Answers to comments from the original essay on WUWT, here.
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I make no apology for returning to the topic of the striking error of physics unearthed by my team of professors, doctors and practitioners of climatology, control theory and statistics. Our discovery the climatology forgot the Sun is shining brings the global-warming scare to an unlamented end. My last article discussing our result attracted more than 800 comments. Here, I propose to answer some of the more frequently-occurring comments, which will be in bold face. Replies are in regular face.
In a temperature feedback loop, the input signal is surface reference temperature 
before feedback acts. The output signal is equilibrium temperature E after feedback has acted. The feedback factor f (= 1 – R / E) is the ratio of the feedback response fE (= E – R) to E. Then E = R + fE = R(1 – f)–1. By definition, E = RA, where A, the system-gain factor or transfer function, is equal to (1 – f)–1 and to E / R.
But your result is too complex. Please state it in simpler terms.
Erroneously, IPCC (2013, p. 1450) defines temperature feedback as responding only to changes in reference temperature. However, feedback also responds to the entire reference temperature. Climatology thus omits the sunshine from its sums and loses the opportunity to find, directly and reliably, the Holy Grail of climate-sensitivity studies – the system-gain factor.
Lacis+ (2010) imagined that in 1850 feedback response accounted for 75% of the equilibrium warming of ~44 K driven by the pre-industrial non-condensing greenhouse gases, implying a feedback factor 0.75, a system-gain factor 4 and an equilibrium sensitivity 4.2 K. i.e., 4 times reference sensitivity 1.04 K (Andrews 2012). Lacis misattributed to the non-condensing greenhouse gases the large feedback response to the emission temperature from the Sun.
In reality, absolute emission temperature in 1850 with no non-condensing greenhouse gases would have been 243.3 K and the warming from those gases 11.5 K, giving a reference temperature of 254.8 K before feedback. The HadCRUT4 equilibrium temperature after feedback was 287.55 K Thus, the system-gain factor, the ratio of equilibrium to reference temperature, was 287.55 / 254.8, or 1.13.
By 2011, if all warming since 1850 was anthropogenic, reference temperature had risen by 0.68 K to 255.48 K. Equilibrium temperature had risen by the sum of the 0.75 K observed warming (HadCRUT4) and 0.27 K to allow for delay in the emergence of manmade warming: thus, 287.55 + 1.02 = 288.57 K.
Climatology would thus calculate the system-gain factor as 1.02 / 0.68, or 1.5. Yet the models’ current mid-range estimate of 3.4 K warming per CO2 doubling implies an impossible 3.25.
In reality, the system-gain factor was 288.57 / 255.48, or 1.13, much as in 1850. It barely changed over the 161 years 1850-2011 because the 254.8 K reference temperature in 1850 was 375 times the manmade reference sensitivity of 0.68 K from 1850-2011. Sun big, man small: nonlinearities in feedback response are not an issue.
Given 1.04 K reference warming from doubled CO2, equilibrium warming from doubled CO2 is 1.04 x 1.13, or 1.17 K, not the 3.4 [2.1, 4.7] K imagined in the CMIP5 models (Andrews, op. cit.). And that, in just 350 words, is the end of the climate scare. There will be too little warming to cause harm.
The feedback-loop diagram simplifies to this black-box block diagram
But your result is too simple. Bringing 122 years of climatology to an end in 350 words? It can’t be as simple as that. Really it can’t. It has to be complicated. Models take account of a dozen individual feedbacks and the interactions between them. IPCC (2013) mentions “feedback” more than 1000 times. Feedback accounts for 85% of the uncertainty in equilibrium sensitivity (Vial et al. 2013). You can’t just jump straight to the answer without even mentioning, let alone quantifying, even one individual feedback. Look, in climatology we just don’t do simple.
Inanimate feedback processes cannot “know” that they must not respond to the very large emission temperature but only to the comparatively small subsequent perturbations. Once it is accepted that feedback responds to the entire input signal, it becomes possible to derive the system-gain factor reliably and immediately. It is simply the ratio of equilibrium to reference temperature at any chosen time. Equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 (after feedback has acted) is simply the product of the system-gain factor and the reference sensitivity to doubled CO2 (before feedback has acted). And that’s that. To find the system-gain factor, one does not need the value of any individual feedback. We can treat the transfer function between reference and equilibrium temperatures simply as a black box.
But each of the five Assessment Reports of the IPCC is thousands of pages long. You can’t just get the answer that has eluded the world’s experts in a few paragraphs.
To quote a former occupier of the office of President of the United States, “Yes We Can.” The “experts” had borrowed feedback math from control theory without understanding it. James Hansen of NASA first explicitly perpetrated the error of forgetting the sunshine in a lamentable paper of 1984. Michael Schlesinger perpetuated it in a confused paper of 1985. Thereafter, everyone in official climatology copied the mistake without checking it. Correcting the error makes it easy to constrain the system-gain factor and hence equilibrium sensitivity.
But climate sensitivity in models is what it is. The science is settled.
All honest experts in control theory will agree that feedback processes in dynamical systems respond to the entire input signal and not just to some arbitrary fraction of that signal. The math is the same for all feedback-moderated dynamical systems – electronic op-amp circuits, process-control systems, climate. Build a test rig. All you need is an input signal, a feedback loop and an output signal. Set the input signal and the feedback factor to any value you like. Now measure the output signal. The circuit doesn’t respond only to some fraction of the input signal. It responds to all of it. We checked by building our own test rig and then getting a government lab to build one for us and to measure the output under a variety of conditions.
Feedback amplifier test circuit built and operated for us by a government lab
But the circuits you built are too simple. Any undergraduate could have built them. You didn’t need to go to a government lab.
We knew official climatology and its devotees would kick and scream and whinge and throw all their toys out of the stroller when they learned of our result. Trillions are at stake. So we checked what did not really need to be checked. Feedback theory has been around for 100 years. To borrow a phrase, it’s settled science. But we checked anyway. Oh, and we went right back to basics and proved the long-established feedback system-gain equation by two distinct methods.
But you didn’t need to prove the equation by two methods. All you needed to do was to prove it by linear algebra.
Yes, indeed. The proof by linear algebra is very simple. Since the feedback factor is the ratio of the feedback response in Kelvin to equilibrium temperature, the feedback response is the product of the feedback factor and equilibrium temperature. Then equilibrium temperature is the sum of reference temperature and the feedback response. With a little elementary algebraic manipulation, it follows that equilibrium temperature is the product of reference temperature and the reciprocal of (1 minus the feedback factor). That reciprocal is, by definition, the system-gain factor.
But we also obtained the system-gain factor as the sum of an infinite series of powers of the feedback factor. Under the convergence condition that the absolute value of the feedback factor is less than 1, the system-gain factor is the sum of the infinite series of powers of the feedback factor, which is the reciprocal of (1 minus the feedback factor), as before. We are guilty of double-checking. Get over it.
Convergence upon the truth
But the equation you use is not derived from any known physical theory.
Yes, it is. See the above answer. But all you really need to know about feedback is that the system-gain factor is the ratio of equilibrium temperature (before feedback) to reference temperature (after feedback). For 1850 and for 2011, we know both temperatures to quite a small margin of error. So we know the system-gain factor, and from that we can derive equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2.
But climatology’s version of the system-gain equation is derived from the energy-balance equation via a Taylor-series expansion. It can’t be wrong.
It isn’t wrong. It’s just not useful, because there is much more uncertainty in the delta temperatures than in the well constrained absolute temperatures we use. Neither the energy-balance equation nor the leading-order term in the Taylor-series expansion reliably gives the system-gain factor. It is only when you remember the Sun is shining that you can find the value of that factor directly and reliably.
Climatology in the dark
But if you’re saying climatology isn’t wrong, why are you saying it’s wrong?
Climatology’s system-gain equation, using reference and equilibrium temperature changes rather than absolute temperatures, is a correct equation as far as it goes. It is the difference between two instances of the absolute-value equation. But climatology erroneously limits its definition of feedback as responding only to changes, effectively subtracting out the sunshine. Feedback also responds to the absolute input signal, making it easy to find the system-gain factor and thus equilibrium sensitivity.
But you’re starting your calculation from zero Kelvin. You’re literally Switching On The Sun.
No. We have looked out of the window and noticed that the Sun is already Switched On and shining (well, not in Scotland, obviously, but everywhere else). Our calculation starts not with zero Kelvin but with the reference temperature of 254.8 K in 1850. The feedback processes in the climate respond to that temperature and not to any other or lesser temperature. They neither know nor care whether or to what extent they may have existed at any other temperature. They neither know nor care how they might have responded to some other temperature. They respond as they are, and they respond only to the temperature they find. We know the magnitude of the response they engender, for we can measure the equilibrium temperature, calculate the reference temperature and deduct the latter from the former.
But the Earth exhibits bistability. It can have two different temperatures for the same forcing.
Given the variability of the climate, Earth can have several temperatures for a single forcing. But not in the short industrial era. The system-gain factors for 1850 and 2011 are close to identical, indicating that at present there is insufficient inherent instability to disturb our result.
The scrambled account of feedback math in Hansen (1984)
But the feedback system-gain equation is not appropriate for climate sensitivity studies.
Interesting how the true-believers abandon their “settled science” when it suits them. The system-gain equation is mentioned in Hansen (1984), Schlesinger (1985), Bony (2006), IPCC (2007, p. 631 fn.), Bates (2007, 2016), Roe (2009), Monckton of Brenchley (2015ab), etc., etc., etc. If feedback math were not applicable to the climate, there would be no excuse for trying to pretend that equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 is anything like 2.1-4.7 K, still less the values up to 10 K in some extremist papers. As it is, all such values are nonsense anyway, as we have formally proven.
But Wikipedia shows the following feedback-loop block diagram, which proves that feedback only responds to changes, or “disturbances”, in the input signal and not to the whole signal –
A feedback loop diagram from the world’s chief source of fake news
Our professor of control theory trumps the CreepyMedia diagram with the following diagram. And behold, the reference or input signal is at left; the perturbations (in pink) descend from above to their respective summative nodes; and the feedback block (here labeled the “output transducer”) acts on all of these inputs, specifically including the reference signal –
Mainstream block diagram for a control feedback loop
But the models don’t use the system-gain equation. They don’t even use the concept of feedback.
No, they don’t (not these days, at any rate, though until recently their outputs were fed into the system-gain equation to derive equilibrium sensitivity). However, we took some care to calibrate the models’ predicted [2.1, 4.7] K interval of Charney sensitivities using the system-gain equation, which produced exactly the same interval based on the excessive feedback factors derivable from Vial+ 2013. The system-gain equation is, therefore, directly relevant.
The models try valiantly to simulate the multitudinous microphysical processes, many of them at sub-grid scale, that give rise to feedback, as well as the complex interactions between them. But that is a highly uncertain and error-prone method – and even more prone to abuse by artful tweaking than the temperature records themselves: see e.g. Steffen+ (2018) for a deplorable recent example. Besides, no feedback can be quantified or distinguished from other feedbacks or even from the forcings that triggered it by any measurement or observation. The uncertainties are just too many and too large.
Our far simpler and more reliable black-box method proves that the models have, unsurprisingly, failed in their impossible task. By correcting climatology’s error of definition, we have cut the Gordian knot and found the correct equilibrium sensitivity directly and with very little uncertainty.
But you talk of reference and equilibrium temperature when radiative fluxes drive the climate.
Well, they’re called “temperature feedbacks”, denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that induced them. They are diagnosed from the models and summed. The feedback sum is multiplied by the Planck sensitivity parameter in Kelvin per Watt per square meter to give the feedback factor. Because the feedback factor is unitless, it makes no difference whether the loop calculation is done in flux densities or temperatures. Besides, our method requires no knowledge of individual feedbacks at all. We find the reference and equilibrium temperatures, whereupon the ratio of equilibrium to reference temperature is the feedback system-gain factor. Anyway, if you want to be pedantic it’s radiative flux densities in Watts per square meter, not fluxes in Watts, that are relevant.
Ten handsome unpersons
But you’re not a scientist.
My co-authors include Professors of climatology, applied control theory and statistics. We also have an expert on the global electricity industry, a doctor of science from MIT, an environmental consultant, an award-winning solar astrophysicist, a nuclear engineer and two control engineers, to say nothing of our pre-submission reviewers, two of whom are the world’s most famous physicists.
But there’s a consensus of expert opinion. All those general-circulation model ensembles and scientific societies and intergovernmental agencies and governments just can’t be wrong.
Yes They Can. In suchlike bodies, totalitarianism prevails (though not for much longer). For them, the Party Line is all, and mightily profitable it is – at taxpayers’ and energy-users’ expense. But the trouble with adherence to the Party Line is that it is a narcotic substitute for independent, rational, scientific thought. The Party Line replace the heady peril of mental exploration and the mounting excitement of the first glimmer of a discovery with a dull, passive, cringing, acquiescent uniformity.
Worse, since the totalitarians who have captured academe ruthlessly enforce the Party Line, they deter terrorized scientists from asking the very questions it is the purpose of scientists to ask. It is no accident that most of my distinguished co-authors now live and move and have their being furth of the dismal scientific establishment of today: for if we were prisoners of that grim, cheerless, regimented, unthinking, inflexible, totalitarian mindset we should not have been free to think the thinkworthy. For these malevolent entities, and the paid or unpaid trolls who mindlessly support them in comments here regardless of the objective truth, punish everyone who dares to think what is to them the utterly unthinkable and then to utter the utterly unutterable. Several of my co-authors have suffered at their hands. Nevertheless, we remain unbowed.
But no one agrees with you.
Here is one of many supportive emails we have had. I get ten supportive emails for every whinger –
“Hi and congratulations on what I believe may have the potential to put the final nail in the coffin of the anthropogenic global warming hysteria. The work of you and your team is very promising and I cannot wait to see how alarmists will go about to attack this. Bring out the popcorn, as we say. The application of feedback theory in this case is simple, physics-wise elegant, mathematically beautiful, and understandable to a wider audience. I am especially excited about how the equation grasps the whole feedback problem without having to deal with all the impossible little details of trying to distinguish which gas does what and without relying on hopelessly complex computer models. And that is why I think it will stick. I will be following this eagerly in the coming months and years and I am considering going to Porto [on 7-8 September: portoconference2018.org: b there or b2] to catch all the latest from others as well, even though your work is the current crown jewel of the anthropogenic global warming debate so far.”
But global temperature is rising as originally predicted.
No, it isn’t –
Our prediction is close to reality: official climatology’s predictions are far out
But you have averaged the two global-temperature datasets that show the least global warming.
Yes, we have. The other three longest-standing datasets – RSS, NOAA and GISS – have all been tampered with to such an extent that they are no longer reliable. They are a waste of taxpayers’ money. We consider the UAH and HadCRUT4 datasets to be less unreliable. IPCC uses the HadCRUT dataset as its normative record. Our result explains why the pause of 18 years 9 months in global warming occurred. Because the underlying anthropogenic warming rate is so small, when natural processes act to reduce warming it is possible for long periods without warming to occur. NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 admitted that if there were no warming for 15 years or more the discrepancy between the models and reality would be significant. It is indeed significant, and now we know why it occurs.
But …
But me no buts. Here’s the end of the global warming scam in a single slide –
The tumult and the shouting dies: The captains and the kings depart …
Lo, all their pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre
Lord M says:
“The other three longest-standing datasets – RSS, NOAA and GISS – have all been tampered with to such an extent that they are no longer reliable.”
________________
Two points on this. (Apologies if they have been covered elsewhere, they’re not exactly subtle.)
1. RSS and UAH both made significant changes to their methods of calculating temperatures in the lower troposphere (TLT) recently. Both published peer reviewed articles in support of these changes. Both data sets are officially archived by the American Meteorological Society. Obviously one or both of these is wrong with respect to post ~2000 trends. But it appears that, as far as Lord M is concerned, the only thing that makes RSS “no longer reliable” is the fact that the changes it made resulted in an increase in the warming trend. Hardly a quantitative dismissal.
2. The somewhat garish “IPCC Observed MofB” chart that the above quoted passage refers to starts at 1990 and stops in 2012, missing out on all the many record warm temperatures since 2012. In fact, if you use the rather odd method of averaging HadCRUT4 (surface) with UAH (TLT) data, the linear trend from January 1990 to June 2018 is +1.50 C/century, which is even faster than the IPCC prediction!
I’m all for scepticism (or skepticism, if you prefer), but this is just silly.
Just noticed I misread the chart (due to garishness!). The claim is that the IPCC forecast was 2.78 C/century from 1990, so the 1.5 C/Century observed to the present is still short of that by -1.28 C/Century. Hands up for that.
However, I believe the 2.78 C/century was originally a full century average projection, in other words, the the best estimate average rate of warming expected over the course of the 21st century. It was also the 1990 IPCC forecast, which was revised downwards in subsequent reports.
In 2007 (AR3) the IPCC forecast was: “For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios.” https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html
In the decade or so since 2007 temperatures have risen quite a bit faster than that, but this is influenced by the big El Nino at the recent end; so the rate from 1900 is probably more reflective. Combining HadCRUT4 and UAH gives 1.5 C/century since 1990 which is close to the IPCC forecast.
However, the 2007 IPCC forecast was based on surface temperatures, not TLT. So the rate of warming since 1990 that it references in HadCRUT4 is even closer, 1.7C century.
That’s the rate from 1990, not ‘1900’, sorry.
No, the 2.78 K/century equivalent was not a centennial projection: it was a projection to 2025, which is not that far away. And the IPCC projection is from its First Assessment Report in 1990.
IPCC has approximately halved its medium-term projection since then, but has left its longer-term projection interval puzzlingly unaltered.
Mr Rice should understand that if one is considering the data for the period 1990-2011 one should consider the warming for that period too, and not for some other period.
If one were to study the period 1990-2018, one would need the net anthropogenic forcing to 2018, which would of course be somewhat higher than in 2011. Mr Rice is free to source those data and redo the calculations in the head posting. The result will not differ greatly from ours.
So if the actual feedback to net changes in climate forcing is negative, none of this is correct either.
If the net feedback response is negative, then our result – that equilibrium sensitivity is very considerably below the models’ estimates – is true a fortiori. However, it is not net-negative, as we have determined by comparing the reference and equilibrium temperatures in 1850. Since the equilibrium temperature is larger than the reference temperature, the system-gain factor – and therefore the feedback factor – is positive.
You have assumed and not determined a positive feedback to net changes in climate forcing, and you have excluded the possibility of a negative feedback.
We have assumed nothing except what official climatology assumes, wherever we cannot prove that what official climatology assumes is incorrect.
In 1850 the reference temperature was well below the equilibrium temperature. The entire difference was occasioned by net-positive feedback.
There is no such thing as “official climatology”
..
It’s a fantasy creation on your part. You cannot assume something that doesn’t exist. That is a serious logic error.
Don’t be silly. Climatology, perhaps more than any other science, has an official wing, whose Bible is the leaden, multi-thousand-page reports of the Intergummintal Panel on Climate Change.
“In 1850 the reference temperature was well below the equilibrium temperature. The entire difference was occasioned by net-positive feedback.”
Leaving aside the effects of thermal reservoirs such as oceans, and given the gross reference temperature of the irrational uniformly heated Earth without albedo of 278.6K. Water vapour then provides radiative gains, and also losses through cloud albedo. If these gains and losses were even balanced at unity, poleward heat transport could easily make up the difference between 278.6K and 289K.
It is not at all clear why Mr Lyons is interested in an Earth without albedo. The albedo of the Earth in the absence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases would be 0.418 (Lacis+ 2010). That is hardly zero.
Furthermore, to the extent that natural factors diminish the difference between reference and equilibrium temperature, to that extent our low-sensitivity case is made for us a fortiori, because the system-gain factor will be even lower than the 1.13 we have found. This possibility is of course discussed in our paper, in the context of official climatology’s failure to take account of Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals in deriving its estimates of emission temperature.
“It is not at all clear why Mr Lyons is interested in an Earth without albedo.”
It’s called factorising the problem. Start with a theoretical black-body temperature of 278.6K, which is then reduced to 254.8K by the 0.3 total albedo. That is standard climatology. 😉
It’s called irrelevantizing the problem. The albedo on which we based our calculations was not a zero albedo; nor was it an albedo of 0.3, as today. It was an albedo of 0.418, given in Lacis+ 2010 as being applicable to the Earth without greenhouse gases.
it is not at all clear, therefore, why Mr Lyons is interested in an Earth without albedo.
There is “climatology” but none of it is “official” and none of it is “unofficial.” Monckton has constructed a straw man argument using a bogus definition of “official climatology”.
In response to Mr Petersen, in English (not, perhaps, his first language) the word “official” is applied to governmental documents, such as those published by various governments or government entities, such as the Bank of England or the UK Climate Change Committee or by committees of Parliament or Congress. The same applies a fortiori to intergovernmental documents, such as those of IPCC, UNFCCC, the World Bank, et hoc genus omne.
Since there is a large body of such documents devoted to global warming, I refer to these documents and their contents collectively as “official climatology”. Get over it.
“it is not at all clear, therefore, why Mr Lyons is interested in an Earth without albedo”
Only because you still don’t understand standard climatology.
Mr Lyons, on being caught out in an error yet again, yet again resorts to mere yah-boo. The head posting refers to an Earth without non-condensing greenhouse gases, but with the hydrosphere, cryosphere and atmosphere in place. The head posting explains that Lacis+ (2010) used a general-circulation model to derive the albedo in that scenario, which – like it or not – is not a zero albedo. Indeed, it is an albedo appreciably above today’s 0.3, at 0.418.
I fail to discern any reason, therefore, for messing about with some other value of albedo, or with no albedo at all: for even if the Earth were a bare rock there would be an albedo similar to that of Mars and somewhat greater than that of the Moon.
And, as I have said before, if the emission temperature of the Earth were higher than we have calculated, as Mr Lyons has suggested, then the ineluctable consequence would be that the system-gain factor and hence equilibrium sensitivity would be still lower than we have found it, though not by much. Mr Lyons’ point, therefore, is either irrelevant to his cause or somewhat damaging to it, but it has little relevance to our calculation.
Emission temperature is seen to be dependent on the theoretical maximum of 278.6K, minus the albedo.
Your definition of “official” is lacking. It does not cover “official” religious doctrine from various churches , nor does it cover “official” academic and scientific matters. For example does “official” science declare a photon a wave or a particle? In a similar vein, there is no “official” economics, nor is there an “official” political science. Claiming any particular scientific viewpoint “official” is ludicrous.
Mr Peterson, yet another picker of non-existent nits, should understand that when I talk of official “climatology” I am not talking of religion (except in the sense that climate extremists believe without doubting whatever the Holy Books of IPeCaC have revealed); nor am I talking of academe in general; nor am I talking of science in general; nor am I talking of “political science” (except to the extent that climatology has become politicized, though the politicians will run for cover once our paper is published); I am talking of climatology. Not difficult, really.
And if Mr Peterson is not aware that governments and related national and international intitutions all take much the same line on the global warming question, he should read – to take just one instance – the list of signatories to the Paris climate accord. Yes, there is such a thing as “official climatology”, and it is erroneous, over-politicized, and totalitarian. But it is doomed. It got the science wrong because it put politics before science, as totalitarianism has done time and time again in the past.
“But the models don’t use the system-gain equation. They don’t even use the concept of feedback.
“No, they don’t (not these days, at any rate…”
— If the climate models have quietly abandoned their feedback equation, using an impossibly complex and error-prone method instead, that’s a fairly good indication that it was wrong.
Even if their new methods were valid and accurate, an honest and open scientific establishment operating in the best interests of society should have announced, “Everybody, all the scientific support for CAGW prior to last year is invalid because the math was wrong. But, we have a new approach that shows the same thing. So the science is still settled. It was wrong before, but it’s right now. And it’s still settled.”
Steve O makes a fair point. It is precisely because the models no longer use the concept of feedback explicitly that we are able to second-guess their predictions by applying feedback theory to them.
Yes, if they still relied on those equations, they would insist on Trial by Combat and would fight to the death for the sake of their reputations.
But feedback in climate is not linear and may have inflection points. Even if 1850 to 2011 is one factor, 2011 on could be very different.
But the models don’t have a feedback factor, they attempt to model physical behavior and the feedback factor is a result of the interaction of multiple complex systems being modeled. So, if the models match when back-casted, but differ in forecast, this could be due to non linear feedback response.
In other words, the models may be wrong, but nothing you say here proves that they are wrong.
We have demonstrated that, under modern conditions, the feedback system-gain factor is near-invariant at about 1.13. The reason why nonlinearities in feedbacks don’t make much difference is that our influence is so very small compared with that of the Sun and the pre-industrial non-condensing greenhouse gases.
The head posting already points out that the models no longer use feedback mathematics. But that does not prevent us from using a black-box approach to demonstrate that their attempts to obtain equilibrium sensitivity by attempting to quantify individual feedbacks have led to absurdly overblown predictions that have no physical basis in the current climate.
In other words, the models are wrong and we have demonstrated that fact. We have also demonstrated that IPCC’s definition of temperature feedback is erroneous, in that it rules out the use of absolute reference and equilibrium temperatures in the system-gain equation.
I’m just wondering if there is not some way to combine automatic interaction detection analysis with bayesian decision tree analysis to determine WHEN major causal variables are/ have been working together and acting upon temperature/climate resulting in inflection points? Any ideas out there? I’m sure the problem is reliable historical data/proxies for the longer periods of time and predicting those changes in causal vaiables that lead to changes in climate. Multivariate regression suffers from multicolinearity due to the causal variables being interrelated. But then AID and bayesian suffer from a lack of classical statistical significance testing ability. But using a probability tree might be useful even if only to give one ideas for further different forms of analysis. With only two actual energy inputs and a myriad of modifying variables, I still believe that determination of when these variables act together or oppose one and other is a key to understanding what is going on.
Under modern conditions, with small and slow warming such as has occurred since 1850, there is no reason to suppose that any phase transition or bifurcation will occur. If there were such a bifurcation, the models would not detect it in any event until after it had occurred.
Our result demonstrates that, in the absence of any such deus ex machina to throw off our calculations and those of the models, the models are predicting warming rates that are simply impossible under anything like modern conditions.
I have no argument there. This post has been excellent and drawn excellent comment and commentators therefore I was hoping to obtain some input from those here regarding further potential analysis of the climate issues I’ve raised. The present AGW line is so flawed as to be laughable and completely misses the mark being more political/religious in nature than scientific. I was hoping that the questions I am asking might lead to actual scientific inquiry. Thank you for the post. It is excellent.
I am most grateful to JimG1 for his kind comment.
The problem with attempting to conduct the further enquiry he suggests is that, with very little warming, the more obvious temperature-related bifurcations, such as a very substantial loss of Greenland or Antarctic ice, are not likely to occur within a policy-relevant time-horizon, if at all.
Furthermore, the climate behaves as a mathematically chaotic object, whose bifurcations are deterministic but indeterminable by any currently-known method. JimG1 may care to study even the simplest chaotic object – such as the Mandelbrot set, or the Verhulst population model, or an oscillating pendulum. Since even these cannot be predicted except with very perfect knowledge of the initial conditions – a knowledge that is altogether unattainable in the climate at anything like sufficient resolution – it is in practice impossible for us to predict bifurcations.
Accordingly, our analysis assumes – as does that of the models – that unless a large warming occurs we cannot predict whether or what bifurcations will occur, however much research we do.
hilarious
referees his own fight and supplies bogus data from the two worst datasets
SM,
Cheap shot. No specifics. I actually expect more from you, most/some of the time.
Mosher is a spent farce.
Responding to comments on one’s analysis is not in the leftist play book, particularly if they are at all critical. Even displaying critical input is usually not going to happen, so the comment regarding you being your own referee should be taken with regards to the source of the comment.
Well, we have submitted our paper to a leading climate journal, and we have recommended that it be sent out for review to those who have in the past made the error that we have identified, so that it can be subjected to the harshest and most skilful scrutiny. The likes of Mosher are irrelevant. They have nothing to contribute but bile. Their day is done, and they know it.
“They have nothing to contribute but bile.”
Lol, that’s rich coming from you.
Philip, while LMOB (and many others including myself) may indeed contribute to the global bile production at times, he (Lord Monckton) generally contributes much, much more than that.
Steve Mosher, sadly, often contributes nothing but bile. This is a shame, because Steve is a smart guy who is frequently worth listening to … when he eschews his normal drive-by commenting style and actually contributes something.
w.
JimG1, Based on his drive-by posting history, sadly, that’s exactly what I expect from him most of the time.
Mosher I’m detecting fear, is Mr. Monckton being correct the source of that fear ?
Referee; don’t you mean debate?
Then again debate is not a word you’d be willing to use because it would undermine your fanatical attachment to CAGW theory.
It’s only going to get worse for you Steve.
You’re beginning to realise that now.
An 1850 starting point for calculating sensitivity may be an issue given the LIA. The math should be redone using multiple starting points to generate a range of likely equilibrium values.
Further, the math should be done for the entire range of probable starting and ending values.
If I weren’t in the middle of a move, I’d write the code to spit this out real quick… but I’m already wasting time just writing comments… ugh..
I think the world is waiting for some kind of accuracy of predictions. Now global warming has morphed into Climate Change to which I keep asking is where are the stronger hurricanes and when are they going to become more numerous?
The reason for starting in 1850 is that it is the first date for which global temperature records were kept. If the little Ice Age were to have depressed the temperature in 1850 and there has been a natural recovery since, our case is made a fortiori, because we had assumed ad argumentum that all warming since 1850 was anthropogenic.
Clearly it was not all anthropogenic since temperatures warmed by about 0.8degC through to about 1879, and during this period (1850 to 1879) there was only an increase of some 3 ppm of CO2 (according to ice cores). This general warming trend might have continued further but for Krakatoa.
And because our data sets are so poor, we do not know whether the temperature today is any different to that of the late 1930s/early 1940s, and because we do not know sufficient about natural variation, we do not know whether all the real warming between 1850 to date, is simply the result of natural variation.
Just for the sake of argument, what if there is cooling between now and say 2050 such that even on HADCRUT data, the temperature in 2050 is the same as it was in 1940? If this were to happen, what would this say about your calculation? What if within error bounds the temperature in 2050 is the same as in 1880? What would that say about your calculation?
Now I would not say that that proves that there is no Climate Sensitivity to CO2 Even though some 99% of all manmade CO2 emissions would have occurred since 1940), but it does suggest that there may be no Climate Sensitivity to CO2, or such sensitivity as there may be is very small.
Mr Verney still does not understand our central premise, which is that we accept all of official climatology’s data, methods and results ad argumentum – i.e., for the sake of argument, without warranting their truth – so as to focus the discussion solely on the error of physics that we have identified. I repeat that if some perhaps considerable fraction of the warming since 1850 was natural then our case is made for us a fortiori – i.e., our case is even stronger than if we assume what official climatology assumes. And if, as Mr Verney predicts, there is cooling between now and 2050, then whose estimate of equilibrium sensitivity is closer to observed reality – ours, or those of official climatology?
Build a test rig. All you need is an input signal, a feedback loop and an output signal. Set the input signal and the feedback factor to any value you like. Now measure the output signal. The circuit doesn’t respond only to some fraction of the input signal. It responds to all of it. We checked by building our own test rig and then getting a government lab to build one for us and to measure the output under a variety of conditions.
Unfortunately that will not work, you’ve omitted the input power. When I built such circuits I would typically use 15V, this limits the output to 15V. If you want to model the earth the equivalent of the solar input is the input power (and the loss to space will be limited to that input power).
And if you connect the forcing input to the 15V supply pin, you have a physical realization of the climate feedback model. Will any amount feedback be capable of producing more output power than input power when the input is connected to the power supply pin?
Don’t be too mechanistic. We use temperatures in the feedback loop. The power supply is in Watts per square meter, but the units in which we operate the loop are Kelvin, to keep matters simple. If there is an input temperature (which there is, because, like it or not, the Sun is shining), and if there is a separately-powered feedback block (which there is, because of water vapor, ice-albedo and cloud feedback), the output signal will exceed the input signal.
An input signal cannot occur without input power. The Sun is shining.
Yes, and this input signal is not the implicit power supply that Bode assumes exists to power the gain. Using temperature as feedback doesn’t fix this, but only adds another layer of obfuscation. The testable fact is that the climate system is quite linear in it’s response of W/m^2 of surface emissions to W/m^2 of forcing and this is demonstrably true from pole to pole and season to season.
The problem is a failure to accommodate COE between the input and output of the modeled gain block. The Bode model assumes infinite input impedance, thus no power is consumed by the input terminal. In contrast to the climate, the input forcing+feedback, both expressed in W/m^2, are the source of the output emissions, also expressed in W/m^2, making the effective input impedance of the climate gain block zero.
Once more, you’re trying to explain feedback within the vernacular of consensus climate science by focusing on temperature, rather than Joules. Temperature isn’t conserved, only energy is, but the broken language of climate science makes it hard to express this unavoidable reality.
Perhaps what confuses many is that temperature is linear to stored energy, but stored energy is not directly involved with the Joules conserved by the energy balance, only emissions are and emissions are proportional to the temperature (stored energy) raised to the forth power which is far from linear to forcing and Bode only applies to linear systems. Temperature doesn’t force the system, only incident energy forces the system.
The temperature feedback model, like the energy one, certainly shows how you must account for all of the forcing and not just small changes. While the model seems to work for a specific set of conditions, it still suffers from a failure to represent the physical reality of how the system operates over all relevant conditions.
co2isnotevil said:
I’m sorry, but this is neither true nor demonstrable. See my posts here and here for a demonstration that your claim is NOT demonstrably true …
w.
Willis,
You should know by now that I don’t make idle claims that I can’t support with definitive science. Here’s the demonstrably definitive data that supports my position. I’ve shown this many times. What is is that you fail to understand about this data?
http://www.palisad.com/co2/tp/fig1.png
This plot shows with no ambiguity whatsoever that the ratio between surface emissions and planet emissions are a mostly constant 0.62 from pole to pole. To be clear, this data is not mine, but originated from GISS as part of the ISCCP cloud project.
Each little red dot is the average temperature plotted against the planets emissions for each 2.5 degree slice of latitude from pole to pole. The larger dots are 3 decade averages for each slice. The evidence is unambiguous that the average output emissions for any point in space above the surface relates to to the average temperature of that surface according to equation:
Po = 0.62*o*T^4
The term o*T^4 are the BB emissions of the surface at it’s average temperature of T. Replacing o*T^4 with the emissions of the surface, Ps, we get,
Po/Ps = 0.62
This is the very definition of a linear relationship between the output emissions, Po and the emissions of the surface, Ps.
Thanks, Christopher. See my graph here. Things are nowhere near as simple as your graph claims.
w.
CO2isnotevil appears not to have understood our method. We remove the gain block altogether (or, if you like, we set it to unity, which amounts to the same thing) and then simply add any change in temperature to the input temperature before it passes to the summative node and then to the feedback loop.
And, as several commenters have pointed out in earlier threads, it matters not whether one performs the calculation in Joules per second per square meter (i.e., in energy densities) or in Kelvin (i.e., in temperatures), just as one can perform calculations on an electronic circuit using current or voltage, or even a mixture of the two. The result is the same either way. We use temperatures because it is simpler to do so. After all, feedbacks are denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature or temperature change that induces them, and in any event the feedback factor, the product of the feedback sum in Watts per square meter per Kelvin and the Planck sensitivity parameter in Kelvin per Watt per square meter, is unitless anyway. Let us not multiply complications when the matter can be simply and reliably represented simply by using temperatures.
“We remove the gain block altogether (or, if you like, we set it to unity, which amounts to the same thing)”
No, it isn’t the same thing. And that is why the diagrams like the top colourful one are just nuts. You can’t have a meaningful feedback loop without amplification.
Unity gain here means unit voltage (or temperature) gain. But the key is that there is current ( or flux) gain, and so power gain. That is essential because feedback works by feeding back a fraction of surplus power. I don’t see in any of the EE talk at WUWT mention of the proper way of analysing these circuits, with is as a two port network. There ire necessarily two inputs (current and voltage, or temperature and flux) and two outputs, and the transfer matrix is what describes the circuit response. I deal with that and the climate analogue here.
Ulric Lyons linked a good article on unity gain amplifiers here. They are not equivalent to no amplifier at all. Two years ago Bernie Hutchins described an amplifier that he had built and analysed which had two unit gain stages and positive feedback, giving a total gain of three.
Nick,
“You can’t have a meaningful feedback loop without amplification”
Exactly correct and there’s no amplifier in the Earth system because an amplifier REQUIRES an implicit source of Joules to power the gain. Amplification requires adding energy to the system, while all the passive Earth system can do is redistribute existing energy. This is an immutable truth and the failure to accept this reality is behind much of the deception coming from the IPCC.
You don’t seem to understand that modeling a transistor amplifier as a linear 2-port ‘small signal’ device means that the signals are limited to what the implicit power supply can support and maintain linearity. Take away the implicit power supply and the conditions required to model the transistor amplifier as a small signal device disappear.
You can’t ignore this truth just because it falsifies a high ECS. The way science works is that when a hypothesis is falsified, the hypothesis must be modified. The hypothesis of an absurdly high ECS is in dire need of being modified. The IPCC will not modify their hypothesis because it would need to be modified by so much that their reason for alarm disappears and it’s the alarm that sustains their existence.
“Amplification requires adding energy to the system, while all the passive Earth system can do is redistribute existing energy.”
In signal terms, there is no distinction here. The Earth has a flow of energy through (sunlight), just as an amplifier has a power supply. I have shown various electronic analogues here. A thermionic triode valve has a flow of current through (like sunlight). The grid modulates this current, (like GHGs modulate IR flux). A small power input gives an amplified signal output.
“means that the signals are limited to what the implicit power supply can support and maintain linearity”
I do understand that very well. In this case the power supply is a flux of 240 W/m2, and the perturbation is a forcing of about 2 W/m2. A long way from clipping.
Mr Stokes, in asserting on no evidence that one cannot have a meaningful feedback loop without a gain block (at least, I assume that that is what he means when he says one cannot have a meaningful feedback block without amplification) is simply incorrect. His statement, like so many contributed by him to these threads, is flat-out false.
We tested the matter on two test rigs, one of them at a government laboratory. We did not need the test rigs, because the theory is entirely plain and the mathematics not particularly difficult. But we built and ran them anyway, because we know that those who are paid to try to conceal what we have unearthed will do as Mr Stokes has done and flatly deny what is not only self-evident from the system-gain equation but was also demonstrated by our two test rigs.
There is nothing to prevent one from removing the gain block from a feedback loop and simply adding any change in the input signal to that signal before it enters the loop at the summative node. We explicitly tested this scenario by setting the gain block to unity (so no gain) and setting the feedback block to a nonzero value.
And we have the benefit of a more than usually competent professor of control theory at our backs. It was he who proposed the simplification of the Bode diagram that appears in the head posting.
What is sad about all this is that Mr Stokes has a doctorate in linear systems theory. He knows perfectly well that he is not telling the truth.
“There is nothing to prevent one from removing the gain block from a feedback loop “
OK, please do it. It’s no use waving around your circuits with op amps (not just one, all that is needed, but 2). Produce a circuit that has meaningful feedback made of just resistances. You don’t even need to show it working; a clear description will do.
Mr Stokes continues to pretend to struggle with the perfectly straightforward notion that in a feedback amplifier circuit the amplifier gain may be set to unity; or, equivalently, that the gain block may be removed from the circuit and any change in the input signal added to that signal before it is input to the summative node.
The elements of a Bode feedback amplifier circuit are these –
1. The input signal.
2. The summative input node.
3. The gain block (these days usually denoted by G).
4. The output node.
5. The feedback block (these days usually denoted by H).
6. The output signal.
The circuit and the elementary linear algebra by which it is governed will be found in ch. 3 of Bode (1945) and illustrated in Fig. 3.1. Similar arrangements of the elements of the circuit can be found in any number of textbooks of elementary network analysis. None of this is in the least controversial.
To simplify the math still further, we have removed the gain block (in our circuits, one can do this by setting the variable open-loop gain factor G to unity) and we have added any change in the input signal to that signal before it is input to the summative node. Since the removal of the gain block renders the input and output nodes equipotential, the summative node can then be described as a single input/output node.
Of course, we might proceed instead by way of argumentum ex hypothesi. At any given moment for which a reference temperature (by definition before the action of feedback is accounted for) and an equilibrium temperature (by definition after the action of feedback has been accounted for) are available, the transfer function between the reference and equilibrium temperature is the ratio of the latter to the former. One does not need to know anything about open-loop gain factors or feedback loops or summative nodes or nonlinear feedback response or any suchlike arcana. Mr Stokes will perhaps find it simpler to treat all these matters simply as a black box, as explained in the head posting.
All that is then necessary is to find reference and equilibrium temperatures for at least two years in the industrial era, one close to the beginning and one close to the end, and to derive the transfer functions for each of the two years, for that will reveal the extent to which any nonlinearities in the feedback response have altered the transfer function over time. That is the approach we took in our paper. For once it is accepted, as it must be, that feedback acts on the entire input signal as well as on any perturbation thereto, it is the simplest and most direct way to derive equilibrium sensitivities.
“I assume that that is what he means when he says one cannot have a meaningful feedback block without amplification) is simply incorrect. His statement, like so many contributed by him to these threads, is flat-out false.”
Still no response to the challenge. Please show a circuit that has no amplifier but meaningful feedback.
And to overview, we are discussing surface temperature data sets that, at best, have 1 sigma error bars of +/-0.5C (+/-0.2C satellite), the length of which are 150 years for surface and 35 years satellite, when 12,000 yeas old proxies indicate past temperatures 1.5C or more higher and variations of 1C-2C over a few hundred year periods. Color me extremely skeptical. With this high a signal to noise ratio, none of this would pass any science course that I was ever taught. Sub MOA accuracy and precision claimed when the target is a barn door at 10 foot range. It all looks very myopic to me.
In response to Al in Kansas (very flat, Kansas), the error bars on the HadCRUT4 dataset, which are commendably published monthly, are +/- 0.35 K in 1850 and about +/- 0.15 K now. These values are small enough not to perturb our result significantly, because the major influence on temperature feedbacks is the fact that the Sun is shining, and that overwhelms everything else.
It would be best if Al in Kansas actually did some calculations using our method to see whether or not the variances either side of the mid-range estimates make much difference. He will find that even quite large variances make remarkably little difference. Does he really suppose that we did not conduct sensitivity analyses to make sure?
Indeed, we went further. We conducted a 30,000-trial Monte Carlo simulation, and determined to 95.4% confidence that, on the assumption that official climatology has made no error other than that which we have identified and quantified, equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 concentration is just 1.17 +/- 0.08 K.
We even imagined, just out of interest, that the Earth started out as an iceball. Even then, equilibrium sensitivity is below 1.5 K. In reality, we should probably have started much nearer to the present than the waterbelt Earth imagined by Lacis et al. (2010). In that event, equilibrium sensitivity would be more like 1.1 K. Either way, not enough to be worth worrying about.
Another significant mismatch between the climate feedback model and Bode’s model of a linear feedback amplifier is time.
In the ideal Bode model that he climate feedback model is derived from, there’s no modeled delays and the input, output and feedback are all considered concurrent. In fact, when you start to model this delay, phase shift is introduced which can turn negative feedback into positive feedback or visa-versa.
When the first Joule from the Sun arrives at the surface in the morning, it’s GHG warming effect doesn’t come into effect until the surface emits the energy, is intercepted by GHG molecules and bounces around for a while until it’s returned to the surface well after the energy was initially absorbed by the surface.
This delay is crucial as the delayed energy is the source of the surface energy that’s returned back to the surface slowing down the rate of cooling and not Bode’s implicit power supply. The COE constraint this infers is conveniently ignored because to acknowledge it falsifies using the feedback model to support an absurdly high ECS and falsification doesn’t seem to be part of what the IPCC accepts are legitimate science.
To allow for possible variation over time, we calculated equilibrium and reference sensitivities for two widely-separated dates in the industrial era. The system-gain factor proved to be near-identical for both dates.
It’s not the variability over time I’m talking about, but the delay between emissions and their return to the surface. This delay binds energy returned to the surface with prior emissions and the COE constraint this imposes by limiting feedback+planet_emissions to the emissions by the surface are what the IPCC ignores.
The failure to accommodate this delayed energy as the source of feedback power is another obfuscation allowing feedback+planet_emissions to rise to infinity, which is otherwise impossible without an infinite power supply. This can be corrected by applying COE between the input and output of the gain block.
All such complications as co2isnotevil mentions are entirely unnecessary to our method. We simply do not need to know what is inside the black box. All we need to know is that the feedback response is by definition the difference between equilibrium and reference temperature; that the system gain factor is the ratio of the former to the latter, and that the values of equilibrium and reference temperatures were approximately what we found them to be in 1850 and again in 2011.
Could one reach the same result by a more complicated method, worrying about conservation of energy etc.? Very probably: but there is simply no need to do so.
Actually the sun has been shining in Scotland for most of the last six weeks!
What a delight is my beloved Scotland on those rare occasions when that funny yellow thing in the sky puts in an appearance! When the Victorians built an observatory near the summit of Beinn Nibheis, they found to their dismay that the stars were visible only only 18 nights per year, and they abandoned the observatory, whose ruins can be seen to this day, a monument to Shakespeare’s apercu that “The rain it raineth every day”.
Lord Monckton …… one last question …. how to you come up with 11.5 for the greenhouse gases. Not trying to sound ignorant, I know it water vapor and CO2 and other GHG s …. but how does that compute to 11.5C.? Is there a reference for this?
Just trying to learn something here for future debates.
Dr Deanster, as is his wont, asks all the interesting questions. In our paper, we derived three values for the warming from the non-condensing greenhouse gases up to 1850. The first method was a simple subtraction sum. In Lacis+ 2010 the emission temperature without greenhouse gases was 243.25 K and the reference temperature after adding in the gases but before feedback was 252 K, giving 8.75 K. Our mid-range estimate was derived by taking the 30 W/m^2 total forcing to date from CO2 given in Schmidt+ 2010, deducting from it the CO2 forcing of 1.68 W/m^2 from 1850-2011 and then multiplying the result by the ratio of total net anthropogenic forcing to CO2 forcing: i.e., 2.29 / 1.68. That gave us an approximation of the net greenhouse-gas forcing to 1850, which we then multiplied by the Planck parameter 0.3 to give the greenhouse-gas warming to 1850. There was a third method, which gave about 13.5 K warming from the non-condensing greenhouse gases to the same year. It does not matter much which of these three methods one uses: the equilibrium sensitivity barely changes, for the feedback response to the sunshine is more important than anything else.
As a climate scientist myself, I can report that, even if the equilibrium warming from doubled CO2 is slight (1.17K), we still face an extreme climate threat. Results from my own consensus climate models prove that even a Slight Warming of Doom (SWOD) caused by the CO2 from fossil fuels will result in widespread weather disasters and other environmental catastrophes within 50-100 years unless we act now. The only way to prevent SWOD is to send me lots of money, and to transfer ownership and control of all fossil fuels to me. Anyone who disputes my claims is a climate denier.
Brilliant! Give MikeW the money now!
( I clicked a “cookies” warning at the bottom of the screen and blew away a more elaborate comment , but I’ve said it all before in various forms and forums . ) To be brief :
This is still curve fitting not fundamental testable quantitative physics .
The energy balance equations must include gravitational energy ( which computes as a negative ) if one believes in conservation of energy .
Mr Armstrong, like many here, has his pet theories, most of which take the form of insisting that one must do the calculation in a fashion more complicated than what we have used. But I am not sure that he is right. What I can say is that we have not in any way indulged in curve-fitting: we have derived our results in a straightforward and replicable fashion from published data.
Actually , I’m just following Lavoisier who turned alchemy into chemistry by bringing his tax accounting background to bear and requiring a QUANTITATIVE audit trail from inputs to outputs .
I simply start at the geometry computing the portion of our celestial sphere subtended by the Sun from our orbit , and it’s estimated effective temperature , and quickly calculate the 278.6 +- 2.3 gray body temperature around our orbit . This is simply by StefanBoltzmann based on a total of about 1361 w%m^2 impinging on a point in our orbit .
The next parameter to add is spectrum , color . In terms of energy , which computes linearly , the equilibrium will be reached when absorption from the sun equals emission to the whole celestial sphere . those 2 values are given by the dot ( scalar ) products of the color spectrum of the ball with the power spectrum of the Sun ( absorption ) and the Planck thermal spectrum for the temperature which balances that absorption . This is a straightforward generalization of the — unforgivably crude at this point in discussion when actual measured spectra of the planet from the outside are available — 255K meme . This slide . http://cosy.com/Science/AGWpptHypotheticalSpectra.jpg , tries to illustrate that computation , but it would be really nice if someone ran the computation for an observed spectrum . I’m busy getting ready to present CoSy the language in Edinburgh next month .
In any case , that’s where the physics comes to full stop . Very few seem to understand even that basic computation of the temperature of a colored ball . Much less present a testable quantitative equation for how some spectral phenomenon “traps” a higher temperature on the interior of the ball than that calculated for its surface .
And that is the gap that gravitational energy quantitatively fills . Again , if you believe in conservation of energy , it cannot be left out of the equations .
I guess it can be said we both build on published data . Mine are the measured temperature and radius of the Sun and our distance from it . But that’s the end of the classical physical audit trail at this point . Getting a best measurement of the planet’s absorptivity=emissivity spectrum as seen from outside would nail down the temperature which can be ascribed to the solar input .
Gee. So accurate. For a flat earth perfectly insolated on one side, perfectly insulated on the other side, of uniform mass and emmissivity.
The earth is round, it does rotate about its axis, and a single average temperature for a flat earth is only a thought experiment.
Mr Armstrong has made the elementary mistake of neglecting to divide the solar forcing by 4, the ratio of the surface area of the terrestrial sphere to its great circle.
As I have tried to make clear all my APL ( ala K ) expressions are in terms of the actual spherical geometry . The next spectral term which needs to be added is Lambertian corrections .
In Mr Armstrong’s earlier statement of his method, he had plainly not described a spherical temperature, for he had failed to divide by 4. He had also failed to provide a proper, explicit, quantified albedo. Nor is it at all clear that he had accounted for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals.
If I effectively “didn’t divide by 4” , how did I come up with the correct answer for the gray body temperature in our orbit : 278.6 +- 2.3 — or do you disagree with those numbers ?
Or do you disagree with that answer ?
I suspect you of not knowing what a “dot” or “scalar” product is — essential for determining the absorption or emission of a colored object irradiated by an arbitrary power spectrum .
That is , I question your ability to calculate the temperature of a billiard ball under a sunlamp .
The emission temperature of the Earth is given in numerous authorities as 255 K, and we make it more like 265-275 K after allowing for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals. However, Mr Armstrong’s earlier account of how he reached 278 K gave a reasonably clear indication that he had not divided by 4. Nor was it clear that he had made any adjustment for Hoelder’s inequalities.
Simply false . Here’s my computation in CoSy RPN APL in x86 Forth ( which is the reason for having to explicitly convert floats )
f( 1361 1366.46 1364.625 )f 4. _f %f P>Tsb278.32 278.59 278.50
where
: sb ( -- StefanBoltzmanConstant ) 5.6704e-8 _f ;: P>Tsb ( Power -- Temperature ) sb %f .25 _f ^f ; | SB power to temperature
were I not to divide by 4 , the results would be
f( 1361 1366.46 1364.625 )f P>Tsb393.60 393.99 393.86
I simply use the disk equivalent when the full spherical geometry is not required .
The fact that you don’t recognize the ~ 278.+ value indicates that you don’t understand how to calculate even the temperature of a gray , ie: flat spectrum , ball in our orbit .
I don’t give a …. about that embarrassingly crude amateurish useless 255K meme . You seem to be indicating you do not understand the generalization of the computation which produces that meme to the temperature of an arbitrarily colored ball in our orbit . And the only effect on our temperature of CO2 or any GHG is its effect on that color , ie: spectrum as seen from space .
It does not and cannot explain why the bottoms of atmospheres are hotter than the radiative balances computed for their spectrums . That can only be , and quantitatively is explained if you believe in conservation of energy and account for gravitational .
I’ve generally seen the term “gish gallop” used by warmists who can’t recognize the least bit of math or physics . But what in the hell does “Hölder’s inequality” , which I see is a generalization of the Triangle Inequality to Lp spaces ( I’m with Hilbert : we live in L2 ) got to do with anything at issue ?
I see you created an interesting tessellation puzzle about 20 years ago . Have you ever looked at my logo which I solved in APL about 40 years ago ?
Hint it’s a cube . Can you tell how many dimensions ? The hard part was figuring out how to draw arbitrary dimensional cubes with a single continuous line which a result of Euler implied must be possible for even dimensions .
Mr Armstrong is becoming muddled. Hoelder’s inequalities (not “inequality”, as he put it) cover many matters. The relevant inequality when deriving the mean dayside temperature of a planetary body is the fact that the fourth power of a sum is not the same as a sum of fourth powers. Official climatology makes the mistake of not allowing for Hoelder’s inequalities when deriving its 255 K global mean emission temperature.
Mr Armstrong accuses me of “not recognizing” 287.5 K as the temperature of the surface of a blackbody sphere (albedo 0) at 1 A.U. from the Sun. He does so on no evidence. In case he is himself in doubt about how it is calculated, I shall be happy to enlighten him. The insolation is 1364.625 Watts per square meter. Divide that by 4, the ratio of the surface area of the sphere to its great circle. Divide by the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. Take the fourth root. Job done. The answer is not correct, of course, because it takes no account of Hoelder’s inequalities.
Furthermore, as I pointed out to Mr Armstrong some way upthread, it is not in the least useful to know the incorrectly calculated mean surface temperature of a sphere of albedo 0. For the Earth has an albedo; and it would have had an even greater albedo in the absence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases. I did not say I did not understand how the 278.5 K temperature was arrived at. I said that it was not in the least useful, both because the relevant albedo is not 0 but 0.418 and because 278.5 K is, in any event, incorrect.
I will take 287.5 !
What do you think that computation :
f( .... ....... 1364.625 )f 4. _f %f P>Tsb...... ..... 278.50
right there is ? Using your ridiculously over precise value .
to be even more explicit , see the
. As I mentioned , because CoSy is executing right at the x86 register level the
is needed to take the 4. off the floating point stack and make it a CoSy list , and the
needs the
because the arithmetic functions have yet to be made generic . But I think it’s pretty damn recognizable anyway .
You persist in going on about the “divide by 4” when I presented the exact calculation I have consistently presented and the FACT that NOT dividing by 4 gives 393.86 . Clearly you are having trouble connecting A with B .
And you STILL appear not to understand that a GRAY , ie: Flat Spectrum , ball , however light or dark comes to the same temperature as a BLACK ( except for a singularity at reflectivity = 1 ) .
Really , this is embarrassing . Bottom line , you are demonstrating again and again that you do not in fact know how to calculate the temperature of an arbitrarily colored billiard ball under a sunlamp — and thus not a dream of analytically understanding the temperature physics of planets .
Like Willis , I am finding you impossible to have a rational mutually respectful convergent discussion with .
( don’t know how to format fixed font aesthetically inline , so … sorry . )
Mr Armstrong, like Mr Eschenbach, is prone to assume that he is right even when he is wrong, and then to hold my feet to the fire when I point out, in the most straightforward way, that he is wrong.
Since Mr Armstrong’s use of scientific terms is more than somewhat cavalier, making his ramblings more than a little difficult to follow, perhaps he will explain what he means when he says that a graybody, i.e., a body whose albedo is on the open interval (0, 1), has the same temperature regardless of its albedo.
It would also be helpful if he would define the term “flat spectrum ball”, with which I confess I am not familiar.
The lunar regolith is predominantly gray. Yet there is an albedo of 0.11. And there is no ocean to retain dayside heat at night. Therefore (overlooking the small heat capacity of the regolith) the lunar mean surface temperature is about 200 K, after due allowance for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals.
Above all, what on Earth is the point he is trying to make, and of what possible relevance is it to the head posting? Could he please ask someone to assist him in putting it into straightforward scientific English?
Jeez I don’t have time for this . I need to nail down my plans EuroForth in Edinburgh the weekend of the 14th and a Dog&Pony on http://CoSy.com , the shortest path from the chip to the math , in London the following week . I invite anybody who’ll be in the area .
“albedo” should be noted WRT a particular power spectrum and object color , ie: asorption=emission spectrum , call it F for filter . It’s a dot product between the 2 .
By the same token , the emission of an object to a given sink will be determined by its power spectrum to that of the sink , will be the Planck thermal spectrum for its temperature modified by that same F . The sink , in the case of a planet can be considered to have a ~3K Planck spectrum — essentially flat 0 .
In the case of a planet passively heated by the Sun , the equilibrium temperature will be reached when , copying and editing from http://cosy.com/Science/ComputationalEarthPhysics.html#EqTempEq
dot[ aeSpectrum ; sourceSpectrum ] = dot[ aeSpectrum ; Planck objectTemp ]
Noch einmal : this is a straightforward generalization of the computation which produces the 255K meme to arbitrary spectra .
By Kirchoff ( & Stewart & others ) , based on Ritchie’s 1830s experiment , a = e at each wavelength .
For a gray ie: FLAT SPECTRUM body , where
a = e = Constant
across all wavelengths , they , it , drops out of the equation .
A gray body , properly defined , no matter how light or dark , comes to exactly the same temperature as a black body ( except for the singularity a 0 ae ) .
The retardation of this field by the red herring of the stupidly crude 255K meme based on a step function spectrum when actual measured spectra of the planet from the outside exist cannot be overstated . Effort should go to refining our measurement of that absorptivity=emissivity spectrum ( which is admittedly difficult — as I’ve chatted with David Crisp , who runs NOAA OCO-2 CO2 measuring satellite program about ) .
Then and only then , when these distinctly undergraduate facts and computations are universally understood can one move forward towards a quantitative analytical model of the planet — because they are also the quantitative relationships which hold for any voxel in a complete analytical model .
Anybody over in Britain who’d like to get together and discuss this physics and work towards an APL level analytical model of planetary physics as discussed in , eg: http://cosy.com/y12/NewsLetter2012.html , while I’m over there , let me know . It would be fun and might get something done .
This is a long quotation, but it deserves repeating…
“In suchlike bodies, totalitarianism prevails (though not for much longer). For them, the Party Line is all, and mightily profitable it is – at taxpayers’ and energy-users’ expense. But the trouble with adherence to the Party Line is that it is a narcotic substitute for independent, rational, scientific thought. The Party Line replace the heady peril of mental exploration and the mounting excitement of the first glimmer of a discovery with a dull, passive, cringing, acquiescent uniformity.
“Worse, since the totalitarians who have captured academe ruthlessly enforce the Party Line, they deter terrorized scientists from asking the very questions it is the purpose of scientists to ask. It is no accident that most of my distinguished co-authors now live and move and have their being furth [?] of the dismal scientific establishment of today: for if we were prisoners of that grim, cheerless, regimented, unthinking, inflexible, totalitarian mindset we should not have been free to think the thinkworthy. For these malevolent entities, and the paid or unpaid trolls who mindlessly support them in comments here regardless of the objective truth, punish everyone who dares to think what is to them the utterly unthinkable and then to utter the utterly unutterable. Several of my co-authors have suffered at their hands. Nevertheless, we remain unbowed.”
WOW! This is quite a plethora of assertions. And what rhetoric! “Terrorized scientists”! “Malevolent entities”! So scientists all over the world are subject to mindless, totalitarian, acquiescent uniformity? What “Party Line” controls them all, when they come from such disparate nations as China and America? Are scientists all socialists, is that the idea? What is the mechanism by which they are colluding – is there some secret authority that determines research outcomes? How come they debate each other at all? (And they do, as anyone familiar with the literature can attest.) Why do some results of research contradict each other? Why do some contrarian scientists more or less agree with AGW theory and only differ from the consensus in their ideas of its “catastrophic” nature – are they, too, being misled into groupthink?
Who exactly are all Monckton’s co-authors, and how have several “suffered”?
It’s this kind of attack, asserting that thousands researchers are completely lacking in scientific integrity – or independent thought of any kind – that I despise. There is no evidence provided, it’s simply thrown out there as if it were fact. What does this say for the ability of Monckton to think with reason supported by evidence? What is this but pushing an agenda of his own?
Why don’t skeptics question and debate such assumptions? Do they all really believe this tripe? Why? Are they aware of Monckton’s predilection for misquoting people, or his repeated public misinterpretation of research? I’ve given links to the evidence before, but people seem to simply ignore them, even saying that they are smearing Monckton’s reputation, but without even bothering to look at the evidence. (Search youtube for potholer54 monckton)
I suppose I would fall within Monckton’s category of mindless trolls, according to him. What gives him so much insight into my views and character that he knows me better than I know myself? What conceit! Is it not he who would like to quash (true) skepticism?
)
You know WUWT is for sceptics and one is unlikely to be banned here unless one is persistently malicious.
You’re welcome here because you’re sceptical of most sceptics in a ‘reasonable’ manner.
Monckton is welcome here because he’s sceptical of the mainstream and has interesting alternate theories and (like you) he makes claims about the conduct of others but in a ‘reasonable’ manner.
We don’t really care what you or Monckton say about others as long as you’re reasonable and have something intelligent to say and value open debate here.
Warren,
“We don’t really care…”
I don’t see how you can speak for all skeptics here, but that is beside the point. My point is that when such claims are made, and made again and again, they can come to seem like the truth even when there is no evidence to back them up. This is what has happened – many people believe that scientists are mindless drones with no integrity, just pushing an agenda. It serves as a justification for ignoring data or asserting that it is fraudulent, even when there is no evidence that’s the case. This is not productive in the search for truth.
To say that such a diatribe is in a “reasonable manner” is stretching things, to say the least…and very unlike anything I would do.
Kristy Silber,
The argument that Cristopher Monckton makes is a straight forward argument.
Why can’t one just acknowledge the possibility of a fundamental error in the foundation of climate science or modelling.
I would say, please stay to the content of the matter.
To me, it looks like there are people out there that would rather live in fear of climate change instead of looking for evidence that refutes it.
I wonder why.
Amen to that!
Kristi …. Anyone who has engaged in Ph.D. Level academia is well aware of the unintentional, or in some cases intentional tendency to bend research to fit the desired outcome. There is money involved, and where there is money involved, there will be corruption.
And Amen to that!
Monckton graciously and comprehensively answered your two early blocks of questions (August 16, 2018 4:57 pm and August 16, 2018 5:12 pm).
When can we expect a comment from you or do you accept his answers as authoritative and definitive?
Ms Silber is being as churlish as she is naive. If she is unaware of the Communist takeover of the universities, including the science departments, she has perhaps spent very little time in one recently. One of my co-authors, solely because he had his name on a paper that gave the first hint of our result, suffered a vicious campaign of personal vilification and libel of the worst kind on the front pages of the Marxstream media – e.g. the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Pest, the Boston Glob, Nature, Science, the Journal of Education and many others, and his institution threatened him with dismissal until I intervened and bullied his bosses a lot more firmly than they could bully him. Another of our co-authors was dismissed from his university on a trumped-up charge just one month after a reviewer of our paper had breached the code of confidentiality by sending our paper to his university, where it created consternation. Another co-author continues to be mercilessly bullied by his university. Others have had their CreepyMedia pages trashed by paid Communists.
I say Ms Silber is churlish because, much earlier in this thread, she asked me a series of perfectly proper questions, to which I provided detailed answers. Now she resorts to recycling hate-speech against me by a third party of known Communist credentials who was not interested in the slightest in the objective truth. Ms Silber should ask her kindergarten mistress to read to her the section on “the community of women” in the Communist Manifesto and perhaps reconsider her current allegiance.
Kristi
I believe that the noble lord is honouring his family roots from the Scottish Borders with this fine use of Furth a guid Scots word.
See also outwith as in “there is a green hill far away outwith a city wall”.
Concerning the point
“But global temperature is rising as originally predicted.”
Is there any scientific reason why you show a graph ending in 2012?
Or is it just to hide the fact that there was a sudden increase in temperature between 2012 and now, which makes the IPCC projection look much better than your feedback model?
Thank you already for your response.
This has been answered already numerous times to quote Lord M from one such instance where this was asked and answered:
“We selected 2011 as the end-point because that was the year to which IPCC and its contributors updated their data and methods in time for the most recent Assessment Report.
However, we also conducted an empirical campaign based on ten separate estimates of net anthropogenic forcing to various dates, four from IPCC’s reports and six from mainstream, peer-reviewed sources. In all cases the equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 was found to be 1.17 K.”
In other words he didn’t choose 2011, the IPCC chose it. The point is to show where the IPCC/official climatology has got it wrong, so it makes sense to use the same time frame they used for comparisons sake.
As for your other claim (that IPCC projection looks better once you add temps to the present), that has also been discussed up thread:
Theo said
Extending the graph to July 2018 would only slightly raise the angle of the blue line. It still wouldn’t make it up to the lower MoE line, ie into the IPCC’s yellow prediction zone.
to which Monckton of Brenchley added:
Theo is correct. It is only if one uses the much-tampered-with GISS data to 2018 that the trend-line barely makes it into the very bottom of IPCC’s prediction region.
Robert W Turner further added:
“The 1998 El Nino raised the global average temperature above the model predictions, the 2015/16 El Nino raised it to the average of the models (and they cheered that they were accurately modelling global average temp), but since then it has cooled whereas the model predictions continue to warm. They will be lucky if the next major El Nino reaches their lowest forecast models”
Sorry, I don’t buy it. Extending to 2018 changes the slope quote a bit, at least that’s what linear regression with XmGrace tels me. Di you have any proof that it doesn’t affect the lope? That would be weird…
See my reply to Zeyanne a little upthread. There has been some warming since 2011, but there has also been a sharp increase in net anthropogenic radiative forcing.
“a sudden increase in temperature between 2012 and now”
Are you referring to this sudden increase:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_February_2018_v6.jpg
Do you know something even mainstream climate science doesn’t?
Ok explain to us dummies how elevated CO2 can cause a “sudden” increase in the globe’s temperature over a 6 or 7 year period?
No one is attempting to “hide” anything and you should go back to whatever you do which clearly doesn’t involve physics or climatology.
In response to Zeyanne, global temperature is not rising as originally predicted by IPCC. And yes, there is a scientific reason why our analysis goes to 2011. That is the date to which IPCC, regarded as Gospel by the true-believers in the New Superstition, updated its data and predictions.
Were we to update the calculation, we would need a generally-accepted estimate of the net anthropogenic forcing to 2018. At present, none is available. The nearest one might come to that is the net anthropogenic forcing to date in the Giss ModelE general-circulation model. That is approximately 2.5 Watts per square meter compared with the 2.3 we used. The surface temperature change is 0.85 K instead of the 0.75 K to 2011. So the result would not be significantly different from the 2011 result, particularly if one allowed for the fact that the official estimates of net anthropogenic radiative forcing are artificially depressed by the use of what Professor Lindzen has called the “negative aerosol forcing fudge factor” calculated artificially to increase apparent climate sensitivity.
Climatology is in error! So sayeth Lord Warlock
A kindergarten version of our result is being prepared for the likes of the furtively pseudonymous “Dr Strangelove”.
Lord Warlock, I will teach you proper atmospheric physics
One did not realize that Dr Strangelove refers to itself as “Dr Warlock”. Perhaps it had better pay closer attention to its atmospheric physics lessons in future. It does not appear capable of mustering anything resembling a scientific argument.
Lord Monkton, I once had the pleasure of shaking your hand and hearing you speak at the Climate Conference in Conway Hall some years ago. I’m delighted to learn that you’re still very much in the fight! Today you have swung the sword of truth in the comments below with aplomb but more importantly, I believe, you have finally found the wooden stake needed to plunge into the heart of the climate zombie which, in spite of many deadly attacks on it that are founded in reason and logic, still staggers on, seemingly unstoppable, de-industrialising, even destroying and at the very least definitively stultifying first world economies, where it selectively chooses to roam.
The strength of the IPCC’s paradigm lies in its simplicity. It avoids the myriad of complexities that go to make up the inner workings of the Earth’s climate making it easy to use as a vehicle to act politically and impose disastrously wrong energy policies on poor bamboozled benighted unsuspecting voters.
I predict with high confidence that you will succeed in getting published.
And the wooden stake? It is of course the error in the IPCC’s own paradigm. The one they need to predict climatic doom. By finding and correcting this carefully hidden fatal flaw, you have turned their own logic against them. This is only possible by staying within their paradigm. In other words, by keeping things simple, the way they do, so a judge in a future court case can understand.
I am most grateful to Mr Keal for his kind comments. I hope that he will join us in Porto, Portugal, on 7-8 September. The same team of eminent scientists and distinguished researchers will be there. And all of us have very interesting results to report.
C.M. writes:
“As to Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals, note that on the Moon a single use of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer suggests a lunar mean surface temperature of 270 K. However, it is in fact about 200 K, because the fundamental equation of radiative transfer is a fourth-power relation and the sum of a series of fourth powers differs from the fourth power of the sum of a series.”
Dayside lunar surface temperature is close to being in equilibrium with solar irradiance. Which would yield an average temperature of 394K*0.5^0.25 = 331.3K. The average of that and the nightside average surface temperature of ~90K is around 211K. Similar to what Earth would be with no atmosphere and no oceans and similar regolith heat capacity.
Though if we imagine that the Moon and Earth are uniformly heated by the Sun, then the effective black body temperature would be far higher; 394K*0.25^0.25 = 278.6K.
Which with 0.3 albedo becomes the 254.8K figure that we are all familiar with.
(278.6*0.7^0.25 = 254.8)
So clearly we need heat capacity to account for the Lunar average surface temperature, but here on Earth, the difference between 254.8K and 288K is all down to the greenhouse effect apparently.
you read but you do not comprehend.
He’s saying there that the Lunar average surface temperature could be considered similar to what Earth would if you took away the atmosphere and took away the oceans and left Earth with a similar “regolith heat capacity”.
He’s explaining where the 254.8K value comes from. That’s *one* value, there isn’t a difference (which requires *two* values) that you “need heat capacity to account for”. The difference comes from comparing that one value with the one for the Earth as we know it (the one that has Atmosphere & Oceans). So you are basically comparing apples and oranges in your failure to comprehend what was written.
Or in other words. 254.8K is used for the Lunar (with heat capacity) and Earth (with heat capacity and no oceans or atmosphere). Notice that both Lunar and Earth have the “regolith heat capacity”, so it’s already accounted for in both.
He said nothing of the sort.
The calculation of the 254.8K figure has nothing to do with heat capacity, it is purely a product of the radiative calculation of an imaginary uniformly heated Earth. Looks like you failed to comprehend my maths.
254.8K cannot be used for the Moon as it does not have 30% albedo, hello?
Mr Lyons has not understood how we arrive at our value of 254.8 K for the reference temperature in 1850. We begin by deriving the emission temperature using the method adopted by official climatology. That method is unsound, but it is what official climatology uses. In our paper we have flagged up the problems with that method and have presented a tentative alternative calculation, with a note to the effect that further work is needed.
Then we add the reference sensitivity to the non-condensing greenhouse gases as they were in 1850 before we had appreciably perturbed them. That gives us our 254.8 K. Correction of the emission temperature to take account of both Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals and the heat capacity of the night-side ocean would increase this value to 272 K, making our case for low equilibrium sensitivity a fortiori.
In answer to Mr Lyons, we have taken the straightforward approach taken by official climatology, which is to the effect that the difference between the reference and equilibrium temperatures is entirely accounted for by temperature feedback. To the extent that some of that difference is attributable to other causes, our case for low equilibrium sensitivity is made for us a fortiori.
That doesn’t answer my point about the large difference in black-body temperature between the spheroid body heated on half of its surface by the Sun, and the unphysical uniformly heated body. Only the former plus the thermal reservoir explains the low mean surface temperature of the Moon.
The surface temperature on the Moon – we make it a mean 200 K – is less than the 270 K on Earth owing to the difference of three orders of magnitude between the heat capacities of the regolith and of the ocean respectively. However, all such considerations are automatically taken into account in our black-box approach. There is a reference temperature before feedback acts and an equilibrium temperature after feedback has acted. We derive both of these using methods standard in official climatology. The ratio of the latter to the former is the system-gain factor. That quantity barely changes throughout the industrial era. We may, therefore, use it to obtain a very reasonable approximation to Charney sensitivity. And that’s it.
It has nothing to do with heat capacity, 270K is purely the irrational uniformly heated figure of 278.6K minus the surface albedo. Other sources have given 207K as the actual mean, I reached ~211K by applying the physics correctly:
‘Dayside lunar surface temperature is close to being in equilibrium with solar irradiance. Which would yield an average temperature of 394K*0.5^0.25 = 331.3K. The average of that and the nightside average surface temperature of ~90K is around 211K. Similar to what Earth would be with no atmosphere and no oceans and similar regolith heat capacity.’
Mr Lyons is an inveterate quibbler. NASA gives the lunar mean surface temperature as 270 K, when if Nikolov and Zeller are right it is close to 200 K. If other sources make it 207 K or 211 K, so what? There is still an enormous difference between NASA’s value and the true value.
On Earth, however, the vast heat capacity of the ocean makes a considerable difference on the nightside by inhibiting heat loss (let Mr Lyons do a radiative-transfer calculation on the top 7 m of the ocean treated as a slab and he will see what I mean).
Therefore, it is likely that the true mean emission temperature of the Earth in the absence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases is not 243.3 K but more like 260.4 K. This difference causes a tiny reduction of about a fourteenth of a Kelvin in Charney sensitivity calculated correctly by our method, but it probably causes a much larger reduction using official climatology’s current incorrect method.
So according to C.M., exposing how the uniformly heated Moon calculation results in a mean Lunar surface temperature that is far too high, is being an inveterate quibbler. I’m now concerned that the physics and the maths has gone right over your head.
Mr Lyons did not expose anything of the kind: he quibbled about whether the lunar mean surface temperature was 200 K, as I had said it was, or 207 or 211 K, as he said it was.
Drivel. The bogus 270K figure is based upon the impossible uniformly heated Moon calculation, and the near correct figure is based upon the calculation of the actual hemispheric heating of the Moon’s mean surface temperature. That exposes the biggest error in climate physics, which you pass off as quibbling, which is most surreal.
Mr Lyons is being characteristically disingenuous. It was I, not he, who had first pointed out in this thread that using a single instance of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer the mean surface temperature of the Moon was 270 K, but that after allowing for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals a more accurate value was 200 K.
Mr Lyons cannot deny that he knows this, because he acknowledged it upthread.
Mr Lyons thereupon quibbled repeatedly to the effect that 207 or 211 K was preferable. I pointed out, reasonably enough, that these values were far closer to the value I had already given than to Nasa’s 270 K.
Now it appears that Mr Lyons is trying to claim credit for having pointed out that the lunar temperature is well below 270 K, when, as he well knows, it was I who had first mentioned that figure as being incorrect.
It will thus be evident to all why I have characterized him as a quibbler.
“Mr Lyons is being characteristically disingenuous.”
Yet another emotional projection, as we can see by the following from M of B:
“Now it appears that Mr Lyons is trying to claim credit for having pointed out that the lunar temperature is well below 270 K, when, as he well knows, it was I who had first mentioned that figure as being incorrect.”
Obviously you pointed out the lower figure first else I would not have been able to quote you at the head of this thread. But here you are needlessly quibbling about who said it first, while accusing me of being a quibbler yet again. Personal attacks in such debates are invariably emotional projections.
Though it should be clear to other readers that you are arguing that the difference is due to ‘Hoelder’s inequalities’, while I am arguing that SB has been applied erroneously.
Mr Lyons continues to be disingenuous at best, mendacious at worst. He had plainly but falsely implied that the correction of the erroneous 270 K estimate of the lunar mean surface temperature was an expose of “the biggest error in physics” and had then accused me passing off that error as quibbling, when in fact it was I, as he now at last admits, who had originally pointed out the discrepancy between the incorrect value 270 K and our own corrected estimate 200 K.
Mr Lyons had earlier quibbled to the effect that the correct value was 207 or 211 K, and had tried to draft his quibble in such a way as to suggest that I had made an enormous mistake when, even if one of his two values were correct, it was not greatly different from mine, as I had pointed out at the time.
He has been caught out in an attempted mendacity that has failed. Let him stop digging. He is providing much amusement for those watching this thread with great interest, but not much enlightenment.
NASA describes the lunar temperature as a (cos(zenith angle))^0.25 which shows good agreement with the Diviner results.
The value of 270K is referred to as the Blackbody temperature which is the temperature you get when thermal equilibrium exists between the power absorbed from the sun and the power emitted by the moon’s surface. That is a different quantity than the mean surface temperature.
The erroneous value of 270 K for the “blackbody” surface temperature, usually known in climatology as the “emission temperature”, actually assumes not a blackbody at all but a Bond albedo of 0.11. The value is erroneous because no allowance is made for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals. The current lunar surface temperature, which is actually quite close to the true emission temperature, is about 200 K. Official climatology was simply wrong about the lunar emission temperature – and quite badly wrong at that.
On Earth, owing to the presence of the ocean, the error is in the opposite direction. Official climatology’s estimate of the emission temperature is about 255 K, but it is actually somewhere between 265 and 275 K, again after correction for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals. This difference is highly significant for official climatology’s method of deriving equilibrium sensitivity, but near-irrelevant for our method, reducing that sensitivity by only 0.07 K.
M of B now turns rather rabid with his emotional projections.
My explanation for the apparent low mean surface temperature of the Moon challenges convention, yours does not. The fact that we both agreed that it is well below 270K, or who said it first, is entirely beside the point, but you continue to relentlessly jabber on about it. How sad.
Ulric,
Confusion seems to exist because if you take the surface of the Moon that’s in equilibrium with the Sun, put it in a hypothetical blender and mix it up, the resulting temperature will a linear average of the temperature of the lunar surface being mixed. The linear relationship between stored energy and temperature is known first principles, i.e. 1 calorie (4.1 Joules) increases the temperature of 1gm of water by 1C.
The problem is that this ‘average’ temperature is meaningless relative to the radiant balance and it’s the radiant balance that matters relative to the sensitivity. The radiant average temperature is the SB equivalent temperature of the average emitted radiation. Rather than a linear average of temperature, the resulting average should be:
Tavg = ((Td^4 + Tn^4) / 2)^.25
Where Td is the average temperature of the day side and Tn is the temperature of the night side. This can be generalized to N equal area measurements as,
Tavg = ((T0^4 + T1^4 + … + TN^4) / N )^.25
If the point of using a temperature centric analysis is to show how broken it is, then CM did well. If the point was to legitimize a broken analysis, and I don’t think it was, then it was a disservice to the scientific truth.
The bottom line is that an obsession about quantifying everything in terms of temperature sends you down the wrong path and ‘consensus’ climate science has been following this broken path for decades. Focusing on Joules is far more correct relative to the underlying physics and which makes the Hölder Inequality moot as there are no exponents in the summation of averages.
Mr Lyons, faced with a straightforward, scientific reply, descends – as he so often does – to mere yah-boo. He is well out of his depth here.
Lord Monckton , .. here is another nice way to look at your equation that I would really love to hear the response from your naysayers. According to the addendum provided in the previous article, you show how climate models currently apply a gain factor of 3.25 to a doubling of CO2 effect of 1.04. If we are to accept that gain increases with temperature then the 3.25 gain factor decreases by a factor of (3.25/288-273) or approximately 0.325 per degree above where water freezes, thus removing the primary GHG effect. Thus, if we start in 2011, and go backwards to 1850 using the current model assumption, we subtract the 0.7K worth of reference increase * 3..0 gain for a total 2.1K. Thus the observed global temperature for 1850 should have been 288K-2.1K which is approximately 286K … a full 1K less than 287K
In reality, it is obvious that the ocean must be playing a larger role in the overall climate than radiative forcing theory would consider. 255K is below, and we’ll add the 0.7K of CO2 and make it 256 K, is still almost 20K below the freezing point of water. As such, there simply is no way the GHG system, which is mostly water vapor, could have even started to have an effect at that temperature, as all water would be ice. That would leave only sublimation as the source of water vapor in the atmosphere, The only way we even have a GHG system is for the ocean to store up enough energy to allow water to exist in liquid, and to sustain water surface temperatures high enough to allow evaporation.
All told, CO2 contribution to the system is 1.04K, whereas everything else … err water vapor, is supplying the other 21K that raises out temp from 255 to 287.
double post
This great work by Lord Monckton brings into light the role of positive feedback. In climatology the simplistic assumption is made that positive feedback will cause runaway unidirectional change. This is wrong. In a complex system positive feedback typically causes oscillation. To see why, consider one of natures purest examples of a system which oscillates regularly from its own internal dynamics, not from any external forcing.
Cepheid variable stars: what light do they shed on back-radiation, feedbacks and climate oscillations?
What is a Cepheid variable star?
Cepheid variable stars as any astronomers know are God’s gift to cosmology since they’re so incredibly useful to star-gazers. Why? – because they tell you exactly how far away they are. Cepheids pulsate in brightness, and the frequency of their pulsation (which is in the range of days to months) is nicely correlated to their size. So if you see a Cepheid anywhere in the sky, measure its pulsation rate and you have its size (actual luminosity). Combine this with its apparent brightness and bingo – you know its distance from us. Priceless information for mapping the size and layout (and expansion) of the visible universe.
https://youtu.be/T6b72sFW0jk
It struck me that Cepheid variable stars were a nice example of a natural system that oscillates from internal dynamics, not requiring any external forcing. What external forcing could a star possibly experience? Unless it happened to be next door to a pulsar or another Cepheid – which would be rare. (But then – how would that object be pulsating …?) So the strong and regular oscillations in diameter and brightness of Cepheids must be a pure example of oscillation from internal nonlinear dynamics.
Why is a Cepheid variable variable?
There is a nice description at the wiki page of Cepheids:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_variable
of the mechanism of their oscillation in brightness. The root of it lies in the opacity of the different ions of helium. Helium at solar temperatures can lose either one (He+) or both (He2+) of its electrons. The electron-bald He2+ ion needs higher temperatures to form than He+, and is also more opaque to radiation. These two facts together make helium ionisation in a Cepheid Star take on the nonlinear pattern characteristics of a Turing reaction – one that becomes oscillatory in time. Here’s the oscillation sequence:
1. Radiative heating forms He2+ in the star’s exterior
2. He2+ ions have higher opacity, so trap more radiation, heating itself up further
3. The increasing temperature forces expansion of the star
4. Expansion diminishes radiation intensity, so cooling occurs and some of the He2+ reverts to the more transparent He+.
5. Greater transparency lets more radiation escape, further increasing the cooling
6. The cooling star contracts
7. Contraction once again increases radiation intensity to the star’s peripheral helium, heating it back up.
Return to 1 …
So the pulsating intensity of the Cepheid comes from endlessly repeating excursions of self-heating from absorption/back-radiation from the more opaque He2+ ion clouds. In a way, this could be seen as an illustration of radiative warming of earth’s atmosphere by CO2. Is not the He2+ ion an elegant analog of CO2 in its radiative warming effect? And also an example of warming propelled by a positive feedback?
But on getting to the part about positive feedback, the He2+ – CO2 analogy breaks down, in an important way. The positive feedback by which He2+ ions drive heating of the Cepheid star’s exterior, is intermittent. The operation of the opacity driven heating feedback set in motion processes – most notably expansion of the star – which counteracted the heating by diminishing the radiation intensity in the cloud of helium. So it did not lead to endless warming but instead it was self-cancelling and led to a regular oscillation, a series of short runs of positive feedback each one self-terminating and reversing to a starting position.
This is an important general insight into the role and effect of positive feedbacks in complex nonlinear systems. It is well known to chemists who study nonlinear oscillatory systems such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky thin film reaction [ref. 1] and the surface catalysed oxidation of CO on a platinum substrate (what happens in a car exhaust’s catalytic converter) [ref. 2]. Positive feedbacks in such complex-chaotic systems are always intermittent and set in motion their immediate reversal, cyclically, leading to regular monotonic oscillation. Negative feedbacks by contrast dampen regular monotonic oscillations (they are referred to as friction or damping) and cause emergence of more complex chaotic pattern. The combination of positive and negative feedbacks in a complex-chaotic system result in the elusive apparent oscillations that feint at certain patterns or frequencies but are nested in chaos. These patterns don’t necessarily come from external forcing. They can arise from the Feigenbaum numbers of pure chaos mathematics [ref. 3]
The Cepheid variable star is a perfect example of positive feedback leading to monotonic oscillation in a dissipative out-of-equilibrium nonlinear system. It never reaches equilibrium and its predominantly positive feedback landscape makes its oscillatory pattern monotonic rather than chaotic-quasi periodic. This is great for astronomers.
Returning to the climate sensitivity, The profound error that Monckton has uncovered is linked to the failure to treat the system as a chaotic-nonlinear system. Otherwise there would be no talk of equilibrium – the system never reaches equilibrium. Neither does a Cepheid star. (How would you define equilibrium sensitivity to Helium forcing in a Cepheid?)
References
1. Lin AL, Bertram M, Martinez K, Swinney HL, Ardelea A, Carey GF. Resonant phase patterns in a reaction-diffusion system. Physical Review Letters. 2000 May 1;84(18):4240.
http://chaos.ph.utexas.edu/manuscripts/1063306441.pdf
2. Kim M, Bertram M, Pollmann M, von Oertzen A, Mikhailov AS, Rotermund HH, Ertl G. Controlling chemical turbulence by global delayed feedback: pattern formation in catalytic CO oxidation on Pt (110). Science. 2001 May 18;292(5520):1357-60.
https://scholar.google.be/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Bertram+nonlinear+belousov+CO+&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&p=&u=%23p%3DEEzyEw9e82kJ
3. Testa J, Pérez J, Jeffries C. Evidence for universal chaotic behavior of a driven nonlinear oscillator. Physical Review Letters. 1982 Mar 15;48(11):714.
https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt18m504mf/qt18m504mf.pdf
4 and 5 are negative feedbacks. Too much negative feedback drives oscillation, known as ‘motorboating’.
Exactly. 4 and 5 work together as the negative feedbacks that stop and reverse the expansion.
It is the combination of positive and negative feedback that makes the system oscillate. Positive feedbacks give the system excitability. Negative feedbacks give the system friction or damping.
But if the negative feedback was smaller the oscillation would also be smaller. Make the negative feedback just right and the oscillation would cease.
And yet the Cepheids oscillate.
It is actually feedback factors around unity that cause oscillation. Negative feedback stabilizes the system. Recall that the response curve of output signals in the presence of feedback factors is a rectangular hyperbola.
Besides, if individual feedbacks in the climate are negative, the feedback sum and hence the feedback factor are net-positive, but nothing like strong enough to induce oscillation.
“Besides, if individual feedbacks in the climate are negative, the feedback sum and hence the feedback factor are net-positive, but nothing like strong enough to induce oscillation.”
-3^2 in maths is positive, but you cannot add negative feedbacks to produce a net positive feedback. Excess negative feedback drives oscillation, like motor-boating in a servo control. Earth’s negative feedbacks are the ocean cycles, which are amplified by the changes in cloud cover and water vapour that they drive. The AMO is a negative feedback to solar variability, it’s normally warm during solar minima.
Mr Lyons raises a legitimate concern. I expressed myself badly. I had meant to say that even though some feedbacks may be negative the feedback sum is net-positive, though weakly so.
Given my knowledge of natural systems, I’d speculate that the farther a signal deviates from what is center, the more feedbacks work to bring the signal back to the center. In this case, if the climate cools, positive feedbacks will dominate and work to warm the system, as the system warms, negative feedbacks kick in to prevent overheating. Hence, this is why you do not see any runaway warming or cooling in the historical record. The entire system is governed such that the extremes are already known. This is why CAGW theory is a fail upon arrival.
Dr Deanster is correct. The cryostratigraphic evidence is that global mean surface temperature has varied by little more than 3 K either side of the 810,000-year mean, suggesting that powerful thermostatic processes are at work. In the present state of the climate, feedback is weakly net-positive and is thus nothing like great enough to engender a runaway climate, even if there were no thermostatic processes acting to stabilize the system.
Dr Deanster is not correct, a climate dynamic feedback that opposes cooling is also a negative feedback. Like the doubling of mean El Nino episode frequency during the Maunder and Dalton solar minima, which would be helping to drive a warm AMO. There is no evidence for climate feedbacks being net positive, only supposition. From a solar frame of reference they are strongly negative, and with a large overshoot.
Dr Deanster is correct. Like it or not, in climatology a feedback that causes warming is a positive feedback and a feedback that causes cooling is a negative feedback. If there is cooling, in a thermostatic system positive feedback will act to inhibit the cooling. If there is warming, in a thermostatic system negative feedback will act to inhibit the warming.
In the climate, the feedback is weakly net-positive, not strongly net-positive as official climatology has hitherto imagined.
Drivel, if the feedback is opposing any net change in climate forcing it is negative in either direction.
In climatology, as I have said, the convention is to use a positive sign for feedback that has a net warming effect and a negative sign for feedback that has a net cooling effect.
You made that up, it’s a fallacy.
Perhaps Mr Lyons would like to point to a reference in climatology where a positive sign is used for feedback that has a net cooling effect.
Standard climatology calls that a negative feedback.
I have asked for a reference. Let Mr Lyons supply one, if he can.
In making an argument it should be borne in mind that it is not the concrete Earth (the one on which we live) that exhibits a constant value for the equilibrium climate sensitivity but rather is the abstract Earth of a model. To treat an abstract object as if it were a concrete object in making an argument is to be guilty of application of the reification fallacy.
There is no such thing as a “reification fallacy.” Please do not mix distinct aspects of Philosophy and Psychology into bovine excrement.
Furthermore Olberg, please post your physical evidence that shows the equilibrium climate sensitivity is not a constant.
Oldberg, please review Whitehead’s ” fallacy of misplaced concreteness” then get back to us.
Mr. Peterson
I searched the Web on “Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and came away with the impression that this fallacy of “misplaced concreteness” is identical to the fallacy of “reification.”
The equilibrium climate sensitivity is a property of an abstract Earth rather than being a property of the concrete Earth. In the physical sciences a distinction is made between abstsract and concrete objects. For eonfirmation, see the book entitled “The Enigma of Probability and Physics” by Lazar Mayants. Mayants was a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts.
By the way, by characterizing my view as “bovine excrement” you apply the “genetic fallacy.” Are you able to make an argument without applying a fallacy? If so, what is it?
Mr Oldberg, as usual, makes an ass of himself with his half-baked, half-understood philosophy. The facts, whether he likes them or not, are that the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere warms it; that increasing the concentration of those gases warms it further; and that, therefore, once the climate has settled to equilibrium after either a natural or an anthropogenic perturbation, the temperature will be higher than before the perturbation. The difference between the temperature before the perturbation and the temperature after it is the equilibrium sensitivity. It is a real difference. It exists. We do not, therefore, “reify” it, for that which exists exists whether or not Mr Oldberg wishes it to exist.
However, till now the equilibrium sensitivity has been hard to quantify because official climatology had erroneously defined “temperature feedback” in such a way as to exclude the fact that feedback processes respond not only to a change in temperature but also to the entire reference temperature, which includes the emission temperature driven by the sunshine and also the warming caused by the pre-industrial, non-condensing greenhouse gases.
Mr Oldberg is out of his depth here.
Dear Christoper Monckton, I love your article, it clearly shows where the climate scientists went wrong and for me it was a real eye opener. I know a bit about electronics and I would like to design and build my own feedback amplifier. I have worked with op-amp stages before albeit with much higher levels of amplification.
Does it use a double op-amp stage: one to simulate the pre-industrial feedback and the second for the additional AWG CO2 forcing?
If you can provide a schematic that would be great but if that is not possible can you at least tell me if two stages were used or a single one? Thank you!
I am very grateful to Inge for her kind support. But it is much better for her to design and operate her own circuit than simply to copy what our own engineer and our government laboratory did. That way, the result will be genuinely independent.
The only elements that need to be included are:
1. A variable input signal. In our approach, any changes to the original emission temperature are simply added to that temperature before it is input to the feedback loop. You will need to be able to check that the measured input signal is equal to that which you have input.
2. A feedback loop with a variable feedback block. The interval over which the feedback factor (i.e., the ratio of the feedback response to the output signal) should be made variable is [0, 0.9]. You will need to check that the measured feedback factor is equal to that which you have input.
3. An output signal that can be measured.
Note that, although for completeness we included a gain block in the circuits we built, there is no need for one, as we confirmed by setting the gain block to unity and the feedback block to a nonzero value, whereupon the output signal differed from the input signal by the predicted margin. So you can leave the gain block out, or include it if you wish.
A couple of pointers:
It is advisable to divide temperature values by 100 throughout so that the componentry can handle the relevant voltages.
Also, very great care must be taken to isolate the operator from the equipment while running the tests, otherwise the ambient temperature tends to interfere with the readings, for we are looking only for very small changes. Our engineer achieved this by using long pairs of wires so that he could operate the equipment from outside the laboratory. The government laboratory used a temperature-controlled chamber, but still had very great difficulty in achieving sufficient environmental stability.
Thirdly, it may be necessary to experiment with various values either side of those specified in the head posting, because otherwise there is a loss of precision, again owing to the very small signals we are talking of. We spent several months going back and forth to the government lab before we realized that it would be necessary for us to choose input values that would yield output values that were valid without rounding.
Finally, there is of course not the slightest need to build any test rigs at all. We only did so because we knew full well that the paid agents of international climate extremism would otherwise swear blind that we had misunderstood the relevant theory. Of course we had not done so, but, as will be evident from some of the stupider comments here, the climate Communists are growing desperate. So we constructed the test rigs, though there was not the slightest need to do so, since the theory has long since been developed and the theoretical performance of a feedback loop is demonstrable by two distinct methods – by very simple linear algebra and by taking the sum of a well-known convergent infinite series.
Best of luck with your circuit, and let me know if you have any problems: for we have already dealt with most of the problems you are likely to find.
Unity gain in an op-amp circuit requires full negative feedback to cancel out the high amplification of the device. To achieve the fixed gain of 1.13 that you are looking for, means reducing the negative feedback with a potential divider, of the ratio of a resistor in the feedback loop, to a resistor from the negative input to ground.
Mr Lyons has not had the benefit of our two test rigs. My account of events is correct, and was verified on those rigs, one of them constructed and operated under rigorous conditions by a government laboratory. I prefer their impartial and competent measurements to his prejudiced and inaccurate opinion.
My description is working knowledge and not opinion.
https://www.dummies.com/programming/electronics/components/electronics-components-how-to-use-an-op-amp-as-a-unity-gain-amplifier/
Mr Lyons is championing the New Superstition in which he fervently believes and is not, therefore, a dispassionate witness. It is perhaps owing to this sullen and irredeemable prejudice that he has failed to think about what he has half read and one-quarter understood.
In the appropriately-named “dummies.com” reference on which he now seeks to rely, he has read about “how to use an operational amplifier as a unit-gain amplifier”. But he has not understood the purpose of such amplifiers in electronics, which is entirely irrelevant to the temperature feedback loop described both mathematically and diagrammatically in the head posting, which he may perhaps be interested in reading and thinking about before he attempts to comment again.
In electronics, as he would know if he were to read a proper textbook or consult a proper professor of applied systems theory or a proper control engineer, the purpose of a unit-gain amplifier is to isolate one part of a circuit from another. This isolation is possible in an electronic circuit, where the ideal operational amplifier does not draw current from the input signal.
Such isolation is neither possible nor necessary in the temperature feedback loop, wherefore, as explained in the head posting, as shown in the relevant diagram and as described on several subsequent occasions in answer to Mr Lyons, the effect of setting the gain block to unity is to remove it altogether.
Mr Lyons has also made the extraordinary mistake of assuming that setting the gain block to unity constitutes an amplification – and, at that, an amplification so large that it must be countered with strong negative feedback. Nonsense. An amplifier gain of unity is no gain at all. If Mr Lyons were familiar with elementary block diagrams, he would know that a signal passing through a block – such as a gain block – is multiplied by the value of the block. Therefore, since multiplying a signal by 1 leaves that signal unaltered, that signal has not undergone any gain at all.
You are talking a whole load of defamatory rot. I gave the link to corroborate my working knowledge, and I am well familiar with unity gain op amps used as buffers.
C.M. writes:
“Mr Lyons has also made the extraordinary mistake of assuming that setting the gain block to unity constitutes an amplification – and, at that, an amplification so large that it must be countered with strong negative feedback.”
Nowhere did I assume or suggest any such thing. Op amps have a large gain factor and require full negative feedback to operate at unity gain.
Show me your schematic circuit diagram with all the component values please.
Mr Lyons said, not far upthread: “Unity gain in an op-amp circuit requires full negative feedback to cancel out the high amplification of the device.” It appears to me, subject to any clarification that Mr Lyons may care to give, that, contrary to his assertion that he had not assumed or suggested any such thing, he had indeed assumed that setting the gain block to unity constitutes an amplification so large that it must be countered with strong negative feedback.
“he had indeed assumed that setting the gain block to unity constitutes an amplification so large that it must be countered with strong negative feedback”
No the full negative feedback ‘sets’ an op amp to unity gain. You’re the only one making assumptions here, as you patently cannot follow the logic of what I have written.
Show me your schematic circuit diagram with all the component values please.
Here’s the op amp circuit for unit gain, as Ulric says it requires full negative feedback.
M of B berates:
1) I prefer their impartial and competent measurements to his prejudiced and inaccurate opinion.
2) Mr Lyons is championing the New Superstition in which he fervently believes and is not, therefore, a dispassionate witness. It is perhaps owing to this sullen and irredeemable prejudice that he has failed to think about what he has half read and one-quarter understood.
3) In the appropriately-named “dummies.com” reference on which he now seeks to rely, he has read about “how to use an operational amplifier as a unit-gain amplifier”. But he has not understood the purpose of such amplifiers in electronics..
4) In electronics, as he would know if he were to read a proper textbook or consult a proper professor of applied systems theory or a proper control engineer.. etc
5) Mr Lyons has also made the extraordinary mistake of assuming that setting the gain block to unity constitutes an amplification – and, at that, an amplification so large that it must be countered with strong negative feedback.
5 apologies due for your undue collection of defamatory conceit, lies, and emotional projection.
Remove the gain block altogether, leaving only a feedback loop. Now explain why you consider that it is necessary to specify that the feedback factor should be negative.
The ideal op amp has infinite open loop gain (real chips have ~10^5) so in order to set up with unit gain you need negative feedback as shown above.
See the diagram in the head posting. There is no gain block. Why, therefore, should one require negative feedback?
Show us your op amp circuit diagram schematic layout with all component values.
Asked and answered. Mr Lyons is in the wrong, having failed to read the head posting with due care and attention, and he knows it.
Coward, and baloney, I am not wrong on this matter.
Where’s my due apologies bounder?
M of B weasels:
“See the diagram in the head posting. There is no gain block. Why, therefore, should one require negative feedback?”
Because in this thread we are discussing Igne’s op amp experiments?
Mr Lyons aptly describes himself as a coward talking baloney. However, the purpose of the head posting was to discuss not an electronic feedback amplifier but a climate feedback loop. Though the essential mathematics is the same for both, Mr Lyons’ suggestion that setting the gain block to unity in the climate feedback loop and thus removing it mandates 100% negative feedback in the climate feedback loop is complete nonsense.
In our electronic feedback amplifier to simulate the climate, we specified that the input signal (reference temperature), the gain block (reference sensitivity) and the feedback block (the feedback factor) should be controllable by the operator, and that the consequent output signal (equilibrium temperature) should be measured once the three inputs had been set, measured and confirmed.
In two of our 23 experiments at the government laboratory, we set the input signal to an appropriate nonzero value, set the gain block to unity and then set the feedback block to various values. The output signal in each instance was precisely what we had calculated that it would be.
Be that as it may, the very first diagram in the head posting shows a feedback loop with no gain block at all. That was the circumstance Mr Lyons was addressing when he tried, erroneously, to suggest that setting the gain block to unity required a large negative feedback. There are of course certain electronic circuits in which this is the case, but it was certainly not the case with our test rigs and it is certainly not the case when there is no gain block at all, now is it?
If Mr Lyons now seeks to argue that he had been talking in abstract terms about how some electronic circuit not analogous to that in the head posting operated, then he had wandered a long way off topic. I assumed, and was entitled to assume, that the point he was raising referred to what had been described and very clearly illustrated in the head posting.
If only he were a little more willing to think and a little less willing to shout, he might make useful contributions here.
“Mr Lyons’ suggestion that setting the gain block to unity in the climate feedback loop and thus removing it mandates 100% negative feedback in the climate feedback loop is complete nonsense.”
I’m talking about op amp circuits and not your climate feedback loop. What you have written there is loopy, setting the gain to unity is done with the 100% feedback, so naturally if you remove it, you’ll have to add it again. Duh!
“If Mr Lyons now seeks to argue that he had been talking in abstract terms about how some electronic circuit not analogous to that in the head posting operated, then he had wandered a long way off topic.”
Igne asked about building an op amp circuit, so I though I had best correct your abstract terms, else she would likely blow up the op amp and maybe the power supply too if she has followed your nonsense. It’s a health and safety issue.
Mr Lyons may now be talking about a form of circuit that has nothing whatsoever to do with the head posting, but he originally introduced this particular piece of nonsense in purported refutation of the head posting. Having been caught out, he now wriggles like a stuck pig.
Don’t call my working knowledge of op amp circuits nonsense. You’re patently the stuck pig.
Monckton of Brenchley
Your reply fails to respond to the issue raised. With regard to the equilibrium climate sensitivity, it is the ratio of the change in the equilibrium temperature (aka “steady state” temperature) to the change in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration. The numerator is not observable on the concrete Earth. Thus, a theory of the magnitude of the equilibrium climate sensitivity lacks falsifiability.
Mr Oldberg, as usual, is talking arrant nonsense. If he does not accept the concept of reference sensitivity – i.e., of the warming induced by CO2 in the absence of feedback – then he should address his feeble-minded and futile ramblings to the Secretariat of the Intergummintal Panel on Climate Change, which has a circular file especially for them.
Monckton of Brenchley:
To characterize my argument as “arrant nonsense” is a logically illegitimate approach to refutation and a waste of the valuable time of each of the participants in this blog. Though Earth’s global temperature is observable its equilibrium temperature is not. This irrefutable fact has the significance that neither the IPCC’s estimate of the magnitude of ECS nor the IPCC’s estimate is scientifically meaningful as both estimates lack falsifiability. Thus, contrary to your claim your work in this area does nothing to resolve the issue of CAGW.
Where an argument is arrant nonsense, a declarative statement or proposition that it is arrant nonsense is the objective scientific truth, and is Popper-falsifiable.
Mr Oldberg considers that Earth’s equilibrium temperature is not observable. If he knew a little climatology, or had read the head posting with due care and attention before presuming to comment upon it, he would have discovered that the measured surface temperature of the Earth in 1850 was an equilibrium temperature for the purposes of the head posting, in that there would be no change in the HadCRUT4 monthly temperature trend for some eight subsequent decades.
He would also have discovered, if he had approached this question with an open mind rather than an open mouth, that in 2011 the equilibrium temperature, though not directly observable since there was no temperature equilibrium that year, was deducible using a method entirely standard in climatology.
Thus, equilibrium temperatures exist at some moments and may be inferred at others, for purposes of calculating equilibrium sensitivity. This approach is, as I have said, standard in climatology and, if Mr Oldberg wishes to disagree with it, he should address his concerns not to me but the IPCC Secretariat, which will give him short shrift.
I have made it repeatedly plain that our approach starts from the assumption – sed solum ad argumentum – that everything in official climatology is true except what we are able to disprove. Like it or not, official climatology recognizes and uses the concept of equilibrium temperature, and the slipperier concept of equilibrium sensitivity. So Mr Oldberg’s maunderings about “reification” are so much waffle.
Monckton of Brenchley (MoB) states the proposition that
“Where an argument is arrant nonsense, a declarative statement or proposition
that it is arrant nonsense is the objective scientific truth, and is Popper-falsifiable.
This statement accomplishes nothing more than to state the truth that if an argument is errant nonesense
it is errant nonsense. Why does MoB waste our valuable time by posting a circular argument?
Elsewhere, MoB claims that “the measured surface temperature of the Earth in 1850 was an equilibrium temperature…”
A premise to his conclusion that this temperature was an equilibrium temperature cannot be the result from
measurement of the equilbrium temperature of the Earth in 1850 as the temperature of the Earth is never at equilibrium for
the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the Sun. Mob’s conclusion must be the result from the computation of a model. Here again,
MoB’s argument is circular.
Mr Oldberg continues to have difficulty in grasping even the most elementary concepts.
All of the arguments I have ever seen him post here have been arrant nonsense (not “errant” but “arrant”, by the way).
However, the proposition that an argument is arrant nonsense, if the argument is indeed arrant nonsense, is the objective scientific truth. Mr Oldberg, who has a very slender grasp of logic, is perhaps unaware of the practice of assigning a truth-function to declarative statements. One advantage of the truth-function is that it facilitates Boolean algebra.
Next, Mr Oldberg makes yet another statement that is arrant nonsense. He says that my conclusion that the temperature in 1850 was an equilibrium (in English, a steady-state) temperature is based on the computation of a model. No, it is based on the observational data for the following 80 years, during which the least-squares linear-regression trend on the monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies was zero. Except in the futilely trivial sense that the derivation of the least-squares linear-regression trend on a data series may be described as “modeling”, the statement that the temperature in 1850 was a steady-state temperature is observationally based. The temperature fluctuated up and down a little either side of the 80-year zero trend and was, therefore, in a sufficiently steady state to be considered an equilibrium temperature for the purpose of our calculations. We have the benefit of advice from a co-author who is an eminent professor of statistics.
Mr Oldberg should stop waffling and go away and learn some elementary science. He is wasting his time here, but, like others of his ilk, whose purpose is purely destructive, his drivel serves as a standing advertisement for the abject intellectual bankruptcy of the climate-Communist cause.