Guest opinion by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In this series, we have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, that after correction of the giant error of physics by which official climatology defined feedbacks in such a way as to exclude or misallocate the large feedback response to emission temperature, global warming in response to doubled CO2 will not be 2-4.5 K with a mid-range estimate of 3.3 K, as the modelers would have us believe, but not much more than 1.2 K.
The question arises: did They know of Their grave error?
They were and are utterly unable to provide a convincing answer to the following question:
How do the inanimate water vapor, albedo and other feedback processes in the climate know that they must respond little, if at all, to the 255 K emission temperature, but that they must suddenly respond with as much as 22-24 K of feedback-driven warming triggered by the extra 9-11 K of temperature directly forced by the presence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases?
Will official climatology now climb down and fess up? Will the IPCC, the UNFCCC, and the alphabet-soup of national, international and global profiteers of doom be shut up, shut out and shut down? Will the Paris climate treaty be torn up? Will the war on coal cease? Will the countryside no longer be trashed by bird-blending, bat-blatting windmills?
Windmills, for heaven’s sake – 14th-century technology to solve a 21st-century non-problem. Will the subsidies stop and power prices fall by two-thirds, as they should?
The answer, of course, is No. For They are in denial. They are the denialists now.
University of Untruthfulness
Some months ago, an outline of our result was sent – behind our backs – to a university long known for its unswerving adherence to the totalitarian Party Line on the climate question, and, indeed, on all questions. There is no Conservative Association on campus, not because there are no supporters of HM Government there, but because the “societies officer” at the students’ union has the right to decide what political societies may and may not be represented on campus, and he has deemed the nation’s governing party to be insufficiently totalitarian to provide a “safe space” for snowflake students. He has banned its supporters at the university from forming any association, holding meetings on or off campus or distributing party materials.
Freedom of speech, thought and political association, once guaranteed by Magna Carta, have been silently, stealthily taken away. How the snowflakes will blub when they learn of our result.
The vice-chancellor, on hearing of our result and on realizing that, when it is eventually published, it will cost the university hundreds of millions a year, summoned a meeting of the entire environmental-sciences faculty and yelled at them: “Monckton’s paper is a catastrophe for us.” He hollered at them that they should drop everything else they were doing and work full-time on trying to refute our result. Some weeks later, postgraduate students went on strike because the faculty were so busy trying to please the vice-chancellor by refuting the irrefutable that they were no longer providing the personal supervision that the postgrads were contractually entitled to expect.
One of those who heard the vice-chancellor feared that the university would expose itself to fraud charges if it failed to admit that the Party Line had been wrong all along and instead went on applying for hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxpayer funding for research on global warming that its senior members knew was not and is not going to happen at anything like the predicted rate. He broke ranks. There is goodness even in the grim, concrete camps of the Forces of Darkness. That is how we learned of the vice-chancellor’s meeting.
We were also told that one of the faculty, furious that we had rather easily and rather completely demolished the nonsense he and his colleagues had been peddling for decades, decided to respond to our scientific argument in the fashion of totalitarian extremists everywhere. He stood outside his lecture-hall and handed out copies of a personal attack on me that had been published some years previously in a totalitarian daily propaganda-sheet in London. There was not a single scientific statement in the entire article. It was pure hate speech of the sort we are all used to. Its educational value to students of environmental sciences was nil.
On obtaining irrefutable evidence of the vice-chancellor’s remarks to the faculty, and of the lecturer’s consequent circulation of childish libels against me as though they constituted scientific evidence of anything, an overseas journalist telephoned the university’s head of publicity and asked for a comment. The head of publicity unwisely denied that the meeting of which we had received a direct report had taken place, and also denied that any lecturer had handed out propaganda to my detriment to his students.
However, the university’s website is notoriously insecure. We were able to download an image of the hate-speech document in question. We got it from the lecturer’s own area of the website, where he had prominently (if unwisely) displayed it. The university’s head of publicity had lied, and we were and are in a position to prove it, definitively.
The university now finds itself in a difficult position entirely of its own making. It now knows with a chilling certainty that manmade global warming will be small, slow, harmless and beneficial. Yet despite that knowledge – knowledge that we can prove the entire faculty of environmental sciences now possesses – it is continuing to preach the Party Line to its students.
And that constitutes fraud. It is fraud against the Government, which heavily subsidizes the university and expects it to produce sound science, not totalitarian propaganda. It is fraud against the students, who pay good money to be taught what is true and are now being lied to. It is fraud against every taxpayer and user of gasoline or electricity, for all of us pay through the nose to subsidize the deeply unpleasant coalition of canting vested interests profiteering from the climate scam at great and damaging expense to the general public.
It is, as Professor Nils-Axel Mörner has rightly said, the greatest lie ever told. When I recover from a recent illness, reports of the university’s frauds will be sent to the public authorities, which will at first try to get away with doing what they do best: nothing. However, Britain is still in one or two respects a free country. It is open to us, if we wish, to institute a private prosecution. In due course, not only the university but any public authority that should have acted upon being given evidence of its fraud but did not act will face prosecution.
How long has official climatology known of its grave error? In truth, the vast majority of the pietistic preachers of doom and gloom have never had the slightest idea what they were talking about. They can – and, in due course, will – plead ignorance. And they will find to their horror, as the cell door slams behind them, that, in English criminal law, to intend to profit by proclaiming that something false is true when one does not know whether it is true or false is no less a deception than to proclaim that something one knows to be false is true.
But the university, which, being unspeakable, shall be nameless (though you can have fun trying to work out which it is from the not particularly informative illustrations) can no longer plead ignorance. It knows the truth, and it knows we know it knows the truth. I wrote to the vice-chancellor, on hearing of the meeting at which he had summoned the entire faculty and had yelled at them, and suggested that he should let me present our scientific results at a faculty lecture. He was unwise enough not to reply.
The extraordinary reactions of the vice-chancellor and of the lecturer are evidence in themselves that those driving the global warming scam, as opposed to the army of useful idiots who unthinkingly and rebarbatively regurgitate the Party pabulum, have known for some time that the very high climate sensitivities they have been luridly predicting cannot and will not occur, and that the true rate of manmade warming will be far too small to matter.
There is plenty more evidence that the Forces of Darkness knew They were making stuff up. I shall now rather breathlessly summarize this series. It will become apparent to anyone with an open mind that the debate is now indeed over, and that the result is not at all what the usual suspects had expected, and that our result is so obvious that They – or the brighter ones among Them, at any rate – must have known the truth.
IPCC’s official definition of a “climate feedback” is as follows (with my italics):
“Climate feedback An interaction in which a perturbation in one climate quantity causes a change in a second, and the change in the second quantity ultimately leads to an additional change in the first. A negative feedback is one in which the initial perturbation is weakened by the changes it causes; a positive feedback is one in which the initial perturbation is enhanced. In this Assessment Report, a somewhat narrower definition is often used in which the climate quantity that is perturbed is the global mean surface temperature, which in turn causes changes in the global radiation budget. In either case, the initial perturbation can either be externally forced or arise as part of internal variability.”
This definition very deliberately excludes the feedback response to the input signal. I say “very deliberately” because the word “perturbation” or its variants appears five times. Whoever drafted it knew perfectly well that the large feedback response to the large emission temperature must be taken no less into account than the small feedback response to any small perturbation of it driven by a radiative forcing. But IPCC’s author was most energetic in trying to mislead readers into overlooking the feedback response to emission temperature and concentrating only on the perturbation.
The corrected definition is as follows:
“Climate feedback, external or inherent, modifies an output signal by returning part of it to the input. Negative feedback attenuates the output; positive feedback amplifies it. A temperature feedback, in W m–2 K–1 of the output (equilibrium temperature), induces a feedback response in Kelvin that modifies the output even where the input (emission temperature) was unamplified.”
IPCC’s definition is 114 words: mine is half that length. Unlike IPCC, I am not ducking and diving and circumnavigating the truth without ever landing upon it. The standard, textbook feedback loop diagram makes it quite clear that even an unamplified input signal, which in the absence of amplification is also the output signal before accounting for feedback, must induce a feedback response if a nonzero feedback process is present:
The feedback loop diagram for the standard zero-dimensional-model equation
Teq = Tref μ / (1 – μβ)
In this standard feedback loop (see Bode 1945, ch. 3), the reference system that will operate whether or not a feedback is present comprises the input signal Tref and the μ gain block. The β feedback loop returns some fraction of the output signal from node P2 to the input node P1.
The mathematics of feedback applies to every dynamical system (i.e., a system that changes its state over time) in which feedback processes are present. It is not optional. Therefore, it is blindingly obvious – once it is pointed out, at any rate – that IPCC’s official definition of a “climate feedback” is plumb wrong, and that even with a unit μ direct-gain or open-loop-gain factor, indicating no amplification at all from any forcing, any nonzero value of the feedback fraction β must induce a feedback response that modifies the output signal.
A remarkable benefit of using the correct definition of a “temperature feedback” is that it becomes possible, for the first time, to solve the biggest problem in climate-sensitivity studies, which is to discover how big (or, as we shall see, how small) the feedback fraction is.
This matters, because at present the official feedback fraction is little better than guesswork, and IPCC et hoc genus omne use feedbacks as the excuse to triple – and, in several extreme papers, to multiply up to tenfold – the small direct warming from doubled CO2. Without big feedbacks, there is no big warming.
We know that at today’s insolation and albedo the emission temperature that would obtain at the Earth’s surface in the absence of any forcing and before accounting for feedback is about 255 K. Actually it is probably 10-20 K higher than that, but that is a story for another time.
We know that the radiative forcing from the presence of the naturally-occurring CO2 in the air in 1850 was about 30 Watts per square meter, which, when multiplied by 0.3 to allow for the Planck parameter at that time, was 9 K of CO2-driven warming.
We know that IPCC currently imagines that the CO2-driven warming should be increased by 35% to allow for all other anthropogenic forcings, so that the directly-forced warming from all natural sources was about 12 K.
We know that the temperature in 1850, at the beginning of the global temperature record and before any appreciable anthropogenic influence, was about 287 K. And we know that that 287 K was an equilibrium, for we had not yet noticeably perturbed the climate.
Armed with just these three generally accepted round numbers – emission temperature 255 K, directly-forced natural greenhouse-gas warming 12 K and equilibrium temperature 287 K in 1850 – we can obtain the feedback fraction without further ado. It is 1 – (255 + 12) / 287, or 0.07. James Bond would be delighted.
We know that the CMIP5 models predict 1.1 K directly-forced warming from doubled CO2, and that their mid-range estimate of equilibrium sensitivity after accounting for feedback is 3.3 K. So official climatology imagines that the feedback fraction is 1 – 1.1 / 3.3, or 0.67. But our feedback fraction is a proven result. Official climatology’s feedback fraction is ten times too big. Corrected Charney sensitivity, which is equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 with all else held fixed, is then 1.1 / (1 – 0.07), which is not 3.3 K. It is 1.2 K. End of climate problem.
So, how much global warming do we say should have happened since 1850? IPCC says net anthropogenic forcing in the industrial era to 2011 was 2.3 Watts per square meter (IPCC 2013, fig. SMP.5, lower panel). Divide that by 3.2, today’s value of the Planck parameter, to get the equivalent directly-forced warming before accounting for feedback. It is 0.7 K.
So, using our feedback fraction 0.07, equilibrium warming since 1850 should have been 0.7 / (1 – 0.07), which is 0.75 K. And how much warming was measured, according to the HadCRUT4 dataset for 1850-2011? It was (wait for it) 0.75 K. Our result matches observed reality. Official climatology’s result, not so much: 0.7 / (1 – 0.67) = 2.1 K, almost three times observation.
But wait, say the naysayers. What about the Earth’s radiative imbalance of 0.6 Watts per square meter? This implies that anthropogenic warming has radiated 2.3 – 0.6 = 1.7 W m–2 to space. Accordingly, equilibrium warming attributable to the period from 1850-2011 may eventually prove to be 0.75 K x 2.3 / 1.7 = 1.0 K.
Right. Even after allowing for the energy imbalance, official climatology’s grossly excessive feedback fraction still gives a mid-range prediction more than twice the 1 K that may eventually be observed, whereas our result remains close to reality, Indeed, if just a quarter of the 1 K equilibrium warming from 1850- 2011 was natural, as it may well have been, for the official “consensus” proposition says no more than that recent warming was mostly manmade (and only 0.3% of published papers say even that much: Legates et al., 2013), our result remains bang on target.
But wait, say the naysayers. What about nonlinearity in feedbacks? The atmospheric burden of water vapor increases exponentially at around 7% per Kelvin of warming. Yes, it does, but the radiative feedback response to that additional water vapor is logarithmic, just like the direct forcing from CO2, so the overall effect of the water vapor feedback is linear. Other feedbacks are not as nonlinear as column water vapor, and are too small to make much difference.
Besides, the models assume only 1-2% growth in column water vapor per Kelvin, because the evaporative cooling from 7%-per-Kelvin exponential growth in water vapor would reduce Charney sensitivity to below 1 K per CO2 doubling (Kininmonth 2010). The formidable Professor Lindzen has made the same point.
Nevertheless, let us assume, just for the sake of accommodating the New Denialists, that the linear growth in the feedback fraction would give a value double the 0.07 we have calculated. Then Charney sensitivity would rise from 1.1 / (1 – 0.07) = 1.2 K to 1.1 / (1 – 0.14) = 1.3 K. At triple the real value, Charney sensitivity would be 1.1 / (1 – 0.21) = 1.4 K.
So let us near-quadruple it to 1 – 0.75 / 1.00 = 0.25, the value that would obtain if one believed that the energy imbalance is as big as 0.6 W m–2 and if one believed that the net anthropogenic forcing (greatly diminished by the aerosol fudge-factor hastily introduced some years ago by IPCC when it realized that without the fudge-factor equilibrium sensitivity would necessarily be very low: you should just hear Dick Lindzen on that subject) is as little as 2.3 W m–2. Let’s pretend.
In that event, Charney sensitivity would still be less than 1.5 K and, therefore, below the lower bound of IPCC’s official 1.5-4.5 K range, and half a Kelvin below the CMIP3 and CMIP5 models’ 2 K minimum. To get to the models’ minimum, one would have to assume a feedback fraction almost seven times the 0.07 we have calculated.
Nonlinear? Schmoninear.
But, say the naysayers (now desperate), how do you know that the models don’t take the feedback response to emission temperature fully into account when deriving their value of the feedback fraction? It is questions like this that reveal that there are plenty of climate fanatics who know perfectly well that official climatology is fatally in error.
Look at it this way. The directly-forced warming from the presence of the naturally-occurring, non-condensing greenhouse gases is about 12 K. The difference between equilibrium temperature in 1850 and emission temperature is 32 K. So, using official climatology’s method, carefully omitting the feedback response to emission temperature, its feedback fraction is 1 – 12 / 32, or 0.63. Actually, the CMIP5 models, like the CMIP3 models, assume 0.67, and Lacis (2010) assumes 0.75. So we know They are getting it wrong, and we know where and why They are getting it wrong, even without reading Their cheesily dishonest definition of a “climate feedback”.
What is more, Lacis says the pre-industrial and current values of the feedback fraction are the same: 0.75. Not much nonlinearity there, then.
If official climatology were using our method, it would have had to include the emission temperature in the calculation, thus: 1 – (255 + 12) / 287 = 0.07, or something pretty close to that.
Now you know why that hapless, red-faced, sweating vice-chancellor yelled at his faculty that our result is “a catastrophe” for the profiteers of doom. So it is.
Not a blade of grass to gladden the students’ eyes in the eco-fraudsters’ paradise
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We have had periods in history with 3-4x higher CO2 levels than today. If the high-sensitivity approach of IPCC is correct, I just cannot figure out how humans or animals would have been able to evolve or survive because the warming would have increased to a level where most of the living creatures cannot exist.
It appears that during the Cambrian Period, first of the Paleozoic Era and ongoing Phanerozoic Eon, CO2 has been estimated at ~7000 ppm, vs. ~400 ppm today. That’s more than four doublings of CO2, and, guess what!, global average temperature wasn’t more than 13 degrees C higher than now (as would be the case at IPCC’s ludicrous central value of 3.3 degrees C per doubling). Granted, the sun was about five percent weaker then, but still, observations don’t compute with “theory”. I wouldn’t dignify the CACA hypothesis with such a grand term, however.
During the following Ordovician Period, CO2 was still more than 11 times higher than now, but there was an ice age! Even average temperature during the period was only about two degrees C higher than now, despite 3.5 doublings.
The AGW conjecture is notorious for being based on only partial science. The improper feedback calculation is only one problem.
The radiametric calculations that I am familiar with come up with a climate sensitivity for CO2 of 1.2 degrees C which in itself tells us that the climate effects of adding CO2 to the atmosphere are not very significant. To make it more significant the AGW conjecture adds the concept of amplification by means of H2O feedback. The idea is that CO2 based warming causes more H2O to enter the atmosphere which causes more warming because H2O is also a so called greenhouse gas with LWIR absorption bands. They like to assume a positive feedback that results in an amplification factor of roughly 3 but admittedly they do not know exactly what that amplification factor really is. The idea is that CO2 based warming causes more H2O to enter the atmosphere which causes even more warming because H2O is also a greenhouse gas. In fact if you believe in the radiant greenhouse effect, H2O is the primary greenhouse gas and molecule per molecule, H2O is a stronger absorber of IR than is CO2. Christopher Monckton of Brenchly is apparently saying that, given that one accepts the “Official Climatology”, the amplification calculation is in error and must be significantly reduced. In the IPCC’s first report, they published a very wide range of possible values for the climate sensitivity of CO2. In the last report that I read of their’s they published the exact same values. So after more than two decades of effort they still do not really know what the amplification factor really is, they do not really know what the climate sensitivity of CO2 really is, and they have been unable to narrow the range of their guesses one iota. So’ in all that time they have learned nothing which would more accurately determine what the climate related danger of adding CO2 to the atmosphere really is. The climate simulation models supported by the IPCC have all predicted much more warming than has actually taken place which would lend credence to the idea that the lower feedback amplification feedback factor that Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has calculated is a much better number than what the IPCC has been using.
A researcher from Japan has pointed out that the radiometric calculations that were made totally ignore the fact that a doubling of CO2 will cause a slight drop in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere which is a cooling effect. When one includes this cooling effect, the climate sensitivity of CO2 is reduced by a factor of more than 20, So instead of 1.2 degrees C we have less than .06 degrees C for the climate sensitivity of CO2.
The AGW conjecture ignores the fact that besides being the primary greenhouse gas, CO2 is a major coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere, moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface to where clouds form where the energy is more readily radiated out to space. The over all cooling effect of H2O is evidenced by fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate. This means that the H2O feedback is negative and would operate to reduce any warming caused by CO2 How much H2O reduces the climate sensitivity of CO2 has not been determined by me but a climate sensitivity of less than .06 degrees C is already trivial. Negative feedback systems are inherently stable as has been the Earth’s climate for more than the past 500 million years..
A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the action of heat trapping gases with LWIR absorption bands. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. It is a convective greenhouse effect. So to on earth. The surface of the Earth is not kept warm because of the action of some trace gases with LWIR absorption bands. The surface of the Earth is as warm as it is because gravity limits cooling by convection. In the troposphere, heat energy transfer by conduction, convection, and phase change dominate over heat transfer by LWIR absorption band radiation. It is a convective effect that is a function of the heat capacity of the atmosphere, the pressure gradient, and the depth oft the troposphere that causes the insulation effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. All gases in the atmosphere play a part and no gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere are thermally inert as the AGW conjecture would have us believe. As derived from first principals the Earth’s convective greenhouse effect results in an average temperature at the Earth’s surface of 33 degrees C higher than it would otherwise be. 33 degrees C is the derived amount and 33 degrees C is what has been observed. Additional warming caused by a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, on Earth, or anywhere else in the solar system for that matter, The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction so hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction.
If CO2 really affected climate by causing warming then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused at least a measurable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but that has not happened. There is no real evidence in the paleoclimate record that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is evidence that warming causes more H2O to enter the atmosphere as it is well known that warm water cannot hold as much CO2 as cooler water but there is no real evidence the added CO2 has caused any warming. It iis all conjecture.
My conclusion has been that there is not real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensitivity is essentially zero.
What do you think is causing the warming, if not CO2?
The sun and the oceans.
In reply to Will Haas, experiments in the laboratory show that introducing CO2 to an atmosphere without it will intercept some of the near-infrared radiation passing through it, causing it to warm. The quantum physics of how a molecule of a greenhouse gas causes warming is quite well understood. The question, therefore, is not whether CO2 or other greenhouse gases cause warming, but how much warming they cause. Our answer is that they cause very little warming, because the feedback response, which official climatology had thought was large, is actually small. And we have proven that the large estimates of the feedback factor arise from an elementary error of physics, Correct that error and the global warming problem vanishes.
I really appreciate your taking the time to respond to so many of our comments. That is a fundamental problem with climate science in that one cannot set up definitive experiments with the Earth’s climate system. One may be able to show that in the laboratory, adding CO2 to a volume of air may cause that block of air to warm more quickly when irradiated with LWIR radiation than that same block of air without the CO2 added to it, but that block of air in the laboratory is not the same as the Earth’s climate system. In the past it was believed that a greenhouse was kept warm because the glass blocked the passage of IR radiation but experiments were performed and showed that blocking the passage of IR radiation had nothing to do with it. I believe that you are right in that the feedback effects have been miscalculated but, as I have explained, there is a lot more wrong with the AGW conjecture then just the calculation of feedbacks.
In response to Mr Haas, indeed there is a lot more wrong with official climatology than its definition of feedback. However, since feedbacks contribute two-thirds to nine-tenths of all imagined anthropogenic warming, correcting the definition of feedback removes almost two-thirds to nine-tenths of the imagined warming, leaving equilibrium sensitivity at not much more than 1.2 K.
“A researcher from Japan has pointed out that the radiometric calculations that were made totally ignore the fact that a doubling of CO2 will cause a slight drop in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere which is a cooling effect”.
Could provide link or name of the researcher?
Look at the Hockey Schtick.com Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Basic Global Warming Hypothesis is Wrong
by Kyoji Kimoto.
“The improper feedback calculation is only one problem.” If you consider that feedback isn’t a parameter that is dialed in arbitrarily, but emerges from the actual system itself (or in simulations thereof) due to the underlying physics, you’ll begin to see that this statement is nonsense. There isn’t a “feedback calculation” coded in climate models (except in extremely simple ones such as Monckton is using).
I believe that feedback is used to compute the climate sensitivity of CO2 and the warming that they think that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes is hard coded into their simulations. The IPCC has published a wide range of guesses as to the climate sensitivity of CO2 and largely due to the uncertainty of the climate sensitivity of CO2 they have sponsored a plethora of climate models, really simulations. All of their models have failed to adequately predict today’s global temperatures. They have predicted global warming that has not happened. If there is any truth to the climate simulations, then one can conclude that the IPCC’s entire range of guesses as to the climate sensitivity is all wrong and that the actual is lower than the IPCC’s published range of guesses. For me a climate sensitivity of less than .06 degrees C is more defensible than anything the IPCC has published. Of course if one concludes that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is actually less than .06 degrees C then one must conclude that the climate effects of adding CO2 to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is negligible and hence the IPCC no longer needs to be funded.
Will Haas’ point is interesting. Some years ago a specialist in forecasting techniques calculated that if one had predicted zero global warming in 1990 one would have been considerably closer to the truth than IPCC’s prediction at that time. Our result explains why IPCC has been over-predicting: it is using far too large a feedback factor.
The first picture is the building of the Ministry of Propaganda, 1934-1938, Hitler’s Germany. Found here: https://jaywaytravel.com/blog/berlin-nazi-architecture/
Wrong. It isn’t the building in Germany. Just do a google for “Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus” and go to the Google Maps street view of the building, and you will see that this is definitely not the German building. Similar, but definitely not the same building
It’s a view from the inside of the South-East quadrangle, not from the street.
Check the relative heights of the left and right rooflines.
Yes you are right Bob: https://jaywaytravel.com/blog/berlin-nazi-architecture/ number 5
“Did official climatology know its predictions were nonsense?”
A pertinent question but the most irrelevant question at the same time.
A better question, “Does official climatology care that its predictions were nonsense?”
no because this brings in their ‘daily bread ‘ and where else could third rate academics get such an easy life.
I’ve been reading the “climategate” emails. It’s striking what a contrast there is in the respect for the value of quality science and the integrity of the profession between them and those here who make comments like, “A better question, “Does official climatology care that its predictions were nonsense?”” and “no because this brings in their ‘daily bread ‘ and where else could third rate academics get such an easy life.”
The climategate emails supposedly blackballing scientists are instead an demonstration of the thoughts and behavior of scientists who have integrity. Only those whose ideas are distorted by preconceptions could read them as trying to keep a lid on alternative ideas. The ideas aren’t even mentioned, it’s the science that is the problem, and they feel it their professional duty to rebut the poor science because they think could be misleading.
Seeing the exchange as a whole could lead to no other conclusion.
Comments like, “no because this brings in their ‘daily bread ‘ and where else could third rate academics get such an easy life” are just silly.
Kristi Silber has not read the Climategate emails with due care and attention. There, she will find personal insults directed at me by the unspeakable Michael Mann in an email to a scientist who had written to me asking for clarification of a result I had obtained. I had supplied the clarification to the satisfaction of that scientist, who had then circulated it to colleagues including Mann. there was no call for any insults in the circumstances, but Mann is a totalitarian and, ever since Pacepa and the disinformation directorate, that is how totalitarians instinctually behave.
You will also find Phil Jones of the unspeakable University of East Anglia talking of destroying data so that other scientists could not verify it. Not one of the seven enquiries into Climategate asked him whether he had destroyed any data, or why he had made such a remark.
Silber, in imagining that the Climategate emails indicate the conduct of principled and high-minded scientists, is demonstrating an irremediable prejudice,
“Windmills, for heaven’s sake – 14th-century technology to solve a 21st-century non-problem. Will the subsidies stop and power prices fall by two-thirds, as they should?”
As per the old saying, “follow the money”. You will very likely find the real feedback loop(monetary), between power providers and the universities peddling the climate schlock. If you look very carefully at published papers in support of climate alarm, you may also find the same disclaimer lines being reused again and again when citing reference material, something about personal belief or personal conviction. Happens a lot in humanities.
I rejected the supposed positive feedback of extra water vapour years ago; when one looks at the tropics, all that extra water vapour doesn’t make things warmer, rather it makes things cooler. The tropics are cooler than the deserts largely due to the endothermic effect of evaporation and thunderstorms, and the greater cloud cover.
But I would like to know how one accurately derives the magnitude of positive feedback from the initial temperature condition, prior to any warming. This might be the one weakness in Monckton’s paper, if the initial effect from positive feedback is estimated, it weakens the certainty of any further calculations.
In response to thingodonta’s excellent question, one can calculate directly the feedback response to emission temperature by simply setting the mu amplifier to unity in the equation that is described by the feedback-loop diagram in the head posting, and then setting the beta feedback fraction to 0.07, and then the calculation is 255.4 x 0.07 / (1 – 0.07) = 19.2 K. To derive the feedback response to the 12 K directly-forced warming from the presence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases, the calculation is 12 x 0.07 / (1 – 0.07), giving 0.9 K. To find the total feedback response, the calculation is (255.4 + 12) * 0.07 / (1 – 0.07), giving 32.1 K. Note that this calculation assumes the feedback factor is constant. However, even allowing for the fact that the feedback sum, and hence the feedback fraction, rises a little with temperature, the feedback factor will not be large enough greatly to increase equilibrium sensitivity.
Wow!!
That says it all!!
Done – and dusted..
On a previous post in this thread (Looping the Loop…) Lord Monckton said:
“Emission temperature is dependent on just three quantities: insolation, albedo, and emissivity”
And later he applied the corresponding formula and arrived to the accepted 243.3K in absence of feedbacks. And I cannot blame him because everybody uses this. But then, at some point, everybody also makes the same mistake than he does, by assimilating “Emission temperature” to “Earth’s average temperature”. The only circumstance when you could assimilate both would be if Earth’s temperature was a constant accross the entire planet. In THAT unreal scenario with perfect conductivity of heat accross the planet, the emission temperature would be the same as the Earth’s average temperature. But the very moment that you have some places colder/warmer than others and the temperature in each place varies during the day and with the seasons, you can be sure that the average temperature will be lower than the calculated emission temperature. Because the emissions taking place right now in the small 1 square meter where I am standing depend on the temperature in THIS square meter at THIS time of the day and THIS time of the year. And because the dependance is to T^4, the overall emissions of the year will be HIGHER than they would have been if, all accross the year, the temperature had remained the same and equal to the average of the year. Because when temperature goes up from average by N degrees, emissions increase more than what they decrease when temperature goes down from average by the same N degrees.
((T+N)^4 + (T-N)^4)/2 = T^4 + 6*T^2*N^2 + N^4 which means higher than T^4.
Emissions being higher means the planet cools faster than the ideal “perfect heat conductivity and therefore permanently isothermal” planet at the same average temperature and incoming energy. So the average temperature of our real planet without feedbacks has to be lower or else it would not be at equilibrium. Should there be no feedback, the average temperature would NOT be the calculated emission temperature. It would be lower.
This can be easily verified with the Moon. It is a fantastic example because the Moon is fantastically diferent from isothermal, temperature variations there are enormous thanks to its 14 days “day” and 14 days “night” and the lack of atmosphere and oceans to distribute heat around. If you apply the formula of the emission temperature of the Moon based on its insolation, albedo and emissivity, you will arrive to a value that is waaay higher than the Moon’s actual, real, average temperature.
Nylo, you explain this very well are. Are you a teacher? Where can I read your work?
No I am no teacher and I don’t have any work related to climate published anywhere. Too lazy.
In response to Nylo, on the Moon the mean surface temperature is probably some 70 K below the 271 K that the fundamental equation of radiative transfer applied globally would lead us to believe. However, on Earth the position is the other way about owing to the formidable heat capacity of the global ocean. On the dayside, integration of latitudinal calculations suggests a mean emission temperature of 288.9 K. On the nightside, thanks to retention of heat by the ocean, the mean temperature would be about 250 K. Subject to various uncertainties, the global mean emission temperature may well be 269.5 K, a long way above the 255.4 K that is derived from the fundamental equation of radiative transfer applied globally.
Thaks a lot for your response Lord Monckton.
I am not sure how you did those integration of latitudinal calculations, but IF it was from real measured temperatures, then obviously you are already including some of the feedbacks of the system and the temperature can be higher. My point is that to evaluate how much of a feedback there is, you cannot start from the claimed 243.3K or 255.4K. Yo have to start lower, because the calculations of the “fundamental equation of radiative transfer applied globaly” are only correct for an isothermal planet. A planet with different temperatures day/night, poles/ecuator, land/sea etc emits the same ammount of outgoing radiation with a lower average temperature. Which means that the feedback of the system through GHGs, condensation/evaporation, melting/generating of ice, convection etc, all of it, is some Kelvin bigger than you think.
In further response to Nylo, I used to design sundials (including the largest sundial in Scotland), so I am familiar with the relevant spherical geometry. One useful wrinkle, which is useful when explaining matters to those who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with calculus, is to note that the zonal surfaces of equialtitudinal spherical frusta are equiareal. One determines via the fundamental equation of radiative transfer the zonal temperature for each frustum using today’s insolation and albedo, sums the temperatures and divides by the number of frusta. The answer is 288.9 K. For the nightside, we have borrowed the 250 K estimate of Merlis et al. (2010), which, however, is for an aquaplanet of albedo 0.38 rather than today’s 0.29. Adjusting for albedo, the nightside emission temperature on Earth might be more like 260 K. Take the mean of the two hemispheric temperatures and one arrives at an emission temperature, without greenhouse gases, of 269-274 K, rather than the 255.4 K currently universal in official climatology, which, however, scandalously ignores Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals.
However, as stated in the head posting, we are still working on a demonstration of what the emission temperature of the Earth should be, and we are not yet ready to challenge official climatology on this point. So we have accepted its 255 K value ad argumentum, but work on this aspect of the calculation continues, because if emission temperature is indeed of order 270 K then the feedback fraction is negligible and the issue of nonlinearity (pretty much a non-issue anyway) all but disappears.
Thanks a lot once again Lord Mockton. I still have some important objections to your calculations, not in the part of dividing in frustra (new word for me, thanks for that), calculating and averaging temps, but on the insolation values that you must have used to arrive to such a result, probably the correct average insolation during the day time of a day, but not for the 24h day, meaning that your 288.9K temp would be the temperature reached by a “permanently under the sunlight” day side of the planet (a tidally locked planet), and not the day side of our non-tidally locked planet. In fact, the result that you show is very similar to what one can see in the Merlis et al. (2010) paper that you have mentioned (and also thanks for that), for the day side of a tidally locked water planet. A non-tidally locked planet necessarily has a lower average temperature for the day side of the planet. In addition for a planet like ours, should we divide the surface in 2 parts, the difference between tropical-nontropical areas is way greater than between day/night areas. So this is the divide that I would have started with.
However, this is not the point that I am trying to make, which is that Earth’s temperature would NOT be 243.3K in absence of feedbacks of any kind affecting the incoming energy (GHGs) or the albedo (clouds). It would be lower. I can totally believe, in absence of a better estimate, whatever estimate you want to give to me about what the temperature would be without GHGs alone, but still with the rest of the feedbacks (convection, evaporation, condensation, freezing and defreezing of the polar seas…). You say this is 269-274? Ok for me, why not? THAT ONE is not the value that I dispute, as I haven’t done yet my own maths. What I dispute is that the way to calculate the importance of the non-GHG feedbacks is to substract 243.3K from this temperature, or from IPCC’s 255.4K if we are going to accept it ad argumentum. Temperature without feedbacks of any kind would NOT be 243.3K. They would be lower. They could only reach an average of 243.3K under a perfect heat transport mechanism making the surface isothermal.
My best regards.
In response to Nylo, I perhaps neglected to make it clear that the tidal locking in the case I used from Merlis (2010) was that of an aquaplanet rotating at the same rate as Earth, i.e., once a day.
As to the temperature without any greenhouse gases and without any feedbacks, official climatology says that, at today’s albedo, that temperature – known as the emission temperature – would be 255.4 K. I have adopted all of official climatology except what I can prove to be wrong. Though I think that 255.4 K is too low, for the reasons I have explained, I cannot yet prove it to be too low, so I am using it because it avoids all argument.
If Nylo would like to use some other, lesser value, he can of course do so, but to get a lesser value he will have to increase the Earth’s albedo. And he will find that, even at an albedo of 0.6, the feedback fraction would not exceed 0.2, giving a Charney sensitivity of about 1.4 K. Our result, for obvious reasons, is very resistant to stress-testing of this kind.
I am not sure that Nylo is correct that emission temperature without feedbacks is lower than 255.4 K. The emission temperature is a function only of insolation and albedo (assuming a unit emissivity, as is usual). Feedbacks don’t come into it.
Lord Monckton: “I am not sure that Nylo is correct that emission temperature without feedbacks is lower than 255.4 K. The emission temperature is a function only of insolation and albedo (assuming a unit emissivity, as is usual). Feedbacks don’t come into it“.
To clarify my position: I do NOT claim that the emission temperature would be lower than 255.4K. What I DO claim is that the planet’s AVERAGE temperature would be lower than this emission temperature, in the same way that the moon’s average temperature is lower than its emission temperature, although to a much lower extent than in the case of the moon because in our temperatures distribution, the temperatures’ departures from average are much smaller. Some “back of the envelope” calculations that I have done put this difference between the emission temperature and the average temperature at somewhere between 2 and 3 Kelvin. It looks like a small ammount, but it is significant, because when comparing actual AVERAGE temperatures to what they would be without feedbacks, you have to compare as well to AVERAGE temperatures, not to emission temperature.
Best regards, and thanks a lot, as always.
Simple experiment: Earth’s surface average temperature is believed to be somewhere around 14ºC (287K). what is Earth surface’s emission temperature? Well, if we were to consider an isothermal Earth, that would be 14ºC as well. Let’s divide the Earth in 2 separate parts with the same area: the 30S-30N “tropical” area and the rest. Let’s consider now that instead of being isothermal, the 2 areas are separately isothermal but have different temperatures from each other, equal to our Earth’s average temperatures in such areas. I don’t have the data, but I believe that the tropical Earth has something like 24ºC average temperature, which means that the non-tropical Earth’s average temperature must be around 4ºC, so that the planet’s average temperature stays at 14ºC. What is now the average emission temperature of the planet?
(((297K)^4+(277K)^4)/2)^(1/4) = 287.52K = 14.52ºC
We have just found that the emission temperature in this waaaaaaay simplified model of the distribution of Earth’s surface temperatures is already half a degree higher than the planet surface’s average temperature.
You can continue to divide areas of the planet. You can now divide in 4 latitudinal parts: 0-14, 14-30, 30-48 and 48-90. And use the average of those regions. Emission temperature will go up by another half Kelvin. Then you can divide each region between “summer” average and “winter” average (actually the average of its 182 hotest days and its 182 coldest days), for a distribution with 8 different temperatures, and find the emission temperature rises by about another half of a Kelvin. And then you can divide the summer and winter averages between their hoter day temperatures and colder nigh temperatures… You can continue ad infinitum. You will continue to get increases in the emission temperature, although soon the increases will start to be small. In the end, I estimate a difference between emission temperature and average temperature of between 2-3 Kelvin, being quite conservative. It could be more.
Nylo appears to be confusing emission temperature and surface temperature. The two coincide only in the absence of any greenhouse gases or feedbacks.
Lord Monckton: Nylo appears to be confusing emission temperature and surface temperature. The two coincide only in the absence of any greenhouse gases or feedbacks.
No, they don’t. Emission temperature and average temperature only coincide in the absence of any greenhouse gases or feedbacks AND in an isothermal planet. A non-isothermal planet Earth with NO greenhouse gases or feedbacks will still have an emission temperature of 255.4K, if we don’t modify albedo nor incoming energy, but will NOT have an average temperature of 255.4K. The same exercise that I did before, you can do it with an average planetary temperature of 255.4K, with the tropics 10K hotter and the rest 10K colder, the average emitted longwave radiation would be higher than the average incoming energy, meaning that the planet would not be at equilibrium, it would be cooling down. And this doesn’t involve feedbacks nor GHGs. It purely involves only the fact that the planet is NOT isothermal. Average temperature does not need to reach the emission temperature for the planet to radiate as much heat away as would do an isothermal planet at the emission temperautre.
To calculate how much the GHGs and other feedbacks are increasing Earth’s average temperature, you should NOT substract 255.4K from today’s average temperature. You should substract around 252K or 253K, which would be the average temperature in absence of such feedbacks, assuming that the temperature distribution of the planet didn’t change too much in terms of anomalies from the average from today’s Earth’s distribution of temperatures. Which basically means that the heat provided by the GHGs and feedbacks is 2-3K greater than commonly believed by ignoring the fact that the Earth is not isothermal.
To put it simpler, if as you claim the average temperature and the emission temperature coincide in the absence of GHGs or feedbacks, please explain why they are vastly different in our Moon, which does not have GHGs nor feedbacks of any kind.
In response to Nylo, let us be clear that in the absence of greenhouse gases or feedbacks the emission temperature would apply at the Earth’s surface, for there would be no other functioning emitting surface in the atmospheric column.
That fact is quite separate from the question of how to calculate the emission temperature. I have already spent some considerable time explaining to Nylo that, just as the Moon’s emission temperature as determined by a single global use of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer is inaccurate, so I think it very likely – but cannot yet definitively prove – that the Earth’s emission temperature thus determined is also inaccurate. On the Moon, which has no ocean, the true emission temperature is very considerably below the value derived using the fundamental equation of radiative transfer in a single, global calculation. On the Earth, which has an ocean, the emission temperature is perhaps 10-20 K higher than the value thus derived. But, as I have explained again and again and again in this series, our policy has been to accept all of official climatology except what we can prove to be incorrect. We cannot yet definitively prove, to our own satisfaction, that the 255 K value for emission temperature is incorrect, so, since that – like it or not – is the current canonical value, that is the value we use.
Nylo is entitled to his own estimate that emission temperature is 252 K rather than 255 K. That would not much alter our result. The feedback fraction would then be 1 – (252 +12) / 287.5, or 0.08, instead of 0.07. Charney sensitivity would still be 1.2 K.
So, who is right – Nylo or us – about emission temperature on Earth? He says 252 K; official climatology says 255 K; we say 265-275 K. What we can say is that we used the outputs of the Lunar Diviner mission to calibrate our dayside-temperature curve (with the lunar albedo substituted for the Earth albedo), and the Diviner curve, derived empirically, and our own curve, derived theoretically, coincided exactly.]
The real difficulty is the nightside, where, on Earth, the vast ocean retains much of the heat it accumulates during the day. We have not found a definitive method of deriving the nightside temperature yet, but we are working on it.
Lord Monckton: “just as the Moon’s emission temperature as determined by a single global use of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer is inaccurate, so I think it very likely – but cannot yet definitively prove – that the Earth’s emission temperature thus determined is also inaccurate”.
I think I understand then what our discrepancy is. You are basically saying (correct me if I am wrong) that the emission temperature of a planet is its average temperature, and not the one derived from the equation that only considers albedo and incoming energy. If that’s the case and you are only using the equation not to disagree with what is commonly considered in climate science for a planet without feedbacks, then I agree with what you say, although for me the emission temperature is something else, it is the temperature at which an isothermal planet would emit the same total radiation as a given planet. I don’t use emission temperature for the average temperature because I don’t need a new term to refer to the average temperature, I already have one: average temperature.
A simple final question to verify that I understood your position correctly, forgetting about the term “emission temperature” as we understand it differently: Do you believe as I do, that two planets with the same albedo and different incoming energy can still have the same average temperature and be in equilibrium (i.e. radiate away on average the same ammount of energy that they receive), just by having a different distribution of temperatures, in space or time (day length / seasons)? Or, to put it differently, do you believe that they can be both in equilibrium with different average temperatures and different distribution of temperatures while the albedo and incoming energy are exactly the same for both planets?
Thanks a lot for your time and patience.
Best regards.
In response to Nylo, the emission temperature is supposed to be the mean temperature that would obtain at the surface of a planetary body of known albedo and insolation in the absence of any greenhouse gases or temperature feedbacks. The divisor 4 in the equation for insolation is designed to distribute the sunlight across the surface area of the Earth, which is four times the area of the great circle.
In climatology, the term “mean temperature” without qualification is taken to be the current global mean surface temperature.
However, trying to apply the fundamental equation of radiative transfer globally with a single calculation is very likely to fail because no allowance is made for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals. My own calculations for the dayside make specific allowance, by integrating latitudinal calculations. The nightside is more complicated, but, if a Merlis aquaplanet of the same rotation period and insolation as the Earth but an albedo of 0.38, much greater than that of the Earth, has a nightside emission temperature of 250 K, then the Earth probably has a nightside emission temperature of 260 K or thereby, in which event, since the mean dayside emission temperature is 290 K, the Earth’s emission temperature (by which is usually meant the mean emission temperature) is more like 275 K than 255 K.
Unfortunately, Nylo has provided no reasoning to support his contention that on a waterbelt Earth, the mean emission temperature would be lower than the 243.3 K that is derivable by a global calculation using the fundamental equation of radiative transfer using Lacis’ albedo 0.418. On the dayside, the temperature would be not less than 275.2 K, and might well be more, since the calculation takes no account of the latitudinal distribution of albedo, and the albedo is less in the equatorial zone of a waterbelt Earth than elsewhere. On the nightside, the temperature will be very close to Merlis’ 250 K (call it 245 K), since the albedo of a Lacis waterbelt Earth is not much different from that of a Merlis aquaplanet. So the mean planetary emission temperature is about (275 + 245) / 2 = 260 K.
Lord Monckton: “Unfortunately, Nylo has provided no reasoning to support his contention that on a waterbelt Earth, the mean emission temperature would be lower than the 243.3 K that is derivable by a global calculation using the fundamental equation of radiative transfer using Lacis’ albedo 0.418”.
Now I am totally disappointed. I will leave this exchange here. If Lord Mocnkton wants to do that calculation, he can just do the math. Add together the emissions of each separate piece of land (or sea in this case) of the “planet at an average temperature of 243.3K or higher”. Get the total emissions, in watts (joules per second). Then compare them to the total incoming energy, in watts (joules per second). If total emissions, in watts, are higher than the incoming energy, in watts, then the planet is not in equilibrium, it is cooling down. As simple as that. I know that I am absolutely right in this, it is a very easy thing to do. (T1^4+T2^4)/2 will always be higher than ((T1+T2)/2)^4, for any T1T2. I am very disappointed that Lord Monckton cannot see this, because it is true for any planet, be it rocky, water or have any other kind of surface, in absence of atmospheric feedbacks modifying the ammount of surface radiation that is able to escape the planet based on the surface’s temperature. You only need the planet to not be isothermal.
Do the maths, Lord Monckton. Add the emissions of the surface of your Lacis planet’s dayside area at 275K and nightside area at 245K and compare them to the total incoming energy. It is really that easy.
Planet radius: R=6,371km=6.371*10^6m
Total incoming energy: (1364.625(1 – 0.418))(W/m^2)*pi*R^2 = 1.012748*10^17 Watts.
Total outgoing energy, dayside: σ*(275K)^4*(2*pi*R^2)=0.82408935*10^17 Watts.
Total outgoing energy, nightside: σ*(245K)^4*(2*pi*R^2)=0.52100570*10^17 Watts.
Total outgoing energy, dayside + nightside: 1.34509505*10^17W, clearly bigger than 1.012748*10^17W.
Or if you prefer, use your claimed 260K “average temperature of emission” (which again would be wrong even if the other had been right, because you cannot average temperatures to get average emissions due to the T^4 dependance as we see applying the formula right now):
Total outgoing energy at 260K for the whole planet: σ*(260K)^4*(4*pi*R^2)=1.32160455*10^17 Watts. Notice that it is DIFFERENT from the sum of the emissions of two halves at 245K and 275K.
The planet is losing energy and cooling down, at an impresive rate of around 3.3*10^16 Joules per second.
Lacis’s planet is as hot as it is because he IS already including atmospheric feedbacks, by GHGs, in particular water vapour, which limit the outgoing energy by capturing some and sending back half of what it traps. This is what makes his planet as hot as it is.
I hope I didn’t mess up with the html tags as I used too many. If so, please excuse me mods. I also hope that the sigma symbols can be seen correctly in the comment after I post it.
Note: when I said Lacis’s planet I meant Merlis’s planet at Lacis’s albedo.
A simplified Earth without GHGs, with a tropical zone (30S-30N) only 30K hotter than the non-tropical zone (thanks to distribution of heat by the oceans and thanks to water’s heat capacity) would only need an average surface temperature 1.384K lower than 243.3K (i.e. 241.916K) to have the same total emissions than an isothermal planet at an average temperature of 243.3K. Demonstration:
E1=σ*(243.3K-1.384K-15K)^4*(2*pi*R^2)=0.3834*10^17W
E2=σ*(243.3K-1.384K+15K)^4*(2*pi*R^2)=0.6300*10^17W
E1+E2=1.0134*10^17W = total emissions of our non-isothermal simplified Earth at 243.3K-1.384K = 241.916K average temperature.
E3=σ*(243.3K)^4*(4*pi*R^2)=1.0134*10^17W = total emissions of an isothermal Earth at 243.3K.
E1+E2=E3. Which means that if the isothermal planet is in equilibrium, then the other one is in equilibrium as well, despite having a lower average temperature, for the same incoming energy and albedo.
Nylo,
Nice! Thanks very much for that comment, that explains things quite nicely indeed. The example of the Moon is the frosting on the cake.
In Monckton’s response,
“Subject to various uncertainties, the global mean emission temperature may well be 269.5 K, a long way above the 255.4 K that is derived from the fundamental equation of radiative transfer applied globally.”
Hmmm. It may well be 269.5 K. That’s mighty precise. In the OP it was 10-20 higher than the accepted 255 K.
Interesting the things he comes up with.
Kristi Silber, instead of asking nicely how I arrived at an emission temperature of 269.5 K, sneers about it. Well, that is Silber’s specialty. Sneer, sneer, sneer.
So here is a little science. Any kindergarten will explain the terms to Silber.
Consider the dayside of the Earth without greenhouse gases but with the present albedo. Divide the lit hemisphere into a billion equialtitudinal frusta. Equialtitudinal frusta are of equal spherical-surface area. Determine the latitude of each frustum and derive from it the mean dayside temperature at that latitude. Integrate by summing the temperatures thus obtained and dividing by a billion. That is a simple way, without even resorting to calculus, of deriving the dayside hemispheric mean temperature of 288.9 K.
Now read Merlis (2010), which considers inter alia the surface temperature of a tidally-locked Earthlike aquaplanet with today’s insolation but an albedo of 0.38 rather than today’s 0.29. The nightside surface temperature of such a planet, rotating at the same rate as the Earth, would be 250 K. Sum the dayside and nightside temperatures and divide by 2 to obtain a global mean temperature of 269.5 K.
But, as I stated, this calculation is subject to various uncertainties. For instance, the mean temperature on a Merlis aquaplanet would be lower than that on the present Earth owing to the higher albedo of the Merlis planet. In that event, it is likely that the nightside temperature could be as much as 260 K on today’s Earth, increasing the emission temperature from the previously-calculated 269.5 K to more than 274 K.
However, as the head posting makes clear, we are not yet in a position to provide a formal demonstration that the usually-cited 255 K emission temperature for the Earth – whose derivation via the fundamental equation of radiative transfer was performed earlier in this series – is too small. Therefore, we have adopted official climatology’s figure ad argumentum while we wait for Professor Merlis to reply to our enquiries.
Dear Monckton of Brenchley,
Aren’t you assuming this a linear system where feedback gain will not be dependant on temperature? I do not see why this should be so. The feedback should be piecewise approximately linear but not necessarily linear over the whole range. Thanks for a response, Dan DaSilva
Dear Monckton of Brenchley, OK, I see where you talk “linear stuff” I will read the whole paper and think about it. Thanks, Dan DaSilva
I first learned about feedback analysis in the context of electronic amplifier design almost 50 years ago and frankly the whole pretext of using feedback analysis in a climate context confuses me.
Bode spends the first chapter of his paper on mesh analysis (climate model) and the second on ‘the complex frequency plane’ which deals with how reactive components affect the frequency response.
In the feedback chapter the assumption is made that u and B are separate and independent components of a system. Bode worries a bit about that because ‘30s vintage electronics did not always provide clean interfaces between the system elements. Bode, and a couple of other techniques were taught as graphical tools to allow design to take place with a minimum of effort. In other words a short cut that provides analyticaly correct answers if the conditions are true.
So one of my concerns is the independence of the gain and feedback transfer functions are not independent of each other or of the input. The whole (IPCC) analysis is fatally broken then and there.
The second problem I have is the appearance that the feedback analysis is being applied over and above an already (complete) model of a system which is being sold as being able to model the climate. As an EE it’s perfectly acceptable to drop the entire circuit into a modeling tool and see what happens. You wouldn’t do a Bode analysis except maybe for documentation.
Losing the non-EEs at this point: with both u ans B strictly real, the output must be imaginary.
“So one of my concerns is the independence of the gain and feedback transfer functions are not independent of each other or of the input. The whole (IPCC) analysis is fatally broken then and there.”
Yes. Dependence of μ and β on input is a point I made here and following. But this isn’t an IPCC analysis that is broken. It is entirely Lord M’s.
“with both u ans B strictly real, the output must be imaginary”
It is supposed to be a circuit for equilibrium response to adjustments, so there isn’t really a phase to shift. In fact this is part of the shuffling between flux (the real input) and temperature. It’s really a transimpedance amplifier, and if time response mattered, μ and β would probably be complex.
Mr Stokes imagines, incorrectly, that the mu direct-gain factor is dependent upon the magnitude of the input signal. No, it isn’t. The beta feedback fraction, to the extent that it is assumed constant, is not dependent on the input signal either. However, to the extent that the beta feedback fraction increases – probably slowly and near-linearly – with temperature, it is to that limited extent dependent upon the input signal.
However, to impugn the analysis in the head posting on the ground that the beta feedback fraction is not constant requires a demonstration that an inconstant- or even a nonlinear-beta feedback model will give more accurate equilibrium sensitivities than the constant-beta model.
As a first approximation, the constant-beta model works surprisingly well,. And one certainly cannot assume that when using the corrected form of the zero-dimensional-model equation that is illustrated in the head posting one should assume a steeper linear slope or a greater nonlinearity than would be present if the incorrect current form of the equation is relied upon.
As Lacis et al. (2010) have pointed out, using the incorrect version of the zero-dimensional-model equation, the feedback fractions for the total greenhouse effect and separately for the current climate are identical. Not much nonlinearity or variance there, then.
The nonlinearity issue applies no less to the current system than to the corrected system.
This whole thing is complete nonsense. Firstly the story about the vice-chancellor yelling at a whole department because of some paper would never happen in any UK university. And the fact that there are no details about which University it was only makes it more likely that it is a complete lie.
Secondly as discussed before Monckton’s alleged formula for the climate makes no sense
physically or mathematically. This is clear from the fact that he has a feedback coefficient with
the wrong units – he is claiming that an input temperature of T_in gives an output temperature
determined by some feedback – in which case the feedback parameter must be dimensionless.
Yet he says the feedbacks have dimensions of Wm^2 K^-1 which gives the wrong units to his
equations.
Moreover it is clear that temperatures do not act as an “input signal” to anything. If I were to ask
Monckton or anyone to apply a input signal of 255K to a pot of water and then measure the temperature what would that mean? I can apply heat to the pot of water, or energy in some other form but I cannot apply a temperature to a pot of water. Similarly I cannot apply a temperature signal to the earth. I would like to know what Monckton thinks applying a temperature signal means in relationship to a pot of water on a stove rather than applying heat or energy.
[?? .mod]
Germinio, consider the signal “T” as a transformation of the actual signal in W/m2 which is the change in incoming energy. The “T” means the temperature change that would be needed for the outgoing energy to match the new incoming energy and therefore be at equilibrium, in absence of feedbacks. And the feedbacks represent how the actual change in temperature that happens relates to this theoretical change of temperature. A positive feedback means the temperature will change more than theoretical, because as it increases it induces other changes in the climate that either further increase the incoming energy by reducing albedo, or reduce the ability of the planet to cool by increasing the ammount of greenhouse gases (humidity), or reduce the energy lost due to convection. A negative feedback means the temperature will change less than theoretical because of the opposite changes in climate happening as the planet warms.
Nylo – if the temperature is a transformation of the actual signal then Monckton’s argument is
nonsense since his formula explicitly has temperature as an input and as an output. If you want
to claim that the temperature is a transformation of the energy then it is a highly nonlinear function
given by the Stefan-Boltzmann law and hence his feedback coefficients depend in a highly non-trivial
way on the reference state.
Again the claim that you can apply an input temperature signal to an object is plain wrong. There is no
clear or obvious meaning to the statement “apply a temperature signal of 255K” to any object.
If Germinio/Germonio and Mr Born think it inappropriate for feedback loops to be denominated in Kelvin, and if they therefore think it inappropriate that feedbacks themselves should be denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, then they should address their concerns not to me but to secretariat@ipcc.ch.
All we have done is to use the standard methodology that appears in paper after paper after paper in the learned literature. Several of these papers have been cited in this series.
As to Germinio/Germonio’s allegation that I have lied about the university’s misconduct, it is repellent that whoever this creepy individual is should make personal attacks on me from behind a craven, cowardly cloak of anonynmity. The allegation that I have lied should be disregarded, because Germinioi/Germonio lacks the guts to tell us who he is. He is contemptible.
Germinio:
between temperature 
and what we’ll call “total forcing” 
; i.e., we know that 
. By “total forcing” I mean a quantity that has a temperature-dependent part 
, usually thought of as the input forcing, and a temperature-dependent part 
often thought of as feedback:
![T_{eq}=g[F+f(T_{eq})]](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=T_%7Beq%7D%3Dg%5BF%2Bf%28T_%7Beq%7D%29%5D&bg=ffffff&fg=000&s=0&c=20201002)
.
usually encountered in such discussions.)
, we could obscure things by expressing it as an input temperature 
, where 
is 
‘s inverse function. That is, 
is the temperature that the temperature-independent component would cause without feedback.
You seem to be nearly the only critical thinker left in the discussion. I, too, think that Lord Monckton has made no sense in using temperature as an input.
That said, one could imagine a transformation from forcing as an input to temperature as an input. Suppose we know the equilibrium relationship
(Not that it matters, but here I’m thinking of forcing as an absolute quantity rather than the relative quantity
In this situation, in which our input is usually thought of a the temperature-independent forcing
We could do that, but why would we want to—unless our purpose is to frighten the natives? It just confuses things; Lord Monckton’s writing is so vague, and his logic so incoherent, that we could never be sure that’s actually what he means. Moreover, it’s apparent that by using his obscure formulations he has confused himself along with everyone else.
The fact is that official climatology, in diagnosing sensitivities, uses the zero-dimensional model. That equation, like it or not, has a quantity in Kelvin as its input and a quantity in Kelvin as its output, and the two are related by the mu direct-gain factor, which is unitless, and the beta feedback fraction, which is unitless. The product of mu and beta, the feedback factor, is, therefore, also unitless: but it is the product of the Planck parameter, in Kelvin per Watt per square meter, and the feedback sum, which – like it or not – is denominated by official climatology in Watts per square meter per Kelvin. Anyone who considers that the zero-dimensional-model equation should not have Kelvin as its inputs and outputs, or who considers that temperature feedbacks should not be called temperature feedbacks and should not, therefore, be denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, should not imagine that attacking me for using these conventions from official climatology will be in the least bit effective. If you want to attack official climatology or lecture it about how wrong it is to use temperatures as the inputs and outputs in feedback loops, send an email to secretariat@ipcc.ch. Don’t try to hold my feet to the fire for what official climatology does: all I have done is to accept all of official climatology except what I can prove to be wrong.
Monckton – your claim about the zero dimensional model is wrong as you know. In Roe 2009 which you
frequently cite the equation is written as
delta T = lambda_0 Delta F/(1-f)
so the input is a forcing Delta F and not a temperature. Claiming that the input is a temperature is
just wrong. lambda_0 Delta F has units of temperature but the input is Delta F not lambda_0* Delta F.
Having a temperature as an input to a physical system does not make any physical sense in any obvious
way. You still need to provide an explaination of how I could apply an input signal of 255K to a pot of water.
I can heat a pot of water but in that case I am applying an input signal that has units of W/m^2. Or I could
bring a pot of water to a specific temperature in which case there can be no feedbacks by definition.
Germonio needs to learn a little elementary climatology. The reference system in a dynamical system (i.e., in a system, such as the climate, that changes its state over time) upon which feedbacks operate consists of the input signal and any direct amplification thereof. The input signal in the climate is emission temperature, which is about 255 K. The mu direct-gain factor is 1.047. The product of that direct (or open-loop) gain factor, before taking any account of feedback, is 267 K. That is the reference temperature, of which 12 K is the directly-forced warming in response to the presence of the naturally-occurring, non-condensing greenhouse gases.
Before we look at the return-transmission characteristic, or feedback fraction beta, and its effect, let us first of all show the link between radiation and temperature. The link is, of course, the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, whose first differential, to first approximation, is the Planck parameter, denominated in Kelvin per Watt per square meter. It can be approximated by the Schlesinger ratio (Schlesinger 1985), which is Ts / (4Q0), where Ts is surface temperature and Q0 is the emission flux, which is about 241.2 Watts per square meter at today’s albedo. So the Planck parameter increases approximately linearly with temperature, but very, very slowly. It is thus generally taken as constant in the industrial era. Since today’s temperature is 288.4 K, the current value of the Planck parameter is around 0.30, though, for convenience, it is usually taken as the reciprocal of 3.2.
Now we have the means of converting any radiative forcing into a temperature change. One merely takes the product of the forcing and the Planck parameter, and the reference temperature change emerges. Thus, for instance, the 3.5 W/m^2 forcing at doubled CO2 is divided by 3.2 to yield the reference warming of 1.1 K. Because the Planck parameter is near-invariant across the temperature interval of interest, official climatology finds it convenient to denominate feedback forcings not in Watts per square meter, as Germonio prefers, but in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature (or temperature change, or both) that induced the feedback forcings. If, therefore, Germonio would prefer the feedback forcings to be denominated in units other than Watts per square meter per Kelvin, he should address his concerns to secretariat@IPCC.ch.
For our part, we have accepted all of official climatology except what we can prove to be wrong. Therefore, we use mainstream methods – however unpopular they are with Germonio – unless we can prove them wrong. If Germonio thinks feedbacks do not respond to temperatures, his beef is not with me but with official climatology.
Monckton, again you appear to be wrong and deliberately ignoring my main point. Firstly the Planck
parameter is precisely the first derivative of the Temperature with respect to the radiative forcing for a
black body and as such it goes like 1/T^3 and thus decreases slowly with temperature rather than
increases.
Again it makes no physical sense to claim that a temperature is an input signal. What does that mean?
Germonio thinks that “the Planck parameter is precisely the first derivative of the Temperature with respect to the radiative forcing for a black body and as such it goes like 1 / T^3 and thus decreases slowly with temperature rather than increases”.
It is important that if Germonio wishes to contribute usefully it should read my responses to its musings. I have already explained that the Planck parameter is, to first approximation, the first derivative of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer. But I also explained that the first derivative, expressed as the change delta-Ts in surface temperature Ts per unit change delta-Qe in emission flux density Qe, is Ts / (4Qe). This is the Schlesinger ratio. Since the emission flux density Qe, at today’s albedo, is fixed at about 241.2 Watts per square meter, any increase in surface temperature Ts is bound to increase the Planck parameter, not reduce it. But it will not increase the Planck parameter by much.
The reason for taking the Planck parameter as the ratio of surface temperature to four times the emission-altitude flux density is that it is not “precisely” the first derivative of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer. It is necessary to determine the derivative at each separate altitude and, preferably, latitude, and then integrate. The models do this: it is the sort of thing they are good at. But Schlesinger’s approximation (Schlesinger 1985) is a workmanlike simplification.
To illustrate how wrong Germonio is to assume that the Planck parameter is “precisely” the first derivative of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, one has only to realize that the surface temperature today is 288.4 K and the surface flux density is about 392 K, and that would imply a Planck parameter of only 0.18, when actually it is about 0.31.
On Germonio’s second point, I have repeatedly explained that it is inherent in the corrected form of the zero-dimensional-model equation that the input signal will itself induce a feedback response. Germonio should really go away and consult a professor of control theory. That is what we did, and he is now a co-author.
Monckton you need to read the literature more carefully. In Roe 2009, Eq 3 defines the Planck constant
as precisely 1/(4 sigma T^3) which is again precisely -1/(d F/dT). There is no first approximation it is
exact. This agrees with your definition since the emission flux depends on the fourth power of the
temperature so Ts/Q0 goes like 1/T^3.
If you want to define the Planck constant as something different then that is fine but that would involve
defining a completely new reference system which would have different feedbacks.
And on my second point it is that have a temperature as an input signal makes no physical sense.
As I have asked repeatedly and you have ignored is how would you apply an input signal of 255K
to a pot of water in your kitchen?
If only Germonio were interested in the objective truth rather than in shrieking for the Party Line, then its lack of mathematical acumen would be less of a barrier than it is. It is not my place to try to teach elementary calculus to Germonio, but I can at least explain that Te / (4Qe) and the reciprocal of 4 sigma Te^3 are equal. However, as I have now tried to explain to Germonio on several occasions, one cannot select the surface values Ts and Qs because that would give a Planck parameter of only 0.18. One cannot even take Te and Qe, because that would give a Planck parameter of only 0.26. It is necessary to take the values at each altitude and then integrate.
As I have repeatedly explained, the simplest approximation to that otherwise refractory integration is to take Ts and Qe: thus, today’s Planck parameter is 288.4 / (4 x 241.2) = 0.3 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. Since Qe remains constant at today’s albedo, which the head posting said would be held constant in accordance with the principle in Schmidt (2010), the Planck parameter increases linearly with temperature, and does not decrease exponentially as Germonio had attempted to assert.
Self-contradictorily, Germonio describes the Planck parameter as a “constant”. But one cannot in the same breath say it is a constant and an exponentially-diminishing variable. it is in reality a variable that increases approximately linearly in accordance with the Schlesinger ratio, because surface temperature, the numerator, increases while emission flux, the denominator, is by definition constant.
Germonio continues to refuse to learn not only the necessary differential and integral calculus but also to learn the necessary minimum of elementary control theory. Study the circuit diagram in the head posting. Study the equations set out in that diagram. Think about them. Don’t just recite the Party Line – any fool can do that, and a lot of fools do just that. Think man (if man you be).
One may denominate the input and output of a feedback loop in any convenient unit. Since feedbacks are denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that induces the feedback response, it is always convenient to denominate the entire circuit in Kelvin, as I have done, and as is often done in the literature. Indeed, even in Roe’s paper, which of course contains the error that is the subject of this series, there are plenty of equations denominated in Kelvin for this reason.
Schlesinger (1985) actually changes his units from one part of the circuit to the next. One can do that, of course, but it is in danger of creating a muddle.
Germonio’s objection is in reality an objection to the denomination of feedbacks in Watts per square meter per Kevin of the originating temperature. Well, that is how official climatology denominates them. If Germonio thinks feedbacks should not be denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, and that, therefore, no one should denominate the inputs and outputs of climate-sensitivity calculations in Kelvin, let him address his concerns to secretariat@ipcc.ch, and not to me. I have made it repeatedly plain throughout this series that I have adopted all of official climatology except what I can prove to be wrong, and, whether Germonio likes it or not, official climatology denominates the emission temperature in Kelvin, the reference sensitivity in Kelvin and the equilibrium sensitivity in Kelvin. Of course, official climatology neglects to make any provision for the feedback response to emission temperature in its cut-down implementation of the zero-dimensional-model equation, and that is precisely the error that we have exposed.
Our professor of control theory is entirely content that we are right about this. Let Germonio not seek to preach to me: let it go and consult its own professor of control theory. But first, let it set aside the Party Line, just for a little, and let it think, and think hard, about the circuit diagram that I have taken the trouble to provide. See how it is entirely consistent with Bode (1945, ch. 3). See how it is mainstream science. No, it is not yet mainstream climate science, because mainstream climate science is in error.
And none of this has anything to do with putting a pot of water on the stove. However, it is necessary for the heating element in the stove to be hotter than the desired final temperature of the water. The temperature of the heating element is the input, and the temperature of the water is the desired output. But one does not want to wait for hours for the system to equilibrate, so one takes the pot off the stove as soon as the water is boiling. The temperature of the water – the output temperature – will be less than the input temperature from the heating element, because to save time the system is not allowed to reach equilibrium. But the input and output are denominated in temperature, for that is convenient. And feedbacks don’t really come into that calculation at all. Let us stick to the point, which is that if feedback processes are denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that triggers them, then it is – to say the very least – convenient to know what that temperature is. From there it is but a short step to denominating the equilibrium-sensitivity equation in Kelvin, for one is concerned with the difference between the reference sensitivity (in Kelvin) and the equilibrium sensitivity (in Kelvin); and, if one uses the corrected form of the ZDM equation, one is also concerned with the feedback response to the input temperature (also in Kelvin).
If Germonio wants to write its own version of the ZDM equation, that’s fine by me: but I have adhered to official climatology’s method except where I can prove it to be wrong, and I have proven it to be wrong in overlooking the feedback response to emission temperature.
Germonio pays no attention to my answers, so I shall keep this one short. It is here trying to say that the Planck parameter is a constant, when previously it was trying to say that it was declining exponentially. It is in fact increasing linearly, but very slowly, with temperature, The simplest approximation is the Schlesinger ratio: Ts / (4Qe), where Ts is surface temperature and Qe is emission-altitude flux, which is constant at 241.2 Watts per square meter.
It is not my place to instruct the mathematically-challenged Germonio in elementary calculus, but it should be able to verify for itself without too much difficulty that the first derivative of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, Te / (4Qe), is equal to the reciprocal of (4 Te^3). However, as I have explained, it is insufficient to take that first derivative either at the surface or at the emission altitude and call it the Planck parameter (the values would be 0.18 and 0.26 respectively). One must integrate across the emission surfaces at all altitudes, and the Schlesinger ratio does that to quite a respectable approximation. Therefore, the Planck parameter today is 288.4 / (4 x 241.2), or 0.30 (though IPCC usually takes 0.31 for convenience, because it is the reciprocal of 3.2). It is not, therefore, precisely the first derivative of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer; it is not constant; it is not decreasing exponentially. It is increasing near-linearly, and very slowly.
As to Germonio’s second point, the fact remains that official climatology denominates temperature feedbacks (the clue is in the name) in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that induces the feedbacks. It is, therefore, necessary to know what the input temperature in Kelvin is, and it is necessary to know what the mu gain factor is. Armed with these two values, together with the value of the feedback fraction beta, one can swiftly use the corrected form of the equation to derive the equilibrium temperature. If Germonio thinks that feedbacks ought not to be denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, it is really no good complaining to me: let it address its complaint to secretariat@ipcc.ch.
But it should be obvious even to Germonio, blinded as it is by the Party Line, the Party Line and nothing but the Party Line, that since feedbacks are denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin it is necessary to know the magnitude, in Kelvin, of the temperature that induces them.
Germinio, read any CP Snow?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/16/leavis-snow-two-cultures-bust
Academic disputes are visceral precisely because most of what is disputed is trivial.
Nigel,
I am not sure how that is relevant. What is the academic dispute you are talking about? Monckton is not an
academic.
You said ‘the story about the vice-chancellor yelling at a whole department because of some paper would never happen in any UK university. And … more likely that it is a complete lie.’ MoB is not a professional academic (thank God) but this is certainly ana academic dispute which takes us back to CP Snow.
So the informant is lying? I expect you work at a nice old one, not a modern upstart struggling for money to pay the vice chancellor’s inflated salary.
‘One of those who heard the vice-chancellor feared that the university would expose itself to fraud charges if it failed to admit that the Party Line had been wrong all along and instead went on applying for hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxpayer funding for research on global warming that its senior members knew was not and is not going to happen at anything like the predicted rate. He broke ranks. There is goodness even in the grim, concrete camps of the Forces of Darkness. That is how we learned of the vice-chancellor’s meeting.’
The furtively pseudonymous “Germinio” falsely accuses me of lying, and does so from behind his cowardly cloak of anonymity, contrary to site policy here. If it wants to accuse me of lying, let it name itself and do so honestly, and also with evidence. Otherwise, no one here but “Germinio’s” fellow totalitarians will pay the slightest attention. It is “Germinio” who is lying, and is a lying coward to boot, because it is not willing to say who it is. How craven and poltroonish is that?
Germinio, put the pot on a stove that has a constant temperature of 255K. Problem solved, heat will flow into the pot or out of the pot depending on temperature of pot.
Dan,
That is my point – you are applying heat to the pot not a temperature. And if we adopt your
definition of how to apply a temperature signal then it is clear that there can be no feedback.
If you put the pot on a stove that has a constant temperature of 255K and then measure the
temperature of the put it will be at 255K.
“If you put the pot on a stove that has a constant temperature of 255K and then measure the
temperature of the put it will be at 255K.”
Only true if there is no thermo resistance or if heat capacity of the pot is zero. Otherwise, it will take some time.
Dan,
Of course it will take some time but that is irrelevant. You agree that energy (heat) is flowing into or out of the pot – that is the signal that is being applied not the temperature. The same is true with the earth –
energy flows into the climate and produces a temperature change. It makes no sense to say that a temperature is applied. Monckton’s formula makes no sense – if you want to claim that applying a temperature signal means bring a body into contact with an body at a constant temperature then there
can be no feedback .
If the pot is losing heat to the air it will never reach the temperature of the 255k unless the thermal resistance between the stove and pot is zero. There will be temperature drops as heat flows through a thermal resistance just like voltage drops across a resistor. Even if the pot is in a vacuum it will radiate heat to colder objects. So I do not think it reasonable to assume the pot will be at 255K even if it has been on the stove for a long time. However, if the air and all other objects are at 255K then the pot it will settle at 255K.
So Dan you are agreeing with me – if as you suggest applying a temperature signal of 255K means
surrounding the pot by an infinite thermal reservoir then the final temperature will be 255K so there
can be no feedback. This is then clearly not what Monckton means since he is claiming a feedback
from an input temperature signal. So again the claim that you can apply a “temperature signal” makes
no physical sense. You apply energy to a system you do not apply temperature.
Germonio, I think I see your point. Summing two temperatures does not mean anything. Is that what you are getting at?
Germonio,
If you have 255K and you add 255k, What does that mean? Is he using temperature to mean heat?
You can not add temperatures. Mockington had better go back and work on this some more. Thanks for pointing this out.
Mr Da Silva seems to have as much difficulty with climate science as he does with my surname. Whether he likes it or not, official climatology denominates feedbacks in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that induced them. Therefore, it is perfectly sensible to denominate the input to and output from the feedback loop in Kelvin. If Mr Dsa Silva objects to this, let him address his concerns not to me but to secretariat@ipcc.ch.
lord monckton , i would like to add my gratitude that you have taken the time to reply to so many questions from the good members of this website. i would also like to add at first glance it appears there may be one or two members that are not playing the game correctly. sock puppets have been a consistent problem here.
i am fairly sure if the type of analyst that derives personal identity from internet posting style were to have a look at some of the recent replies, they might suggest there is at least one poster using possibly three separate identities to hold a conversation with themselves.it may be worth considering if the time taken to respond to this one/three individual is worth it ,given your busy schedule.
that this occurs is one of the reasons i take no offence when willis regularly derides those using pseudonyms. the fact i don’t mind using my own name instead of my mildly mocking of cagw online moniker helps of course.
regards r.gallacher
Monckton,
“…official climatology denominates feedbacks in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that induced them. Therefore, it is perfectly sensible to denominate the input to and output from the feedback loop in Kelvin.”
No, it’s not. You cannot input a unit of temperature and have it turn into a unit of rate of energy transfer. How do you add 10 C to a watt? How do you turn 255 K into power? It’s not sensible. This is such an enormous, fundamental error in your whole argument, how could you fail to recognize it? Many have independently, it seems, identified this as a problem. You can dismiss them as “climate fanatics” but the problem will remain.
“But our feedback fraction is a proven result.”
This shows you are not a scientist. No half-decent scientist would say such a thing, regardless of it veracity of the finding.
Apart from that, it’s really quite bizarre to me that you could calculate something that depends on such complex factors using one observed, one calculated and one theoretical terms. What’s the error on that, Monckton?
Where’s your uncertainty? Or do you presume to accurately calculate the feedback fraction to the hundredth of a degree? That settles it, then. In what year will the 1.2 increase C be, precisely, given our current rate of CO2 increase? Or how about this: what will be the global average temperature in 2020? That’s not so far off, so we can see if you’re right pretty soon.
On no discernible rational basis, Mr Da Silva imagines that one cannot add temperatures. In mathematics and in physics, one can add any number of quantities, provided that the quantities are of the same denomination. Thus, the emission temperature in the absence of greenhouse gases is 255 K or thereby. The direct warming in the presence of greenhouse gases is 12 K. Adding these two quantities, each denominated in Kelvin, gives the 267 K global mean surface temperature that would have obtained in the pre-industrial era in the absence of feedback.
bitchilly,
“i would also like to add at first glance it appears there may be one or two members that are not playing the game correctly. sock puppets have been a consistent problem here.
i am fairly sure if the type of analyst that derives personal identity from internet posting style were to have a look at some of the recent replies, they might suggest there is at least one poster using possibly three separate identities to hold a conversation with themselves.”
Why do you say this? What reason do you have to believe that “sock puppets” are at work? What are they, anyway? Do you suppose they are only on one “side,” whatever they are? (I honestly don’t know what you mean, even though I’ve been called one. Different names of single people? Oh, now I’ve got the visual! But one person could only have two puppets, unless he used his feet.)
I still don’t know why you’d assume this. I assure you I have only one identity here, at any rate. I didn’t see any of the above replies before posting my own.
Silber, like many of the commenters who have – albeit feebly – tried to question our result here, is attacking not me but official climatology. Whether Silber likes it or not, official climatology denominates a “temperature feedback” – the clue is in the name – in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that induced the temperature feedback. Note the “per Kelvin” bit. That is why – again, whether Silber likes it or not – the zero-dimensional-model equation used diagnostically by official climatology relates the input and output temperatures via the unitless mu direct-gain factor and the unitless beta feedback fraction. The product of mu and beta, also unitless, is equal to the product of the feedback forcing, in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, and the Planck parameter, in Kelvin per Watt per square meter. if Silber does not like the fact that that is the way it is done, there is absolutely no point in trying to whine at me about it. Silber should send an email to secretariat@ipcc.ch, telling it that IPCC does not, in this respect, know what it is talking about. For our part, we have adopted wholesale – for the sake of argument – all of official climatology except what we can prove to be wrong. Since official climatology denominates feedbacks in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, so do we. Since official climatology uses the zero-dimensional equation in which temperatures serve as the input and output signals, so do we.
The problem with Silber, and with the few other totalitarians who have sneeringly attempted and failed to impugn our result, is that totalitarians have already decided upon (or have been instructed to obey) the Party Line, so they start from the aprioristic assumption that the Party Line cannot be questioned and that, therefore, anyone who questions it must be wrong. But Silber, again like many of the totalitarians who have commented in an unpleasant and strikingly ill-informed fashion here, is – over and over again – attacking not me but the very Party Line that the totalitarians are sworn to uphold.
Those of us who do science rather than deferring to some Party Line or another approach these questions with an open mind, not an open mouth. Let Silber read the papers cited in this series, and then think about them, and then think about the points we have made in saying that those papers are in one crucial respect incorrect. Silber will then realize that we are making a sound and reasonable case. The Party Line is simply wrong.
Bitchilly is correct: very large sums are spent by the totalitarians on trying to discredit these threads. One or two of the commenters on this particular thread have been called out in the past by our kind host as paid agents of the Green Blob. The fact that so many of them make personal attacks from beind a cowardly cloak of anonymity indicates that they have no intention of playing fair.
In the law of the United Kingdom, you can call yourself by any name or pseudonym you like, as long as in doing so you are not acting dishonestly.. To direct personal criticisms at named contributors here from behind a cowardly cloak of anonymity is to act dishonestly.
I’m sure that many of us want to help in some way but don’t know how. Money always plays a role. Could we perhaps hire a blimp loaded up with suitable text to hover over particular institutions inviting them to respond?!
But, seriously, what other ideas can we come up with? Even though I have been unemployed for a considerable time I would give generously to assist in some way.
Perhaps the offer of a substantial prize to anyone who can prove Mr Monckton’s team wrong?!
Or should we play by the rules of the climate game and bribe an editor? Or threaten his livelihood? I jest.
In other words, how can we (I) help other than by cheering from the stands?
(I live in Australia – currently a political and ideological cloud-cuckoo land.)
I am most grateful to Mr Van Wegen for his kind offer. We are indeed much in need of funds to support our work, which has gone unpaid for many years. But I do not like to ask, though I am very willing to encourage others to ask on my behalf, perhaps on Kickstarter or Gofundme. That would be a real help.
Bottom line the author points out the degree of uncertainty that means they cannot predict weather for more then 72 hours ahead beyond the the level of ‘in the summer it will be warmer than the winter ‘,remains despite all the claims of ‘settled science’ .
However, it never has been about the science , no matter its good or bad parts , and the give away has been the very language used which finds its home in politics, religion and the support of sports teams.
But the castle they have built on this ‘sifting sands ‘ is very impressive and provided a very comfortable home for many, so despite its poor foundation its walls will prove hard to undermine and much effort will go into opposing such an approach from those that know they will never get the like again .
My Lord (of the Rings)
What university? Who is the vice chancellor? Who is the lecturer?
You have repeated your claim here several times. I suggest you get the approval of two sympathetic skeptics – Lindzen and Spencer. If they agree with you, post here their statements of approval. Otherwise, repeating your claim again and again won’t make it come true.
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
– The Hunting of the Snark
I presumed the deliberate obfuscation was to preserve legal standing for a potential libel lawsuit. I’m sure clever people can find all the particulars you’re looking for. Unfortunately, I am not a very clever person.
The story has the ring of truth. I cannot imagine that it would be fabricated. And I would like to know the particulars, too.
Actually if you had any knowledge about the working of a UK institution or I am guessing any
university around the world you would realise that the story is rubbish. No VC would act in such
a way and even if they did the story would be all over the media.
I am not saying anything about which university panicked when our result became available to it, or which lecturer handed out libelous propaganda material. In due course, this information will be passed to the appropriate public authorities for investigation and, if thought fit, prosecution.
In response to the ever-childish “Dr Strangelove”, who steers very close to offending against site policy by smearing me from behind a curtain of furtive, cowardly anonymity, we shall in due course seek publication in a learned journal in the usual way. We are expecting a long and tough battle, because our result is inconsistent with the Party Line. But, in the end, there must be some intellectual honesty somewhere in the system, and, if our result is correct, then it deserves publication. If not, it will not be published.
She keeps her secret identity from the Lord of the Rings. The warlock might cast a spell and turn her into a Hobbit
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eExswRDlvw8/T3-iUKVl0NI/AAAAAAAAAN0/PFdJRTtkdQ8/s1600/kick_ass_hit_girl_chloe_moretz-normal.jpg
Monckton of Brenchly,
“…we shall in due course seek publication in a learned journal in the usual way”
Didn’t you say the paper had already been submitted to a leading climatological journal? Was that submission withdrawn?
Our paper has indeed been submitted: but one does not seek publication until it passes peer review, whereupon all authors will be asked by the journal to indicate their personal wish that it be published in its final form. We are expecting a long process of more than usually thorough and probably even acrimonious scrutiny, since our result, if correct, does not reflect at all well on official climatology. And there is always the possibility that we are wrong. Unlike the climate fanatics, we always bear that possibility in mind. That is why we do not rush to report our result in the mainstream news media. Peer review, even if it is hostile, will reveal any genuine weaknesses in our argument. If we are able to remedy such weaknesses as may be found, well and good: we shall in due course be published, and then it will be worth telling the world of our result. If there is any fatal weakness – and none has yet been identified – that will be the end of that. But at least we tried. For science advances not by recitation of the pre-existing Party Line but by refutation of it. That is why it is and has always been such an uncomfortable process for the trailblazers, requiring great courage and persistence on the part of those who think they have discovered something that was not previously known. For the true-believers in the pre-existing Party Line, of course, no thinking at all is required. They can recite the mantras they have been ordered to recite, and sink into well-earned obscurity.
Monckton of Brenchley, here is my opinion. Take your idea and talk to a control systems engineer and clean it up.Then drop all this hyperbolic talk about college and spend the next year on working on nothing but this. If you really have a Tesla-like mind you will become one of the great scientists in history. I will applaud you.and you will have saved us from Michael Mann
In response to Mr da Silva, three of our co-authors are control engineers and one of them holds an associate professorship in applied control theory. The analysis I have put forward in these articles is actually mainstream control theory, but of course the climate fanatics, not a few of whom are paid to try to disrupt threads such as this, are not willing to admit it.
The point we are making is actually very simple and very robust. Feedback processes do not respond only to amplification of an input signal: they also respond to the input signal itself. But climatology denies that feedback processes respond to the input signal: see IPCC’s definition in the head posting. If one takes proper account of the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature as well as to the 12 K further temperature contributed by the non-condensing greenhouse gases, the feedback fraction falls by nine-tenths compared with the official estimate. Therefore, equilibrium sensitivity is about one-third of the current central estimate. And that’s the memo.
Mockton of Bencey
Glad to hear it. But really if you want to be taken seriously stop jumping around from theory to theory and get this one reviewed. I sm sure Richard Lindzen could as some seriousness to your endeavors.
I want to know what an input signal of 255K means. If I have a pot of water in my kitchen how do I apply
an input signal of 255K? I can physically apply a voltage to it or a current or and energy flux but I cannot
apply a Temperature to pot. So since such a statement would appear to not to correspond to a physical system any equation that describes a non-physical situation would also appear to have no physical meaning.
In response to the furtively pseudonymous “Germonio”, the Earth’s emission temperature is 255 K. There is a further direct warming of 12 K from the non-condensing greenhouse gases. That makes 267 K. But, before Man had any significant impact, the temperature in 1850 was 20 K higher, at 287 K. The difference is accounted for entirely by feedback. But the feedback processes, notably the water vapor feedback, cannot distinguish between the 255 K and the 12 K, failing to respond to the larger signal and responding only to the small amplification of it. They respond to both signals, thus, the feedback factor is 1 – (255 +12) / 287, or about 0.07, and not 1 – 12 / 20 = 0.63, as official climatology thinks.
We tested the zero-dimensional-model equation by building circuits to represent it and then putting in an input voltage to represent 255.4 K of temperature, then holding the mu amplification factor at unity, and then setting the beta feedback fraction to 0.07. Sure enough, there was a large feedback response. This result has come as a nasty surprise to official climatology, which has tried to define feedback as a response only to a change in temperature, when in fact it is a response to whatever temperature is present in the circuit. All of this is elementary control theory – and we have a professor of it as a co-author.
I don’t know what it is about the totalitarians that makes them so near-universally nasty. What on earth is Mr da Silva doing moaning about my “jumping about from theory to theory”? Has the Party Line blinded him to how the scientific method actually works? In a series of articles over many years here, I pointed out, with hard evidence from all the principal temperature datasets, that the world was not warming at anything like the predicted rate. In 2015, with three distinguished co-authors, I published a paper in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, setting out a first outline of our concerns about the extent of official climatology’s over-prediction and working towards an explanation. That paper remains, by a factor of 12, the most-downloaded paper in the entire 63-year history of that eminent journal of the world’s largest academy. And in it we first outlined our concern that there was something not well with feedback mathematics.
We published a further paper that year in the same journal, in response to a rather feeble attempt to knock down our original paper on the part of a clutch of notorious climate fanatics. I then wrote a third paper that year, this time in Energy & Environment, after a long discussion with the editor, who agreed that I might write a paper setting out some anomalous results that appeared to arise from official climatology’s feedback methodology and ask for assistance in nailing down what had been done wrong.
Sure enough, some months after the paper was published, a control engineer contacted me to say he had heard of our work and to identify an error in official climatology’s feedback math. However, the error he had found was very small, and would make only about 0.01 K difference to equilibrium sensitivity. “But it’s an error!” he protested. “Read the standard textbook!” And he kindly sent me a copy of Bode (1945). I read the chapter on feedback and at once realized in what area to look to narrow down the error.
After another 18 months of research, including working with a government physics laboratory, we were able to refine our result and set it before the public here for further discussion.
Now, I am at a loss to discern how any reasonable person could describe this long and slow and careful process as “jumping about from theory to theory”. Naturally, we have tested numerous possibilities before refining our result. Naturally, our enquiries continue in various directions. But, whether Mr da Silva likes it or not, science is a slow and meticulous process of formulating hypotheses (he would sneer that this is “jumping about from theory to theory”, then expressing them in rigorous mathematical terms, then testing them, and then presenting them for scrutiny by others. So I make no apology for having researched this question for some years, moving ever closer to the truth. And – again, whether the impolite Mr da Silva likes it or not – we now think we are close to the truth, and the remarkably feeble attempts by the usual suspects here to tear down our result tend powerfully to confirm that, after all, we may well be right.
Monckton,
“I don’t know what it is about the totalitarians that makes them so near-universally nasty.”
Do you not see the irony behind this? You accuse others of nastiness in the same sentence you vilify and insult and generalize! “Totalitarians”??!! Nonsense! You would be so much more believable if you refrained from such juvenile, unprofessional tactics.
“The analysis I have put forward in these articles is actually mainstream control theory, but of course the climate fanatics, not a few of whom are paid to try to disrupt threads such as this, are not willing to admit it.”
This is interesting. This is a perfect tactic to dismiss in the public mind any disagreement as paid by special interests. Where’s the evidence that this even happens? Perhaps the idea comes from the skeptic propaganda strategy? Who would bother paying for this kind of thing, when it’s completely ineffective?
Monckton, your comments about your experiment appear to prove my point. You applied a voltage
as an input signal to your circuit not a temperature. Again what does an input signal of a temperature
mean? Unless you can describe how I can apply a temperature signal to something as simple as a
pot of water your arguement makes no sense.
Furthermore building a test circuit proves nothing – there are any number of clever engineers around who
can built electronic circuits to mimic equations (this is called analog computing). It does not prove that
the equation correctly describes the physics of the climate. Furthermore I am sure that for some sufficiently high input voltages your circuit would saturate and no longer correctly model your equation which would
again show that equations are only valid for particular parameter regimes and you have not shown that
your equation is valid for the wide range of input temperatures you discuss.
And if you don’t like me calling you a liar then provide details about which University and which vice-chancellor otherwise you are as much hiding behind a screen as I am.
Of course Silber can be expected to spring to the defense of its fellow totalitarians. The totalitarian style of argument, taken originally from the Germany of the 1930s and then copied by the disinformation directorate of the KGB, which recruited a million totalitarian saps in the West over 40 years to attack the personal reputations of those who were proving effective in publicly opposing the totalitarian Party Line, is instantly recognizable. Silber may like to read Ion Mihai Pacepa’s book on the subject, for it was he who ran that directorate. The sheer numbers of totalitarian shriekers were so great that before long Pacepa’s people trained them to recruit their own successors. And the only technique they used was personal attack after personal attack. They were trained never to argue for Communism or against Capitalism, but always to make false but calculatedly damaging accusations against the successful opponents of the Party LIne, until almost all who might otherwise have dared to speak out were silenced for fear of having their own reputations trashed.
If Silber were to read the bulk of the critical comments here, she would discern just how little science there is, and just how much personal sniping.
As to the lying, cheating “Germinio/Germonio”, let it say who it is. Otherwise, its lies are just that. It is contemptible.
No, talk to a climate scientist who has expertise in this area.
(Above comment referred to “Take your idea and talk to a control systems engineer and clean it up” – Dan da Silva.)
Silber, as is the fashion with totalitarians, arrogantly assumes that none of the co-authors has any climatological expertise and that our paper has not been submitted to leading professors in the field. Wrong on both counts.
Monckton:
“Of course Silber can be expected to spring to the defense of its fellow totalitarians.”…then a tirade about totalitarianism, communism, the Party Line, etc.
This is why you are not a scientist, Monckton. You are so steeped in politics and prejudice that you can’t help ranting about it, and it affects your judgement. You can’t help seeing me as a totalitarian – or at least calling me that – when I am nothing of the sort. You don’t know me at all, you just label me based on your preconceptions. It’s foolish. There aren’t many people here for whom I’ve developed the level of dislike and distaste that I have for you. You slander people so freely, and play the victim so readily, I’ve no reason to believe you aren’t doing the same thing at the top of your post. It’s people like you who give skeptic science a bad name.
You are very good at avoiding discussion of the fault that people are talking about. Saying, complain to the IPCC doesn’t make sense, since in your illustration of the “great error” in mainstream modeling it is you who made the change to the equation that makes it nonsensical.
I feel no need to defend myself against your accusations. Fire away.
Silber whines that I am not a scientist. In this, Silber reveals the totalitarian’s obsession with the notion, which sprang originally from the French revolution, that each should have his own metier and a certificate of his entitlement to practise that metier and no other. Well, I have no certificate that I have received appropriate Socialist training in climatological physics and related topics, but I have a host of eminent co-authors who have such certificates. So sneering at me is a complete waste of time. It makes no difference to our result, and it will make no difference to the eventual acceptance of our result.
Silber, a totalitarian bully, has no certificate of appropriate Socialist training itself, and yet it presumes arrogantly to lecture my eminent co-authors who have. And Silber does not like getting a taste of its own medicine. Well, I give as good as I get. if Silber had made sensible scientific points without snideness or rancor, it would have received polite responses in as much detail as was necessary.
As it is, I repeat that official climatology’s definition and understanding of feedback is incorrect. Nothing that the totalitarian shriekers have written in these threads has in any way led us to question that conclusion.That does not mean we are right: but it does mean that the shriekers, none of whom is sufficiently qualified in control theory to address our result, are shrieking in vain. They will need to get their act together and mount a proper scientific challenge, free of the snideness and spite and sniping that has characterized their contributions here. Be polite, or stop whining.
I made hopefully helpful comments to the second and third paposts in this series. It would be nice if they got reflected in the eventual paper; attribution is not necessary or desired. Nothing further to contribute this time other than the admonition that having this theoretical control systems result square more nicely with observational energy budget approaches—the important new Lewis and Curry 2018 that carefully responds to all previous criticisms of LC15—woild be desireable. My previous comments showed how that can easily be accomplished inside this posts framework. An ECS of 1.45 or 1.5 kills CAGW just as effectively as 1.2.
As Mr Istvan will see, we have indeed taken account of the energy-imbalance in the last couple of articles – and, of course, in the underlying draft paper. We had to keep things as simple as possible initially to try to aid comprehension.
As the draft paper points out, our theoretical approach, based on the known emission temperature, the known temperature in 1850 before significant anthropogenic perturbation and the known estimate of the radiative forcing contributed by the non-condensing greenhouse gases allows a far more certain estimate of the feedback fraction and hence of equilibrium sensitivity than any empirical approach.
If Mr Istvan would like to email me at monckton[at]mail.com, I shall be happy to send him a copy of the draft paper.
The atmospheric burden of water vapor increases exponentially at around 7% per Kelvin of warming.
I do not understand how this incorrect statement can continue to be made. It has been wrong ( not even wrong, actually ) for as long as Climate Science has been a subject for investigations.
For me, a more nearly correct statement is:
The atmospheric burden of water vapor has a potential to increase at around 7% per Kelvin of warming.
Use of “exponentially” is a red herring.
Consider the former version. How does it apply to areas at which there are no sources of water vapor. How does it apply to areas at which the thermodynamic states and energy exchanges required to convert liquid water to water vapor do not exist. How does it apply to Transpiration from plant leaves that self regulate evaporation. How does it apply to those cases from which the evaporation process is critically controlled by physical phenomena and processes at/within the interface between the atmosphere and the source of water vapor, and not by a bulk-to-bulk driving potential. How does it apply to evaporation for which wind and radiative energy input are important and these are at decreased levels of effectiveness. &etc.
Mr Hughes makes a fair point: the space occupied by the atmosphere is capable of carrying near-exponentially more water vapor with temperature. In the lower troposphere, the NOAA record shows that it does so. In the middle and upper troposphere, where 90% of the water vapor feedback is imagined to occur, it does not.
As explained in the head posting, though an increase of 7% per Kelvin in lower-troposphere specific humidity is of course an exponential increase, and is observed, the absorption occurs only at the far wings of the principal absorption bands of water vapor and is, therefore, logarithmic, giving a net-linear and actually quite small water vapor feedback, especially when the countervailing effect of the lapse-rate feedback is taken into account.
It took me a few tries before I think I got the argument, and I had control theory way way back in the day. If I understand it correctly, the basics are that the basic black body emission temp of the earth itself must be included in any feedback calculation (in addition to forcings), while the IPCC and climate folks have attempted an end run using only perturbations.
I think what needs to be done on a more general scale for a wider audience is to somehow simplify the argument as much as possible, and then for folks who are interested, scale it back up to it’s total complexity. We need to reach the common person and the totally accurate technical part of the argument is going to be an instant eye glazer. I’m trying to think of analogies which might work for a casual explanation but have been drawing a blank. In any event, any way to simplify the overall argument and to show how the IPCC’s definition is inherently deceptive would be a very good step to aid broadening the reach of this crucial argument.
I particularly liked the strength of the argument with respect to finding the climate sensitivity using earlier records, since the time period chosen is claimed to be a baseline by warmists to begin with. It’s so much simpler to do the calculation when even your opponent essentially argues that for that period, the perturbation is zero.
TheGoat makes an excellent point that in due course we shall need to explain our result in terms that as many as possible can understand. At present, however, we are more interested in making sure that we have made no significant error in our analysis, which is at this stage inevitably somewhat technical, though at root very simple. If TheGoat would like to turn our articles into a plain-man’s-guide to our idea and would like to email it to me at monckton[at]mail.com, I’ll be happy to check it for scientific accuracy.
Greetings Mr Monckton, that’s an interesting challenge, thank you for the reply. I’ll mull it over and see what I think can be done, it sounds rewarding. Best regards, and thank you for the contact info.
Monckton,
Have you considered sending it to someone who is involved directly in climate modeling for consideration, since you believe you have found a key problem? They could evaluate it with more expertise than anyone here can. If you hadn’t already spread the idea on the internet, you could have sent it anonymously or with a pseudonym if you were worried about bias (making it clear that’s what you were doing). It this is truly the breakthrough you suggest, it needs to reach those who do the modeling for assessment.
However, it’s too late for that approach now. You have chosen a different route: publicize it first as if it were “settled” – obvious, no less. No major upset to the scientific consensus should be touted as valid based on one hypotheses that hasn’t been through a rigorous scrutiny and debate within the climate science community. That doesn’t mean skeptic blogs.
Kristi Silber
Please name an an honest, independent, unbiased “climate scientist” and “science journal editor” who are NOT tied to the billions in government aid and funding network REQUIRING their consent to the government bureaucracy’s and bankers’ demands for the trillions in taxes and carbon future trading only made possible by their own cultural CAGW hypothesis.
Do you consider Trump’s selection for the EPA to be unbiased and “fair”?
Do you consider his selections for the DOE, DOD, Interior Dept, HHS or any other agency to be fair and honest?
Do you consider ANY of their predecessors selected by the Obama administration to be fair, upright, honest and balanced?
RACookPE1978,
You have made the of-so-common error of confusing science and politics. You will forever be hindered from a realistic view of science this way. My opinions of the EPA have no bearing on science.
“Please name an an honest, independent, unbiased “climate scientist” and “science journal editor” who are NOT tied to the billions in government aid and funding network REQUIRING their consent to the government bureaucracy’s and bankers’ demands for the trillions in taxes and carbon future trading only made possible by their own cultural CAGW hypothesis.”
What? I don’t even know what this means. Anyway, it’s too late. I can’t name anyone who would want to help Monckton figure out if his idea is any good; those qualified to do so are those he insults endlessly.
Kristi Silber
That you do not know an unbiased, honest, ethical, self-called “climate scientist” in the self-policing, restricted CAGW academic-publication-bureaucratic community is interesting and important in its own right. But I expected that reply.
What I find more interesting, more important, and far more frightening is that you do not even know “what” an honest, ethical, un-biased “scientist” is!
The relentlessly totalitarian Silber asks whether we have considered sending our paper to “someone who is involved directly in climate modeling”. Now, why didn’t we think of that. Well, of course, we did think of that. We sent the paper to two of the most eminent professors of climatological physics on the planet. Both commented with approval on what we had found. That does not mean we are right, but it provides some reassurance. Certainly, the two professors were considerably more knowledgeable and less prejudiced that the totalitarians – paid or unpaid – who have fumblingly attempted to criticize our result here. And several of our co-authors have considerable experience in all the relevant fields of science, from climatology and astrophysics to statistics, as well as control theory.
Amusingly, Silber mischaracterizes the totalitarians who have shrieked and sneered their opposition here as “qualified” to do so. Well, no, they aren’t. For a start, if they were genuine and well-qualified scientists, rather than totalitarians, they would have expressed their criticisms politely – something that Silber, to take one example, has yet to learn. I respond politely to politely-expressed points, but if any of the totalitarians here resorts to sneering or name-calling I give as good as I get, and it is entertaining to watch the resultant blubbing from the bullies, who are used to dishing it out but not to taking it.
RACookPE1978:
Well, whom would you like? Richard Lindzen? Roy Spencer? William Happer? Judith Curry? Steve McIntyre? Nic Lewis?
Surely, if this were the simple, profound, earth-shattering demonstration of a mainstream-climatology error in basic physics that Lord Monckton contends, the heavy hitters would rush to embrace it.
Or maybe–just maybe–they prefer not to be linked to someone who’s known for shoddy work. Maybe they’ve already looked at it and found it wanting. Maybe they consider him an embarrassment.
I know I do.
The Born Liar, who has made numerous fabrications here and elsewhere and, by his habitual sneering tone, has demonstrated over and over again that he has not the slightest interest in the objective truth, says I am “known for shoddy work”. Pot calls kettle black – except that the Born Liar does no work at all, preferring to snipe and carp safely from the sidelines. He asks why skeptical climate scientists are not falling over themselves to congratulate us on our result. Well, true scientists, unlike the Born Liar, a clapped-out shyster by “profession”, wait to see the full details of the published paper before rushing to sneer.
The Born Liar, in these threads, has already been caught out making up spurious numbers, then finding to his dismay that even the spurious numbers deliver the low sensitivity that is inherent in our result, then making up further spurious numbers without saying he had tampered with his own numbers, and then finding to his further dismay that these numbers, too, deliver low sensitivity.
And that is the point of our result. The moment one accepts that feedbacks respond not only to changes in temperature, as official climatology falsely asserts, but also to the 20 times larger emission temperature, one can only posit a feedback factor anywhere close to official climatology’s 0.67 by assuming – per impossibile – that the rate of increase in the feedback fraction beta is considerably greater than the 7%-per-Kelvin increase in specific humidity with temperature, making no allowance for the logarithmic response of the absorption spectrum, which guarantees a net-linear change in the water-vapor feedback with temperature, and – on NOAA’s evidence of decline in specific humidity in the mid- and upper-troposphere layers where 90% of the water vapor feedback is supposed to come from – a very small one.
But the main reason why no one believes the Born Liar is the generally spiteful tone of his comments, on which our kind host here has already had to call him out in this series. The Born Liar needs to learn manners as well as the scientific method and elementary climatology and control theory. My rule here is to give as good as I get. The Born Liar has been consistently and repellently rude, for that is the way of certain shabby, shoddy, shysters. So let him not blub now. Let him wait till our paper has been published, and then let him give the entire scientific community the benefit of his shyster’s wisdom by writing a paper of his own. But he is wasting his time sniping here. His comments are being widely taken as confirmation that we are very likely to be right. In this sense, by the relentlessly discourteous tone of his remarks here, he has become what the sociologists call a “negative reference group”: people listen very carefully to what he says, and to the hysterically malevolent tone in which he says it, and know there is a strong probability that we must be correct.
The Born Liar asks why skeptical climatologists have not rushed to congratulate us on our result. That shows just how little the Born Liar knows about the scientific method. Grown-up scientists do not rush to sneer and snipe and snark, and certainly not in the spiteful tone that the Born Liar habitually uses,. until they have had the opportunity to read the published paper. Till then, there is nothing for them to comment on. And, in any event, science does not, repeat not, work by mere head-count. Democracy works by head-count: science does not. It advances when those who have the courage to question the previous orthodoxy, rather than pretending to oppose it while in fact supporting it, are successful in establishing that the previous orthodoxy was in some material respect incorrect. It did not matter that the eugenicists prevailed at one point in scientific history, for they were wrong. Likewise the Lysenkoists. Likewise the climate fanatics. Either we are, objectively speaking, correct, in which event it matters not how few or how many scientists for the time being agree that we are correct, or we are wrong, in which event our hypothesis, like many others before it, will fail. Climate theories are two a penny these days: serious climate scientists simply don’t have the time or inclination to comment on every new theory that comes along. Peer review – for all its faults – is their filter, removing all but the hypotheses that look something like respectable science. The Born Liar, by his present appeal to authority, is marking himself out as a totalitarian climate fanatic in very poor disguise.
MoB,
Of all your comments and efforts, the one I appreciate the most is your continued deference to true science. And by this I mean your stated position that you remain open to the possibility that someone could validly demonstrate your conclusions to be incorrect. I wish more scientists were this way. Any branch of research, any conclusions, and any theories should be held loosely, with the full belief that some potential future knowledge could suddenly and irrevocably change our understanding.
When we de-personalize this…when we disassociate ourselves from our theories and beliefs in this manner, we truly free ourselves to follow the science without fear, wherever it will take us.
So, thank you again. I’m definitely looking forward to how this all plays out.
rip
(aka Brian Lindauer)
I am most grateful to Mr Lindauer for his kind words. We are certainly open to genuine and well-intentioned corrections designed to improve upon, or even altogether to overthrow, our result, for that is how the scientific method works. Al-Haytham wrote a wonderful passage on the duty of the “seeker after truth” – his beautiful description of the scientist – to be critical of his own work and open to correction.
I think it will be as obvious to Mr Lindauer as to most others reading this thread that most of the attempts to attack our result have not been well-intentioned. They have been motivated by defensiveness, by financial reward, and in at least one instance by outright malice.
We shall see what the peer reviewers say. The journal normally sends its reviews within three months, so we should be hearing from it anytime now. There will be a long period of back-and-forth (unless they sling us out altogether). But if they sling us out without having provided a proper and legitimate argument against our result, we shall simply submit it elsewhere, and go on submitting it until either someone provides a proper argument against our result or bows to the inevitable and publishes it. Then it will be popcorn time.
“You have made the of-so-common error of confusing science and politics. You will forever be hindered from a realistic view of science this way. My opinions of the EPA have no bearing on science.”
So-called climate science has no bearing on science. You make the common mistake of confusing CAGW for science when it is and has mostly been politics. the UN’s IPCC is a political body with a political charter hence their “for policy makers” summaries written by politicians for politicians.
thegoat, i don’t understand any of the control theory. my basic understanding of what lord monckton proposes is as you say ” the basics are that the basic black body emission temp of the earth itself must be included in any feedback calculation (in addition to forcings), while the IPCC and climate folks have attempted an end run using only perturbations”.
if i can understand the basic tenet of the proposal i would be surprised in anyone else cannot. most people posting here have a higher iq in a toenail clipping than i have so it should not be a problem 🙂
Bitchilly is surely correct. The main point we are making is a very simple point – so simple that one notoriously irascible skeptical blogger refused to allow a discussion of it on his thread because “We don’t do simple”.
Consider the input data we are using for our theoretical derivation of the feedback fraction. The Earth’s emission temperature of 255 K is cited in paper after paper after paper. We think it is on the low side, but for the sake of argument we have adopted it. The Earth’s equilibrium temperature in 1850 is likewise a settled quantity. It is 287 K. There is general agreement that the directly-forced warming from the presence of the naturally-occurring, non-condensing greenhouse gases is about 12 K, and it could vary quite a bit either side of that value without much affecting our calculation.
Now, official climatology says that the 32 K difference between emission temperature and equilibrium temperature in 1850 is accounted for by 12 K of forcing and 20 K of feedback. So do we. But official climatology takes no account of the pre-existing emission temperature in deriving its feedback factor. It says that the feedback factor is about 1 – 12 / 32, or 0.63. Actually, the CMIP5 models’ equilibrium-sensitivity estimates imply an interval of 0.67 [0.46, 0.76].
We, on the other hand, bear in mind the emission temperature of 255 K and the equilibrium temperature of 287 K in the calculation, thus: the feedback factor is 1 – (255 + 12) / 287 = 0.07, an order of magnitude below official climatology’s value. And that means that, given a reference sensitivity of 1.1 K to doubled CO2 , Charney sensitivity is 1.1 / (1 – 0.07), or 1.2 K.
Now, what uncertainties are there in our calculation? They are very few, since the three input quantities are very widely agreed upon and will not be vastly different from the values we have used. The only remaining uncertainty lies in the fact that some feedback processes are themselves temperature-dependent. But, even if one assumes a linear or even an exponential growth in the feedback fraction, one would have to multiply our 0.07 by 4 to 0.28 even to get the equilibrium sensitivity as high as 1.5 K, the IPCC’s present minimum estimate. In our numbers, therefore, there is very little wriggle-room.
Given the numerous – Hell, almost constant – justifications for alarmist messaging to ‘bring about awareness’, yeah, I’d say they knew.
This is one of the few threads that I have read in more than skim fashion.
An observation that has yet to be made (unless an all-too-possible miss has occurred) is His Monckship’s (familiarity by way of admiration not approbation) choice to make his ideas available on a public medium.
While this medium is by and large friendly it is by no means un-sceptical and indeed contains an (albeit modest in quantity but not in quality) essential criticism.
Is this unusual in climate analysis?
Colin Noggin Smith,
Monckton has here in one swift moved cast a grand, general insult on the integrity of those who come here and voice disagreement. He has not only called into question their characters, but suggested that they were unable to find fault with his arguments – which is not at all the case! Even I saw the most obvious flaw.
I can’t imagine this getting published. Posting it here 5 times is no substitute for peer review. The main flaw stays the same, and the others flow from that.
“paid agents of the Green Blob come here to do their best to disrupt the discussion threads, often in a rather venomous style”
So how can I get in on the bucks? Are you paid more for being more venomous?
(I wonder if he will characterize what I’ve said here as “nasty” or “venomous”? His insults describe his own verbiage far more than others’. Weird. Maybe he’s the paid agent here. Sounds like lots of work and money went into this, including hiring an unnamed university to create what – a circuit with a feedback? Did you take photos of the model, Monckton?)
Kristi Silber bangs on futilely and ignorantly about what is said to be the “obvious flaw” in our argument, but without saying what the “obvious flaw” is. It is very likely that the “obvious flaw” is in fact a flaw in official climatology, and Silber is attacking me instead of official climatology. But I can’t be sure, because Silber’s latest posting is mere yah-boo,
I have not stated that everyone commenting critically here is paid by the Green Blob. But some are, and our host has a good idea who they are, and on one or two occasions he has called them out, and without challenge from them.
Silber, by the manner of its conduct, is manifestly a totalitarian who has accepted a priori the Party Line handed down by those peddling the climate scam. And now Silber whines, not being willing to take what it has dished out. Tough luck.
With such creatures, no amount of reasoning will make any difference. Silber will just have to wait, as we shall have to wait, to see whether our result will in due course be published in a journal sufficiently acceptable to the scamsters to require them to respond properly and scientifically. Eventually, the Party Line will change, if we are right, and Silber will then have to salute and obey, just as Silber does now. Silber should read 1984 by George Orwell, for Silber’s approach seems very like that of the orator who, on being told in mid-speech that the Party Line had changed 180 degrees, seamlessly continued his oration by attacking vehemently every word he had previously uttered. For the Party Line is all.
Well, those of us who think for ourselves rather than allowing the Party to think for us find this curious denial of the use of reason by the totalitarians to be not merely strange but pitiable.
But it has been most encouraging to us that, in response to this series, very little that constitutes genuine, competent and legitimate scientific criticism has emerged. Of course, formal peer review will be far more rigorous than the lamentably inadequate drivel that some have spouted here. But those now reading these threads (and they are being very widely read) have come to realize, by the sheer egregious feebleness of the arguments advanced by the totalitarians, by the strikingly unpleasant manner in which they express those arguments, by their weeping and gnashing of dentures when they are subjected to a taste of their own medicine, and by the very high frequency of the occasions when their arguments in fact prove to be attacks not upon me but upon official climatology, that the game is up and the scare is over. And no amount of chanting the Party Line will change that.
“(I wonder if he will characterize what I’ve said here as “nasty” or “venomous”? His insults describe his own verbiage far more than others’. Weird. Maybe he’s the paid agent here. Sounds like lots of work and money went into this, including hiring an unnamed university to create what – a circuit with a feedback? Did you take photos of the model, Monckton?)”
Kristi, I don’t know whether you have prior “familiarity” with Monckton’s MO here (and elsewhere). He is not interested in genuine critique of his various (and many) “game-changers”. Any such is met first of all by obfuscation by verbiage and if one persists, as does, say, Nick Stokes, with obvious knowledge and expertise, we get the resort of ad hominem. Meanwhile he laps up the “hugs and kisses” from those here that fawn over him.
I have met his exemplary manners, fit only for a Lord (hereditary and therefore not commanding respect) metted out to his inferiors.
Rest assured he will be back with more “game-changers”, most probably having incorporated some fudge factor to the errors he so discourteously rejected here with this and others.
No one takes any notice of him because of his attitude and past form.
I would suggest you watch the series of videos by potholer54 – “Monckton’s Bunkum” – which gave him the opportunity of detailed rebuttal. Which was not forthcoming.
And so we have ….
“But it has been most encouraging to us that, in response to this series, very little that constitutes genuine, competent and legitimate scientific criticism has emerged. ”
Such is the netherworld where publication on a sceptical blog, denizened by say 5% who are both capable and have bothered to engage with the good Lord on matters of legitimate critique and with whom he treats as mere dirt on the bottom of his shoe.
No Monckton. A temperature does not have a feedback. A detlaT does, created by a forcing of W/m^2.
Like I said it’s the hugs and kisses.
I look forward to his reply to this……
No, on second thoughts the man, and his bad manners are irrelevant.
The furtively pseudonymous Tony Banton, a.k.a. “Toneb”, is his usual discourteous self. What a dull life it is for totalitarians such as he, shrieking his hostility to reasoned argument if it indicates that the Party Line is incorrect. As far as I know, I have not used the phrase “game-changer” of our result: that would be somewhat premature, for even if we are right the likes of Mr Banton, inured to the Party Line and deferential to that and to nothing else, will not be at all willing to accept that in this major respect the Party Line is simply incorrect.
In the furtive and misguided Mr Banton’s long and tedious posting, the only discernible attempt at a scientific point is his unsupported asseveration that “a temperature does not have a feedback” and that only a change in temperature does. In that, he – and all of official climatology with him – is simply wrong. He faithfully reflects IPCC’s definition of a “climate feedback”, but IPCC’s definition, as the head posting demonstrates, is incorrect.
Mr Banton, and many other paid or unpaid totalitarian shriekers here, have not the slightest interest in the objective truth. They are paid to defend, or too stupid to do other than defend, the Party Line, and only the Party Line, and, for these pitiable creatures, there is no truth beyond or contrary to the Party Line. What a denial that attitude is of the use of the faculty of reason.
Mr Banton also forgets that sneering at me will make not the slightest difference to anything. I am supported by a team of distinguished scientists, including an associate professor of control theory, who is entirely clear that temperature feedback processes, where they exist, respond not only to a change in temperature but also to the input temperature, which, in the climate, is the emission temperature. Therefore, it would seem that Mr Banton, like official climatology, is at odds with mainstream control theory. Perhaps he would like to write a paper in a journal of control theory, trying to inform the specialists in that field that the input signal in a feedback loop, if unamplified, does not induce a feedback response.
If he were able to read scientific textbooks, he might try to work through the equations in Bode (1945, ch. 3), where he will find the form of the system-gain factor mu / (1 – mu * beta) proven in one of several simple ways. It follows that the output signal is the product of the input signal and the system-gain factor. It is then self-evident that any variation in the value of beta must vary the value of the output signal, contrary to Mr Banton’s recitation of the Party Line.
It has been depressing to see the various adherents of the Party Line trying to deny or explain away the well established mathematics of control theory, which was borrowed by climatologists who did not understand it and was therefore misapplied, with the effect of very greatly but very wrongly increasing the estimates of equilibrium sensitivity. Once the elementary error we have identified has been corrected, the Party-Liners will be reassured to know that there will still be some global warming caused by Man – but they will be displeased to learn, and the rest of the world will be delighted to learn, that the global warming will be slow, small, harmless, and beneficial.
Toneb,
How true! All you said. It’s really a waste of time conversing with him, but at least putting in a presence and pointing out the scientific errors again and again, by many and sundry, might make his ideas a little less unquestionable to others. As Monckton knows, repetition is part of getting a point across. Boy, he has some whoppers of attacks!
Silber continues to demonstrate a merely totalitarian streak, resorting yet again to nothing more than yah-boo. None of the totalitarian commenters here, who are identifiable by their spiteful tone and their disregard for scientific truth and objectivity, is in any way qualified to challenge the eminent team of scientists who are my co-authors. Sneering at me, therefore, is altogether pointless.
Our scientific point is a remarkably simple one. It is that the 255 K emission temperature, as well as the 12 K directly-forced warming from the presence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases, induces a feedback response, and that, therefore, the very high feedback factor and consequently high climate sensitivity based on assuming that the feedback response to emission temperature is part of the actually very small feedback response to the non-condensers are unwarrantable and erroneous. In due course, once our result is published, eminent control theorists will examine it and, if our own control theorists are anything to go by, they will uphold our result as correct.
Silber has conducted itself like a bully, and, like a bully, it does not like getting a taste of its own medicine. Well, I give as good as I get. For too long, the totalitarian bullies have tried to cow us into silence, but I am no longer prepared to take the bullying in silence.
ToneB,
Thanks for the tip on the videos. I got a kick out of the Bunkum…and yet it’s a reminder of the sad state of affairs when someone can and will willingly dupe the public with lies (if they are errors, that’s no less egregious, spectacular as they are).
How strange that in his latest post to me he yet again tries to explain the “science” in between his slanders.
Sly devil, I’ll give him that. Or slimy devil.
Don’t whine.
ToneB,
Hahaha! The Pinker stuff is great! Monckton is publicly informed of the truth that he’s been misrepresenting, then he goes and lies to members of Congress?!
Those really are great. Hard to refute, too! And pretty hard to misinterpret – nothing ambiguous about it that the propaganda machine can put a spin on.
(Mods, this is not off-topic. It goes to his credibility.)
Look at that: “Stop whining.” Just 2 words? Not a diatribe?
Don’t whinge.
I am grateful for Mr Smith’s careful interest in our discussion of our result here. One reason why we chose to give an outline of our work here is that a number of paid agents of the Green Blob come here to do their best to disrupt the discussion threads, often in a rather venomous style. Therefore, I was genuinely interested to see if they could come up with some substantive criticisms. But they can’t.
Their sneering tone gives them away. There would be no need to be impolite if they were confident of their case. But they know the game is up, and that means their paymasters will no longer send the monthly check. Of course they’re angry. But sneering at me for being a mere layman won’t help. I have a formidable team of experts behind me.
Mr Smith is right that getting any kind of debate on the climate question is very rare, because the climate fanatics know by now that they are wrong and would very nearly always lose any debate, so they sniffily say the science is settled. But they cannot allow the world’s most popular climate website, which is this one, to go unchallenged in case it becomes so powerful as to menace the drab and erroneous uniformity on which they, like totalitarians in every age, insist upon. So the disruptors (some of them even pretending to be skeptics) are paid to make a nuisance of themselves here. But it will do them no good. Not any more.
Your lordship,
I am an electronics engineer of some experience so am able to use my rusty (but hopefully not beyond economic repair) control knowledge to follow some of the debate.
It is regular best practice in my industry to review designs informally & formally to arrive at a good solution. To not use all means to check ones work would be regarded as negligent. There is nothing like another person’s view to spot the tree that close involvement conceals in a wood. Person’s reviewing may be expert, they may not. Indeed in some problem solving exercises it is mandated that they should not be an expert.
Presenting your work in this way will undoubtedly increase its robustness.
Mr Smith makes the excellent point that one must check and check and check again. Indeed, al-Haytham, who founded the scientific method in the East as Thales of Miletus had done in the West, said in 11th-century Iraq that one should be deeply suspicious of one’s own results, and should subject them to the most searching scrutiny, investigation, inspection, inquiry and verification.
That is why, when I first realized that something was amiss with official climatology’s derivation of feedback responses, I recruited three eminent co-authors and published a paper two years ago in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences giving, among other things, a first outline of our concerns, though we had not at that stage tracked down official climatology’s error. We knew there was one, but we did not know what it was.
That paper provoked perhaps the most vicious campaign of totalitarian hatred ever directed at a blameless individual. One of our co-authors found his reputation trashed on the front pages of Science, Nature, the New York Times, the Boston Globle, the Journal of Education, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times et hoc genus omne.
As a result of that hate campaign, I realized that there was something in our paper for the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy that had upset the Green Blob more than somewhat. Most of our paper was an unexceptionable pedagogical account of the zero-dimensional-model equation and its utitlity in climate-sensitivity studies. There was nothing in that uncontroversial account to provoke the malice directed at my award-winning co-author. But there was a single paragraph in which we had briefly aired our concern about some irregularities that were evident in official climatology’s handling of feedbacks. It was plainly that paragraph that had provoked the organized, paid fury of the marxstream media.
So, after a long discussion with the then editor of Energy & Environment, I wrote a full-length paper setting out in mathematical terms the reasons why I thought there was something wrong with climate feedback math. I said that at that stage I did not know what was wrong, and I asked readers to contact me if they were able to shed light on the problem I had identified.
A few months later, an electronics engineer who had heard of this paper got in touch and said that indeed there was an error in official climatology’s method. However, that was a small error, which would have made a difference of only 0.1 K to global temperatures. But the engineer told me to read Bode’s textbook on feedabck amplifiers and network analysis, published in 1945, which had been a best-seller worldwide for several decades until the digital revolution made the study of feedback less important. As soon as I read ch,. 3, on feedback, I realized at once what official climatology had gotten wrong. I recruited numerous co-authors and we set to work on drafting a paper.
So stark was the difference between IPCC’s definition of a “feedback” and the definition in Bode’s text that we decided to build a test rig to verify that, even if there were no amplification of the input signal by greenhouse gases, that input signal would still generate a feedback response, in the form of a higher output signal, in the presence of a non-zero feedback process. Sure enough, a signal was measured, and it was exactly what our use of the equation had predicted it would be.
We were not satisfied, however, and we commissioned a government laboratory to build a more sophisticated test rig and operate it under strict laboratory conditions, including careful control of the ambient temperature in a special chamber. The result was the same as it had been on our own rig. We carried out some two dozen different tests to investigate different properties of the corrected form of the zero-dimensional-model equation, and in every case, to the nearest tenth of a Kelvin, the result was as the equation had predicted it would be.
So we wrote up our research in the form of a learned paper. That paper is now out for peer review at a leading climatological journal. We are not expecting to be given an easy ride, for our result has come as a great shock to the hate-filled totalitarians some of whom are paid to disrupt discussion threads here, for this website is far more dangerous to the Green Blob’s totalitarian ambitions than is generally realized. The hatred directed at me for having dared to do this research and to publish an account of it in this series was a further clue suggesting that we were on the right track. For if we were obviously wrong, there would be no need to direct hatred at us. All that would be necessary would be to track down an experienced control theorist and invite him or her to review our work. That is what we did, and the control theorist made one or two modest corrections, but otherwise found our result to be correct.
The process of peer review will be a further level of checking. The journal to which we sent our paper is right at the heart of official climatology, and we chose it precisely because we expected its reviewers to be hostile. Therefore, they will do their very best to find any weaknesses in our result. If there is a fatal flaw, you can be sure that they will find it. And, once they have found it, that will be that. But if they do not find a fatal flaw, we expect the journal to allow us to make such major or minor revisions as may be necessary and then to publish our result.
Then the final round of checking will begin, as the entire discipline directs its searching gaze at our result. There will of course be counter-papers. But official climatology will find that, to a large extent, its freedom to overthrow our result is limited, because it has borrowed feedback methodology from electronic network analysis without really understanding it, as is all too evident from some of the comments here from the totalitarian shriekers. We think, therefore, that if we succeed in getting as far as publication, it will be very difficult to impugn our result.
However, I bear in mind at every stage that, eminent though my co-authors be, we may all be wrong and the totalitarians right after all. All that one can really say at this stage is that we have done quite a bit more checking and scrutinizing our own result than would perhaps be normal, and we are prepared to do quite a bit more to answer any genuine concerns that the reviewers may have. I hope that Mr Smith will find this account of our researches helpful. He may be left wondering why, given that the point we are making is so simple and so obvious, we did not find it a great deal sooner than we did. I have known for at least six years that there was something wrong with feedback mathematics, and had been researching climate questions for another six years before that. Well, it took time because our result is, at first blush, so surprising. At first, we found it hard to believe that such an elementary error could have been perpetrated. So we went back and read all the early papers on feedback in the climate, and we saw exactly how the error had crept in.
To make assurance doubly sure, we also consulted several of the world’s most eminent physicists in various relevant fields. They tell us we are not wrong. Of course, they too could be wrong. But, for the moment, we are entitled to think, cautiously, that we may be right.
Your lordship,
As well as the findings the multi-disciplinary nature of your team also strikes me as unusual in this field. I have a perception that climate science is largely the output of a small pool of earth-science-qualified authors. And that mistakes appear to be oft discovered by (so called) citizen scientists or experts in other fields into which climate scientists stumble (blunder?) – statistics being a rich hunting ground.
I wish you and your team joy in your endeavour.
Apologies for the alternate names, it’s still me!
Different computers had different signin means.
Mr Smith raises an interesting point. The sciences are becoming more and more specialized. When, as here, one branch of science borrows physics from another branch without understanding it, no one notices. I think this is the main reason why no one in the past 40 years had discovered the error we eventually found. Climate scientists on both sides of the debate are having genuine difficulty with our result, because they have been trained all their working lives to believe that a feedback process responds only to a change in temperature, and not to the temperature that was present before the change. Of course, as any control theorist would tell the climatologists, it responds to both.
I think that our difficulty in publishing in a journal of general physics or even of control theory is that the editors will be suspicious that we are trying to hornswoggle them into publishing a paper that is full of elementary climatological errors.
In the end, we have thought it right to publish our result in a leading journal of climate science, because the reviewers will be able to confirm that the climate-science side of our argument is correct and mainstream. We are expecting to get several rejections before we are published, not because we are wrong but because we are right, and the implications for official climatology are just as grave as the vice-chancellor realized they were when he shouted at his environmental-sciences faculty that our result was a “catastrophe”.
But each journal we send the paper to will have to send it out for review, and the reviewers – though they will reject it – will nevertheless be educated in the truth. In due course – it may take years, but we shall get there in the end – a journal will break ranks, do the decent thing and publish. That’s if we’re right. if we’re wrong, then our paper will not deserve to be published. On verra, as the French say.
“When I recover from a recent illness” reports of the university’s frauds will be sent to the public authorities.
1. Wishing you a full and long lasting recovery.
2. My donation is ready and waiting for WUWT to host the Monckton event; USD 100K target, or more?
3. Mr Monckton will you post a copy of the ‘university fraud’ complaint(s) on WUWT?
Does Lord Monckton not yet know that his successive blog “papers” are just nonsense ?
Does Lord Monckton naively believe that repeating the same drivel over and over again will magically give it more sense ?
When repeatedly shown by several commenters here and elsewhere why his reasoning is false he is definitively unable to respond to a handful of (definitely fatal) criticisms and instead systematically resorts to ad hominem attacks and further laughable rant against professional scientists.
Nice textbook example of Dunning Krueger effect at work.
Gammacrux,
I imagine Lord Monckton knows that if something is repeated often enough it begins to carry the weight of truth. A few months from now people will be citing the stuff as if it were accepted, regardless of its veracity.
He has an admirable ability to skirt around the issue of the T-feedback problem, blaming the IPCC, even though it is their models he supposedly is improving – as if he didn’t understand what people are talking about. He’d make a good politician.
Kristi Silber
Lord Monckton is obviously not at all seeking the truth about climate sensitivity to CO2 as scientists really do. His agenda is indeed nothing but politics and pushing preconceived wishful thinking.
When confronted to any criticism he invariably tries to vilify its interlocutor . With the lame excuse in my case that I do express my criticisms anonymously I’m a “coward”, according to the good Lord !
As if anonymous reviewing of papers submitted to scientific journals was not to standard practice in science.
Now as I already pointed out here the climate sensitivity may well be lower than the medium value of IPCC range, yet this is for sure not because of the so-called “grave error” that Monckton trumpets.
Only observations will eventually tell. The Lewis and Curry recent paper is precisely an example of a scientifically sound and serious work in this respect. Yet the results remains quite questionable because the uncertainty is still very large in the observational data available up to now.
In response to the coward “gammacrux”, who snipes childishly and anti-scientifically from behind a pathetic pseudonym, not a single argument recognizable as scientific is discernible in its puerile rant. If it wishes to make yah-boo comments of this kind, let it find the courage (if it has any) to say who it is.
I’m just a physicist, not even a climate scientist. Name is in my e-mail. Get it from Anthony Watts.
I told you previously about what makes your “paper” plain nonsense and you were definitely unable to address the criticism. No need to further argue.
And knowing who I am won’t lend more sense to your drivel either.
Nor does it really give you any handle to spout even more laughable ad hominem attacks.
“gammacrux” was entirely unable to find any genuine fault with our result. But only cowards attack from behind a cloak of craven anonymity. Let it declare itself: otherwise, everyone will know it for the poltroon it is.
Mr Blair is very kind. I am now well on the road to recovery. And his kind offer of a donation is most generous. As to posting any criminal complaints, the usual method in Britain is to submit them in confidence to the appropriate authorities for investigation and, if thought fit, prosecution.
gammacrux: unfortunately the rest of us here don’t know what you told CM that made his theory plain nonsense. If you can’t repeat it here, or give a link to it, we shall have to ignore you, and assume that actually, you haven’t got anything.
See-owe to Rich
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/06/looping-the-loop-how-the-ipccs-feedback-aerobatics-failed/#comment-2789840
Now you are definitely free to ignore me. No problem.
As science will definitely and can safely ignore Monckton’s blog “papers”.
I answered the furtively pseudonymous and cowardly “gammacrux” in a previous thread. His point was not a serious one and was easily disposed of. In essence, he recited IPCC’s Party Line to the effect that feedback responds only to a change in temperature and not to the pre-existing emission temperature, which the most cursory look at the corrected zero-dimensional-model equation demonstrates to be nonsense, and he made the startling discovery that the emission temperature of 255 K is 255 K greater than 0 K. If he were to visit his local kindergarten to learn some elementary arithmetic, he would discover that any absolute quantity N exceeds zero by N. That trivial truth does not in any way alter our result.
Correct or not, Lord Monckton’s team has made an original contribution. I am eager to see a convincing response. So far, none – and yet the Monckton idea, since it is theoretical and mathematical, ought to be capable of being settled PDQ. No need to wait for more data; it’s about the correct interpretation of data we have already have in our hot little hands.
One question for the lord, from a mere villein in the matter of feedback theory. If a system contains a positive feedback from a prior state (like your 255k?) why is it not doomed to grow? Can it ever be stable, unless some other, negative, feedback(s) compensate?
I tend to think of world temperature as an emergent feature of a complex system(s) which is continually being perturbed, by sun, season, Trump, whatever. If the system feedbacks are predominantly positive, then it would tend to boil over. But it is pretty stable (my opinion), so it must contain negative feedbacks. Indeed, if and when these dominate, they may produce ice ages; which I understand have been observed. If Monckton is correct, it seems my negative feedbacks – my epicycles – are no longer required. Sad; I have become rather fond of them.
BTW, Mr Watts, me being lazy, I would be grateful if you could place references to the previous blog posts on this work, at the head of this one and on any subsequent posts.
Noswedd da to Hywel Morgan, and many thanks for his kind words about our result. I agree with him that so far there has been no convincing rebuttal of our result. Mr Morgan is also right that our result was arrived at by theoretical means, and indeed we have referred enquirers to the relevant sources in control theory.
Mr Morgan asks a sensible question about whether there is anything to stop a runaway feedback from occurring. The simple answer is that the value of the output signal (i.e., equilibrium temperature) is well constrained where the feedback factor is sufficiently far from the singularity in the rectangular-hyperbolic response curve of equilibrium sensitivities in the presence of feedback factors. That singularity occurs at a feedback factor of 1. Therefore, there is indeed a real danger that, if the feedback factor were higher than, say, 0.5 (and official climatology’s interval of feedback factors is almost entirely above 0.5) there is a danger that, under certain climatic conditions, the temperature would try to climb infinitely far and infinitely fast.
However, one important cosnequence of our result is that it is very, very close to certain that the feedback fraction is below 0.3. If it is that low, the zero-dimensional-model equation shows that equilibrium sensitivity will be only 1.5 K at most, so there is no need to worry about runaway feedback.
Finally, Mr Morgan mentions negative feedback. It is easy to calculate that, for any reasonably foreseeable negative feedback, the climate would be very stable, as it would for any positive feedback factor greater than 1.5.
Diolch yn fawr, arglwydd Monckton … close, but no cigar: it’s “noswaith dda”.
But to be serious, and to Mr Da Silva’s understandable urging to get the work out formally; the climate mags will recoil; they may even want to find peers. Cut out all the climate implications except what is absolutely unavoidable, and offer it to a publication in physics or engineering. Accepted there, you are made; otherwise, the stamp-collectors will ignore it. Pob lwc!
Aaaargh! “may NOT even want to find peers”. Blin.