
Because the closed-loop gain is the dominant influence on climate sensitivity, we had no need to perform the usual sensitivity analysis to identify the parameters that mattered. Please look at what we actually did and make specific comments on where, if anywhere, we went wrong. Do not just hand-wave as you have so far. There is simply need for complex sensitivity or other parameter-space analyses when using a simple model. It is feedback amplification that is the chief defect in the general-circulation models, and our model demonstrates with great clarity and simplicity the difference between the high climate sensitivity in response to strongly net-positive temperature feedbacks whose sum approaches the singularity in the Bode system-gain relation., on the one hand, and the much lower and surely more realistic sensitivity to the appreciably net-negative feedbacks that appear to have ruled the climate throughout almost all of the past million years.
We ran several calibration tests, all of them successful
The paper hangs completely on those tests so they need to be discussed in detail, yet there is no such discussion in the paper. This is a serious deficiency that should be remedied. In addition, the paper claims that the model was fitted to the observations [I presume of temperature] since 1850 and that the model ‘tracks’ the observations. Nowhere is that discussed in detail, and, yet, such is vital for a viable model and a meaningful conclusion. It is a puzzle that such basic things got by the reviewers, hence my request to see their report(s).
P.S. I’m missing your usual nasty references to my person and my dishonesty, incompetence, and other goodies. Please revert to your usual self [at least for my amusement]. Thanks in advance.
You referred to my as malicious. A Danish proverb says “a thief thinks everybody steals”. This seems to apply to you in full measure.
Mr Svalgaard says there is no discussion of the calibration tests in the paper. As I have said before, he should really read the paper before making any more of an idiot of himself commenting on what he appears neither to have read nor to have understood.
If he does not like our model, he is of course entitled to his opinion, though we should have liked some proper scientific reasons for his dislike of it. But America, unlike Britain, is a free country. If he wants to write his own model, then by all means let him do so. In our paper he will find the key parameters well described and discussed in a shorter compass than anywhere elses. But, for Heaven’s sake, if he cannot find any scientific objections to the paper, he is wasting his breath huffing and puffing here.
Prove that you are not the idiot here, by showing the page number, line number, and quote where the calibration and test against global warming since 1850 are discussed in detail.
Let Mr Svalgaard read the paper. It is high time he did so. His inconsequentiual criticisms of various irrelevancies do not look impressive given that he has plainly not read the paper. No doubt he will be able to enter the search term “calibrat” into the Acrobat search box, which will take him straight to the passage he requires. I do not propose to spoon-feed someone who has sneered and whined to such little purpose without having had the courtesy or common sense to read the paper he is sneering and whining about before sneering and whining about it. Grow up, for heaven’s sake.
On the contrary, I have read the paper carefully. That is how I can provide the sharp criticism you have seen here. You see: I know whereof I speak. It is depressing to come across such an insecure person who has to resort to your standard profanities and who cannot take valid criticism like a man.
Let us demonstrate that Mr Svalgaard has not read the paper he has so pathetically attempted to criticize. He has repeatedly asked where the description of the calibration of the model against the climate since 1850 occurs. If he had read the paper he would not have said, repeatedly and without the slightest justification, that there is no such description in the paper. I do not propose to tell him where it is. He can find it in seconds by searching for it. Then – if he is man enough, which I doubt – he can apologize for all his criticisms of a paper he is now proven not to have read before he started shooting his mouth off about it. His conduct is not the conduct of a scientist but of a mere bearer of grudges. He should be thoroughly ashamed of his pathetic behavior.
Nonsense. You demonstrate that you have not read my comments, but let that ride. If you look at
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT4.pdf
you can see that there are very many intervals to test the model on, so Table 4 should have been augmented with a test, say, every decade. This would be a standard test of parameter sensitivity, but you fail that, and thus fail generally.
Mr Svalgaard’s latest whine to the effect that we had not done as much testing as he would have preferred takes absolutely no account of the long and careful explanation I had already given. He continues to behave like a small child. We are not, repeat not, interested in short-term fluctuations in temperature. The purpose of the model is to determine climate sensitivity over the long term.
The difference between a formula and an equation :
Example
Equation ;
y = x^2 (y equals x squared)
Formula ;
For all x equal to or greater than 1
y = x^2
else y = 1 (all other values of x maps to, equates to, equals 1)
– – –
Note, this is just one example of infinitely many.
Note, infinity is not a number.
I’ll just add that a model can model an equation or a formula, or combinations of such. That doesn’t make a model a formula.
I am grateful to Mr Mount for making it independently clear that a model is simply a mathematical representation – inevitably simplified – of some object, whether the object be a formula, or – as here – a cascade of equations, or an entire climate with billions of parameters. Mr Svalgaard, in maintaining that the standard model of cosmogony is a complete description of the universe from its origins to the present, is flagrantly exaggerating. At its simplest, the standard model boils down to a single equation that – in a remarkable degree – describes all the particles and forces at work in the universe with the vexing exception of gravity, whose place in the scheme of things is not yet pegged down. Yet to maintain that that single equation is enough for us to describe every star and its origin and its destination, let alone the complexity of the planets and life on planets such as ours, is obvious nonsense. The standard model is a simplification – remarkably elegant and powerful, but a simplification nonetheless.
Simili modo, our model is a simplification of the climate object, designed to illuminate certain features of that object’s past and future behavior but not – of course – to provide a complete description of it. But our model is still a model, so I hope there will be no more semantic quibbling on that score. It would really have been far more interesting if anjyone commenting here had found some defect in the model that we could have addressed to put it right. Instead we have had whining about why we have not made our code available (answer: because we didn’t write any, for a pocket calculator was all we needed); and whether our model is a model or something else that behaves like a model; and whether I am a real Lord (yes, get over it) and whether I claim I can cure HIV (no: get over that too).
We are hoping, however, that there will be reviewed replies to our paper – by real scientists – in the Science Bulletin, and that in accordance with immemorial custom we shall be given the courtesy of answering any such rebuttals in the issue in which the rebuttals are printed. I suspect that the quality of the comments here has been rather poorer than usual because various trolls and people with grudges have piled in to make a nuisance of themselves because they fear we may, after all, be right. They should not fear our being right: for, if we are right, then there is no climate crisis and every Western nation can save trillions over the coming century by not squandering any more taxpayers’ money on it.
Mr Svalgaard, in maintaining that the standard model of cosmogony is a complete description of the universe from its origins to the present, is flagrantly exaggerating
Talking about misrepresenting. The Standard Model is an expression of our knowledge so far, and you missed the point that models are needed because there are unknown layers of reality below that we are at at the moment, so can never be a complete description.
Mr Svalgaard, in his first reference to the standard model of cosmogony in this thread, explicitly stated that there was “no simplifciation” in it. Now he says that it is of course a considerable simplification. Of these two mutually exclusive positions, the latter is scientifically correct.
Just as the standard model is a simplification of the evolution of the universe since a fraction of an isntant after its origin, so our model is a simplification of the climate object. As we concede several times in the paper, our model is not a substitute for the more complex models. It has its limitations. But it has its uses too.
No, the Standard Model is not a ‘simplification’ of the Universe. It is ALL we know about it. Whether or not it is even correct is not a given, even though we think that it is not far from the truth. You did not understand anything of the discussion about this.
leif svalgaard: No, the Standard Model is not a ‘simplification’ of the Universe. It is ALL we know about it.
What a peculiar pair of sentences. Unless we know everything, then the Standard Model is a simplification.
No. The Standard Models incorporate all we know about their subjects. They are not a simplifications of a wider body of knowledge. They may not be correct, but that is for the future to tell. For now, they represent the best we can do. One can make simpler versions [‘simplifications’], e.g. by imagining the electrons trapped in an atom as a miniature solar system. Is treating matter as in Classical Physics rather than Quantum Mechanistically a simplification [that model works well most of the time]? No, it is not. It is just Wrong. Models do not as their defining characteristic have the property of ‘simplification’. Instead, they are tools to gain understanding of something difficult at the level of discourse.
Mr Svalgaard makes the remarkable assertion that the standard model is all we know about the Universe. It is not, of course, and it is fatuous to suggest that it is. Indeed, it cannot even be said with complete confidence that we know the standard model to be correct, for we know for certain that it is incomplete. Mr Svalgaard, in his anxiety to avoid producing a respectable scientific argument against our paper, is digging himself an ever-bigger hole. He should really stop digging. He is not making himself look like a serious contributor to scientific debate.
Our model is a simplification of the climate, much as the standard model is a simplification of the universe. it matters not that we could produce more elaborate versions of the climate model, or of the standard model. For these, too, like all models, would be analogies, and it is of the essence of any analogy, whether simple or complex, that it will break down at some point. So there is no sound intellectual basis for Mr Svalgaard’s failed attempt to discredit our model on the ground that – like all models – it is a simplication. And his assertion that the standard model is not a simplification because it is all we know about the universe has only to be repeated to be seen for the arrant nonsense it is.
Verdict: must try harder. Take an F.
Mr Svalgaard makes the remarkable assertion that the standard model is all we know about the Universe.
Perhaps you should think about what you write before pressing the Send Key. And do I have to spoon-feed everything to you? The Standard Model is all we think we know about how the Universe works. See the difference? If not, I can recommend several good books on the subject. Just let me know.
there is no sound intellectual basis for Mr Svalgaard’s failed attempt to discredit our model on the ground that it is a simplication.
That is, obviously, not the basis. The paper fails because of shoddy ‘science’. Because of lack of detail about the fitting procedures. Because of no exploration of the parameter space. Because of …[etc]. Many reasons. The fate of such papers is to be ignored in well-deserved obscurity.
And furthermore, every model is by its nature a simplification. Perhaps Mr Svalgaard, instead of making up ever more feeble and inaaccurate definitions as he loses the argument, would refer to any textbook of general mathematical logic, where it will become at once apparent to him that in practice any model is a simplification of the object it is intended to represent. it is not the object itself.
Besides, if Mr Svalgaard had read even as far as the title of our paper, he would have noticed that it talks of “results from an irreducibly simple climate model”. Our model, like it or not, is a simplification, just like all other climate models. If Mr Svalgaard is criticizing our model on the ground that it is simpler than the object it represents, then he is by implication criticizing all other climate models, for they, too, are simplifications.
It looks to me as though he has lost the thread of whatever argument he was once advancing, and is thrashing around in his desperation to find fault with a paper he has not read or understood. Perhaps he should take a few days of to read it and think about it, and then return with an organized list of questions. And let him frame them as straightforward questions, so as to free himself from the bearing-a-grudge, sneering tone in which he has unfortunately conducted this matter. He must raise his game, and show a genuine interest in the scientific argument we are advancing, and ask sensible, scientific questions about our results, rather than complaining that we have not explained our calibrations when we rather obviously have, or complaining that our model is not a model when it rather obviously is.
Or perhaps he could go away altogether and write his own model and submit it for peer review. But he would have to have better answers for his reviewers than those he has given here, or he will not get his paper published.
Or, if he really wants to manifest his unreasoning hatred of us, he can offer to the Science Bulletin an attempt at a rebuttal of our paper. But he should be aware that we shall be given the right of reply in the same issue, so he will need to make a proper job of his rebuttal. And he will have to raise serious points. The series of futile inconsequentialities with which he has sought to disrupt this thread would not withstand peer review even for five minutes. Let him go away and do some propler thinking, and replace his hatred and his grudge with real, dispassionate, fair-minded science. That is the way grown-up scientists behave.
he can offer to the Science Bulletin an attempt at a rebuttal of our paper
No rebuttal needed. Bad papers die all by themselves.
I am not at all surprised that Mr Svalgaard, non-scientist and bearer of grudges, is not man enough to attempt a rebuttal of our paper – a rebuttal that would have to face both peer review and a refutation from us in the same issue. He prefers to snipe and carp here, without even having read the paper he is sniping and carping about. That is why his “criticisms” are so unfocused, non-specific and unscientific.
As I said ‘bad papers die all by themselves’. There are papers worth rebutting, yours is not among them. Any scientist worth his salt can see that from the shoddy parameter exploration. It is bad form to publish what is evident to everybody.
Well, three peer reviewers thought the paper worthy of publication. Not one of them commented that the model had been inadequately calibrated. And if our paper is not worth rebutting, why, one wonders, has Mr Svalgaard spent so much time here bad-temperedly trying – and spectacularly failing – to criticize a paper that, thoughout most of this thread, it can be proven he had not even read? Does he, perhaps, bear some sort of a grudge – perhaps because I came to the defense of my friend Dr Evans when Dr Svalgaard unfairly subjected him to the same ugly and loutish and relentlessly unscientific treatment he has now lavished foolishly on me?
At any rate, let us accept that Mr Svalgaard is defeated. He does not dare to try to rebut our perfectly reasonable and sensible paper, because he knows full well – now that he has actually read some of it – that there is nothing wrong with it (or, rather, that if there is anything wrong with it he does not know what it is). So he retreats from the field, unable and unwilling to face the same peer review that we faced. Certainly, what he has presented in this thread would not pass muster on peer review. He has been indulged here for too long.
This ugly argy-bargy about the “Monckton Model” being a model or whatever has one positive result: the Alarwarmistas will choke with laughter. It’s nit-picking at its best. The question cannot be: “What is the ‘Monckton Model'” but it ought to be “Can it deliver better, plausible results?”. The future will show whether the latter is the case, until now it is -at least to me- highly probable that it will. I always thought of dogmatism as a vice of the Alarwarmistas. I don’t want to live to see that the sceptics can do so much better,,,
The ‘wait and see’ attitude seems very much at variance with the headline of the post that the model “reveals that Man’s influence on the climate is negligible”. So the conclusion has already been drawn regardless of what happens in the future. That is not science.
Don’t be childish. If you are incapable of adopting a scientific approach, be silent. If Mr Svalgaard had read the paper he so sneeringly but ineffectually presumes to criticise, he would realise the reasons why we say the influence of Man on global temperatur is negligible. However, only time will tell whether our model will do a better job of predicting global temperatures than the politicised GCMs.
If only time will tell, you can not categorically assert the conclusion already. And you call that science.
>> lsvalgaard January 18, 2015 at 11:02 pm
If only time will tell, you can not categorically assert the conclusion already. And you call that science.<<
But it is science that corresponds with reality. All "models" of the established 'science' have utterly failed. They do deliver krap at its best. 'Monckton Model's" results correspond with reality.
So: reality check passed, carry on!
Monckton of Brenchley
You say to lsvalgaard
History shows that although your admonition is warranted it is pointless because it will have no effect.
lsvalgaard has great knowledge and understanding of solar matters but he cannot resist the temptation to make a fool of himself on other matters. This is a great pity because he harms his very deserved credibility on solar matters by pontificating about other matters he does not understand.
I have corrected blatant nonsense from him in two WUWT threads. The first is here and the most recent is in this thread where he made untrue assertions concerning modeling and provided two unsolicited links to support his assertions. When I pointed out that both of his links refuted his assertions and one supported my comments which he was disputing he here wrote
I genuinely hope lsvalgaard will adopt your admonition for his own sake, but I suspect that he will not.
Richard
You bet I won’t.
Richard, you are quite right that Mr Svalgaard is making a spectacular idiot of himself by attempting to criticize a paper he has not even read, and has been proven not to have read. Let him continue to make an idiot of himself, for all of these threads are being archived by the Lord Monckton Foundation, where future generations will be able to see how uncivilized and unscientific Mr Svalgaard has become.
Perhaps he was once a reasonable solar physicist, though his loutish, not-invented-here mistreatment of Dr Evans suggests that even in that field he is not all he cracks himself up to be: but in matters of climate sensitivity and modeling he is well out of his depth.
And how many real scientists do you know who would wade in and go on and on whining about a paper (“criticizing” is perhaps too grown-up a word to describe Mr Svalgaard’s sniveling) without having taken the elementary trouble to read it first? Perhaps it is old age. Who knows?
But he has one value: his idiocies here will be studied with a mixture of horror and amusement by future generations, and they will perhaps learn from the absence of scientific integrity or intellectual honesty in his contributions to this thread that they should not emulate him, and that they should be as vigorous as you and I have been in not accepting pseudo-scientific nonsense: for there is too much bunkum already in climate science, and it is time for us to speak up against those whose conduct falls so very far short either of the scientific method or of common courtesy.
Once Mr Svalgaard has read the paper, and has apologized for not having read it before presuming to snivel about it, perhaps we can move forward. As it is, he has not come gloriously out of this affair. Imagine how silly he must feel, now that he realizes that the calibration against the record since 1850 that he has been asking for, and that he has repeatedly sworn is not in the paper, has a section all to itself? But will he apologize for not having read the paper? Let us just say that we ought not to hold our breath.
Did Hans von Storch get a copy of “Monckton’s Model”?
First of all, I must say that this discussion is taking place on a completely wrong setting that has been taken as the basis for finding the causes of climate change. It is a mistake and deception and scientific public and all participants in thinking about the causes of climate change. Looks like someone deliberately put CO2 as the main culprit for the warming of our planet, in order to draw attention to something else that is “behind the hill wrong,” and that should bring some new tax.
Science has “derailed” and completely forgot about the laws of nature and their study and application of knowledge to further the true causes of the phenomenon. Instead, they chose themselves over time to some sort of model of “telling fortunes,” what will prove to be something they like. Thus, the models become “golden calf” which experts “poured” into the PC and after praying this model to tell them what’s out there about which they have no idea. Well i have no idea. Is it the result of your model smarter than you who you are as your idea of “baked” in the PC so you now all “tastier”. And what is actually a model? It should be an attempt to based on natural phenomena, which are related to what we investigate, get something fairly and in accordance with natural phenomena and in compliance with the law by which all takes place in nature.
Gentlemen, climate change, in general, in the solar system, not only on Earth, depend exclusively, from the relation between celestial bodies (both who influences whom in the movement, with its: Weapons “(attractive force, magnetism, electrical boxes and everything else related to their behavior in space). do not forget that it is the size of a human being can not even comprehend, let alone change. We can pollute the air or water, or who may be reheated Earth to temperature changes on it. Did not clear sunspot cycles that are just indicators of some changes in the system, which should be on the basis of study.
When speaking of Kepler’s laws, when you know that the planets do not move in ellipses according to Kepler, but it is another way to explain the causes of spin planets and their proportions and in the bulk and at distances from each other (System planets and their barycenter ) and so on !!
These discussions and models will never give true causes of the phenomenon.
I’m a little sharper, but excuse me, I have to, because this leads to something, so far at least someone to prove something.
Mr Milovic is right that CO2 has been unduly demonized, as though it were the only – or the principal – influence on the climate. To the nearest tenth of one per cent, there is no CO2 in the air at all. So, though it can exercise some influence, it is not very likely to exercise an overwhelmingly dominant influence.
I am not sure about the extent to which planetary influences on the Sun have an effect on Earth. Some scientists say this is the case, and there are identifiable cycles of climatic activity which appear coincident with orbital cycles of the major planets, but – although a small but dedicated group of scientists asserts that the “planetary beat” is influential, the jury is still out on this question.
What we should certainly study, however, is whether the methodology by which we are told the initial small direct warming from CO2 is tripled is correct. For the reasons briefly touched on in the present paper, and expanded on in a forthcoming paper now accepted for publication after peer review, i consider that the tripling of global temperature to allow for imagined strongly net-positive temperature feedbacks is unphysical and should be rejected.
This point of view is gaining ground in the climate-science community and – in my opinion – deserves to prevail.
Mr Milovic is right that CO2 has been unduly demonized, as though it were the only – or the principal – influence on the climate.
Suggest you read Hansen’s 1988 paper you have appeared to missed the point.
Or perhaps you could read Hansen’s presentation (below) where he points out that in the short term it would be better to focus on Methane. “The best opportunity for a decrease is in methane, and thus also tropospheric ozone and stratospheric water vapor”
To the nearest tenth of one per cent, there is no CO2 in the air at all. So, though it can exercise some influence, it is not very likely to exercise an overwhelmingly dominant influence.
Frankly that’s nonsense, since 99.9%+ of the atmosphere (the three gases which are more abundant than CO2) aren’t IR active! That’s like saying that you only need 8mg/day of iron in your diet it can’t have much effect.
Phil.:
Has not CO2 been fingered as the climate culprit? Is not 99% of the alarmism directed at CO2?
And please show us where CO2 has had any effect on climate. You are one of the die-hards.. 18 years and counting.
Phil says I should read Hansen’s 1988 paper. In fact, I recently reviewed the predictions from that paper, in which he had forecast 0.5 K/decade global warming by now as his business-as-usual case (Scenario A). The actual rate of warming since 1988 has been little more than 0.1 K/decade, so Hansen’s predictions have turned out to be laughably extreme.
Phil then says Hansen recommends we should focus on methane [which has a global-warming potential, mole for mole, that is 21 times that of CO2]. However, unlike CO2, the concentration of methane has not been rising all that fast since 2000, and in fact has risen at below the least rate predicted in IPCC’s assessment reports 1-4. The primary biogenic source of methane, in any event, is not cattle demenant: it is termite ants. And have you heard of the Greens’ mighty campaign against the white ants? No, I thought not. Our emissions of methane are, frankly, negligible. The total methane concentration, from all sources, is less than 2 – yes, 2 – parts per million, or the equivalent of about 40 ppm CO2. So, on the elementary math, there is practically no point in our trying to address emissions of methane, when our agricultural sector and even the gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe (now that it has been repaired) are so very small to start with, and when the concentration in the atmosphere is barely measurable.
And, whether Phil likes it or not, to the nearest tenth of 1 per cent there is no CO2 in the atmosphere at all. As I correctly stated, that trace quantity can have some effect on temperature, but adding CO2 to so low a concentration will make – in practice – remarkably little difference to global temperature.
Finally, Phil should know that water vapor is far more abundant than CO2 in the atmosphere, and it too is a greenhouse gas. The estimates of CO2’s contribution to the greenhouse effect range from 10-25%. But that is the effect of the total accumulated concentration. Each additional molecule has less forcing effect than its predecessors (Myhre et al., 1998); so that in today’s conditions we can’t make much difference to global temperature.
Phil says I should read Hansen’s 1988 paper. In fact, I recently reviewed the predictions from that paper, in which he had forecast 0.5 K/decade global warming by now as his business-as-usual case (Scenario A). The actual rate of warming since 1988 has been little more than 0.1 K/decade, so Hansen’s predictions have turned out to be laughably extreme.
Read it perhaps but clearly didn’t understand it. Scenario A was intended to be extreme, ‘business as usual’ referred to continuing emissions at the 1970-1980s rate indefinitely, which he didn’t expect to be the case.
“These scenarios are designed to yield sensitivity experiments for a broad range of future greenhouse forcings. Scenario A, since it is exponential, must eventually be on the high side of reality in view of finite resource constraints and environmental concerns,”
“Scenario C is a more drastic curtailment of emissions than has generally been imagined; it represents elimination of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions by 2000 and reduction of CO2, and other trace gas emissions to a level such that the annual growth rates are zero (i.e., the sources just balance the sinks) by the year 2000. Scenario B is perhaps the most plausible of the three cases.”
Notably in your paper you only included Hansen’s high prediction not the other two, in fact Scenario C was surprisingly accurate in its estimate of future emissions (see Climate Audit: http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/17/hansen-ghg-concentration-projections/)
Phil then says Hansen recommends we should focus on methane [which has a global-warming potential, mole for mole, that is 21 times that of CO2]. However, unlike CO2, the concentration of methane has not been rising all that fast since 2000,
A good match for Scenario C! You had claimed that “Mr Milovic is right that CO2 has been unduly demonized, as though it were the only – or the principal – influence on the climate“, anyone able to read a graph can see that Hansen did not do so in either the 1988 paper, or the other report I referred to.
By the way I suggest that you adopt the practice recommended by Willis, i.e. quote verbatim what I said, don’t make it up. Water vapor is not a well mixed gas in the atmosphere, its concentration is dependent on temperature and indeed in major parts of the atmosphere is at a lower concentration than CO2.
I apologise that the link to Hansen’s report didn’t appear above:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2009/Copenhagen_20090311.pdf
In further reply to the less than fully informed “Phil.”, Scenario A from Hansen’s paper was his business-as-usual case. How do I know? Because he is on record as having said so in subsequent Congressional testimony.
“Phil.” goes on to say that Scenario C was “remarkably accurate” in its projection of future global warming. No, it wasn’t. Global temperature is running well below even Scenario C, which – though “Phil.” is very careful not to say so, was predicated on the assumption that from 1988 to 2000 there would be drastic reductions in CO2 emissions, which would remain stable from 2000 onward. Since this rather obviously did not happen, and yet global temperatures are still running well below Scenario C, this was a predictive failure of a heroic order.
“Phil.” then gives me a characteristically bossy lecture about quoting his drivel verbatim, and then succeeds spectacularly in misquoting himself. I had said there was more water vapor than CO2 in the air, and Phil, alleging I had misquoted him, said that water vapor is not a well-mixed greenhouse gas. But I can find nothing in Phil’s earlier posting that mentions that water vapor is not a well-mixed greenhouse gas.
In short, Phil. is trolling in his usual feeble-minded, sneering, whining fashion, without displaying the slightest intention of conducting the conversation in an honest fashion. His postings here are flagrantly mendacious and dishonest, and fall well below the standard of intellectual integrity and scientific knowledge that are expected here. One hopes he is paid well by his climate-Communist masters, for he is a standing advertisement for the utter bankruiptcy of the climate-Communist party line.
“and fall well below the standard of intellectual integrity and scientific knowledge”
…
From a third party observer, you have miss characterized Phil. Judging by both his and your postings here, I would say, it is very possible and highly likely that his grasp of the subject matter is well above yours.
….
Would Mr Socrates care to be specific? As any impartial observer can observe, and as future generations will observe, Phil has been caught out again and again getting his facts wrong.
It is obvious to even the most casual observer that ‘socrates’ is a third-party observer, as he states. Perhaps he should read the WUWT archives for a few months, in an effort to get up to speed on this subject.
As for Phil., he is his usual grumpy self, adding nothing worthwhile to the discussion.
Dbstealey posts….
..
“in an effort to get up to speed on this subject.”
…
I’m surprised he continues to use that sort of language.
..
Remeber this post Mr Dbstealey?
..
“Yes, those of us up to speed on the subject know that global temperature (T) rises or falls the most at night,” ???
..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/31/2014-in-review/#comment-1825830
…
Thank you, but I don’t want to get up to YOUR speed.
Mom and Dad enjoy reading Mr. Stealey’s posts and think he has a good grasp of the subject matter. At the very least he knows the difference between an algebraic expression and a temperature measurement.
Something with which I have at my disposal: four planets, their positions in space cause maximums and minimums of sunspots, which occurs mainly in the global cycle of about 44 years, but the cycles of about 11.2 years repeated with different intensities. If this lending inters, there is a possibility that this agreement and demonstrate. In this there is plenty of other evidences.
Therefore I suggest that all of the major phenomena in the solar system depend on the relation between participants. We do not know, because we are not aware that the planet and act as “living beings”. Can someone from the “makers” model, to make a model that will show you how to successfully treat cancer, AIDS and the like?
Mr Milovic may like to read the forthcoming book by Niklas Moerner and others on the interaction of the major planets with the Sun and the consequent effects on Earth’s climate. This area of research is not one of my specialisms, so I have no idea whether they are on to something, but there is some interesting material in the papers there, and the book should be available for download in a month or two.
As to the research on broad-spectrum treatment of infectious diseases, we shall keep plugging away until we have results that are verified and publishable according to the very high research standards that are expected (though not always achieved) in the field of medical research. In the meantime, please do not believe the various climate-Communist sneerers who say I have claimed to be able to cure HIV and many other diseases. We make no, repeat no claims. We are quietly getting on with the research and, when and if we are satisfied that our results deserve to be communicated, we shall publish them after due peer review in one of the leading learned journals of medicine. My guess is that we are many years away from being able to publish. But thank you very much for your interest, though it is off the topic of this thread.
[Deleted. You were warned before about posting that link. Any more such ad hominem links will be deleted, and this commenter will be invited to comment elsewhere. This discussion concerns models, not someone’s gratuitous attack/hate links. ~ mod.]
[Trimmed. A bit excessively critical of Socrates. .mod]
And what scientific point, if any, is Mr Socrates making? Cures have been effected, but we make no claim that we can replicate them till proper laboratory and clinical trials have been conducted and the results evaluated, a process that takes years to decades. And what has any of that got to do with a scientific paper on the climate, published after independent and thorough peer review?
Interestingly, my original answer to the BBC’s question had been a long and cautious one about how we had had some promising results against various diseases but were not ready to make any claims till we had completed the trials. The journalist wanted a blunter, plainer version – presumably so he could spin it up with his preceding (and inaccurate) remark that I had no background in science.
A truly honourable commenter would wish us well with our research, and hope that some of the diseases against which we propose to investigate our broad-spectrum treatment can indeed be cured one day. Until then, – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – we make no claims.
Monckton There is an obvious millennial cycle in the temperature and driver data see Figs 5 -9 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
any calculations of climate sensitivity or forecasts of future trends which ignore the contribution of this natural periodicity to 20th century warming are pretty much irrelevant. As I said earlier
” This approach is a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense .It is like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. The models are back tuned for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial.”
As I also said earlier
“Best Regards and thanks for your herculean efforts to stop the UNFCCC – IPCC circus.”
Dr Page fails to appreciate that our paper concerns itself only with the anthropogenic component in global radiative forcing, and with the consequences for global temperature of that anthropogenic influence. Add the natural to the anthropogenic and you are predicting real-world temperature change. Consider solely the anthropogenic, as our paper does, and you are predicting the manmade component in any future temperature change that may occur.
I am well aware of the claims made by various parties for various cycle lengths. I have sympathy with some – such as those who talk of the ocean oscillations (see e.g. Anastasios Tsonis’ paper of 2006 on the subject). And a millennial-scale cycle is also possible, though I am not sure we can predict when it will change its sign. Fred Singer is a pioneer on the millennial-scale cycle, and has written a book about it. But all the key predictions of the IPCC are at sub-millennial timescales. Even if we were considering the human contribution to warming (which we were not), it would still be inappropriate to assume that we know when the cycles start or stop or how big they will be.
Monckton I agree that the main uncertainty in my cooling forecasts is the exact timing and amplitude of the millennial cycle. However reasonable working hypotheses can be made by looking at the proxy data for solar activity. First , for the suggested peak of the millennial cycle see
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
There is an estimated 12 year lag between the solar driver peak at about 1991 and the RSS climate temperature trend peak at 2003.
For the driver peak see Fig 14 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
The major solar driver shift into the cooling regime is suggested to be at 2005/6 in Fig 13 of the same post.
I suggest that the validity of this approach and my forecasts would be given a boost therefore if there is a significant cooling in 2017- 18 .or thereabouts.
It should also be noted that the lags between the driver change and the particular climate metric being used (e g SSTs, OHC, Land Sea Temp series.) vary – guesstimate 20 years +/- 10
I think the RSS data is the most useful as the canary in the coal mine because it has been the less homogenized, statistically adjusted and otherwise reanalyzed the others.
Sorry to poop on Dr Page’s party, but our paper concentrates solely on the anthropogenic influences on global temperature. It is silent on the natural influences, except to the extent that it was natural influences that determined the temperatures of the past 810,000 years as evidenced by the d18O ratios in ice-core samples. Promotion of Dr Page’s opinions on the natural cycles of climate is off topic here.
Monckton Perhaps I am not understanding your model As I understand it your paper states that the model outputs depend on – and I quote from the paper:
“Assuming that all global warming since 1850 was anthropogenic, the model fairly reproduces the change in
global temperature since then, suggesting that the 0.6 K committed but unrealized warming mentioned in AR4,AR5 is non-existent. If some global warming was natural,then a fortiori the likelihood of committed but unrealized warming is small.”
I think that it is entirely pertinent and on topic to point out, and link to data which shows, that the fundamental assumption that all warming since 1850 is anthropogenic on which your model is based is probably wrong
For the last time I must ask Dr Page to Read The Paper and then to Think and then, and only then, to comment. We do not say that all global warming since 1850 was anthropogenic. We draw a conclusion, based on one of the calibration runs, that even if all global warming since then was anthropogenic one would not expect 0.6 K unrealized but committed global warming as imagined by IPCC. We specifically go on to state, in the very passage cited by Dr Page, that if in fact some global warming was natural then, as fortiori, the likelihood of committed but unrealized warming is small.
There is absolutely no basis, in the cited passage or elsewhere in our paper, for Dr Page’s statmetment that our model is based on a “fundamental assumption that all warming since 1850 is anthropogenic”/ Our model is constructed so as to allow any assumption to be made – that all, some, or none of the warming since any chosen start date was anthropogenic. It is a model. It does not prescribe or proscribe any viewpoint on the magnitude of the anthropogenic as opposed to the natural component in warming. It determines, if our chosen parameter values be accepted, that the amount of anthropogenic warming from a CO2 doubling will be small. It is, as I have repeatedly stated, silent on the extent to which recent warming was anthropogenic.
I draw attention to section 9 of the your paper
“How skillful is the model?
Remarkably, though the model is very simple, its output proves to be broadly consistent with observation, while the now-realized projections of the general-circulation models have proven to be relentlessly exaggerated. If, for instance,the observed temperature trend of recent decades were extrapolated several decades into the future, the model’s output would (be)coincident with the observations thus
extrapolated (Fig. 6).”
I submit that there is reasonable evidence that the global warming temperature trend peaked in about 2003 and that the earth has cooled since then. If that cooling trend was extrapolated several decades into the future the models output would bear little relation to observations.
I would contend that the GCM models are not just relentlessly exaggerated but simply meaningless as a basis for discussion of future climate.
In response to Dr Page, I am leery of arbitrarily extending very short observed trends into the future and assuming that the prediction will be accurate. The basis of our paper – which was rigorous – was the physical equations determining climate sensitivity. The observed record since 1850 was used purely for calibration, as the cited passage makes quite clear. The science establishing that one should expect some warming from CO2, all other things being equal, is clear, and, as I have said before, it was not our intention to re-examine that question. Our paper is concerned solely with the anthropogenic component of past and future global warming, and projections of naturally-occurring cooling are wholly irrelevant to it.
The observed record since 1850 was used purely for calibration, as the cited passage makes quite clear
So you say, but the paper does not describe how and so your statement no little value. Get it into your head: it is important that those details be spelled out.
Mr Svalgaard should read the paper, where he will see the calibrations well described, with worked examples. It is scandalous that he is still whining about the imagined content of a paper he has so obviously taken little or no trouble to read, and still less to understand. He does himself no favors by behaving sourly and pettily as one who bears a grudge rather than as a dispassionate scientist.
Your so-called test against global warming since 1850 is not a test at all, but simple curve fitting. If the model can describe the climate it should work for all years since 1850, not just for the end points of that interval. So Table 4 should have included an entry for each year, or at least for each decade [to save space perhaps].
I agree that the cooling trend is short but the cooling trend extension is not arbitrary – it stems from the reasonable working hypothesis that the millennial cycle peak likely occurred in the first decade of the 21st century and that trends in solar activity since 1991suggests that the peak has passed. .When in about 2110 a useful 60 year moving average of the global temperature data is run and we may get general agreement as to when exactly that peak was. Obviously we will get indications of the general cooling -or lack of it much sooner than that.
Dr Page continues to be off topic. The paper is about the anthropogenic contribution to global warming, not about various cycles of unknown aetiology or periodicity.
With due respect ,how is it off topic to point out that it seems difficult for a model to calculate a purported human contribution to global warming if in fact in the future the earth is actually cooling.
For the nth time, our model is concerned with th anthropogenic, not the natural, component in climate change. If the Earth is cooling p, then the manmade contribution is still more obviously insufficient to cause a climate problem. But the map natural component in temperature change is not, repeat not, the topic of the head pisting,
Mockton the point I am trying to make , with little success so far is, exceedingly simple i.e that until you know within reasonable limits what the natural variation is and account for it , it is not possible to calibrate either your models or the IPCC models against the empirical data. The IPCC actually agrees.Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections. It concludes:
“Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections, consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability (i.e., they don’t know what future temperatures will be and we can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2). This also begs a further question of what erroneous assumptions (e.g., that CO2 is the main climate driver) went into the “plausible” models to be tested any way.
By the time of the AR5 report even the IPCC has given up on estimating CS – the AR5 SPM says ( hidden away in a footnote)
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on
values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”
but paradoxically they still claim that we can dial up a desired temperature by controlling CO2 levels .This is cognitive dissonance so extreme as to be crazy.
The successive uncertainty estimates in the successive “Summary for Policymakers” take no account of the structural uncertainties in the models and almost the entire the range of model outputs may well lay outside the range of the real world future climate variability. By the time of the AR5 report this is obviously the case.
Dr Norman Page: Mockton the point I am trying to make , with little success so far is, exceedingly simple i.e that until you know within reasonable limits what the natural variation is and account for it , it is not possible to calibrate either your models or the IPCC models against the empirical data.
With respect, I think that you are confounding two questions: (1) whether the Monckton et al model can be calibrated and compared to data and (2) whether the Monckton et al model is complete and accurate. For sure, if the periodicities identified in the data are a result of a persistent physical process, then the Monckton et al model will soon fail to agree with the data. At present, the best we can say is that there are a lot of models, some have those periodicities, and some don’t. If the models with the periodicities are in fact the most accurate (hence likely “realistic”) then the sensitivity to CO2 is even less than computed by Monckton et al. Which models will be shown in the future to be least inaccurate we do not know.
Meanwhile, the IPCC reports are viewed as eminently respectable by many scientists and policy makers. For and to that audience, Monckton et al have written a paper and model that is based on a close reading of the reports.
Mr Svalgaard continues to insist that we have indulged in curve-fitting. He only gets away with this by serially enlarging the definition of curve-fitting. Properly speaking, curve-fitting is altering the parameters or design of a model so that it more closely replicates a given body of observations. We did not do that, and we should not have passed peer review if we had done so. Our model is soundly based in climate physics, and – as Mr Svalgaard has now very belatedly realized, having been shamed into at least glancing at the paper he has been so unbecomingly ready to snivel about before he had even read it, that there is indeed a description in the paper of how we calibrated the model against temperature change since 1850.
So now he shifts his ground, like a schoolboy debater caught out in a lie, and says that he is not satisfied with our calibration, and that he would prefer it to have been performed against periods starting every year. Don’t be childish. If you want to do such tests, do them. If you find the results render our model unsuitable, say so. But don’t whine till you’ve done the work. This is a simple model that does not – for instance – take into account the ups and downs of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, so of course there will be mismatches in individual years or even decades. Overall, though, what we are concerned with is the long-run trend of global warming. And the model seems to be doing a lot better in that regard than the billion-dollar brains. And, though it is rash to make predictions, I expect our model to outperform the GCMs in future: for our model is a genuine search for the truth, while the GCMs have become politicized and also corrupted by intercomparison, so that their results are ever closer to each other and ever further from observed reality.
Well, from the very beginning it was clear that the so-called test was insufficient and that the model should also work with intermediate years, but you failed to make that simple accommodation [and failed to describe how you showed that the model ‘worked’. So, the only ‘test’ was a two-point curve fitting. I have spent time on this because there are lessons for you and lurkers to learn from this. At this point, perhaps one should let the paper wither on the vine as it surely will do.
Well from the beginning and for several days Mr Svalgaard pretended he had read the paper when it can be proven he had not done so. Yet he attacked it when he had no basis for doing so. He went on and on, repeatedly refusing to take the elementary step of reading what he was attacking. That was not the conduct of a scientist.
When he was at length shamed into looking at the paper, he discovered to his visible discomfiture that the account of the model’s calibration that he had several times declared did not exist was there all the time. Two sections of the paper were devoted to it. That is how we know he had not read the paper.
Did he apologise for his days of scientific dishonesty? No.
Curve-fitting, of which he has accused user least a dozen times without having read the paper, is a dishonest technique by which, if a model is found not to work, it is adjusted till it fits some desired real-world iutput. That is what it means. Mr Svalgaard has p, in effect, repeatedly accused us of intellectual dishonesty, and our three excellent reviewers of egregious ineptitude.
In fact, we had not one any curve fitting at all. There would have been no point. Unlike Mr Svalgaard, we were looking for the truth, not to score points by the fabrication of which his allegation of curve fitting accuses us,
Now Mr Svalgaard, instead of apologising for his repeated allegation of dishonesty against us for a paper he had not even read, doubles down on his allegation of curve fitting by the ridiculous further allegation that we had taken two points in the past temperature record – 1859 and today – and, after finding that our model did not fit the temperature change between these two points – had tampered with the design or parameters of our model till they fitted the measured temperature change between the two points.
In fact, we used two standard statistical techniques to establish the least-squares linear-regression trend from 1850 to the present. One of us, after all, is a statistician. Why did we determine the trend? Because that told us, not on the basis of two end points but on the basis of every monthly dada point in the entire record – by just how much global temperature had risen since 1859. One cannot, as Me Svalgaard suggests, simply take the two end points of the entire global temperature record and subtract one from the other, because if either or both of the endpoints is far from the trend line quite large errors can intrude.
Having determined the warming since 1850′ we then used the model to estimate the radiative forcing from Nan’s emissions since 1850. From this, we used the model to determine how much man made global warming we’d have expected to occur since 1850. We then concluded, reasonably and oroportionately, that if all of the global warming since 1859 had been caused by Man there was no 0.6 K committed but unrealised global warming in the pipeline. If some of the warming had been natural, then it was still clearer that there was no global warming in the pipeline that was yet to emerge as a result of our past sins of emission.
Then, having conducted this perfectly proper and diligent research, we reported, in detail, exactly what we had done and how we had done it. From that report, any scientist would know we had not done any curve fitting.
Mr Svakgaard, however, not only persisted in his allegation of curve fitting when it can be proven that he had read the paper and knew there had been none, but now triples down on his flagrant double scientific dishonesty by claiming that we should have compared prediction with observation between every pair of dates in the record since 1950.
Here, Mr Svakgaard, who is not a statistician, misunderstands least-squares linear regression. One usually takes the longest available run of data in order to get the most representative and reliable trend line. Besides, the purpose of research into global warming us not to examine every jiggle and wiggle in the data but to find out how much has occurred over time. And our additional stated purpose in performing this calculation was to determine whether the 9.6 K in-the-pipeline warming imagined btpy the IPCC was plausible. For this we needed the longest available run of data.
Furthermore, it is self-evident that if the complex models cannot represent the stochastic temperature data month by month, with every up and down, our far simpler model would not be able to do it either. Heck, the models did not even predict the Great El Nino of 1998.
Thus Mr Svakgaard owes us the following apologies. 1. For having repeatedly criticised a paper he has been proven not to have read. 2. For having on multiple occasions accused us baselessly of the dishonest technique of curve fitting when he had no idea whether we had done any such thing because he had not read our paper. 3. For having repeatedly alleged that we had not provided deaptails of how we had calibrated our model when we had devoted two sections of the paper to calibration. 4. For having persisted in his allegation of curve fitting when he had eventually been shamed into looking at the paper he had been coat tacking for so long and with such sullenly malevolent frequency, when he now knows full well we had not indulged in any firm if curve fitting.
His behaviour here constitutes grave and malicious research misconduct,
You persist in your misguided diatribe. The fact is that you did not do a proper parameter space exploration [resorting to two-point curve fitting] and you have still not responded to my question ‘how did you establish that the model worked correctly’.
Your nonsense about my not reading the paper is just that, nonsense. I did not in the paper find satisfactory answers to my relevant and probing inquiries. Instead I get a shitload of ad-hom attacks, which border on the humorous and are characteristic of your insecurity when it comes to science. As I said, let your paper die on the vine as it surely will.
I have provided a detailed answer to Mr Svalgaard down thread. He had at the outset said there was no account of how the model had been calibrated in the oaoer, he had plainly not read it, or he would have known that there was an account of it. Have actually asked for the page and line number, which he would not have needed to do if he had read the oaoer. For the calibration since 1850 that he had said was absent has an entire section to itself. A detailed account if that calibration is down thread.
There was no detailed and satisfactory account of the calibration. Only vague references to hand waving banalities. My valid criticism stands: the paper is un-convincing and shoddy.
Sorry. That should be upthread. Mr Svalgaard’ ps latest response is on any view inadequate. It is self-evident that we had not indulged in antsy form of curve fitting, and that Mr Svakgaard had not read the oaoer before making his characteristically malevolent allegation. That was serious research misconduct on his oart, as well as shamefully unscientific.
Try to control your temper a bit to avoid all those typos and various other excesses. As I said: the paper is poor, un-convincing, shoddy, and destined to a silent death in obscurity. The fate of bad papers in general.
Does Mr Svalgaard have any serious scientific point to make? Or just yah-boo as usual? He has lied and been caught out. And the paper has been downloaded 3500 times.
Whoever chose this journal deserves an additional pat on the back. Too many westerners are ignoring the Chinese scientific societies and journals. Also, it seems that Chinese scientists have less of a commitment to the idea that CO2 is the only or most important culprit in global warming.
Mr Marler is right. Our reasoning was that sending to any Western journal a paper that raised fundamental questions about the reliability of the climate models would have a very small chance of success, since the climate-science journals have been captured by climate Communism and are no longer willing to be dispassionate about the climate issue.
Our guess was that the Chinese, noticing the collapse of Western scientific integrity, seized the opportunity to run our paper to demonstrate that they are as we once were – open-minded enough to take a line that may depart from the climate-Communist party line, provided that the new line is properly justified by scientific argument. The Chinese are, in effect, going to take over scientific publishing from the West, where editors have abandoned intellectual honesty and independence in favor of a cloying, fatuous adherence to the climate-Communist party line.
It is a pretty paradox that a Communist country should now have become the one place on Earth where climate Communism can be questioned in the scientific learned journals.
Were the reviewers friendly Chinese, bent on getting the scoop on Western Journals?
We have deduced that at least one of the reviewers was Chinese and at least one from North America. Beyond that, we cannot say, for the review process in a grown-up journal is of course double-blind. Our paper was considered on its merits, and by people from both East and West who demonstrated that they were well qualified to conduct the review.
Many ‘grown-up’ journals [e.g. JGR] reveal who the reviewers [and the editor] were. And I doubt the review was double-blind, meaning that the reviewers didn’t know who the authors were. The Science Bulletin website does not specify that the authors’ name be withheld.
If the reviewers knew the paper was written chiefly by a layman, and yet they passed it after thorough peer review, then they would surely have been no less likely to pass it if they had known it was written chiefly by a climatologist. Why cannot Mr Svalgaard make a genuine scientific criticism of the paper, rather endlessly whining and sniping about irrelevancies? Grow up.
So you [as often] were economical with the truth when you claimed that “of course” the review was double-blind…
Don’t be childish. If you can find a legitimate point of scientific criticism, make it. Otherwise, be silent and stop making yourself look silly.
“since the climate-science journals have been captured by climate Communism”
So you sent it to a Communist journal?
Does Mr Stokes have a scientific point to make? Interesting how few scientific points the trolls have managed to muster in this thread. I have already pointed out upthread the pretty paradox that a Communist country’s journal has published a paper that questions the climate Communist party line. Mr Stokes should try to keep up with the debate, rather than adopting his rather silly and negative habit of drive-by shooting.
Let him read the paper and see if he can muster some proper scientific criticisms, rather than his current childish inconsequentialities.
Could one explain to me the laboratory experiments that declared that co2 was a greeen house gas. If I take 2 test tubes of equal volume and shape and fill one with air and one with only co2 .The co2 one will be 67 % hotter than the one with air according to the gas law PV=RT. Where does IR radiation enter into this?
Greenhouse molecules, their spectra and function in the atmosphere :
http://warwickhughes.com/papers/barrett_ee05.pdf
Nowhere, the premise is false, they’ll be at the same temperature according to the gas law.
Mr Prudhomme may like to read accounts if the original experiment by John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in1859. That is a good starting point.
Monckton of Brenchley January 19, 2015 at 2:56 pm
In further reply to the less than fully informed “Phil.”, Scenario A from Hansen’s paper was his business-as-usual case. How do I know? Because he is on record as having said so in subsequent Congressional testimony.
And of course because I told you, I even explained what it means which apparently you were unaware of! I also quoted his statement from the paper explaining why he didn’t expect it to occur.
“Phil.” goes on to say that Scenario C was “remarkably accurate” in its projection of future global warming.
No I didn’t, apparently you didn’t heed my warning about misquotations, I can’t say I’m surprised.
No, it wasn’t. Global temperature is running well below even Scenario C, which – though “Phil.” is very careful not to say so, was predicated on the assumption that from 1988 to 2000 there would be drastic reductions in CO2 emissions, which would remain stable from 2000 onward. Since this rather obviously did not happen, and yet global temperatures are still running well below Scenario C, this was a predictive failure of a heroic order.
Apart from your misquotation you also fail to understand that the most important contribution to greenhouse forcing in the early 21st century would be trace gases other than CO2 as shown in Hansen’s Fig 2, the trend of those was well described by Scenario C. Scenario C showed a temperature increase of ~0.6ºC from 1960 to 2015, not well below observations.
“Phil.” then gives me a characteristically bossy lecture about quoting his drivel verbatim, and then succeeds spectacularly in misquoting himself. I had said there was more water vapor than CO2 in the air, and Phil, alleging I had misquoted him, said that water vapor is not a well-mixed greenhouse gas. But I can find nothing in Phil’s earlier posting that mentions that water vapor is not a well-mixed greenhouse gas.
Your reading comprehension hasn’t improved I see.
In short, Phil. is trolling in his usual feeble-minded, sneering, whining fashion, without displaying the slightest intention of conducting the conversation in an honest fashion. His postings here are flagrantly mendacious and dishonest, and fall well below the standard of intellectual integrity and scientific knowledge that are expected here.
Your usual ad hominem attack, a sure sign that you’re losing the argument as well as your deliberate misrepresentation and dishonesty. As for intellectual integrity and scientific knowledge those are areas where you are sadly lacking.
Phil,hanging been caught out in serial mendacity, resorts as usual to trolling bluster. Hansen made it quite plain in his subsequent Congressional testimony that he regarded scenario A as his best estimate on business as usual. And there has been business as usual ever since, which highlights just how exaggerated Hansen’s predictions were.
As for scenario C, that scenario was predicated on the assumption that ther would be no increase in CO2 concentration after 2000; yet, even though the concentration continued to accelerate after 2900′ the temperature curve fell ever further below scenario C. Hansen’ ps 1878 predictions were gross exaggerations. Reality has been far less exciting,
More lies from Monckton, as stated by Hansen in the original paper Scenario A was what would happen If emissions continued indefinitely at the levels of the 1970s and 80s, he clearly stated that he expected Scenario B to be the most likely:
“Scenario A, since it is exponential, must eventually be on the high side of reality in view of finite resource and environmental concerns….”
“Scenario B is perhaps the most plausible of the three cases”.
Those are Hansen’s actual words not your unsupported handwaving, which is clearly not true.
There has not been “business as usual ever since”: CFC emission was eliminated by 2000 (Scenario C), Methane growth reduced to near zero (lower than Scenario C), “no increases occur for the other chlorofluorocarbons, O3, stratospheric H2O”, (Scenario C). Scenario A also included “several hypothetical or crudely estimated trace gas trends (ozone, stratospheric water vapor, and minor chlorine and fluorine compounds) which are not included in scenarios B and C”, which is an additional reason why Hansen thought it was unlikely. Hansen anticipated in Scenario C that CO2 would stabilize at 368 ppm from 2000 whereas it has actually been 370-398ppm ( a 7% increase ). The temperature has not fallen “ever further below scenario C”, in fact Scenario C models reality rather well.
By the way, I endorse Lief’s recommendation that you calm down when posting and do some proof-reading, the multiple errors you’re making mean your posts are more difficult to follow.
http://chemlinks.beloit.edu/Ozone/thumbs/CFCem.gif
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/indicator_downloads/ghg-concentrations-download2-2014.png
Don’t be pompous. I’m traveling and have had to do some posts on an iPad that, irritatingly, substitutes its own words randomly for mine. So there are several errors, but not enough to whine about.
Hansen, in his Congressional testimony, said that Scenario A was his business-as-usual scenario. Scenario C assumed that CO2 growth would slow till 2000 (i.e., that it would be less than the 368 ppmv that actually occurred in the absence of the slowdown imagined on Scenario C), and that it would not rise further thereafter. CO2 concentration was about 350 ppmv in 1988 and 368 ppmv 12 years later. Suppose that the rate of increase had fallen to zero at a more or less uniform rate over the 12 years, CO2 concentration would have been 359 ppmv by 2000. it is 400 ppmv now, an 11% increase on where it would have been if Hansen’s Scenario C had obtained. Yet the temperature trend is now well below Scenario C.
In short, Hansen’s predictions, like so many others, were flagrantly excessive. Not surprising, since the fudge factors or “flux adjustments” in the Giss ModelE were an order of magnitude larger than the small warming signal the model was supposed to detect. It was, in short, guesswork – and the guesswork has been proven wrong, and that fact can no longer be concealed or denied.
Monckton of Brenchley January 20, 2015 at 8:06 am
Don’t be pompous. I’m traveling and have had to do some posts on an iPad that, irritatingly, substitutes its own words randomly for mine. So there are several errors, but not enough to whine about.
So if you know it happens proof-read, it’s not hard.
Hansen, in his Congressional testimony, said that Scenario A was his business-as-usual scenario.
Yes a phrase you appear unable to understand, and you continue to ignore his other statements which indicate that he did not regard that as a plausible scenario.
Scenario C assumed that CO2 growth would slow till 2000 (i.e., that it would be less than the 368 ppmv that actually occurred in the absence of the slowdown imagined on Scenario C), and that it would not rise further thereafter.
No, he actually said that it would be 368ppm (page 9362): “after 2000, CO2 ceases to increase, its abundance remaining fixed at 368 ppmv.”
CO2 concentration was about 350 ppmv in 1988 and 368 ppmv 12 years later. Suppose that the rate of increase had fallen to zero at a more or less uniform rate over the 12 years, CO2 concentration would have been 359 ppmv by 2000. it is 400 ppmv now, an 11% increase on where it would have been if Hansen’s Scenario C had obtained.
Try reading the paper you’re making too many errors. I note that you omit all the predicted changes that he explicitly stated and which have happened.
Yet the temperature trend is now well below Scenario C. It isn’t.
You can’t blame your computer for the following:
I said: “Notably in your paper you only included Hansen’s high prediction not the other two, in fact Scenario C was surprisingly accurate in its estimate of future emissions
Monckton substituted: ““Phil.” goes on to say that Scenario C was “remarkably accurate” in its projection of future global warming.”
That this was a deliberate misquotation is indicated by his only including two words in quotation marks and didn’t do so with the words he changed. That is dishonest and is typical of Monckton’s mendacity
The troll “Phil.” said Scenario A was his “business-as-usual” scenario. And there has been business as usual ever since. CO2 concentration has continued to rise at an ever more rapid rate. In his testimony he said Scenario A assumed that the rate of increase in concentration observed over the previous 20 years would continue. He thought that rate was about 1.5% a year, but it was actually just 0.4%. However, the rise in CO2 concentration from 1988-2000 was about 1% a year – halfway between the 1.5%/year he thought had occurred in the previous 20 years and the 0.4%year that had actually occurred. So it is on Scenario A that he should be judged. Not that it makes all that much difference: all three of his scenarios have proven to be exaggerated.
And it is baffling that “Phil.” imagines that Hansen’s scenario C (which predicted temperature change, not emissions) had been “successful in predicting emissions”. CO2 concentration did not stay at 38 ppmv from 2000 on: it rose to 400 ppmv, because CO2 emissions had continued to rise. Hansen’s temperature predictions – all three of them – have accordingly proven exaggerated, as have the temperature predictions of the IPCC in 1990.
“The troll “Phil” ”
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Is it possible for you to discuss things without resorting to calling people names?
After reading your response, Dad said there might be a lesson in this…
Thank you Babsy
I appreciate the fact that you seem to feel the need to respond to my posts
…
Dad says we have to look out for those less fortunate than ourselves and help them along whenever we can.
Monckton of Brenchley January 20, 2015 at 10:33 am
The troll “Phil.” said Scenario A was his “business-as-usual” scenario. And there has been business as usual ever since.
There has not been as detailed above, since you say you’ve read Hansen’s paper your constant misrepresentation of it must either be because you don’t understand it or you’re deliberately trying to deceive. Yet more errors are detailed below.
CO2 concentration has continued to rise at an ever more rapid rate. In his testimony he said Scenario A assumed that the rate of increase in concentration observed over the previous 20 years would continue.
No he didn’t, he said that: “the growth rate of trace gas emissions” would continue indefinitely.
He thought that rate was about 1.5% a year, but it was actually just 0.4%.
Over that time period emissions from fossil fuel increased from ~60000 MtCO2/y to 140000, an increase of ~1.8%/y, the 0.4% you refer to is concentration not emissions!
However, the rise in CO2 concentration from 1988-2000 was about 1% a year – halfway between the 1.5%/year he thought had occurred in the previous 20 years and the 0.4%year that had actually occurred. So it is on Scenario A that he should be judged. Not that it makes all that much difference: all three of his scenarios have proven to be exaggerated.
No they haven’t because as shown in his Fig 2 and discussed on pages 9361-2 the other trace gases included in Scenario A were more important in the increase in forcing over the intervening period and Scenario A was therefore much to high (as intended it was supposed to represent an upper bound).
And it is baffling that “Phil.” imagines that Hansen’s scenario C (which predicted temperature change, not emissions) had been “successful in predicting emissions”.
It projects emissions upon which the calculations are based, as I’ve posted above the projections for the trace gases were very close to what occurred, CFCs stopped before 2000, methane leveled at a lower level than projected etc.
CO2 concentration did not stay at
38368 (glad to see you’ve corrected the value) ppmv from 2000 on: it rose to 400 ppmv, because CO2 emissions had continued to rise. It’s the only one that did, by now Hansen’s Scenario A would have been ~0.6º above C due to trace gases and CO2 but only ~0.1º above due to CO2 alone (Fig 2).Hansen’s temperature predictions – all three of them – have accordingly proven exaggerated,
No Scenario C turns out to have been good, because the ‘more drastic curtailment of emissions’ actually happened except for CO2.
In answer to the troll Mr Socrates, I call trolls trolls. Don’t whine. Raise your game and discuss sience properly rather than sneering to no purpose.
Calling Phil a troll is serious mistake on your part.
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You might learn a lot from him.
Not much science in your paper to discuss.
We could discuss why you neglected to give credit to Gerard Roe whose prior work you derived your “model” from.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yp_W6pxtv0g/VLyN4mhkZyI/AAAAAAAABH8/OmDIvYMzyZI/s1600/roe_etal_areps2009a_eqs9-11.png
It would help if the sniping troll Mr Socrates were to read our paper before waffling about it. The sources for each term or equation in our model are cited in our paper. We took the system-gain relation from IPCC (2007) and traced it back to its origin in Bode (1945), to whom we also gave credit. We also cited Roe (2009) with approval and specifically credited him with the derivation of the system-gain equation for non-linear feedbacks. So, not another squeak from Mr Socrates till he has read our paper.
In normal science publication, the credit is given the introduction of your work, you don’t bury the source of our model deep in the 38th citation.
No wonder the world of science doesn’t take you seriously.
Monckton of Brenchley January 20, 2015 at 2:10 pm
In answer to the troll Mr Socrates, I call
trollsthose who disagree with me trolls.Don’tI indulge in ad hominem attacks on them and I whine.There it’s corrected for you, as amply demonstrated by the contributions to this thread.
Monckton of Brenchley January 21, 2015 at 4:45 am
It would help if the sniping troll Mr Socrates were to read our paper before waffling about it. The sources for each term or equation in our model are cited in our paper.
Socrates point was that your model is equation 10 from Roe and that you did not acknowledge that, on that he is correct you did not acknowledge Roe as the source of the equation.
We also cited Roe (2009) with approval and specifically credited him with the derivation of the system-gain equation for non-linear feedbacks.
Really, where?
“In [38], a simple climate model was used, comprising an
advective–diffusive ocean and an atmosphere with a Planck
sensitivity ∆To = 1.2 K, the product of the direct radiative
forcing 5.35 ln 2 = 3.708 W m-2 in response to a CO2 doubling
and the zero-feedback climate-sensitivity parameter
𝝀o = 3.2^-1 K W^-1 m2. The climate object thus defined was
forced with a 4 W m-2 pulse at t = 0, and the evolutionary
curve of climate sensitivity (Fig. 4) was determined. Equilibrium
sensitivity was found to be 3.5 K, of which 1.95 K is
shown as occurring after 50 years, implying r50 = 0.56.”
By the way why do you use ‘𝝀o = 3.2^-1’ rather than 0.3125?
Also
“∆Ft is the radiative forcing in response to a change in atmospheric CO2
concentration over t years, which is the product of a constant
k and the natural log of the proportionate change (Ct / Co) in CO2 concentration
over the period [3, 32]”
Correction in bold.
It would really be wiser if Mr Socrates were to troll a little less incompetently by actually reading the paper he so ineffectually and serially sneers at. There is internal evidence from his comment about my having allegedly “neglected to give credit to Gerard Roe” that he had lifted that point from another blog. He now tries again to echo without acknowledgement that blog’s suggestion (firmly dealt with by me) that, though I had indeed given credit to all from whom elements of our model were derived, I had not given them credit early enough in the paper. In short, this is a particularly futile whine about the ideal geographical locations at which Mr Socrates (or, rather, the blogger from whom he has plagiarized the point) would have preferred me to acknowledge the contributions of earlier researchers in the field.
If Mr Socrates had bothered to read the paper for himself, rather than lifting climate-Communist talking-points from another blog without acknowledgement, he would have discovered that the introduction to our paper was a very short general introduction saying why the new model was needed. Next came a short section on the growing discrepancy between prediction and observation of global warming.
The third section of the paper is where the model is outlined in mathematical terms for the first time. And, as each sub-equation or parameter is described, its source is at once acknowledged. Had Mr Socrates actually read the paper, he would know that we did not obtain the Bode system-gain equation from Dr Roe (our 38th of almost 60 references): we obtained it from IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (our fourth reference). We acknowledged Dr Roe at the point in the paper where we discussed the technical question whether the Planck parameter should be regarded as a feedback or as a sensitivity parameter. And we acknowledged him again in the Appendix, where we explained that the derivation of the system-gain equation as modified to handle non-linear feedbacks would be found in his paper.
I can find no fault in our referencing of prior authorities. Everything that we did not originate is most carefully acknowledged and referenced. True, the blogger from whom Mr Socrates has lifted his latest whine says we ought to have given acknowledgement to Dr Budyko as the originator of zero-dimensional models such as ours. However, our model contains elements not in Dr Budyko’s models, and his models are far more extensive and complex than ours. There was, therefore, no particular value to readers in being referred to Dr Budyko’s work. And, by chance, I recently read a paper by an eminent professor specializing in climate feedback analysis. The paper was specifically about zero-dimensional models and – for reasons similar to mine – Dr Budyko was not referenced in that paper either.
Trolls, of course, when they cannot find any scientific fault, will try ad-hom attacks such as that by the blogger whom Mr Socrates is copying without acknowledgement. Plagiarism is a serious charge, which is why I have had to deal with it firmly at the blog where it was originated and have had to deal with it equally firmly here. Anyone actually reading the paper will realize at once that Mr Socrates’ characteristically malicious allegation of unacknowledged repetition of material from earlier publications is untrue and without foundation. Mr Socrates should have the grace to apologize. His contributions to this thread have been more than usually valueless.
“Phil.” should read the paper before criticizing it. The derivation of the system-gain relation as it applies to non-linear temperature feedbacks is acknowledged in the appendix in which the derivation appears.
And it is plain that global temperature has risen far more slowly than Hansen had predicted even on his scenario C, where CO2 was supposed to stop increasing in 2000 (hint: it hasn’t stopped). The excuse that various other gases have not risen as Hansen had predicted is no excuse at all. He misled Congress by making them think he had a sound basis for his predictions when, manifestly, he didn’t.
Like very nearly all of the predictions of the climate Communists for whom “Phil.” acts as though he were a paid shill, Hansen’s predictions were wildly exaggerated. Indeed, few others have made such wildly overblown predictions. One might mention Murphy (2009), who predicted up to 10 K global warming per CO2 doubling, on the basis that strongly net-positive temperature feedbacks would drive warming towards infinity; Stern (2006), who predicted up to 11 K warming per doubling because otherwise he could not make a case that acting to prevent warming was cheaper than letting it happen; and Thatcher (2008), who thought temperature would rise by 1 K/decade unless something was done about CO2. Unlike the other two, she later had the grace to admit she had been misled (by my successor at 10 Downing Street).
Sorry, but Hansen got it wrong. Whether he got it wrong because he used the wrong model or whether he got it wrong because he used the wrong parameter values is of little relevance. He made predictions that, if he had been honest, he could not justify: predictions that have proven in every scenario to have been exaggerated, and no amount of sophistry will convince anyone but a climate-Communist otherwise.
It is both ironic and humorous that the author of the paper throws around the term “climate-Communist” yet had to go all the way over to a Communist country to get the paper published.
David Socrates
It is clear that you really, really don’t understand this thing called science. There is a difference between consideration of information and consideration of those who respond to the information.
I refer you to my post in this thread here.
Richard
Thank you so much for your input Mr richardscourtney.
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I however, am thoroughly enjoying watching your Viscount squirm.
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David Socrates
The only “squirming” I have seen in this sub-thread is your response to my rebuttal of your daft accusation of irony and humour.
Richard
Again, thank you so much for your input Mr richardscourtney.
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If you enjoy watching the two of us squirm, all I can say, is “whatever floats your boat”
David Socrates
Oh! You now say you are two people!
Well, I am not surprised at that: trolls are rarely the individuals they pretend to be.
Henceforth, if I address you it will be as “The pair of trolls posting as David Socrates”.
Richard
Gee Mr. richardscourtney, I don’t know how to express my appreciation for your follow up posts.
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I do think your use of name calling (i.e. “troll”) represents one of your most distinguishing argumentative techniques. But the point is that being called that name by you is extremely satisfying, it means I have made the grade.
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Feel free to address me any way you please.
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Again, thank you so much for your input.
The pair of trolls posting as “David Socrates”
Thankyou for your kind offer saying to me
In response, I address you honestly.
You are an obnoxious and dishonest fake personality whose intentionally disruptive trolling of threads has yet to rise above the nuisance level.
Richard
Mr Monckton, I’m just wondering if anyone can make such a computer model to show that the solution of treatment of various diseases. I know it will fail no one, but it is proof that all the models that scientists made with the intention that their model is “baba fortune teller,” does not represent any connection and the ability to get out of something useful and can be accurately obtained.
But there is something more important, I want to ask you, not only you but also other high-ranking experts. What do you think “whether science can progress further in knowledge about the behavior of the planet, if you do not know the causes of spin planets and their true and real path around the sun and around its axis.” You are all investigating the causes of climate change, and to me it looks like no one has the interest to consider what I have said above, because without this knowledge, nothing can be further understand, explain or prove. How can discuss the warming of the planet, and not understand the state of our planet, as, for example, the question: why is Earth, the past five billion years and has cooled down what it is that this state remains within certain limits which no one understands.
Are today’s scientific circles (universities, institutes, academies and the like, really, so strayed from the true interest in deepening knowledge, but only if they benefit from it. Should such people to pay for something useful for science can be published.
You recommend me a book that will come out and you think that I would change its stance on climate change-related behavior and mutual influence of the heavenly bodies. And your discussions and all the works of all of you are called into question, because you’re going the wrong way, you forgot the laws of nature or misapplied. Many do it for the sake of businesses and not for science and its advancement.
If you do not know the true characteristics of the planet, there is a possibility that their influence “altered” and explain in a way that suits your models (I do not mean personally to you).
Is there anywhere with you the possibility that I may give an explanation on climate change in the behavior of participants in the solar system.
I’m afraid that with you now with a system of police, more dangerous than the police in one-party systems that are already “died out”. That’s why none of these circuits must not engage to help such as I am, and that they can get a place to give their opinion.
We wander off topic: but prospective, randomized, double-blind clinical trials, honestly and properly conducted, are an excellent way to determine whether a proposed treatment is efficacious. Prospective trials are described mathematically in detail and in advance and, in particular, the criteria for regarding the trial as a success or a failure are carefully spelt out before the trial is conducted. Randomized trials choose two cohorts – one to receive the treatment and one to receive a placebo – by proper methods that, as far as possible, ensure a total absence of bias in the allocation of the patients to one cohort or the other. Double-blind trials are conducted so that neither those administering the treatment or placebo nor the patients receiving them know whether they have been given the treatment or the placebo. These trials, properly conducted and analyzed according to strict statistical criteria, are far more rigorous than most of the procedures in climate science.
To determine how the climate will behave in the next few hundred years, we do not need to know what caused the planet to spin: we merely need to know that it will continue to spin. The principal criteria for establishing how much global warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause are spelt out in our paper, which makes it possible for anyone with sufficient mathematics and physics to determine climate sensitivity, arguably more reliably than the bigger general-circulation models.
Robert R. Prudhomme : reference Phils comment to my comment on the gas law .Lets assume that the tubes are of large height in a vacuum .and of equal volume
– – left off too soon. Since co2 is 1.67 times as dense as
air . The bottom of the tube would be 1.67 times as warm as the tube with air. T=PV/R R is a constant. and the volume is the same. Venus if had an equal volume of air instead of appox 82% co2 ,neglecting the suns influence, would be cooler..
No, the bottom of the tubes would be at the same temperature. The temperature lapse rate is given by g/Cp, so in the tube containing air the lapse rate is ~9.8 and for CO2 ~11.6.
Under ‘Empirical Evidence of models running hot’, the paper states that the IPCC FAR predicted a trend in global mean temperature of 2.8K / century 1990-2025, and correctly states that the actual warming (so far) was rather less.
Fair enough, this was IPCC Scenario A, described as ‘business as usual’. However, 25 years later we now know that Scenario A did not come to pass. It had a CO2 forcing of 1.85 W/m2 by 2000 and 2.88 by 2025. Actual outcome, as stated in the paper was a rather smaller 1.82 by 2011. In reality, IPCC scenarios B, C and D were closer, with CO2 forcing values of at around 1.75 by 2000 and 2.35 by 2025. For these scenarios, the IPCC actually projected:
“average rates of increase in global mean temperature over the next century are estimated to be about 0 2°C per decade (Scenario B), just above 0 1°C per decade (Scenario C) and about 0.1 °C per decade (Scenario D) ”
Which, given that the paper estimates the actual trend at 0.14C /decade, apparently means that IPCC FAR was spot on!
I would be interested in learning why the paper uses the 1990 Scenario A projection to illustrate ‘model failure’, when it was based on forcing projections that simply did not materialise. It may show that the IPCC were unduly pessimistic about emission trajectories, but tells us naught about model performance.
We did not use any of the scenarios in the First Assessment Report. We used the central prediction for medium-term global warming that appears in the Summary for Policymakers. It [] was that estimate that started the scare. It was based on modelling, and it was double what has transpired. It was wrong. On that exaggerated prediction the scare was built.
If this is the case, perhaps this should have been mentioned? The references section cites the FAR itself only. I can find references only to scenarios in the policymakers summary and none to a central medium term prediction (or projection) in the policymakers summary. Could you perhaps help me with a page number? And also where the range 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] K is stated, because I am unable to locate these numbers anywhere in the summary or the report.
The figures stated in the paper are consistent with Scenario A, which was not ‘central’, but considerably higher than Scenarios B-D, which turned out to be closer to the reality of how forcings evolved.
Also the words ‘substantial confidence’, quoted verbatim in the paper, appear not in the Policymakers Summary but in the body of the report and only in the phrase :
“Nevertheless, for reasons given in the box overleaf, we have substantial confidence that models can predict at least the broad scale features of climate change”
certainly not linked to a specific number.
The Executive Summary of the Policymakers Summary states this clearly
“Based on current model results, we predict:
• under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A)
emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of
global mean temperature during the next century of
about 0 3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of
0 2°C to 0 5°C per decade), this is greater than that
seen over the past 10,000 years This will result in a
likely increase in global mean temperature of about
1°C above the present value by 2025 and 3C before
the end of the next century The rise will not be
steady because of the influence of other factors
• under the other IPCC emission scenarios which
assume progressively increasing levels of controls
rates of increase in global mean temperature of about
0 2°C per decade (Scenario B), just above 0 1°C per
decade (Scenario C) and about 0 1 °C per decade
(Scenario D)”
As we now know Scenario A did not come to pass, actual forcings were substantially less (so far) whereas Scenarios B-D turned out to be more prescient, and their temperature predictions on the money.and so it would appear that ’empirical evidence of models running hot’, is in fact no such thing.
In answer to Mr Clarke, there is a prominent section in the summary for policymakers in the First ASSessment Report, headed by the words “We predict” (which shuts up those who quibble about the difference between prediction and projection). The prediction was that there would be 1 K warming by 2025, plus 50% or minus 30%. That’s 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] K. We’re so far below even the least estimate that there’d have to be a great deal of global warming over the next decade to put global warming back on the IPCC’s predicted interval.
CO2 is brought before the International Court of science as a major “klimatocid”, who is accused as someone unauthorized weapons in the hands of those who carelessly used for private gain, causing great damage to all the problems.
I think you caught completely innocent participant in many processes in nature that many do not know, but they are important to be sentenced this particular CO2, because they will insted him to set some of whom they will benefit greatly.
How can one know anything about the behavior of the planets and their participation in all events in the solar system, if you are not familiar with their movement and position in space?
Leave this defendant (CO2), let him do his duty as it has done for thousands of years, looking for a real cause of climate change. If you find the right person, you will not be able nothing to prevent him from performing his duties, can only advance, for hundreds of years, to know his movements and prepared to defend themselves from possible harmful consequences of its application.
And who is this suspicious? We can only find out if we analyze the interaction of the planet, but there is a need to know who is the cause of the spin and everything will be easier to understand. Why are many ways of escaping from that of many other solutions non decoded phenomena around us.
Mr Milovic is of course correct that CO2 has been unduly demonized – or, rather, our sins of emission have been demonized. In fact, the current increases in CO2 concentration are proving beneficial. They are doing far more good than harm.
As to the influence of the major planets on the Sun and thus on our climate, this remains a contentious and unproven hypothesis, though there is certainly some suggestive (though not definitive) evidence.
What seems clearer is that the major changes between ice ages and interglacial warm periods are chiefly attributable to the three Milankovich cycles in the Earth’s orbit: the variations in the eccentricity of the orbit (i.e. the ratio of the major to the minor axis of the orbit), in the obliquity of the Earth’s axis with respect to the plane of the ecliptic (i.e. the orbital plane); and in the libration or wobbling of the Earth’s axis (i.e. the cause of the precession of the equinoxes).
As our model shows, we should expect to see some warming from our returning to the atmosphere some minuscule fraction of the CO2 that once occupied at least 30% of the air. However, we should not expect to see very much warming, not only because the direct warming caused by doubling a concentration that, to the nearest tenth of one per cent, is zero but also because the paleoclimate record powerfully suggests that the singularity in the Bode system-gain relation and very high net-positive temperature feedbacks cannot coexist in the modern climate object.
Monckton of Brenchley January 21, 2015 at 8:10 am
“Phil.” should read the paper before criticizing it. The derivation of the system-gain relation as it applies to non-linear temperature feedbacks is acknowledged in the appendix in which the derivation appears.
I did, I even asked you a couple of questions about it which you have avoided answering.
Can you give us a link to the appendix you refer to, since there’s no link to one at Scibull.com.
And it is plain that global temperature has risen far more slowly than Hansen had predicted even on his scenario C, where CO2 was supposed to stop increasing in 2000 (hint: it hasn’t stopped). The excuse that various other gases have not risen as Hansen had predicted is no excuse at all. He misled Congress by making them think he had a sound basis for his predictions when, manifestly, he didn’t.
Clearly he did, please stop lying about the temperature record and Scenario C.
From GWPF:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01a73d6bd651970d-pi
Like very nearly all of the predictions of the climate Communists for whom “Phil.” acts as though he were a paid shill, Hansen’s predictions were wildly exaggerated.
Your usual ad hom attack, his predictions were remarkably good considering when they were made, had he used the modern value for the sensitivity rather than the accepted value from the 80s, they would be even better.
Sorry, but Hansen got it wrong. Whether he got it wrong because he used the wrong model or whether he got it wrong because he used the wrong parameter values is of little relevance. He made predictions that, if he had been honest, he could not justify: predictions that have proven in every scenario to have been exaggerated, and no amount of sophistry will convince anyone but a climate-Communist otherwise.
Repeating your usual nonsense doesn’t make it right.
Try the supplementary material. If the appendix was inadvertently deleted, I’ll send a copy. However, it was only in the appendix, where the system-gain equation for non-linear feedbacks was given, that it was necessary to acknowledge Gerard Roe’s derivation of it: the non-linear form of the equation does not appear elsewhere in the paper. We did try to persuade the editors to send us a copy of the supplementary material as prepared for publication, but we did not receive it.
I note that the GWPF graph to which you refer draws exactly the same conclusion that I or any honest man of science would draw: that Hansen’s predictions had spectacularly failed. Even the HadCRUT3 terrestrial dataset shows that in 2013 the global temperature anomaly was running below even Hansen’s Scenario C, where he had assumed no increase in CO2 concentration after 2000. As previously explained, CO2 continued to increase after 2000, but global temperatures (on the satellite records and, until this year’s tamperings, the terrestrial records) did not.
And it is very clear that Hansen’s business-as-usual scenarios A and B were disgracefully exaggerated. There was and is no scientific basis for such extreme predictions. Hansen had thought that CO2 concentration had been increasing at 1.5% a year for 20 years, and extrapolated that forward from 1988 as the basis (using the exaggerated and error-prone and fudge-factored ModelE) for his wild Scenario A prediction. In fact, as previously noted, the annual compound growth in CO2 concentration in the 20 years before 1988 was not 1.5% but just 0.4%.
His scenario B assumed modest CO2 growth, not the record growth that in fact ensued. And the temperature projection is nearly as much of a wild exaggeration as Scenario A, which, no doubt, is why the GWPF’s graph, to which you refer me, labels these projections as “failed”.
At least “Phil” now accepts that Hansen’s climate-sensitivity estimates were exaggerated in the 1980s. His estimates were always somewhat higher than nearly everyone else’s, and this, combined with his inability to calculate the rate at which CO2 concentration had actually been rising (for it is concentration, not emissions, that determines the amount of warming to be expected), led to his absurd exaggerations, which even climate-Communist lecturers usually prefer not to dwell upon.
Hansen got it wrong. Badly wrong. And, as the temperature trend extends to the end of his prediction, you will be able to crow, perhaps, that his scenario C and the satellite temperature trend coincided, just briefly, at the point a couple of years from now when he somewhat arbitrarily predicted that there would be a major volcanic eruption, causing a transient dip in the global-temperature anomaly.
But, whichever way one stacks this, it is a failed prediction, and I shall be using this graph (with the satellite as well as the terrestrial datasets) in my next Congressional testimony, to illustrate the absurdity of the exaggerations – now repudiated even by “Phil.”, who has accepted that the 1980s climate-sensitivity estimates were on the high side (to put it mildly) – on which the climate scare was unsoundly founded.
It is really pointless of “Phil.” to try to pretend anything other than that Hansen’s predictions in 1988, given in a congressional hearing room on a very hot day in the hottest June for some time (indeed, there has been no hotter June in Washington since), on which Senator Wirth and Senator Gore had deliberately turned off the air-conditioning – exactly the sort of spin that has given the climate Communists a bad name.
The more “Phil.” tries to defend his fallen hero, the sillier both of them will look in the world’s eyes. Come off it, mate: pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
Try the supplementary material. If the appendix was inadvertently deleted, I’ll send a copy. However, it was only in the appendix, where the system-gain equation for non-linear feedbacks was given, that it was necessary to acknowledge Gerard Roe’s derivation of it: the non-linear form of the equation does not appear elsewhere in the paper. We did try to persuade the editors to send us a copy of the supplementary material as prepared for publication, but we did not receive it.
There is no accessible supplementary material at scibull.com, so contrary to your earlier statement there is no acknowledgement of that aspect of Roe’s contribution in the paper.
“Phil.” should read the paper before criticizing it. The derivation of the system-gain relation as it applies to non-linear temperature feedbacks is acknowledged in the appendix in which the derivation appears.
You omitted to answer my earlier question and correction to the paper so I’ll repeat them below.
“why do you use ‘𝝀o = 3.2^-1′ rather than 0.3125?
Also
“∆Ft is the radiative forcing in response to a change in atmospheric CO2 concentration over t years, which is the product of a constant k and the natural log of the proportionate change (Ct / Co) in CO2 concentration over the period [3, 32]”
Correction in bold.
I note that the GWPF graph to which you refer draws exactly the same conclusion that I or any honest man of science would draw: that Hansen’s predictions had spectacularly failed.
Only if you choose to ignore the fact that the three scenario’s were designed to span a range of possible outcomes: “These scenarios are designed to yield sensitivity experiments for a broad range of future greenhouse forcings” An honest man of science would recognize that instead of pretending that it was otherwise. That GWPF would come to that conclusion is hardly surprising since that is their raison d’être.
Even the HadCRUT3 terrestrial dataset shows that in 2013 the global temperature anomaly was running below even Hansen’s Scenario C, where he had assumed no increase in CO2 concentration after 2000. As previously explained, CO2 continued to increase after 2000, but global temperatures (on the satellite records and, until this year’s tamperings, the terrestrial records) did not.
By continuing to focus of CO2 only you are indicating your misunderstanding of the Hansen paper or deliberately misleading. By the way note that GWPF ‘adjusted’ the temperatures downwards in that graph.
And it is very clear that Hansen’s business-as-usual scenarios A and B were disgracefully exaggerated. There was and is no scientific basis for such extreme predictions.
Yes there is and it’s given in the paper and stands up.
Hansen had thought that CO2 concentration had been increasing at 1.5% a year for 20 years, and extrapolated that forward from 1988 as the basis (using the exaggerated and error-prone and fudge-factored ModelE) for his wild Scenario A prediction. In fact, as previously noted, the annual compound growth in CO2 concentration in the 20 years before 1988 was not 1.5% but just 0.4%.
As previously noted by me that is not true as explicitly stated in the Hansen paper, repeating that statement after you have been corrected is not telling the truth, please desist!
At least “Phil” now accepts that Hansen’s climate-sensitivity estimates were exaggerated in the 1980s. His estimates were always somewhat higher than nearly everyone else’s,
No they weren’t they fell within the range of contemporaneous data.
and this, combined with his inability to calculate the rate at which CO2 concentration had actually been rising (for it is concentration, not emissions, that determines the amount of warming to be expected), led to his absurd exaggerations, which even climate-Communist lecturers usually prefer not to dwell upon.
Again your absurd mis-statement about what Hansen did. His study estimated emissions of various GHGs and calculated the concentrations from that.
Hansen got it wrong. Badly wrong.
No monckton has it wrong, badly wrong.
But, whichever way one stacks this, it is a failed prediction, and I shall be using this graph (with the satellite as well as the terrestrial datasets) in my next Congressional testimony, to illustrate the absurdity of the exaggerations
Excellent, you can incorporate the rest of what I have taught you about the subject, point out the arbitrary adjustments that GWPF made to the temperature, point out how well Hansen’s Scenario C predicted the future trajectory of the trace gases, leading to his predicting a pause in the temperature growth.
– now repudiated even by “Phil.”, who has accepted that the 1980s climate-sensitivity estimates were on the high side (to put it mildly) – on which the climate scare was unsoundly founded.
No, I did not, see above.
It is really pointless of “Phil.” to try to pretend anything other than that Hansen’s predictions in 1988, given in a congressional hearing room on a very hot day in the hottest June for some time (indeed, there has been no hotter June in Washington since), on which Senator Wirth and Senator Gore had deliberately turned off the air-conditioning – exactly the sort of spin that has given the climate Communists a bad name.
You appear to have got lost in the middle of this long, rambling, meaningless sentence.
The more “Phil.” tries to defend his fallen hero, the sillier both of them will look in the world’s eyes. Come off it, mate: pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
Not a ‘fallen hero’, I object to someone lying about what the paper says and how it does it.
Come on monckton, start telling the truth.
Saying you are acting like a paid shill isn’t ad hominem attack…its an observation of your behavior….not you as a person.
Its akin to the difference between saying you are acting like an ass, and that you are an ass.