By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
My previous posting was published while I was traveling from Scotland, where I had been scrambling up mountains in the freezing sleet, to my fragrant Gloucestershire garden. Therefore, I have not been able to respond to individual commenters as usual. Here, then, is a collective response, beginning with the moral case against climate fraud.
The International Energy Agency defines “access to electricity” as the ability to switch on the equivalent of a single 60-Watt light-bulb for about four hours. Even on this hardly generous definition, the IEA finds that some 1.3 billion people worldwide – a sixth of the global population – have no access to electricity.
Without power, life is poor, nasty, brutish and, above all, short. Life expectancy in regions without electricity – sub-Saharan Africa, for instance – is little better than 60 years. In the European countries, it is more like 80 years.
Yet since 2010 the World Bank, one of the plethora of unelected supranational institutions to which democratic nations are unwisely transferring great power and wealth, has refused to lend to developing countries for coal-fired electricity generation – because global warming.
From this year onward, that hideous, stony-faced, flint-hearted entity will not lend to poorer countries for extraction of coal, oil or gas either – because global warming.
In Western countries, too, the crippling cost of global-warming policies is causing real harm. Britain’s last aluminum smelter was forced to close some years ago, killed by savage real increases in the cost of electrical power for the furnace. The British Steel Corporation, the country’s last major steelworks, has just gone into bankruptcy. Again, the major reason for the collapse is the cost of electrical power, absurdly inflated not by market forces but by governmental fiat – because global warming.
Jobs in the West and lives in the South – millions of them every year – are being destroyed because affordable electricity is unavailable. More than 4 million people a year die of particulate pollution from open cooking fires because they have no electricity. Half a million women die in childbirth chiefly because there is no electrical power. These are just some of the tens of millions who die annually because they cannot so much as switch on a light.
A growing fraction of these job losses and deaths arise not because the rate of global warming is dangerous – it isn’t – but because official policies intended (whether piously or not) to mitigate global warming are, in their effect, genocidal.
The global welfare loss arising from policies to mitigate global warming very greatly outweighs even the vastly-exaggerated benefit imagined by true-believers in the cult of Thermageddon. That is why it is essential to get global-warming science right. Not merely the jobs of vulnerable working people but the very lives of tens of millions in developing countries are at stake.
Yet when I set out, in my previous column, a highly-compressed but quite detailed account of a grave error of physics right at the heart of climatology, some of those who commented decided to cling, with increasing and visible desperation, to their aprioristic belief that global warming science is free of the error that had been spelt out for them.
I do not propose to name these wretches, but I do propose to deal with their arguments. Before I do, let us cheer ourselves up with another Scottish picture, this time of a cataract behind a fine, stone bridge across a tributary of the River Lyon along the ancient drove-road to the far West. I took it just before we headed back to the South.
An outline of climatology’s error: IPCC explicitly misdefines feedback as responding only to perturbations of an input signal, when in well-established control theory whatever feedback processes prevail at any given moment must perforce act upon the entire reference signal then obtaining.
The reference signal is the sum of the original input signal and all subsequent perturbations of it, before accounting for feedback. The equilibrium signal is the output signal after accounting for feedback. In climate, the input signal is the 255 K emission temperature that would obtain – before accounting for feedback – purely because the Sun is shining. The natural and anthropogenic perturbations of that signal are known as reference sensitivities. Therefore, the reference temperature – the temperature that would obtain at a given moment before accounting for feedback – is the sum of emission temperature and all subsequent reference sensitivities.
In the block diagram, emission temperature comes in at top left. Then the reference sensitivities are added to it. Then it passes to the input/output node and thence infinitely round and round the feedback loop, where the separately-powered feedback block adds a smidgin to the signal on each pass. The output signal is equilibrium temperature, the temperature that obtains after feedback has operated and the climate has settled to equilibrium.
Take a good look at the diagram. It should be self-evident that the feedback loop cannot act selectively upon the 1 K anthropogenic reference sensitivity. It must also act not only upon the 10 K sensitivity to the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases that were already present in the air before 1850 but also, and most importantly, upon the 255 K emission temperature. Therefore, if one knows the reference and equilibrium temperatures at a given moment one can calculate the feedback response at that moment: it is simply the difference between reference temperature before feedback has acted and equilibrium temperature after feedback has acted.
One can also calculate the feedback fraction at that moment: it is the fraction of equilibrium temperature represented by the feedback response: i.e., the ratio of the feedback response to the equilibrium temperature. Finally, the system-gain factor is the ratio of equilibrium to reference temperature.
In 1850, reference temperature was the sum of the 255 K emission temperature and about 10 K reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. The equilibrium temperature was about 287.55 K (HadCRUT4). So the feedback response in 1850 was 32.55 K, to the nearest twentieth of a Kelvin. The feedback fraction was 32.55 / 287.55, or 0.113. And the system-gain factor was 287.55 / 255, or 1.085.
Now, if we assume at this stage that the curve of equilibrium temperature as a function of reference temperature is linear, then Charney sensitivity – equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 – will be the product of the CMIP5 1.05 K reference sensitivity to doubled CO2 – and the system-gain factor 1.085: i.e., just 1.15 K, not the 3.35 K currently imagined by the CMIP5 models (based on Andrews et al. 2012). Since 1.15 K is about a third of official climatology’s current central estimate, that’s the end of the climate problem. Let’s celebrate that with a picture of some bluebells in Glen Lyon.
Of course, one could make the mistake of ignoring the fact that the Sun is shining and imagine instead that the system-gain factor was 32.55 / 10, or 3.255. Then one might multiply the 1.05 K reference sensitivity to doubled CO2 by 3.255 and conclude that equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 is about 3.4 K. And that, not entirely by coincidence, is what the CMIP5 models erroneously do.
But if one were doing it correctly, one would remember that the 255 K temperature caused by the fact that the Sun is shining itself generates a substantial feedback response. One must not – as the models in effect do at present – allocate to greenhouse gases the vast majority of the total feedback response that comes from the fact that the Sun is shining.
With that background on the moral importance of trying to get the science right and on how climatology has gotten the science wrong, I now turn to some of the criticisms leveled at our conclusions by commenters on my earlier posting here.
One commenter, who has some experience of control theory, tries to muddy the waters in a manner that does not seem to me to be morally justifiable. He says we are wrong because the input signal – emission temperature – is itself a perturbation when compared to absolute zero. So it is – and that is exactly why it should not be excluded when, at any given moment, one is calculating the magnitude of the effect of feedback on temperature. At any given moment, feedback processes respond to the entire temperature they find – the sum of all the perturbations compared with absolute zero.
That commenter, after confusing the input signal (before any natural or anthropogenic perturbations) with the reference signal (the sum of the original input signal, emission temperature, and the subsequent perturbations caused by the presence of noncondensing greenhouse gases), perpetrates what another commenter calls out as “lies” by taking a quotation from a reviewer of a previous version of our paper, falsely asserting that it was a quotation from a review of the present paper and then suggesting that the reviewer’s criticism was correct, when the commenter, as an expert in control theory, knew full well it was wrong.
That reviewer had said we had arbitrarily decided that feedback responded not only to perturbations of emission temperature but also to emission temperature itself. But feedback does respond to both, and the commenter knew that. Look at the block diagram.
The commenter went on to try to leave the impression that, since feedback is not explicitly implemented in models, it is not really important to the derivation of equilibrium sensitivities – i.e., to answering the “how-much-warming” question.
The first answer to any such suggestion is that IPCC (2013) mentions “feedback” more than 1000 times. Without the pretence that feedback multiplies reference sensitivity to anthropogenic forcings by 3, which is absolutely essential to official climatology’s case, there is no climate crisis. We know that the reference sensitivity to doubled CO2 (before feedback) is 1.05 K, and we know that the equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 (after feedback) is 3.35 K. The ratio of the two – about 3.2 – is the system-gain factor that official climatology is using, when it ought to be using something less than 1.1. It doesn’t matter by what method climatology reaches its wildly-exaggerated midrange estimate of Charney sensitivity: the estimate is exaggerated, and the exaggeration arises almost entirely from climatology’s misunderstanding of what a feedback is.
The second answer is that getting the definition of feedback right is crucial, for the following simple reason. The system-gain factor in official climatology is the ratio of very small sensitivities. Tiny uncertainties in small sensitivities entail a very large uncertainty in the system-gain factor and hence in equilibrium sensitivity. It is for this reason, above all, that there is still such a very large range of estimates of equilibrium sensitivity. After 40 years of “settled science”, it’s still 1.5 to 4.5 K, just as it was in the Charney report of 1979.
The corrected system-gain factor is the ratio of absolute temperatures that are greater by two orders of magnitude than the sensitivities used by official climatology. We know roughly what that system-gain factor is, because we know what it was in 1850. It was 287.55 / 265, or 1.085. It won’t have changed all that much since then, because the climate sensitivity parameter, which allows for forcing and feedback together, is described in Ramanathan (1985) and in IPCC (2001) as “a typically near-invariant parameter”.
The point is that even quite large uncertainties in the values of the entire reference and equilibrium temperatures that ought to be but are not used in deriving equilibrium sensitivity entail only a small uncertainty in the system-gain factor and hence in equilibrium sensitivity – a point well illustrated by our professor of statistics when he ran Monte Carlo simulations, each of 300,000 iterations, comparing official climatology’s vast equilibrium-sensitivity interval with our own much narrower interval. The diagram tells all. The bin widths (the number of iterations per histogram bar) is identical in both simulations.
Next, a notorious concern troll, who, unlike our professor of control theory, has no qualifications in control theory or in any scientific subject, weighs in with a characteristically confused series of pseudo-scientific objections to our case.
The concern troll begins by saying that in the models climate sensitivity is not derived as we say it is. But our argument does not depend on how the models derive equilibrium sensitivities: it depends on the observation that, if one were to correct official climatology’s published misdefinitions of temperature feedback, one would be able to constrain equilibrium sensitivity very simply and yet very robustly, and one would find that equilibrium sensitivity cannot possibly be anything like as elevated as the modelers profit by asking us to believe.
Next, the troll says some quantities we had relied upon are incorrect, but does not say which or by how much or on what grounds. This kind of yah-boo is all too common among trolls.
Next, the troll says we have gotten our arithmetic wrong, but carefully fails to show where, in the head posting, any such error is evident – in short, a mere smear. The math was verified by our professor of statistics so that he could calculate the probability distributions. It is not, therefore, particularly likely that there is any significant arithmetic error.
The troll himself, however, makes the elementary error of assuming that reference temperature upon a doubling of CO2 compared with 2011 is the sum of emission temperature and reference sensitivity to anthropogenic but not to natural greenhouse gases. Oops!
Finally, the troll says that maybe the curve of equilibrium temperatures as a function of reference temperatures is nonlinear. Maybe it is: our paper considers curves of all shapes. However, if “settled science” is right that the climate-sensitivity parameter is a “typically near-invariant parameter”, the curve is necessarily linear or very close to it. For once, settled science is very probably correct, for the reference temperature in 1850 was more than 92% of the equilibrium temperature that year, leaving little room to imagine that today’s feedback processes are at all likely to have an extravagantly nonlinear influence on global temperature.
We did some tests to see what would happen if one assumed that existing equilibrium-sensitivity estimates were correct. In every case, making that assumption led to an impossible contradiction. A brief account of some of these tests is given in the short scientific section in the previous posting: but the troll – one can tell it is a troll by its nasty, arrogant writing style – had not read it.
For instance, quite a simple calculation shows that official climatology’s midrange estimate of 3.35 K Charney sensitivity implies that the feedback fraction in response to greenhouse-gas warming is more than 80 times the feedback fraction in response to emission temperature.
That is, of course, quite impossible, since precisely the same sensitivity-altering feedbacks were responding to emission temperature in the absence of noncondensing greenhouse gases as are responding to reference temperature (the sum of emission temperature and all subsequent natural and anthropogenic perturbations) today.
To make sure, we carried out a careful Gedankenexperiment in which we calculated the surface temperatures at all points on Earth in the absence of the noncondensers. We then verified our latitudinal temperature profile method by applying it to the Moon, and were able to reproduce exactly the curve produced at a cost of billions by the measurements of the Lunar Diviner experiment.
One commenter, who had read the scientific section with great care, noticed a misprint: at one point the feedback fraction had been incorrectly stated as the ratio of equilibrium temperature to the feedback response, rather than vice versa. Our proof-reader had spotted that one, but had not responded before I submitted the paper to our kind host for posting.
Another, less constructive commenter gave me a rather flatulent lecture on the need to define our variables. because, he said, we had not defined our variable R. However, we had defined R as reference temperature both in the paragraph cunningly disguised as the definition of feedback and related quantities, specifically including R, and (twice) in the block diagram. For good measure, both in the abstract and in the main text we had explained exactly what reference temperature is.
Fraus est celare fraudem: The main point of the previous posting had been to invite comment on our proposal to involve the police in those aspects of the climate debate that are demonstrably fraudulent. Several commenters said there was no point in trying to approach the police, but I have long learned not to heed suchlike counsels of despair. There are some people who do, and others (a majority, alas) who sit on the sidelines, swaying slowly from side to side, wringing their hands, pouting petulantly, blinking goofily and explaining in reedy voices why nothing can be done.
Other commenters said that the courts were not a good place to settle scientific questions. Yet we did not heed their reedy voices before, when we successfully defeated Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy-horror movie in the High Court in London on the basis of 80 pages of scientific testimony drafted by me. It was the testimony wot did it: the moment the Government (which had been proposing to send a free copy of Gore’s silly movie to every school in England) saw our testimony, it conceded the case.
Besides, as several commenters were quick and right to point out, if we do have to report various journals for fraud we shall not be inviting the police or the courts to pronounce on scientific questions such as whether our paper is meritorious. And it would not be just one journal we were reporting: we only propose to ask for an investigation if the pattern of egregious professional misconduct evident at the present journal were replicated by the editors of two further journals. Then it would be limpidly clear that a pattern of dishonest conduct worthy of investigation was present.
We should be drawing attention to a pattern of deception by journals that hold themselves out as publishing sound science after a process of peer review that they describe on their own websites in some detail, presenting it as thorough and scientific. On any view, our treatment to date by the current journal – which we have given one final opportunity to redeem itself – has not been honest. If the journal reverts to us with genuine scientific objections to our paper, then it is doing what it ought to do and, if it is correct, we shall not complain. But if there is any more messing about we shall take the first step towards stopping the climate nonsense by putting the police on notice that fraudulent behavior is evident.
Purchasers of such journals, and authors who submit their papers thereto, have a legitimate expectation in law that the journals will conduct the process of peer review process honestly, competently and in the manner in which the journals themselves has represented that they will conduct it.
From the brief account I gave in my earlier posting of the manner in which the current journal has handled our submission to date, it was clear to most commenters that, on the face of things, a jury of reasonable men on the Clapham omnibus (and that is the legal yardstick) would conclude that our paper had been dishonestly handled thus far.
Fraud at the IPCC: Then there’s the dismal, corrupt IPCC. We twice asked it to activate the error-reporting protocol that the Inter-Academy Council had obliged it to put into place precisely to deal with errors that it had in the past swept under the carpet. But it has not activated the protocol. It has not even replied to us.
One of the nastier trolls said that was because our paper was nonsense. Well, it isn’t, for we’ve had enough pre-submission reviews from scientists considerably more eminent and less prejudiced than the troll to know we’re barking up the right tree.
Under the error protocol the IPCC is obliged to respond willy-nilly, and not simply to ignore an inconvenient truth. It has not responded. Again, a reasonable jury would be likely to conclude that its failure to respond was motivated by a desire not to bring the gravy-train that runs solely on the basis of climatology’s error of physics to a decisive and permanent halt.
As I made plain in the earlier posting, we are not proposing at this stage to invite the police to act: merely to put them on notice that something irregular – with very costly consequences not only in treasure but in human lives – is going on in climate science, and in the journals that are, for good or ill, the gatekeepers of modern science.
As one commenter who formerly served in the police nicely put it, a fraud is a fraud, and it does not cease to be a fraud merely because it is a fraud by boffins in white coats with leaky biros sticking out of the top pocket.
Finally, several commenters suggested that we should establish a crowd-funding campaign, to which they said they would be happy to contribute. That is a most generous suggestion, and we shall consider it carefully. Watch this space.
The bottom line: most readers of this column know full well that several aspects of the prevailing climate-extremist story-line are fraudulent. These frauds are costing tens of millions a year their very lives. Morally speaking, that genocide is intolerable. In my submission, it is now time for us to alert the public authorities to those aspects of present-day climate science that the reasonable juror on the Clapham omnibus would at once recognize as frauds and then, in due course, to demand that they should forthwith bring to an end what Professor Mörner has rightly called the greatest fraud in human history.
More global warming, please, squire! Deer at Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire, 2019
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Christopher, I raised an issue on your other post with the temperature you are using as an “emission temperature”. You say:
“In climate, the input signal is the 255 K emission temperature that would obtain – before accounting for feedback – purely because the Sun is shining.”
However, the earth’s temperature “before accounting for feedback” is a slippery, moving target. The moon, for example, has a temperature “purely because the sun is shining” … but it’s on the order of 80 K cooler than the 255 K you are using.
So … you are not using that temperature. Nor are you using the Stefan-Boltzmann temperature corresponding to the 340 W/m2 the Earth receives from the sun. That’s about 278 K.
It appears that you’re using some other temperature. I see indications in your paper that it is a temperature from a climate model run without CO2 … but that paper gives us 243 K.
I’m not here to argue one over the other. I’m just here to say that you’ve made a TOTALLY ARBITRARY choice for your “emission temperature”, and that a number of other choices are totally defensible.
And because of that, the results of your calculations are also totally arbitrary … which in science is generally not a good look.
Comments?
w.
Willis Eschenbach is perhaps unaware that in paper after paper after paper the value 255 K or thereby is given as the emission temperature that would obtain on Earth in the absence of the noncondensing greenhouse gases and in the absence of any feedback.
We went back to first principles and calculated what the actual emission temperature would be in each of 10 billion annular bands with the zenith point at the center, and then integrated, using a useful principle in geometric number theory which gives a simple but accurate integration. That took care of the dayside. We relied upon Merlis+ (2010) for an approximation to the nightside temperature.
We made allowance for the fact that the annuli closest to the zenith point would be in open water with a low albedo, but that the remaining annuli would be ice, with a high albedo.
We verified our method by applying it mutatis mutandis to the Lunar dayside, and were able to replicate with great precision the temperature-curve given in the Lunar Diviner experiment.
Our conclusion was that emission temperature is probably more like 265 K than 255 K, but we decided to minimize opportunities for petty conflict by adopting the value that is stated over and over again in the climate journals. The higher value for emission temperature that we think realistic would somewhat reduce equilibrium sensitivity.
It was perhaps unwise, in the circumstances, for Mr Eschenbach to assume, without first having verified the matter, that we had merely plucked an arbitrary value out of the air.
The 255 K value that is near-universal in climatology does have many defects, not the least of which that it is derived without making any allowance for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals. Our own method, of course, by its nature does not suffer from the same defect.
One could indeed adopt various values either side of 255 K, but they would not greatly affect our result.
Monckton of Brenchley June 6, 2019 at 3:18 pm
Lord Monckton is surely aware that in paper after paper after paper the value of 3°C per doubling of CO2 or thereabouts is given as “climate sensitivity” … So what? You’re the guy who knows the Latin name for the Appeal To Authority fallacy … time to break it out.
Next, I’ve searched the literature and haven’t found any papers saying the temperature would be 255K without non-condensing GHGs. I see people all over saying that with the current albedo, the earth gets ~240 W/m2 from the sun. This equates via Stefan-Boltzmann to ~255 K, and papers to that effect are indeed legion … but I’m not finding the ones regarding the temperature in the absence of non-condensing GHGs.
In your previous post here on WUWT, you pointed to a 2010 paper by Lacis which says that when we remove the non-condensing GHGS:
That’s 252.15 K, so clearly that’s not the source of your claim.
Here’s the oddity. Regarding the temperature with no non-condensing GHG situation, you are taking the word of a model that you would refuse to believe regarding the climate sensitivity because that model concludes the climate sensitivity to be 3°C per doubling …
In other words, you are utilizing the results of a model depends sensitively on having a climate sensitivity of 3°C per doubling of CO2 to argue that the sensitivity is NOT 3°C per doubling of CO2 … Ouroboros wept at the beauty of that one.
Some links would be useful here. You’ve claimed that the 255K value without non-condensing GHGs is given in “paper after paper after paper”, so if you would provide links to say three of those papers we could understand the logic of your choice and the way that they’ve justified it.
Finally, let me recommend once again Dr. Robert Browns excellent post entitled Earth’s baseline black-body model – “a damn hard problem”.
In it he points out that even very simplified models of the earth are quite hard to analyze.
My best to you and yours,
w.
In response to Mr Eschenbach, the practice in Socratic elenchus, the most powerful method of reaching the truth when two viewpoints disagree, is to concede as much of the opponent’s argument as possible, for the sake of avoiding the distractions arising from petty disagreements.
Therefore, our approach has been to adopt all of official climatology except what we can formally disprove. That approach compels most participants in the discussion to focus relentlessly on the main point, which is that such feedbacks as may subsist in a dynamical system at any given moment must perforce respond to the entire reference signal then obtaining, and not merely to some arbitrarily-selected fraction thereof. Once that point – which is well established in control theory but has , as far as we can discover, hitherto entirely escaped the attention of climatology- is conceded, as it must be, then it follows that equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 must be low.
So to the distraction that Willis wishes to raise for the second time. On the first occasion he had unwisely assumed we had plucked the Earth’s emission temperature of 255 K out of the air. Now that he has discovered we had in fact taken some trouble to verify that it was a respectable value, he makes no apology for having rudely suggested we had simply guessed it. Instead, he asks for our evidence that the emission temperature is the temperature before allowing for the greenhouse effect.
It appears, then, that he is not familiar with the fundamental equation of radiative transfer. Let us begin with some values. We shall take total solar irradiance as 1363.5 Watts per square meter; albedo as 0.3; and the Stefan-Boltzmann constant as 0.000000056704.
Then the emission temperature is [1363.5 x (1 – 0.7) / 4]^0.25, which is close to 255 K. Note that in this calculation there is no term for feedback and none for any greenhouse forcing either.
If Mr Eschenbach wants evidence that this is the way the calculation is done, he can consult any textbook of atmospheric physics. Dr Salby’s textbook, for instance, is excellent. If that is too much for him, he may care to reread the reference he gave – Dr Brown’s excellent if a little overcooked account of why obtaining an exact value for emission temperature is difficult. In that piece, Dr Brown makes it explicit that the emission temperature is derived before taking any account of the greenhouse effect.
Self-evidently, the calculation giving 255 K emission temperature does not depend, as Mr Eschenbach imagined it did, upon assuming any particular value for Charney sensitivity, since the calculation is manifestly antecedent to any such consideration.
It is not quite as difficult as Dr Brown imagines it is to gain some idea of the emission temperature, for we can study data from other planetary bodies, notably the Moon. As previously noted, we calibrated our method by taking advantage of the Lunar Diviner data, and were able to replicate the curve of dayside surface temperatures precisely. The Earth is in some ways more complex: there is an ocean and an atmosphere, and some of the ocean is frozen. But the heat capacity of the ocean actually stabilizes everything, so that many of the difficulties imagined by Dr Brown are not quite as difficult as all that.
One can bound the problem in various ways. For instance, one can assume an ice-planet with no atmosphere (temperature about 221.5 K). Or one can do as we did, and work out how much of the dayside would be open ocean and how much would be ice (it would be about two-thirds ice). One does not need to worry about the atmosphere at the outset, since the only radiatively-active content is water vapor, which is a feedback and not a forcing.
Our conclusion is that emission temperature is probably about 10 K higher than the canonical 255 K, and that would give us a somewhat lower Charney sensitivity than the 1.15 K that is our midrange estimate. But, as explained upthread, we have thought it best simply to accept the 255 K value ad argumentum.
I might add that the definition of emission temperature is conventionally based on current albedo, so the following excerpt from Lacis et al. 2010 suggests further temperature feedback in the form of albedo change below the emission temperature.
This is among the reasons why the basis of Lord Monckton’s theory—which is that climatology does not realize that feedbacks respond to the entire reference temperature—is such a howler.
(Of course, Lord Monckton would probably make some silly retort such as that this just shows Lacis et al. weren’t even following their own theory.)
In response to Mr Born, the emission temperature is the temperature before and not after feedbacks operate. Lacis’ paper is predicated on the assumption that one starts with today’s climate and then removes the noncondensing greenhouse gases, so that, in their model, the temperature rapidly drops towards the emission temperature (which, as best I can make it out, is about 243.3 K in their understanding).
First-order calculations suggest that at the emission temperature two-thirds of the dayside would be ice-bound, giving a mean planetary albedo rather higher than today’s. But the same sensitivity-altering feedbacks as today’s would at once operate – the water-vapor feedback most notably. This feedback is not, as he suggests, regarded currently as a negative feedback but as a positive feedback.
Perhaps Mr Born would like to provide some references to papers in the peer-reviewed journals that make it explicitly clear that feedback responds to the entire reference signal, and not merely to perturbations.
The moment that fact is accepted, it is trivial to calculate the system-gain factor as it was in 1850. It is about 1.085, and not the 3.2 implicit in official climatology. As far as I can see from the literature, the reason why that calculation has not hitherto been done is that climatology generally does not realize that feedbacks must respond to the entire reference temperature they find.
Certainly, the reviewers of our previous draft last year were astonished at this notion and said – without evidence, of course – that it must be nonsense.
We shall take total solar irradiance as 1363.5 Watts per square meter; albedo as 0.3; and the Stefan-Boltzmann constant as 0.000000056704.
Then the emission temperature is [1363.5 x (1 – 0.7) / 4]^0.25, which is close to 255 K. Note that in this calculation there is no term for feedback and none for any greenhouse forcing either.
That calculation is in the absence of an atmosphere. (Not for the Earth since it has the wrong albedo, Venus perhaps)? Also you have omitted the S-B constant, if calculated correctly I make it 206 K. For Earth it is of course:
[1363.5 x (1 – 0.3) / 4𝜎]^0.25
Which is about 255 K (in the absence of an atmosphere).
In response to Phil., I am guilty of a misprint. The correct calculation is, of course, as he shows it, and it does give about 255 K emission temperature before accounting for feedback. Thank you for the correction. The matter is correctly stated in our paper.
85 Papers Find Extremely Low CO2 Climate Sensitivity
https://notrickszone.com/50-papers-low-sensitivity/
255 K – 101
http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387H/Lectures/chap2.pdf
Lord Monckton, I mostly enjoyed reading your new posting, and to see that you have responded, not always politely, to a number of commenters. However, unless I have missed it, I do not believe that you have replied to my comments, specifically https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/03/reporting-the-fraudulent-practices-behind-global-warming-science/#comment-2716649 . Would you now care to do so?
Thanks,
Rich.
In answer to “CO2-rich”, the values of reference and equilibrium temperature in 1850 are quite well constrained, so we know approximately what the system-gain factor is. In order to bring about a large enough change in the system-gain factor, one must alter these underlying quantities to a degree that has no plausible physical explanation. Our paper carefully considers all of the sensitivity-altering feedbacks, each in turn, and finds no reason to suppose that a strong nonlinearity exists.
LM, first of all, thanks for spotting the pun in my moniker. Perhaps others have too, but they have never commented. The other plays on words are that the poor end up owing the rich through the CAGW scare, and that look, y’all owe me (Rich) something for the wisdom of my comments! Sorry, boastfulness is a sin.
However, to get back to the point, it is that there does not need to be strong nonlinearity in order for there to be a significant effect on your estimate of sensitivity. This is because, having decided that feedback applies to the whole absolute temperature, delta-A gets multiplied by that large number. In my previous comments I have supplied putative numbers which demonstrate that. You have avoided replying with numbers, and I perfectly understand why, which is that you are loathe to admit the magnitude of the effect, because then the CAGW argument is going to rest on the value of delta-A (A is your amplification factor). You may be able to find ways to estimate constraints on delta-A, but it is another task you need to do in order to pass peer review if the reviewer is someone like me.
I am “on your side”, so I hope you can find good constraints.
As I read their 2006 paper, Soden and Held’s primary source for the ‘observational data’ supporting their postulated water vapor feedback mechanism comes from the climate models, a.k.a. the general circulation models — not from direct observation of that mechanism as it operates within the earth’s actual climate system.
If this is indeed where most of the data comes from — i.e., from the climate models, not from the climate system itself — the obvious questions arise as to the validity of that ‘observational evidence’ and its applicability to verifying the actual presence of the Soden-Held water vapor feedback mechanism in nature.
When engineers want to predict the physical behavior of an amplification circuit design operating inside a larger electronic system, they have the option of building a prototype of the design in the laboratory to see if its actual behavior matches theoretical calculations.
The benefit of this approach is that if they have a physical prototype in front of them, the engineers have easy access to the amplification circuitry itself; and just as important, they have easy access to the measurement and test equipment needed to observe and precisely quantify how a physical implementation of the proposed circuitry design actually behaves relative to theoretical predictions.
That said, I ask this question. Shouldn’t it be possible to verify the existence of the Soden-Held water vapor feedback mechanism through observations made directly within the earth’s climate system as it physically exists in nature, using instrumentation systems and data collection systems designed specifically for that purpose?
I believe that has been done by people like Nick Lewis. The result seem to be ECSs in the range of 1-2, at the most.
It is my understanding the UN IPCC climate modelers input H20 feedback assumptions. The lack of an observed tropical tropospheric hot spot invalidates these assumptions.
Mr Fair makes an excellent point: as John Christy has shown, all of the current models over-predict warming in the crucial tropical mid-troposphere, inferentially because they assume that the Clausius-Clapeyron near-exponential increase in specific humidity with atmospheric temperature will operate at that altitude, when in fact that increase occurs only near the surface, where the principal absorption bands of CO2 are substantially overlain by cloud cover and by water vapor. In the mid-troposphere, specific humidity has actually been falling, inferentially owing to subsidence drying. This physical reason reinforces the theoretical reason for suspecting an error that our paper provides.
Not only does this climate scare deny the poorest of this planet the chance for a better life and puts their misery into concrete, but also the less well to do in rich countries will be severely hit. I have no problem believing that an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Leonardo Di Caprio have no problem to afford a 70,000 EURO Tesla but how will average Joe do this? How can one afford a car that’s suddenly at least double if not more the price he usually paid? How will someone keep heating an apartment when energy is multiples the price? People die every winter because they cannot turn on the heating. Those death are on the global warming fanatics. The majority of the population cannot afford this lifestyle but if at least there would be good reason for all this madness, we would still understand. But there ain’t. We get more and more evidence that all this is one giant fraud that makes us miserable and kills a great many. It’s not only fraud they should be in the docket for, its murder.
Something doesn’t make sense. The reference temperature is 255K + 10K reference sensitivity = 265K. If the equilibrium temperature in 1850 is 287.55K then the feedback response = equilibrium temperature – reference temperature before feedback = 287.55 – 265 = 22.55K. Then the feedback fraction is (feedback response)/(equilibrium temperature) = 22.55/287.55 = 0.0784211441488437. The system gain factor = (equilibrium temperature)/(reference temperature) = 287.55/265 = 1.085094339622642.
Good luck me lord. However, even if you succeed, I doubt many in the teaching profession will take heed. I wasn’t aware until now that you were responsible for the removal of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ from the classroom. I was shocked a few years ago when a geography teacher friend of mine told me that ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ has replaced it.
I presume you’re joking? If not milord needs to get on this case too.