By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
USA Today, in common with most of the banestream media, appears to be temperamentally incapable of fairly reporting both sides of the climate question. On Friday July 6 Doyle Rice, its “weather editor”, published yet another “worser than y’all ever done thunk” piece, this time “reporting” – with his trademark lack of critical faculty – a “new study” suggesting that global warming may prove to be “double what had been predicted”.
The article opens in Doyle’s characteristically tramp-toting-“The-End-Is-Nigh”-banner style with the words “Collapsing polar ice caps, a green Sahara Desert, a 20-foot sea-level rise.”
Let’s knock Doyle’s rubbish on the head, point by fatuous point.
Collapsing polar ice caps: Doyle failed to mention that until the last couple of years Antarctic sea ice had been growing, or that both in Antarctica, home to 90% of the world’s ice, and in Greenland (5%), there is a striking correlation between areas of undersea volcanic activity and areas of ice loss, or that in Antarctica a new global low temperature record was recently set.
A green Sahara desert: Doyle somehow failed to mention that greening a desert (the Sahara was first reported to be greening as far back as 1981, so it’s not news) is a good thing, not a bad thing, just as the loss of permafrost in Russia and northern Canada would be a good thing, opening up vast new acreages of agricultural land.
Doyle Rice – “lack of critical faculty”
“A 20-foot sea-level rise”: Frankly, the world is becoming bored of this stale nonsense. IPCC has been menacing us with 20ft sea-level rises for decades, but nobody cares anymore, because sea level continues to rise at about 8 inches a century, not 20 feet. Even Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy horror movie, A Profitable Fiction, made the silly 20 feet claim: but, in the very year when Gore was making the movie, he was buying a $4 million condo at – er – Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, just feet from the allegedly rising ocean. Follow the money, Doyle, baby!
An artfully-colored world map: Again, we’ve seen it all before:
The caption read as follows: “This map shows Earth’s average global temperature from 2013 to 2017, as compared to a baseline average from 1951 to 1980, according to an analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Yellows, oranges, and reds show regions warmer than the baseline.”
Yeah, whatever. Let’s recolor the map. New caption: “Green regions are where the world has benefited from slightly warmer weather”.
Doyle intones, tediously, that “Global warming could be twice as warm as current climate models predict.” Or it could be half as fast as models predict – just as it has been since the 1970s, not that Doyle tells you that. We’ll come back to this point shortly.
Next, Doyle says: “The rate of warming is also remarkable: ‘The changes we see today are much faster than anything encountered in Earth’s history. In terms of rate of change, we are in uncharted waters,’ said study co-author Katrin Meissner of the University of New South Wales in Australia.”
And did he show her – or, for that matter, USA Today’s few remaining readers – the following graph from the Central England Temperature Record for 1694-1733? Um, no. The CET record is quite a respectable proxy for global temperature change, and it shows – in common with many other lines of evidence from the end of the Little Ice Age – that for 40 years the rate of global warming was equivalent to 4.33 K/century – about twice as rapid as the fastest rate seen in any 40-year period since Man began influencing climate in 1950.
Doyle digs himself in deeper: “This could mean the landmark Paris Climate Agreement – which seeks to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels – may not be enough to ward off catastrophe.”
However, as the 2018 BP Annual Statistical Review of Energy shows, growth in GDP and in energy is a good deal faster in the non-OECD countries, to very few of which the “landmark” Paris agreement applies, than in the OECD countries, to nearly all of which it applies.
And does Doyle tell his readers that, after 20 years of politicized reporting by the likes of him, coal’s share of global power generation is 38%, exactly as it was 20 years ago? Nope.
On drones dreary Doyle: “Even with just 2 degrees of warming – and potentially just 1.5 degrees – significant impacts on the Earth system are profound,” said study co-author Alan Mix, a scientist from Oregon State University. “We can expect that sea-level rise could become unstoppable for millennia, impacting much of the world’s population, infrastructure and economic activity.”
Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, who has been studying sea level for half a century and has written more than 650 papers on the subject, says mean sea level rise was 8 inches in the past century and will be 2 ± 6 inches this century. Much of the apparent “sea-level rise” in the official record was artificially conjured into being by devices such as the fictitious “glacial isostatic adjustment” (see diagram above).
Now for the “Worse Than We Thought” meme: “Study lead author Hubertus Fischer of the University of Bern in Switzerland and his team found that our current climate predictions may underestimate long-term warming by as much as a factor of two. Meissner said that “climate models appear to be trustworthy for small changes, such as for low-emission scenarios over short periods, say over the next few decades out to 2100. But as the change gets larger or more persistent … it appears they underestimate climate change.”
Did Doyle check any of this nonsense before merely parroting it? Don’t hold your breath, gentle reader. Of course he didn’t. All he did was check that these supposed “findings” were consistent with the Party Line. And that was that.
We have already seen that the statement published by Doyle to the effect that recent warming was unprecedented was flat-out nonsense. Let us now check his repetition of the statement that “current climate predictions may underestimate long-term warming by as much as a factor of two.”
We shall check this statement in two directions: first, by seeing whether current warming is exceeding existing predictions, and then by seeing whether it is likely that warming will accelerate many times over so as to match the new, “Worse Than We Thought” predictions.
IPCC’s very large interval of predictions made in 1990 is the yellow zone in the graph above. The bright blue trend-line is the least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the NCEI and UAH global-temperature anomalies from 1990 to May 2018. The observed rate of global warming is entirely below IPCC’s original predictions, and not much above half of its mid-range prediction.
To exceed IPCC’s mid-range prediction by double, the warming rate would have to increase by more than triple, from 1.55 K/century equivalent to 5.55 K/century.
What of the computer models? In the CMIP5 ensemble, the mid-range estimate of equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 (which is near enough the same as the mid-range estimate of 21st-century warming from all manmade sources) is 3.35 K (derived from Andrews 2012). To double the CMIP5 models’ mid-range rate, the warming rate would have to increase more than fourfold, from 1.55 K/century equivalent to 6.7 K/century.
It’s not going to happen – or, if it does, Man’s tiny perturbation of the climate is not going to be responsible. To show the arithmetically-challenged Doyle why global warming will be less than half of what is predicted rather than double, let’s do the math for him.
From Andrews 2012 we learn that the radiative forcing from doubled CO2 is about 3.464 Watts per square meter. The Planck sensitivity parameter is 0.299 Kelvin per Watt per square meter (Schlesinger 1985). So reference sensitivity to doubled CO2, before accounting for feedback, is the product of the two: i.e. 1.035 K.
Since the difference between reference and equilibrium sensitivity is accounted for solely by the feedback factor (i.e., the fraction of equilibrium temperature that is feedback-driven), all we need to do is find out what that feedback factor is. That is the holy grail of climate-sensitivity studies.
IPCC mentions “feedback” >1000 times in its 2013 Fifth Assessment Report, but it has no idea of the true value. Why not? Because in 1985 James Hansen at NASA made a striking error of physics that climatologists have profitably copied ever since.
James Hansen, ex-head of NASA GISS, should perhaps have been arrested for bad science.
From Lacis et al. 2010, the albedo in the absence of greenhouse gases would be 0.418 compared with today’s 0.293. Today’s insolation is 1364.625 Watts per square meter (Mekaoui et al., 2010; see also DeWitte & Nevens 2016). To this we should add the direct forcing of about 38.6 Watts per square meter from the presence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases. From these data the fundamental equation of radiative transfer tells us that emission temperature, which would obtain at the surface in the absence of greenhouse gases, would be 254.3 K before taking any account of temperature feedback.
However, the surface temperature in 1850, before any appreciable anthropogenic perturbation, was 287.55 K (HadCRUT4). From these values, we can directly find the hitherto-elusive feedback factor. It is simply 1 – 254.3 / 287.55, or 0.116. And not the 0.6-0.9 assumed by the usual suspects. Ever since Hansen’s catastrophic 1984 paper, climate science has, in effect, been using an equation to represent the influence of feedback on temperature that, though not incorrect, is incomplete and, therefore, incapable of determining the feedback factor correctly.
How official climatology subtracted out the Sun by mistake and got global warming wrong. Its variant is the difference between two equilibrium states of the full, mainstream equation.
Climatology’s defective variant of the system-gain equation that is universal in control theory – the study of feedback in dynamical systems (systems that change their state over time) – is, in effect, the difference between two equilibrium states in the complete, mainstream equation.
Since the emission temperature is common to all equilibrium states, Hansen’s use of an equation that takes the difference between them subtracts out the Sun’s warmth – the principal input on which the feedback response depends. That is why the feedback factor has until now been exaggerated up to sixfold, and climate sensitivity up to fourfold.
How have things changed since 1850? Well, there has been 2.29 Watts per square meter of net anthropogenic radiative forcing (IPCC, 2013, fig. SPM.5). Multiply that by the Planck parameter 0.299 to obtain the reference warming from 1850-2011 attributable to Man: about 0.7 K. But there was 0.75 K warming from 1850-2011 (HadCRUT4 again), and to this we might add 0.25 K to this, making 1 K in all, to allow for the imagined (and probably imaginary) “radiative imbalance” of 0.6 Watts per square meter over the period.
So the feedback factor for 2011 is 1 – (254.3 + 0.7) / (287.55 + 1.0) = 0.116, exactly as it was in 1850. To three decimal places it is the same as the feedback factor for 1850. Why so little change? The reason is that the 0.7 K reference warming contributed by Man is so paltry compared with the 254.3 K already contributed by the Sun and by the pre-existing greenhouse gases.
Now that we know the feedback factor, we can derive equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 concentration. It is simply the ratio of the reference warming of 1.035 K from doubled CO2 to (1 – 0.116), which works out at less than 1.2 K. Not the 1.5-4.5 K predicted by IPCC; not the 2.1-4.7 K predicted by the CMIP5 models; and certainly not the 6.7 K implicit in the paper on which Doyle’s silly, extremist article is predicated. The Party Line is no substitute for doing the math.
How many ppm/v does it take to raise the temperature 1 C ? Don’t need a link, just post here so everyone can see it.
When the world was a black body, the S-F formula says it’s 255 K or -18 C. Then wonderful co2 came along and Viola! added 33 K, which raised the temperature to balmy 288 K or 15 C or 59 F. This all happened when co2 levels were 280… 290… 300 ppm/v. At 280 ppm/v it took 8.48 ppm/v to raise the temperature 1 C or 1 K, at 290 it took 8.78 ppm/v and 300 it took 9.09 ppm/v to raise it 1 K or 1 C. (somebody will nitpick at what the co2 levels were, just providing a range)
So, here we are at 411 ppm/v, what should the increased temperature be? It takes awhile? 50 years? 60?
Did the linear slope of co2 change? Did the rate of change in the effect of co2 change? Does it now take much more co2 to raise the temperature 1 K or 1 C? Or less?
Here’s what’s interesting: If it takes the same or less co2 to raise the temperature ( feed back loop or whatever) the temperature should be apparently much, much warmer. And if it takes more co2 to raise the temperature then after a point, additional co2 will have little or no effect.
If AGW is using the most advantageous number it’d be 300 ppm/v. By Nov 1960 315 ppm/v would equal 1.65 C. Looks like more temperature and co2 records will have to be adjusted.
But then if they wanted to show how much co2 we are ‘stuffing’ into the atmosphere it’d be 280 ppm/v and in 1960 the temperature should have increased by 4.13 K or 4.13 C.
Somebody informed me it was 285 ppm/v, so 8.64 ppm/v to raise the temp by 1 K or 1 C. By 1960 the temperature should have soared by 3.47 K or C.
That’s an awful lot of heat to be hiding somewhere…. since 1960.
If the “science” is so solid that co2 is a GHG, then why aren’t we on our way to 303 K or 30 C or 86 F ? A rise of 1 C at this point is insignificant in proving co2 has anything to do with temperature. It’s taken 126 ppm/v increase in co2 to get a 1 K or C rise ?
30 years later from 1988, when co2 levels were 350 ppm/v, not even a 1.5 K or C increase since then when it should be 7 K or C warmer.
Core radiative transfer calculations performed by GCM’s are bogus
The weather patterns in GCM’s are supposedly calculated with the Navier Stokes equations with turbulence being just one ugly variable. The Navier Stokes equations have only been solved within very limited boundaries and many assumptions. Even to solve them for water rushing through a pipe is a formidable task not to mention air rushing through the whole atmosphere along with 1000’s of other variables. Good luck with that but let us assume that we aren’t worried about being accurate with the weather patterns. Trying to solve the heat transfer equations is another whole new ballgame.
Here is proof that the core radiative transfer calculations performed by GCM’s are bogus. Dr. Judith Curry couldn’t find them and concluded that the physics is not there. Well she is right. I quote from the bible of Radiative Heat Transfer by Michael Modest. Chapter 20 Solution Methods For NonGray Extinction Coefficients
Gray media radiative properties do not vary across the electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore we are dealing with non gray medium.
Page 627 says ” In general radiative heat flux, ……… must be evaluated for many many spectral locations, followed by numerical quadrature of the spectral results. THIS PROCESS WILL ALWAYS INVOLVE THE GUESSING OF A TEMPERATURE FIELD , FOLLOWED BY AN ITERATIVE PROCEDURE. ”
Hitran databases can provide the spectral information but they cant evaluate the temperature for you.
Modest goes on to say ” The above statements are true even for the case of radiative equilibrium. ”
So what does this all mean ? It means that you can never calculate a temperature even if you had all the other 1000 variables experimentally determined ( which is impossible by the way). The physics is not there and never will be there for an atmosphere. GCM’s are junk science and always will be junk science.
Science Officer Spock would know how to do that in around 500 years or so.
NASA are also doing junk science.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2641/keeping-an-eye-on-earths-energy-budget/
If you go to the bottom of the page you will see the last update was July 10 2018. Susan Callery is the science editor . Here is a quote from her after she got hired by GISS.
“I can work in the field of Earth science and enjoy and learn about space science at the same time.”
I wonder how that fulfills NASA’s GISS mission statement. Space studies is within the name of GISS. GISS is the Goddard Institute of Space Studies. So they hire a science editor who is learning on the job. The mind boggles.
1) The energy chart on the above page shows that the back radiation is exactly the same amount as total incoming solar radiation. If the atmosphere is cooler than the surface especially at night, how can you have a transfer of IR the opposite way? Even in the daytime the surface heats up much more than the atmosphere. A room 4 metres by 3 metres with a large single glazed window may need 80 watts/m^2 to heat it by a infrared heater in the winter time. So NASA are asking us to believe that back radiation will supply over 4 times the heating capacity of a 1000 watt infrared heater Don’t forget infrared heaters don’t heat the air , just the walls and floors and objects including people. So why would IR from the surface heat anything?
2) They show IR emitted from the surface at 117% of total incoming solar radiation. NASA does not understand algebraic flowcharts. You cannot have an ongoing flow of energy within a system that is greater than the source energy. If you put air into a balloon it will eventually burst so that the flow in will be equal to the flow out. Since the atmosphere is NOT a balloon, the energy flow in will always equal the energy flow out. The temperature of the troposphere is determined by the pressure and thus the lapse rate. To be sure that that pressure is caused by the N2 and O2, H2O and argon and to a much lesser extent by CO2. We are not warmed much by the temperature of H2O and CO2 but are instead warmed by the 99% of the atmosphere which is N2 and O2. Any decrease in outgoing IR would warm the troposphere but NOAA studies show that outgoing radiation has not decreased since they started measuring it.
3) The chart shows a piddly amount of convection of only 18.4 Watts/m^2. Since the earth surface is covered by 70% water the oceans would have boiled over by now if only 18.4 watts/m^ escaped in latent heat by convection. In fact convection accounts for 2/3 of the heat flux escaping from the surface with only 8% escaping IR and 25% from evapotranspiration (evaporation and plant evaporation).
So since NOAA measurements show no decrease in TOA IR from 1974 to 2012, NASA GISS should be disbanded for practicing junk science
http://www.climate4you.com/images/OLR%20Global%20NOAA.gif
In amongst all the math and statistical calculations we have the fly in the the IPCC ointment, namely the properties of water. These ensure that large quantities of energy are transmitted up through the atmosphere for dissipation into space in reaction to any variations in energy input. During this process, due to the phase changes taking place on a continuous basis much of the energy is transferred at ZERO sensitivity with respect to temperature. A factor, I suggest, which has been ignored in the calculations.
The assumption that H2O exacerbates the warming of the greenhouse effect by the IPCC is a fundamental error; for it is water that reacts to increasing energy input by accelerating the inherent cooling process of the Rankine Cycle.
One has only to observe the kettle in the kitchen to demonstrate this as it boils at 100C at sea level no matter how much you turn up the heat. The physics which ensures this is well known and it is high time this knowledge be used to explain the processes occurring in the clouds and the upward movement of energy.
The Steam Tables tell us that for every kilogram of water evaporated from the surface some 680 Watthrs of energy are moved up through the atmosphere for eventual dissipationof a proportion into space; thus providing the basic global thermostat.
Bore da, arglwydd Monckton. Sut mae’r “diffyg angheuol” heddiw?
Yn dda iawn, diolch!
If there has been discussion other than the WUWT original, it has passed me by. Are you as confident as ever? For (as I said previously) your idea should be very readily debunkable or confirmable by engineers or the math mafia.
In response to Hywel Morgan, we are more confident than when I wrote the original series for WUWT. We have done considerable further work, simplifying and clarifying the argument and demonstrating that the variant zero-dimensional system-gain equation used in climatology to allow for feedback represents the difference between two equilibrium states in the complete mainstream equation.
It is now entirely clear that the models, in trying to take a bottom-up approach by attempting to guess the forcings attributable to individual feedback processes, have in effect been guessing, and their guesses were very wrong. Our own top-down approach allows definitive derivation of the feedback factor from just two quantities: the 254 K temperature that would have obtained in 1850 before allowing for any feedback, and the equilibrium temperature in 1850 after feedback, which is of course the surface temperature of 287.5 K for that year.
The feedback factor for 1850 is then 1 – 254 / 287.5, or 0.116, and, to three d.p., it is the same for 2011. Applying this feedback factor to the 1.04 K directly-forced warming from doubled CO2, Charney sensitivity is 1.17 K. End of climate scare.
Pechodion – os gwelwch yn dda – ceisiwch ddangos rhywfaint o ddinesigrwydd – siaradwch Gaeleg!
.. .ond mae’r Gymraeg yn fwy prydferth na’r Gaeleg.
[Welsh, Gaelic, and Irish spell check not provided by the mods. .mod]
mae’r Cymry yn wir yn hyfryd, fel y mae eu tir
Welsh rugby good . . . language not so easy to understand.
In response to Warren, Welsh is in fact quite an easy language to learn, once one has overcome one’s fear of what appears to be a superfluity of consonants. It is also arguably the world’s most beautiful spoken language.
As you will see from the above exchanges in Welsh, Allan Macrae (of Scottish origin) says, “Guys, come on, be more civilized and speak Gaelic.”
A century or two ago I’d have agreed with him. But, as Scotland’s populace has descended into urbanized (but far from urbane) totalitarianism, the gentle, lilting sibilance with which Gaelic was once spoken has been replaced by a harsh, guttural growling that sounds like a cross between German and Klingon.
There is probably an interesting thesis to be written on the correlation between the sweetness with which a language is spoken and the gentleness of the people who speak it. On that test, the Welsh people are the gentlest of gentlemen – and so I have found them to be on my many happy visits there.
And you should hear them sing!
Diolch yn fawr Christopher.
I get the impression you’re not into rugby, so how about this amazing scene (combines both talents):
Have you or are you passing this info to the White House, President Trump, and the EPA?
They need to be keeping track of all this nonesense; so reality can be removed from all of
the politics.