Did official climatology know its predictions were nonsense?

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 – 14^th-century technology to solve a 21^st-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

T_eq = T_ref 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 T_ref 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