Video: What’s wrong with the surface temperature record?

“You must agree that you have not been barred from presenting your criticisms.”

Actually, I don’t agree. But you may be missing the big picture, because in my mind that isn’t the more-important question.

Lord Monckton had always been loose with the facts. Until last winter, though, that seemed fairly harmless. But then he inserted himself in a lawsuit that could have hobbled my country’s energy industry. With a Heartland Institute lawyer listed as one of their attorneys, he, Willie Soon, Matt Briggs, David Legates, and others filed one of the worst briefs amicus briefs I’ve ever seen, and I made my living as a lawyer, so I’ve seen some stinkers. Fortunately, it seems the judge largely ignored it.

But what if the judge had taken it seriously and had been of a mind to rule on the substance? He saw the Heartland Institute as well as several prominent skeptics all propounding the crazy theory that Mr. Watts has run seven head posts on now and that has been the subject of at least two YouTube videos. And in one of those videos Lord Monckton has Will Happer saying of Lord Monckton’s work, “I like this paper.”

Will Happer, for Pete’s sake.

All these prominent skeptics seemed to have signed on to that preposterous notion that it’s “grave error” to calculate by way of perturbations rather than entire quantities—as EEs would say, with small-signal rather than large-signal quantities.

Apparently the judge has studied engineering, and any reasonably bright engineer would see in fairly short order that this is nonsense. Yet these prominent skeptics all seem to have signed on to it. This, it could have appeared to the judge, was the caliber of skeptical thought. Think of what a disaster that could have been.

So Lord Monckton has gone from being harmless to being a menace.

Look, Lord Monckton’s vitriol doesn’t much matter to me. Again, I made my living as a lawyer, so that’s pretty much just another day at the office. True, I find it a little frustrating that Mr. Watts won’t run one post of mine in rebuttal to seven of Lord Monckton’s.

But the real issue isn’t whether I get my say or not. The issue is this. Mr. Watts, who runs the top skeptic web site, had a choice to run true and/or false head posts on the subject. He chose to turn down the one true one and ran seven that are objectively false. So he’s further promoting Lord Monckton as the face of climate skepticism and stifling a full airing of the issue.

If you don’t find that disturbing, you haven’t comprehended the stakes.

“The argument had become purely an electrical engineering one.”

If that’s what you think, I invite you to take a look at the last slide in the last of the seven posts that Anthony Watts has run for Lord Monckton, at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/15/climatologys-startling-error-of-physics-answers-to-comments/, where Lord Monckton says, “Here’s the end of the global warming scam in a single slide.” That slide shows that his error is really just high-school math, not electrical engineering.

I hasten to add that this is only one of three fundamental errors in his theory.

The first error is that the large ECS estimates bruited about are not arrived at in the way that Lord Monckton claims as the “grave error.” Roy Spencer points out Lord Monckton’s own error in this regard, and I’m pretty sure Dr. Spencer is right. But I don’t have the wherewithal to make that case myself.

The second error is that, even if the earth could be characterized by such a thing as equilibrium temperatures, the values Lord Monckton uses for his with- and without-feedback equilibrium temperatures aren’t correct. If Lord Monckton’s accuracy on other things is any guide, I think this is indeed an error, and I believe others have made that case somewhere. But it’s not one I can creditably make myself.

However, the third error is one that requires no particular expertise to detect. It’s just math; all it takes is a certain analytical ability. The reason most people seemed to find it hard to detect is that Lord Monckton so effectively hid what he was doing (even from himself, I believe). But that slide finally boils things down to their essence, and it reveals that what he was doing is bad extrapolation.

The slide sets forth the correction he proposes to what he calls climatology’s “startling error of physics.” and in that slide are the with- and without-feedback equilibrium temperatures that he previously referred to as and . That slide’s is the (large-signal) slope of as a function of , a slope that he previously referred to as . (Here is the “feedback factor,” i.e., the product of the open-loop gain and the feedback coefficient .)

In the post I proposed, I graphed as a function of . That is, I plotted the points and that the slide sets forth. What the slide does is tell how Lord Monckton would extrapolate the value, call it , for what we’ll call . The resultant is what he concludes ECS is. Specifically, he would use the large-signal slope or as the extrapolation slope. The “grave error” he says “climatology” made was instead to use as the extrapolation slope. (Of course, he obscured this by not describing it in terms of extrapolation or slopes.)

But what his approach implies is that the slope of (a.k.a ) as a function of (a.k.a ) is expected to fall abruptly from the 1.43 value it’s known to have in the first, interval to 0.50 in the contiguous, interval. In contrast, what he characterizes as the climatology approach would employ the known slope as the contiguous interval’s slope. In other words, the climatology approach is standard linear extrapolation, whereas his theory boils down to bad extrapolation.

It is only at this point that the engineering stuff comes in. Lord Monckton believes that his remarkable conclusion is dictated by what he characterizes at 9:10 into the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcZ8LEm2A as “the standard equation that control theory uses,” namely, . Again, shows up in the slide as , the average slope. As I pointed out in a nearby comment to Michael Moon, this is a naive reading of control theory. It uses large-signal values where engineers really would use small-signal ones.

It is this error with which he has apparently infected people like Willie Soon, Matt Briggs, and David Legates. It is this error that by treating Lord Monckton as a responsible representative of skeptical thought Anthony Watts has made appear the level at which skeptics tend to think. It is this error that prompted me to propose a post that would reduce the issue from engineering to high-school extrapolation.

And it is Mr. Watts’s apparent failure to comprehend even this high-school math, which I understand, that makes me wonder about his judgment on things like processing temperature data, which I haven’t dealt with.

Joe Born:
Wow! is all I can say (almost.)
I have no idea if you’re right or if Lord Monckton is right; I can’t understand the math.
But I will say that it doesn’t surprise me at all that you’ve noticed a bit of bandwagon thinking that goes on at WUWT and is very disappointing. This bandwagoon thinking has in some cases replaced real thought and objective consideration. My example would be adiabatic auto-compression, and yes I use what might be the most confusing way to express this idea, deliberately, just to provoke knee-jerk and unthinking reactions. Yet thinking about the effects of atmospheric pressure is a simple and elegant way to think about what’s happening with our atmosphere in terms that are fairly concrete, if we consider that this adiabatic auto-compression is the equivalent of having about 20 grand pianos on top of each of us as we lie down– and yes, I can do that math, at least.

That’s my two cents and maybe that’s all it’s worth; I’m not proud and my only concern is with what’s true and reasonable, not with what I think must be or with some theory I feel I must defend, or some bandwagon I feel I have to climb on board.
Don132

“Joe’s complaints seem reasonable, and let’s note that the fatal flaw that Lord Monckton has allegedly uncovered has had zero impact on general opinion, yet if so obvious and blatant it might have made headlines around the world. It seems there’s some disagreement over whether or not Lord Monckton’s ideas are as clear and distinct as he believes they are.”

I grant the argument for the sake of it.

“I find that Joe’s general complaint about this site– that it is at times uncritical– is valid.”

Given his behavior in this particular thread. Do you also find him to be a liar as well?

If not, why not?

Don: “Misguided or mistaken, maybe, but ‘lying’ I think is going too far.”

I might add that there’s a mind-bogglingly simple way for someone who’s interested in substance rather than name-calling to prove I’m “misguided” or “mistaken” if indeed I am.

At https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/21/video-whats-wrong-the-the-surface-temperature-record/#comment-2466417 I showed how six numbers Lord Monckton provides in his “end of the global warming scam in a single slide” dictate the implausible result that less than half a percent change in temperature causes the slope of with-feedback temperature as a function of without-feedback temperature to decrease abruptly from 1.43 to 0.50.

One need only show (1) that my arithmetic is wrong or (2) that such a bizarre result is required by, as Lord Monckton puts it at 39:30 into the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebokc6z82cg, “the mathematics of feedback in all dynamical systems, including the climate,” which “comes from electronic circuitry.”

Either one would do.

Your logic certainly is dazzling, I’ll give you that. I admit that I’m defeated. Congratulations.
Don132

“I might add that there’s a mind-bogglingly simple way for someone who’s interested in substance rather than name-calling to prove I’m “misguided” or “mistaken” if indeed I am.”

There you go again. You just can’t help yourself, can you? You’ve made quite the substantive case against yourself as has been shown here:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/21/video-whats-wrong-the-the-surface-temperature-record/#comment-2466867

And since I am correct in my assessment of your character, why should anyone care whether you’re right or not? I would argue they shouldn’t! I would argue you should be summarily dismissed, both now and in the future, regardless of the veracity of your claims.

Not for spite, mind you, but rather for the sake of decency.

“What really bothers me is insulting comments like from sycomputing that lean heavily toward personal attacks.”

Attacking the man rather than the argument, Don?

And such as that after such as this:

“I find that Joe’s general complaint about this site– that it is at times uncritical– is valid. Sometimes it does exactly what it accuses alarmists of doing: defending theory or opinion rather than thinking critically and objectively.”

Well done, Don. Congratulations to you as well.

“OK then, lets see your figures and calculations. Have you got anything beyond ‘It’s hot down there! Look at all that heat! Therefore it’s the ignored elephant!'”

OK, I’ll take a stab at this.
Why is the bottom of the Grand Canyon always warmer than the top by a significant amount? If cold air sinks?

Could it be because the air is more densely packed at the bottom due to atmospheric pressure, which at the surface is equivalent to about 23,000 pounds/square meter? This is not trivial.

Why is the air colder the higher one goes? Even if we had no greenhouse gases whatsoever the air would still be colder the higher we go: each cubic meter of atmosphere contains fewer molecules as we go up, and even if these molecules were isothermal the air must necessarily be cooler as it rises.

Atmospheric pressure is immense; just because we don’t feel it since it’s equalized doesn’t mean it isn’t there and exerting enormous pressure, packing molecules in tightly at the surface and even tighter at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I don’t think pressure is just there to make equations of state come out, yet we seem to treat it as if it’s just derivative.

That’s my two cents, and that may be all it’s worth.
Don132

“Namely, in the absence of the convection that uneven surface heating causes, an atmosphere at equilibrium would be essentially isothermal. ”

Even if molecules were isothermal, it would be impossible for the each cubic meter of an atmosphere to be isothermal. I’m baffled why this is so hard to see. What determines the temperature of a volume? The average internal energy of the volume. What happens when you have fewer molecules per unit volume, even if the internal energy of each molecule remains the same? The temperature of the volume must go down.

Nevertheless, we’ve been through this at WUWT and have to agree to disagree; I don’t have time for any protracted arguments.

Don: “It” Is the reason for the temperature decreases with altitude.