By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Some days ago, a prolix, inspissate whigmaleerie was posted here – a gaseous halation, an unwholesome effluvium, an interminable and obscurantist expatiation purporting to cast doubt upon my team’s conclusion that official climatology has misdefined and misapplied feedback and has thus made a mountain out of a molehill, approximately tripling the true midrange rate of global warming we can expect our sins of emission to engender.
We define emission temperature R0 as the 255 K global mean surface temperature that would obtain on Earth at today’s solar irradiance and albedo but before any greenhouse gases have entered the atmosphere and before any feedback begins to operate; B0 as the feedback response in Kelvin to R0; E0, the sum of R0 and B0, as the equilibrium temperature that would prevail after feedback has responded to emission temperature; ΔR0 as the 10 K reference sensitivity to the naturally-occurring, noncondensing, preindustrial greenhouse gases; ΔB0 as the feedback response to B0; ΔE0, the sum of ΔR0 and ΔB0, as the equilibrium sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases present in 1850; R1, the 265 K sum of R0 and ΔR0, as the reference temperature (not including feedback responses) in 1850; B1, the sum of B0 and ΔB0, as the total feedback response to 1850; and E1, the sum of R1 and B1, as the observed equilibrium temperature (including feedback responses) in 1850. The graph above, a detail from Fig. 1 of the whigmaleerie, shows B0 as 5 K and ΔE0 as 28 K, implying that ΔB0 is 18 K or thereby.
Relationships between this gallimaufry of variables constituting the equilibrium global mean surface temperature in 1850 are shown below, where a0, the ratio of ΔE0 to ΔR0, is the system-gain factor or closed-loop gain that transforms reference sensitivity ΔR0 before feedback to equilibrium sensitivity ΔR0 after feedback.
We define the unit feedback response as the ratio of the feedback response to the reference temperature or sensitivity that triggered it: or, in plain English, the amount of feedback-driven temperature or warming per degree of the pre-feedback temperature or warming.
The implication of the whigmaleerie’s Fig. 1 is that the unit feedback response ΔB0 / ΔR0 to the greenhouse warming to 1850 is 18/ 10, or 1.8, while the unit feedback response B0 / R0 to emission temperature is 5 / 255, or 0.02. The implication is that, in the widdershins world of the whigmaleerie, feedbacks are imagined – per impossibile – to respond 90 times more energetically to each degree of greenhouse-gas warming than to each degree of emission temperature. Nothing more need be said of the whigmaleerie, whose author had known of this central defect in his argument in advance, for I had explicitly drawn his attention to it before.
I shall leave the reader to work out the relationship between the feedback impact ratio X, defined in the above equation, and various real or imagined values of the system-gain factor a0. In that revealing relationship between the X factor and a0, the reader will discern why it is that the high equilibrium sensitivities profitably imagined by official climatology, which had erroneously defined feedback and had consequently not understood that feedback responds to equilibrium temperature, are untenable. Or watch the video of my lunchtime keynote at the forthcoming Heartland Climate Conference in Washington DC. It will blow your socks off.
This is possibly a stupid question…what I’ve never understood about this “moisture feedback” is why does H2O only feedback heat absorbed by CO2? How does the H2O molecule know to feedback only radiation absorbed by CO2 and not the much greater amount of heat absorbed by other H2O molecules? If there is a “moisture feedback” wouldn’t the feedback cause “run-away warming” in the absence of CO2 by the presence of H2O alone? And if the “moisture feedback” is working on the H2O heat, than why would a ppm increase in CO2 overwhelm the more important feedback for the part per hundred H2O?….again, possibly stupid questions
tom,
not stupid questions. For example, lots of the literature assumes that some of the IR radiation from the Earth towards space gets absorbed by the CO2 and then gets re-radiated back toward the Earth and is “trapped” somehow. How does the Earth tell CO2 IR from the IR in the Sun’s radiation? Why would the Earth radiate the IR from the sun back toward space but not the CO2 IR?
If the IR from the sun is not radiated toward space by the Earth then it must be stored somehow. The storage of IR energy over millions of years should have us living on a molten rock! When you raise this issue all you get for an answer is that it is magic!
To become the Prime Minister of climate science you must communicate effectively with the entire electorate, not merely those like unaccountable and unrepresentative Permanent Secretaries who delude themselves that using obscure expressions in over elaborate windbaggery is a sign of superiority.
Mercifully, as Monckton would have to emulate Viscount Stansgate to have a chance of becoming Prime Minister, and furthermore as it is highly likely that AWB was not on his list of political heroes, he can sleep easy knowing that he is arguing at Nicea rather than standing for high political office…..
In response to Mr Jagger, one of our most eloquent politicians was Enoch Powell. He always included one or two words of Latin or Greek and one or two long or rare words of English in any speech he made. For he, like me, had had a Classical training, and he knew that the Greek speech coaches who trained the likes of Cicero taught them always to include one or two such words to intrigue the audience and to introduce them to a wider vocabulary.
+1
Whigmaleerie?
Dagnabbit, Monckton, you sent me off to Roget and Frontistery to find things again! Kudos to you. Please do more! I needed a good laugh this morning and you gave me one. Thank you!
It’s a pleasure! Scottish has its own wonderful vocabulary, which deserves to be better known.
Where do I get a thesaurus????? I already have the Scottish Gaelic/English dictionary, but “whigmaleerie” will stick with me for eternity now!
Interesting article, but vis a vis prolix, isn’t the pot calling the kettle black?
in answer to Greg in Houston, my head posting was two A4 pages in length, including the diagrams. The whigmaleerie to which I was replying was at least five times longer, and the whole foofaraw of tarradiddle was predicated on a silly mistake.
I’ll admit that the post of mine criticized by the head post here was longer than I would have preferred; the posts that I proposed to target Lord Monckton’s theory more directly were spiked, so to get one published I had to couch it as a discourse on equilibrium nonlinear feedback.
Still, my post was roughly only the size of the first of the series of more than ten Christopher Monckton head posts on the same theory that this site alone has run, and those were on top of at least a hundred minutes of videos and whatever posts he ran on other sites.
Also, I’ll call attention to one of Lord Monckton’s typical tactics: he says my post “was predicated on a silly mistake,” yet he is unable to identify clearly what that “mistake” was or provide a logical explanation of why it might indeed be a mistake. He only goes on about his made-up X-factor, which proves nothing.
The mistake perpetrated by the author of the whigmaleerie was not to realize that his diagram implied that the unit feedback response to greenhouse-gas warming was 90 times the unit feedback response to emission temperature. He has had this point explained to him many times, and has no answer to it.
The author of the whigmaleerie made a careless error by furnishing a diagram whose implication was that the unit feedback response to greenhouse-gas warming was 90 times the unit feedback response to emissiont emperature. No such feedback-impact ratio is credible, because there is no plausible physical process in the climate that could cause so large a ratio.
It’s good the internet gives you access to the Oxford Dictionary for those colonials of us that did not receive a proper English education.
Monckton
Your opening remarks are obviously having fun with words.
But it gives impetus to my long-running drive to “Eradicate Sesquipedelianism”.
When I first started the movement it was “Stamp Out Sesquideliansim”, but perhaps you will agree that using a longer word adds considerable tone.
I’m sure you will join the movement and welcome you to the ranks of now a two-person crowd.
When you spoke to a group in Vancouver some ten years ago, I presented you with a framed cartoon.
The image was of a business-man seeking wisdom from a guru on a mountaintop. The response was:
“The karma of geophysics will soon overwhelm the dogma of global warming religions”.”
–Bob
I do remember the Guru cartoon, with much pleasure.
I am as much at ease with short words as with long. I use both short and long. Most here like that. Some don’t. They’re sour. Tough luck!
The great Bard , Robert Burns :
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Urgently required reading for all CO2 schemers!
M’Lord,
If you wish to really challenge the magnitude of feedback, here is a little secret: increased atmospheric absorption of surface flux can only occur at the expense of the atmospheric window. And atmospheric partitioning of absorbed radiation limits the surface flux. I will leave the calculations as an exercise for you.
No: let Neogene Geo do the calculations for himself and get them peer-reviewed and published. We are addressing one particular defect in this series: there may be others, but they are beyond our ken.
A sure sign that an advocate has a bad case is that he runs away from it. In the head post Lord Monckton does that by arguing against something that my post—the one he refers to as “a prolix, inspissate whigmaleerie”—never contended.
Stripped of its sesquipedalianism, the head post above boils one simple thing: Lord Monckton doesn’t think equilibrium temperature E as a function of the value R it would have had without feedback is as nonlinear as implied by high equilibrium-climate-sensitivity (“ECS”) values. But neither do I. And my post didn’t contend otherwise. My post instead focused on Lord Monckton’s theory.
His theory isn’t merely that ECS is low—a proposition I’ve never argued against—but rather that a low ECS value is mathematically implied by his entire-signal rule, 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.” As he stated it, “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.”
What my post did was show that the low-ECS conclusion he urged doesn’t at all follow from the entire-signal rule he postulated. As my post demonstrated, a feedback function that complies with his entire-signal rule can indeed result in ECS values as high as “official climatology” contends.
Again, his case isn’t merely that ECS is low; others had argued for low ECS values already. But he dismissed such arguments as mere conjecture. Previous workers like Lindzen & Choi, he said, “can’t absolutely prove that they’re right.”
In contrast, he said, “we think that what we’ve done here is to absolutely prove that we are right.” And an absolute proof, he said, is a “way to compel the assent” of those who would otherwise believe ECS is high—and thus that E(R) is significantly nonlinear, presumably because feedbacks aren’t very strong until temperatures approach water’s phase-change levels.
As a consequence of his supposedly monumental achievement:
—The Heartland Institute had him present his theory at the 12th International Conference on Climate Change.
—In his presentation he implied that someone who’s now a member of the National Security Council commented on it favorably.
—A YouTube video of his presentation was billed as “Monckton’s Mathematical Proof; Climate Sensitivity Is Low.”
—In another YouTube video the editor of The New American magazine introduced his theory as “an incredible new development” and a “game changer” that “is going to make a huge difference in everything we know about climate change.”
—There was a call for crowdfunding support of legal action against scientific journals’ refusal to publish his theory.
—This site dedicated no fewer than ten head posts to his theory and was so taken in by it that it spiked (1) a proposed post showing by diagrams that his theory boils down to bad extrapolation and (2) a proposed post in which simulation of a “test rig” showed that his conclusion doesn’t follow as he says it does from “the mathematics of feedback in all dynamical systems, including the climate,” which “comes from electronic circuitry.”
—He is to give a “lunchtime keynote at the forthcoming Heartland Climate Conference in Washington DC.”
In short, he has managed to distract a great many skeptics from the yawning logical chasm between his entire-signal-rule premise and his low-ECS conclusion. As a skeptic myself, I find this troubling.
I should add that Lord Monckton’s way of saying he doesn’t think E(R) is linear is to say that “feedbacks are imagined – per impossibile – to respond [90] times more energetically to each degree of greenhouse-gas warming than to each degree of emission temperature.”
As is his wont, that is, he compares the small-signal quantity at one point in the function domain with the large-signal quantity at another. Adepts in electronic circuitry, from which “the mathematics of feedback in all dynamical systems, including the climate, comes,” will no doubt recognize that physical systems routinely exhibit ratios that are as high as—and often orders of magnitude higher than—the one at which he directed the gratuitous Latin.
Now, “there is no physical process that I can think of,” he says, “which would allow feedback to respond 90 times more energetically to the pre-industrial greenhouse-gas warming than to emission temperature.” But high-ECS proponents would presumably counter that there are more physical processes in heaven and earth, Lord Monckton, than you can think of.
Well, yes, the 255 K emission temperature that would obtain at the Earth’s surface in the absence of forcings or feedbacks is a large signal. No getting away from it. All subsequent signals are indeed small signals. But it is not plausible that the feedback response per Kelvin of the original large signal will be as much as 90 times the feedback response per Kelvin of the small subsequent open-loop gain of just 10 K – less than one-twenty-fifth of the 255 K large signal.
Hand-waving about large closed-loop gains in other dynamical systems won’t do: one must propose a physically-based argument, in the climate, for the X-factor of 90 implicit in Fig. 1 of the whigmaleerie.
And don’t whinge about Latin – to do so is racialist. We Europeans are proud of our linguistic heritage and at ease with using it.
“[O]ne must propose a physically-based argument, in the climate, for the X-factor of 90 implicit in Fig. 1”
For someone who goes on so about his training formal logic, Lord Monckton has an exceedingly tenuous purchase on how to apply it.
No, I needn’t propose a “physically-based argument” for the proposition that ECS is high enough to cause such an “X-factor”; I’ve never contended that it is high. If all Lord Monckton had said was that he doesn’t believe it’s that high, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Instead, he contended that his entire-signal rule would “absolutely prove” that ECS is low and thereby “force the assent” of high-ECS partisans. So a mere assertion that so high an ECS is implausible or would result from “no physical process that [he] can think of” just won’t do.
Mr Born admits defeat. He is incapable of coming up with any plausible physical reason why the unit feedback response to greenhouse gases should exceed the unit feedback responsse to emission temperature by one or two orders of magnitude.
Yes.
Assume for purposes of argument that Soden & Held’s water vapor feedback mechanism does in fact exist, as described in their 2006 paper.
Assume further that other kinds of processes not associated with the continuous addition of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere — processes which can cause an increase in warming at the surface — will cause their postulated feedback mechanism to become active.
For background on this topic, please see this discussion among myself, Joe Born, Nick Stokes, and Tim Gorman here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/16/remystifying-feedback/#comment-2747126
The state of science is such that it is currently impossible to directly observe a feedback process operating in real time inside the earth’s atmosphere, in the same way we would observe a feedback process operating inside an electronic circuit on a test bed in a laboratory.
The presence and characteristics of such atmospheric feedback processes, if they actually exist, must be inferred from other kinds of observations. Everyone is free to pick a set of observations, a theory to explain those observations, and a mathematical representation of the theory to describe its operational characteristics.
Since 1880, the earth’s global mean temperature has risen approximately 1C, more or less, depending upon which temperature history you choose to believe — HadCRUT4, Best, whatever you like.
If Soden & Held’s water vapor feedback mechanism does in fact exist, but sources of the rise in surface temperature other than CO2 and methane can in fact cause it to become active, then what are the most obvious questions which follow?
Suppose for purposes of argument that 0.3C of that 1C rise is arbitrarily assigned to natural variation, with the bulk of that allocation assigned to the time period of from 1880 to 1945. It seems to me that these implications follow from that initial assumption:
— If the Soden & Held amplification factor is 2, then does it not follow that 0.6C of the 1C rise between 1880 and 2018 might possibly have been a consequence of natural variation?
— If the Soden & Held amplification factor is 3, then does it not follow that 0.9C of the 1C rise between 1880 and 2018 might possibly have been a consequence of natural variation?
If, for purposes of argument, we choose to work within the Soden & Held feedback model and to accept its basic tenets, then we have to ask the question: Does the continuous addition of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere have a unique ability to drive Soden & Held’s water vapor feedback mechanism, as opposed to other kinds of processes which might produce an equivalent result?
Does the continuous addition of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere have a unique ability to drive Soden & Held’s water vapor feedback mechanism, as opposed to other kinds of processes which might produce an equivalent result?
No, of course it doesn’t. No-one says it does. All rises in temperature are what allegedly cause the feedback. In which case the question is, looking historically, what the evidence about the timing and extent of previous rises tell us about the parameters of any feedback mechanism.
They seem to suggest that if rises have any feedback effect in them, (i) its small (ii) its self limiting (iii) its self reversing. Otherwise, why was the MWP succeeded by the LIA?
It would be interesting to hear from Nick Stokes why this argument is invalid.
I like your approach, Michel. Has any group of scientists explained the physical processes involved in the decreasing temperatures (and its associated ups and downs) since the Holocene Optimum? What the hell has been going on with historical climatic changes and how does that information (or lack thereof) affect our current arguments? Climate change did not begin in 1850.
Making mathematical calculations and running computer programs if fun. But if one doesn’t understand the underlying fundamental dynamics, one is substituting conjecture for fact. The AR5 report’s running of UN IPCC climate models with assumed anthropogenic forcings and comparing that to runs without such forcing in order to “prove” everything is explained by Man’s actions is scientific fraud.
I don’t think they have (explained it). No-one seems to be interested in why, after the rises of the RWP and MWP, there was cooling.
We have had the argument over whether earlier CO2 rises preceded warming or followed it. There the argument was that an initial period of warming may have preceded the CO2 rise and perhaps caused it, but then the CO2 rise drove the subsequent phase of increase.
Yes, and now show us what caused the fall in temps afterwards. Was that caused by a fall on the CO2 levels? Did that fall precede or follow the fall in temps? What led to it, if so? Is there any feedback loop in the falling process?
You have to explain both the previous rises and the falls. You have to be able to explain why they happen at all, and why they are of the size and duration they have, and why they reversed as they did. And your explanation has to be consistent with a full account of any feedbacks you claim exist.
We may not be able to measure climate feedback in action, but we can certainly observe its effects and thereby estimate the magnitude and characteristic of any feedbacks we claim to have found.
Well, the data indicate the world is cooling over the last few thousand years. Are we heading into a glacial period on any reasonable planning period?
The alarmists use a 300-year period to calculate the social cost of carbon. Could we be in Little Ice Age conditions within that period? I don’t know and nobody else does either.
“All rises in temperature are what allegedly cause the feedback.”
Occasionally a better informed commenter here will note that you can’t infer feedback just from amplifier performance. In the usual expression for gain with feedback, g/(1-f), you just get a single number out, and there is a range of gain/feedback options that could have produced it.
The fact that past events have been modest doesn’t prove there was little feedback; it could, and probably does, just mean that there wasn’t much happening before feedback.
“The fact that past events have been modest doesn’t prove there was little feedback; it could, and probably does, just mean that there wasn’t much happening before feedback.”
Nick, this is absolute nonsense. You need to identify: 1) The referenced past events; 2) In what respect were they modest; 3) What does any of that have to do with the existence or magnitude of feedbacks; and 4) What the hell do you mean that “there wasn’t much happening before feedback.”
Just what are you trying to prove here?
The matter is simple. Michel is trying to argue that because some past events had modest effect, therefore there can’t be much feedback. But you don’t know what the original forcing was. It may have been small, and so still modest after significant feedback. There is no way of telling just from observing the response.
Again, Nick, you need to describe the events and their effects. What responses are you talking about?
BB,
Final question is a good one for the lateral thinker.
Sadly, my hands-on involvement in physical sciences has lapsed for so long that I cannot provide a quantitative answer.
Geoff S
This is getting tedious. Christopher needs to just calmly argue his point, if he has one, and stop with the cjhildish and self indulgent bluster and verbiage. After the opening sentence I stopped reading. I am sure many others did too.
If he wants to be taken seriously and to persuade, just make the point simply and clearly. Read the first sentence of this and you know immediately that you are reading something by a charlatan.
I did by the way read, and read carefully, the earlier pieces on this subject. I thought they too were mistaken and unnecessarily complicated and obscurely worded, but OK, it was possible to disentangle a fairly simple argument and agree or disagree with it. But this stuff? Its horse manure.
The point Christopher is trying to make can be made in a few sentences. its wrong, but its nothing like as complicated as his rhetoric would have you believe.
Drop it. No-one is listening any more. They know that no serious person addresses these issues in this way.
And yet …. the validity of Soden & Held’s 2006 paper and their subsequent theoretical writings is of central importance to the question of how AGW’s alleged future impacts will affect mankind.
The state of science is such that it is currently impossible to directly observe a temperature feedback process operating in real time inside the earth’s atmosphere, in the same way we would observe a feedback process operating inside an electronic circuit on a test bed in a laboratory.
If Lord Monckton’s refutation of the Soden & Held feedback mechanism is to be persuasive from a scientific perspective — as opposed to being little more than a series of assertions made to a pop science audience — can his refutation be any less complicated in its verbiage and any less extensive in its mathematics than is Soden & Held’s own theoretical work?
The answer is no, it can’t be simpler than what Monckton is now making of it. We don’t yet have the observational tools and the analytical techniques which could make a simpler refutation possible while still employing a disciplined, science based approach.
In response to Beta Blocker, there is indeed a certain minimum of mathematics and physics in our paper, and I don’t think it could be compressed much more than we have already done.
The advantage of having been given the lunchtime keynote at the Heartland Conference is that there will be very many highly competent and highly skeptical climate scientists present, and they will not be slow in coming forward if our analysis is insufficiently scientific, or if it is just plain wrong.
But the author of the whigmaleerie has plainly been taken more than somewhat aback at the news that his Fig. 1 implies 90 times more feedback response per Kelvin of preindustrial greenhouse-gas warming than per Kelvin of emission temperature.
He had previously produced a curve that implied an X-factor of 11, and that had no physical justification either.
Once the Heartland audience see how very slowly the system-gain factor (the closed-loop gain) grows with the X-factor, they will see what we see, and they well tell us whether they think it has the significance we think it has. This will be the toughest but fairest peer review we have ever faced: and we welcome that. If we’ve missed something important, we’d like to know.
“But the author of the whigmaleerie has plainly been taken more than somewhat aback at the news that his Fig. 1 implies 90 times more feedback response per Kelvin of preindustrial greenhouse-gas warming than per Kelvin of emission temperature.”
Hardly. I was well of aware of that meaningless point before I wrote the post; Lord Monckton had brought it up before. The world is full of feedback mechanisms whose (conjured-up-by-Lord-Monckton) “X-factors” are that high. A control-systems text in front of me right now gives an example in which it’s infinite at some output values.
Lord Monckton spews obscure nomenclature to frighten the natives. My guess is that he’ll pull the wool over the eyes of the Heartland Conference audience this time just as he apparently did last time. They won’t quite understand everything he says, but the conclusion will seem right and he’ll use a lot of technical terms, so they won’t think too critically about his logic.
Joe, it would be productive if you justified the “90 times” item under discussion.
Dave Fair:
No, it wouldn’t be helpful.
Lord Monckton is doing what he always does: he’s misrepresenting what I’ve said. I won’t show that his “X-factor” 90, because I don’t think it is 90 and have never said it was. What my post said instead is that I do not—repeat, do not—believe that ECS has a value that would imply “X-factor”of 90 but that such a value, which “official climatology” does believe, would not be inconsistent with his entire-signal rule.
With all due respect, please don’t let Lord Monckton lead you around by the nose. That 90-times business he’s talking about it merely another way of saying that ECS is as high as he says “official climatology” says it is. For many reasons, I don’t think “official climatology” is right. Among them is work by researchers such as Lindzen & Choi and Lewis & Curry.
So, contrary to the impression he repeatedly gives, I don’t think the “X-factor” he goes on about is 90, and neither do those researchers (or, at least they wouldn’t if they’d ever heard of it and accepted for the sake of argument all Lord Monckton’s numbers he bases it on). But Lord Monckton dismisses our opinions—i.e., our reasons for believing that ECS is low and that his “X-factor” accordingly is not 90—as mere conjectures.
In contrast to our mere conjectures about ECS, he says, his theory absolutely proves that ECS is low. Specifically, he contends that a low ECS necessarily follows from the entire-signal rule he’s postulated.
I’ve shown that it doesn’t, and he’s been unable to demonstrate otherwise. So he misrepresents my position and argues against what I didn’t say. Read my post and comments. You’ll see you’ve been misled about my position. And keep in mind that his “X-factor” business is just an obscure way of saying high ECS.
Such obfuscation is Lord Monckton’s stock in trade. He is not an honest disputant.
Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.
If it’s getting tedious, you don’t have to read it. But a lot of people enjoy it. Don’t spoil their fun by being sour.
The above two comments were addressed to the unfortunate Michel, who is not enjoying himself here, and not to Beta Blocker, whose comment is sensible and constructive. Weirdpress has a funny way of deciding where in a thread a comment appears. Apologies to Beta Blocker if I had inadvertently appeared churlish.
Michel will come around once he recognizes that the context in which an argument is being made supplies details to that argument which may not be immediately obvious to someone who is reading an analysis without mentally imposing a prior frame of reference.
Either their own contextual frame of reference, or someone else’s.
For example, the contextual frame of reference for Soden & Held’s postulated feedback mechanism is a need to explain how an increase in surface temperature of 1C to 1.5C over some period of time can be amplified into a projected 2.5C to 3C increase, thus turning an uncomfortable outcome into a disastrous outcome for the earth and for all humanity.
The base process being investigated through Soden & Held’s writings is the continuous addition of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere. The Soden & Held paper would not have been written had there not been a need to explain how CO2’s basic impact of a 1C to 1.5C rise can be amplified into a projected 2.5C to 3C rise over the next one-hundred years.
Most everyone who examines Soden & Held’s work in detail, either to support it or to refute it, understands what contextual frame of reference is being applied when defending or criticizing the scientific arguments.
Given it is impossible at the current state of science to directly observe the water vapor feedback process in operation, and given that the process can only be characterized and quantified by indirect means, then everyone who defends or refutes the Soden & Held feedback mechanism must play by the same set of rules, if they are to be taken seriously.
This means that every line of inquiry which is pertinent to examining the postulated feedback mechanism is fair game for discussion — if the line of inquiry is being honestly pursued, and if the questions being asked have a direct bearing on the validity, or the lack thereof, of the postulated theory.
Actually, IIRC, water vapor changes in the atmosphere have been measured. Such measured values don’t comport with those used by the UN IPCC computer modelers and report authors.
Dave Fair: “Actually, IIRC, water vapor changes in the atmosphere have been measured. Such measured values don’t comport with those used by the UN IPCC computer modelers and report authors.”
It would be very useful if someone having extensive knowledge of how the IPCC climate models are written could explain to us how Soden & Held’s feedback mechanism is being incorporated into the model designs. Are there substantive differences from one model to the next in how the postulated feedback mechanism is being handled?
Agreed.
If you have a point to make and your real goal is to have your audience understand it, make it in as plain language as possible. Technical and Business writing are rarely, if ever, improved by injecting verbalistic geegaws.
When a reader needs to resort to a dictionary or glossary it should be because the word in question has a more precise and context-appropriate meaning than a more familiar synonym.
My misson here, in reply to Mr Werner, is to inform, to educate and to entertain. The number of spontaneous comments from those who enjoy learning new words far outstrips those who are sour about it. Live a little!
Fair enough.
Perhaps on your side of ‘the pond’ there is a different attitude about what we call ten-dollar words.
While I can cope with the logical reasoning, I still have to object the premises. There simply is no GHE of a 33K.
If we take a step back, we might easily agree on the “global warming” narrative failing at a lot of instances. Whether it is dubious temperature records, islands which refuse to sink, or polar bears failing to extinct. However all these questions are indeed “feedbacks” to the very foundations of a theory, and as much as they might be proven wrong, they will not do away with the foundation. The analogy here is not a Jabberwocky, but a Hydra.
What hurts in this regard is the concession to the validity of the GHE, in order to possible cut a single head off the Hydra. Even if the reasoning was ever acknowledged (and it likely never will), it would only be a small Phyrric victory. As long as “climate criticists” support the ill fated theory of the GHE (or badly fail to falsify it), they are all just feeding the troll.
For that reason my humble falsification of the GHE is so important.
https://www.scribd.com/document/414175992/CO21
Michel
This is getting tedious. Christopher needs to just calmly argue his point, if he has one, and stop with the cjhildish and self indulgent bluster and verbiage.
Or maybe not. Yes it has become customary to write scientific text in emotionally sterile text with a logical rigour and apparent complexity which convey mild intimidation. This is necessary to some extent. But human nature being what it is, science-speak ends up becoming the equivalent of medieval Ecclesiastical Latin in simply shutting out outsiders. And what is more pleasant to the human soul than membership of an elite and shutting out outsiders?
Thus instead of asking the question “how long would it take a single aphid to eat all the vegetation on earth?”, the career scientist would dignify the otherwise frivolous sounding question by framing it as “Individual component of global macrophytophagy in Mysus persicae.”
We are all here because in practice, emotionless technical language has not in practice safeguarded sound and effective science. The field of climate science, under an intolerable pressure of politics and conflicts of interest of cosmological proportions, has succumbed to group think, circular logic (tautology), confirmation bias and outright corruption (“hide the decline”). Beyond climate in wider science there is the growing scandal of non-reproducibility (not being able to get the same answer twice). Because fortress mentality defends conflict of interest.
This site and many other science blogs have shown that it is possible to convey precise and important scientific arguments in normal human language. Contributors such as Christopher Monckton, Willis Eschenbach, Kip Hansen, Jim Steele, David Middleton and David Archibald, to name just a few, show that highly individual and expressive styles do not obstruct communication of real and important science.
In short, a bit of tolerance and broad mindedness is no bad thing in scientific discussion as in life in general. Live and let live.
My dictionary fell apart. He might have gone too far – t.
That should be framed and hung at the entrance to WUWT.
Very well said Phil!
Its easy to show that all things being equal with two black bodies except the spread of temperatures – one being 90 to 390K as seen at the equator of the moon and the other 275 to 303 K, the spread of sea surface temperatures on Earth, that you get the same sum of T^4 and mean T very close to the means observed for the Moon (eq) and the Earth (SST).
Surely the first thing to do is account for this 30K effect.
You are perfectly right. The weighted (or geometric) average surface temperature of the moon is about 276K. That of Earth without GHGs, aerosols and clouds would be about 278K, which can well be derived from Fresnel equations with the proper refractive indices of water with regard to visible light and LWIR (N2 = 1.33 and 1.27 respectively).
Although the head post is less internally inconsistent than most of Lord Monckton’s, his comments include a good example of how deceptive he is:
The truth is that Lord Monckton has identified no error, careless or otherwise. And a less-deceptive description of that diagram’s actual implication is instead that the “unit feedback response” after greenhouse-gas warming at the pre-feedback temperature, 265 K, was less than 2.3 times the unit feedback response to warming at the emission temperature, 265 K.
Now, I don’t think the actual climate exhibits a ratio even that high. As Bellman correctly observed, though, “[C]ommon sense tells me many physical mechanisms will only have an effect above certain temperatures. For example, the feedback caused by melting ice can only have an effect once global temperatures are sufficiently warm for ice to melt.” And 265 K is more than twice as close to the melting temperature as 255 K is. Add in effects like polar amplification, the further warming from feedback, and whatever difference there is between different cloud types’ unknown but undoubtedly nonlinear positive- and negative-feedback effects, and Lord Monckton’s basis for calling (what is actually) a ratio of 2.3 “impossible” is far from self-evident.
Much less did that unsupported assertion of impossibility “absolutely prove,” as he claimed he could, that ECS is low. And, remember, his theory’s being an absolute proof is the advantage he claimed over other researchers, such as Lindzen & Choi, whose work he dismissed as mere “conjecture.” If he hadn’t made that claim, we wouldn’t be discussing this.
To distract this site’s readership from his failure, he returned to the tactic he’s used repeatedly: he deceptively conflated large-and small-signal quantities. As my post showed by juxtaposing large-and small-signal quantities in its Figs. 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, and 13, large-and small-signal quantities are different animals, and it’s the small-signal quantity that’s most meaningful for most purposes. As Nick Stokes’ post said, “You can’t mix them.”
But Lord Monckton did mix them. And he so chose his words as to blur the mixing. Specifically, he defined unit feedback response as “the ratio of the feedback response to the reference temperature or sensitivity that triggered it: or, in plain English, the amount of feedback-driven temperature or warming per degree of the pre-feedback temperature or warming.”
Note that he twice used “temperature or warming” (emphasis added). By “temperature or” he not only included the large-signal quantity as well as the more-meaningful small-signal quantity but also lay the groundwork for distracting the WUWT readership’s attention with talk of his meaningless, made-up “feedback impact ratio X.”
He defined that—oh, what to call it—whigmaleerie not as a small-signal quantity, not as a large-signal quantity, and not even as the (already meaningless) ratio of some temperature’s small-signal quantity to its large-signal quantity. He defined it instead as the ratio that (an approximation to) one temperature’s small-signal quantity bears to a lower temperature’s large-signal quantity. The only possible reason for creating the resultant meaningless ratio is to inflate the ratio by more than thirty times and thereby distract the WUWT readership from the fact that his theory had been completely dismantled.
His theory is that a low ECS value is mathematically implied by his entire-signal rule, 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.” As he stated it, “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.”
By using his own “whigmaleerie,” he has distracted attention from the fact that, on the contrary, we’ve shown a high ECS value to be entirely consistent with the entire-signal rule he postulated. His theory has no merit.
Joe Born,
I think the problem here (i.e. your problem) basically boils down to 2 simple things:
1) The concept of the climate having a temperature, and more specifically there being an equilibrium starting temperature is NOT valid. In fact, the concept of there being a steady-state temperature in the climate is not even valid either. The entire system is perpetually oscillating. Yes, the perpetual oscillation can be averaged to a specific temperature and that average temperature can be modeled as being equivalent to a static average in equilibrium, but it never actually is in such a state.
2) You apparently do NOT understand the difference between a system based theoretical error and an error at the raw physical principle level. They’re not the same thing. Monckton’s claimed error is of the former, not the latter. This distinction is crucial to the whole argument.
Yourself (and Nick Stokes and Roy Spencer) apparently think that because the derived equations that generically describe and quantify a thermodynamic response to a temperature change have no imposed constraints or established bounds from the equations themselves, it invalidates Monckton’s whole thing and all other misunderstandings concerning how feedback is being applied to the climate system.
Of course, this is not the line of argument (against it) being made at all, and the fact that one can devise equations that can describe a thermodynamic response to a temperature change of essentially unlimited magnitude or proportion is absolutely meaningless, and says nothing about whether any such response is even possible, let alone feasible and/or logical in a particular system.
Remember also, Monckton is stipulating ‘in dynamical systems’, which also means systems that are perpetually oscillating as I’ve described above. This is a key distinction and stipulation in all of this.
Now, maybe Monckton and his team could do a better job laying all of this out and making their case, but if you can’t understand the difference between a system based theoretical error and an error at the raw physical principle level, then this is just going to keep going around and around in circles forever.
On another thread, I offered another way of systematically laying out the error that I think hones in on it perhaps better than Monckton and his team have.
Joe Born
Now, I don’t think the actual climate exhibits a ratio even that high. As Bellman correctly observed, though, “[C]ommon sense tells me many physical mechanisms will only have an effect above certain temperatures.
“The scientific method exists to overcome the limitations of intuition.”
Patricia Durbin.
https://hps.org/aboutthesociety/people/inmemoriam/PatriciaDurbin.html
So now all you need is for Monckton to explain what scientific method he uses when he determines that all feedbacks work equally across all temperature ranges. I’m not claiming my intuition is correct. The only justification I’ve seen him use have all been based on intuition; that a physical property cannot know it has to act differently at different temperatures, or that all feedbacks should act like electrical circuits.
RW
1) The concept of the climate having a temperature, and more specifically there being an equilibrium starting temperature is NOT valid. In fact, the concept of there being a steady-state temperature in the climate is not even valid either. The entire system is perpetually oscillating. Yes, the perpetual oscillation can be averaged to a specific temperature and that average temperature can be modeled as being equivalent to a static average in equilibrium, but it never actually is in such a state.
True.
Climate is a far-from-equilibrium open and dissipative system containing feedbacks.
Therefore the paradigm needed to study its behaviour is chaotic-nonlinear dynamics, emergent nonlinear pattern formation and attractor landscape analysis.
Ed Lorenz’ discovery of “deterministic nonperiodic flow” in 1962 showed that there is no equilibrium, no stable plateau and in fact, in the strict sense – no climate!
Talk of equilibrium temperatures exists only within a fantastical La-La-LinearLand, somewhere over the rainbow.
Talk of equilibrium temperature
Yes, and this is what apparently Joe Born and Nick Stokes (and so many others) can’t understand even if their lives depended on it. They also can’t understand the difference between a system based theoretical error and an error at the raw physical principle level. It’s truly bizarre, in my opinion.
But maybe Monckton and his team need to do a better job explaining all of this. I even suggested to him that perhaps he needs a separate paper addressing the two kinds of errors and how they relate to all of this. Without clarification, this is just going to go around in circles forever.
Wouldn’t these arguments be better addressed to Monckton? He’s the one claiming that all feedbacks can be reduced to a simple linear equation, with almost no uncertainty. The IPCC in contrast only limits ECS to a rather wide range of possible values – in part because the effects of feedbacks are uncertain.
Monckton’s team is essentially claiming feedbacks have already physically manifested bounds in the system, and given what’s accepted, i.e what they accept regarding everything else, the sensitivity should only be about 1C. These are approximate bounds on the sensitivity from the feedbacks — not a precise measure of it.
But even this is too high because the 1C of intrinsic warming from 2xCO2 is not correct, has nothing to do with GHE warming of the surface, and something like around 0.5C of intrinsic effect is probably more accurate. This implies with net negative feedback (a near certainty), that the actual sensitivity is under 0.5C.
‘RW’ said:
“They also can’t understand the difference between a system based theoretical error and an error at the raw physical principle level. It’s truly bizarre, in my opinion.
But maybe Monckton and his team need to do a better job explaining all of this .. ”
Your distinction between theoretical error and literal physical error seems to resonate with me, come to think of it! Is your idea of theoretical system error like the difference between ideal open loop or “non-feedback” speed for an idealized steam engine vs the actual running speed of the engine, as in the very ideal or hypothetical example that I outlined back in a previous discussion — link for this is at:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/08/feedback-is-not-the-big-enchilada/#comment-2720047
(This was a “negative feedback” proportional control example, since the assumption of ‘negative’ feedback just seemed more plausible than the ‘positive’ type of feedback, for a steam engine example as such)
Now my point here is that while the output speed of my example engine *was* assumed to be a real physical thing, and the *feedback* based on this speed (for manipulating the control valve setting) was also truly physical in principle, what happens is that the *reference* speed (the ‘1000 rpm’ in my example) is not actually “right there” physically, not even in principle really! In the example, the 1000 rpm reference is more strictly a mathematical convenience, a hypothetical thing built into the most straightforward calculation of how the feedback works overall. This “1000 rpm” is similar in principle, it seems to me, to the “snowball earth” reference temperature that Christopher Monckton uses in his climate model — that reference temperature is not in itself supposed to be something you can measure or confirm directly by experiment, right? The difference between actual temperature and the reference is then, as you say, a “theoretical error”, not a “raw physical” one?
Could this more or less elementary point really be a confusion for some people? I know that I reacted skeptically when I first heard of conventional theorists calculating how cold the planet ought to be if someone were to suck all the Greenhouse Gases out of the atmosphere!
It occurs to me here that maybe even some of the “pro” climate modelers may take these reference points as an actual prediction, or as a built in reality of sorts! Wouldn’t looking at such references as a mere ‘formula parameters’ be the better way to picture it?
One can have a great deal of fun with this feedback model, but all of the above posts are making an assumption which is not valid, and that is that the open loop gain is infinite. In a common electronic circuit the open loop gain will be designed to be high (as an approximation to infinite), and the circuit response will be close to that from the usual equation. However if the open loop gain is fairly low the response will be much less than expected, and the feedback factors will not really be in useful control of the design.
Whilst I am in general agreement with Lord Monckton’s analysis, those suggesting that the response may be very high cannot be correct unless they can identify the source of the high open loop gain. The Bode analysis of the circuit requires that both open loop gain is available and that the output may receive power from an external (not the input) source. It also requires that the output is linearly connected to the inputs and feedbacks (although the feedback may be via a non-linear element) and that the gain element is entirely linear. I would like to suggest that no one has yet explained any of these necessities in “atmospheric” terms!
The feedback amplifier may be a useful model of the atmosphere, but its characteristics cannot be given “magical” properties in order to explain warming, or anything else. Feedbacks, both positive or negative, must precisely obey the model rules, as must the open loop gain availability and mechanism. Please enlighten me as to how these work with atmospheric physics.
There’s the complex planetary process of thermalization of cloud-modulated insolation by matter of starkly different thermal capcitance, followed by chaotic energy transfer between variously-coupled heat reservoirs, eventually resulting in the inevitable radiative loss to space through a semi-transparent atmosphere–all operating under the entropy-maximizing principle of thermodynamics. And there’s the simple conceptual model of a single-element “feedback” process that involves nothing more than high-school algebra to compute a static-gain. That the former can be meaningfully represented by the latter is an attempt to do geophysics on the cheap. The public pretense that this succeeds constitutes the undying hoax of “climate science”
Returning to some points I’ve made earlier …..
The state of science is such that it is currently impossible to directly observe a temperature feedback mechanism operating in real time inside the earth’s atmosphere, in the same way we would observe a feedback mechanism operating inside an electronic circuit on a test bed in a laboratory.
The presence and characteristics of such atmospheric feedback mechanisms, if they actually exist, must be inferred from other kinds of observations.
Topic #1:
Soden & Held’s postulated feedback mechanism serves a need to explain how an increase in surface temperature of 1C to 1.5C over some period of time can be amplified into a projected 2.5C to 3C increase, thus turning an uncomfortable outcome into a disastrous outcome for the earth and for all humanity.
Because their postulated feedback mechanism cannot be observed directly, Soden and Held use output from the climate models as one source of data among several in quantifying the theoretical sensitivity of earth’s climate system to the continuous addition of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere.
That Soden and Held take this approach raises another obvious question.
If the climate models take account of their postulated feedback mechanism, either directly or indirectly — and if Soden and Held are using model outputs as inputs into their sensitivity analysis — then is circular logic being used in characterizing and quantifying their theoretical mechanism?
If Soden and Held’s feedback mechanism is being incorporated into the IPCC models in some way, either directly or indirectly, then how is this being done?
Is it being accomplished directly through inclusion of feedback modeling algorithms operating within the main model’s dynamic core, or is it being done indirectly through the choice of values being assumed for the model’s physical parameterizations?
If it being accomplished directly through inclusion of feedback modeling algorithms operating within the main model’s dynamic core, then on what basis in atmospheric physics is the algorithm being formulated?
On the other hand, if it is being done indirectly through the choice of values being assumed for the model’s physical parameterizations, then on what basis are the assumed values being chosen?
Topic #2:
Let’s get back to another issue I raised earlier: the possible existence of processes other than the continuous addition of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere which can raise the temperature at the earth’s surface and thus activate a positive water vapor feedback mechanism.
Both Joe Born and Nick Stokes say that Soden and Held’s postulated mechanism can be activated by other processes which can raise the surface temperature.
If Soden & Held’s water vapor feedback mechanism does in fact exist, but sources of a rise in surface temperature other than CO2 and methane can in fact cause it to become active, then what are the implications for the IPCC models if positive feedback amplification can be activated by natural processes?
For one example, if the addition of CO2 and methane to atmosphere is amplifying water vapor’s GHG effects, and if some natural process is also amplifying those GHG effects at the same time, then on what basis does one quantify and allocate the respective effects of each possible source?
Summing up:
It would be very useful if someone having extensive knowledge of how the IPCC climate models are designed and written could explain to us how Soden & Held’s feedback mechanism is being incorporated into the model designs, and also how that incorporation is being accomplished; i.e., through direct or indirect means, or possibly through some combination of the two.
One small problem:
R0 + B0 is adding temperatures.
My understanding is that it is fundamentally wrong to add temperatures.
You’re right that in general Lord Monckton’s temperature-addition step is problematic, but the particular curve you see above doesn’t suffer from that defect. It wasn’t generated by Lord Monckton’s approach.
As the post he criticizes explains, forcings rather than temperatures were the quantities that got added in my calculations. It’s only after the addition that the forcings were converted to Lord Monckton’s temperature quantities.
Rather than represent temperature additions, therefore, all the drawing above shows is differences between the resultant equilibrium temperatures and the values they’d have had without feedback. Lord Monckton is employing those differences in a gimmick, but in this case the problem isn’t that he’s using temperature addition.
Incidentally, just using without-feedback temperature is problematic, too, as kribaez’s comments on the previous threads explain. But I averted my eyes from that and several other errors to focus on the logical gap between Lord Monckton’s entire-signal postulate and his low-ECS conclusion.
Goodness sakes! So when ‘conventional’ theorists (like, say, Arrhenius in his day) added a certain global temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2, and they add that 1.5 degrees C (or 2 degrees or whatever), it is improper just to add like that? Temperature is immune to the use of arithmetic?