The Thermageddonites are “studying” us. Be afraid – be very afraid

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

My attention has recently been drawn to the existence of a truly repellent pseudo-academic entity – the “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism” at Chalmers “University” in Gothenborg, Sweden. The impropaganda image below disgraces its homepage:

The political ideology of this shonky “university”, as if the hate-filled name of its “Centre for Studies in Denialism” were not a dead giveaway, may be gauged from the style of its logo:

Chalmers “University” was founded in 1829 as a kindergarten to teach poor children reading and writing. It was funded by the eponymous colonialist William Chalmers, who had profited mightily from his directorship of the Swedish East India Company.

The marketing blurb for the nest of vipers in the bosom of the “University” begins thus:

“With Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, as a hub, the world’s first global research network looking into climate change denial has now been established.

“Scientific and political awareness of the greenhouse effect and human influence on the climate has existed for over three decades. During the 1980s, there was a strong environmental movement and a political consensus on the issue, but in recent years, climate change denial – denying that changes to the climate are due to human influence on the environment – has increased, which makes the case for understanding why this is so.

“The comprehensive project, Why don’t we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial, is now collecting the world’s foremost researchers in this area. In the project, the network will examine the ideas and interests behind climate change denial, with a particular focus on right-wing nationalism, extractive industries, and conservative think tanks. The goal is to increase understanding of climate change denial, and its influence on political decision-making, but also to raise awareness among the general public, those in power, research institutes, and industry.”

Notice that there is no focus at all on the real reasons why skeptics are sceptical:

First reason: The world is warming at one-third of the predicted rate

Observed warming from 1850-2011 (lower scale) corresponding to projected Charney sensitivity (IPCC 2013 and CMIP5 2012: upper scale). The 3.35 K CMIP5 midrange projection (red cursor) implies 2.4 K transient warming from 1850-2011, thrice the observed 0.75 K (green cursor) and 2.4 times the 1 K period equilibrium warming to be expected on the basis of net estimated anthropogenic forcing and radiative imbalance to 2011 (orange cursor). The revised Charney-sensitivity interval (pale green zone) found after correcting errors of physics in current models is consistent with observation and with expectation.

Projection vs. observation: IPCC (1990, p. xxiv) had projected 0.33 K decade^–1 transient warming, with 1warming expected from 1990-2025 (ibid., p. xii). However, when only 0.35 K had occurred by June 2012 (HadCRUT4: Morice et al. 2012), IPCC (2013) near-halved its transient-warming projection to .17 decade^–1, and yet did not reduce its projected [1.5, 4.5] K Charney-sensitivity interval, which remained in IPCC (2013) as in IPCC (1990) and in Charney (1979).

Projection vs. expectation: The midrange net anthropogenic radiative forcing to 2011 is 2.3 W m^–2 (IPCC 2013, fig. SPM.5), of which 0.6 W m^–2 radiative imbalance (Smith et al. 2015) remained in 2011 and must fall to zero at equilibrium. Therefore, by 2011, 17/23, or 74%, of the 2.3 W m^–2 net anthropogenic forcing was reflected in the 0.75 K industrial-era warming from 1850-2011 (HadCRUT4: Morice et al., 2012). Then implicit period equilibrium sensitivity was 0.75 / 0.74, or 1 K, and the implicit system-gain factor or open-loop gain was 23/17, or 1.35. Since reference sensitivity (sensitivity before allowing for feedback) in response to doubled CO₂ is 1.04 K in the fifth-generation ensemble of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5: derived from data in Andrews et al. 2012), implicit midrange Charney sensitivity, assuming invariant unit feedback response with temperature, is1.35 x 1.04, or 1.4 K. The 3.35 K midrange estimate of Charney sensitivity derived ibid. accordingly exceeds expectation by a factor 2.4.

Since global warming is not occurring at anything like the projected rate, the imagined harms from global warming are not occurring at anything like the projected rates either.

Second reason: Their predictions were wrong because Their science was wrong

Official climatology has made an elementary error of physics. It imagines that feedback will triple the harmless 1 K direct warming caused by a CO₂ doubling (or even, at the high end, multiply it tenfold). But it erroneously defines feedback as responding only to changes in the input signal, which, in climate, is the 255-274 K emission temperature caused by the fact that the Sun is shining. As Professor Ray Bates bluntly puts it, “The IPCC’s definition of feedback is nonsense.”

The bulk of the feedback response comes from emission temperature, but that feedback response gets misallocated and added to the tiny feedback response to the warming from the naturally-occurring greenhouse gases. I recently asked another control theorist what he thought of IPeCaC’s mistake, on a scale of 1 to 10. “It’s a 10,” he gasped, astonished at the sheer magnitude of the error.

Due to that significant error of physics, official climatology imagines, incorrectly, that the direct warming caused by the greenhouse gases drives a feedback response many times greater than itself. That, in a nutshell, is the chief reason why so very much more global warming is predicted than is observed.

But there’s more. Last week I spent some time in Ireland with Michael Connolly and his son Ronan. The Connollys père et fils are two of the sharpest, liveliest intellects it has been my privilege to come across. They are so fascinated by science that they reminded me of Quintilian’s description of the Athenian historian Thucydides as semper sibi instans – always tripping over themselves in their excitement at the wonders of nature. To spend time with them is to be reminded of the classical age of Physics, when the words “I wonder” – indicating awe as well as curiosity – prevailed, rather than the “I believe” or the chilling “You will believe, or else!” of modern totalitarian pseudo-science.

Whenever I asked a dim, layman’s question (and I had to apologize in advance for the sheer stupidity of some of the questions I’d be asking), they would shoot off on various delightful scientific tangents, interrupting each other constantly. Once I had to ask the same question six times before they stopped with the tangents already. Suddenly, they focused, and brilliantly answered the question.

For five years the Connollys have been patiently working on a result so breathtakingly beautiful, so astonishing, so unexpected and so wonderful that it is the first climatological result I have come across that is worthy of the Nobel Prize in physics.

The Connollys kindly met me on my arrival at the airport and carried my bags for me, for I had broken my foot while instructing Christian teenagers at a summer camp in rural Massachusetts last month, and I was strapped up in a giant, splinted boot that doesn’t work for me as a fashion statement, or for that matter as a boot.

On the way to the car, they apologized most charmingly for being socialists. “And so am I, on social policy,” I replied, But we agreed that on economic policy we were all libertarians.

These two are hands-on guys. They built their own house with their own hands and, during the few moments when they are not doing science, they run their property empire. They have the Irish sense of humor, in spades. Michael has written a wickedly perceptive paper called The Greenpeace Business Model, which is well worth a read.

The Connollys are as hands-on in their scientific experimentation as in their house-building. Michael showed me a suitcase in the trunk of his car where he kept what he described, with a broad grin, as “the longest plastic straw in Ireland”. It’s 100 feet long, and he uses it in his public lectures to demonstrate how energy moves through air.

So to the Connollys’ result. They have been studying the 20 million radiosonde records that have been accumulated worldwide since the middle of the last century. Each record is a profile of atmospheric temperature, pressure, humidity and wind direction at various altitudes from the boundary layer (where we live and move and have our being) all the way up to the mid-stratosphere. The radiosonde records give a more detailed picture of what is going on in the atmosphere than measurements taken either from the ground or from satellites.

The two enthusiasts wanted to know to what extent the atmosphere behaves as an ideal gas. An ideal gas is one that obeys the ideal-gas law (1), which, as every schoolboy knows, embodies Boyle’s, Charles’ and Avogadro’s laws. P is pressure, V is volume gas, n is the number of molecules, R is effectively a scaling constant, and T is temperature.

An ideal gas is one that is in thermodynamic equilibrium. When one plots (1) from the radiosondes, an exasperatingly stochastic (i.e., unpredictably squiggly) curve emerges. Michael deduced that it might be worth rearranging the terms in (1) to give (2), where the molar density D is related to the ratio of pressure to temperature –

If the molar density is plotted against barometric pressure, the stochastic curve vanishes and three distinct and very straight lines appear – one for the boundary layer where we live and move and have our being, one for the rest of the climatically-active region of the atmosphere, and one for the tropopause and as far into the stratosphere as the balloons will go:

Molar density vs. barometric pressure at various altitudes in the atmosphere.

So straight are the straight lines that the R² ccoefficient of determination is at least 0.9997. When Michael discovered them, he went into Ronan’s lab and showed him. Ronan said: “I don’t believe this!” So they spent the rest of the night checking random records. Every record showed similar results. And what the results mean is that the atmosphere in thermodynamic equilibrium.

But here’s the thing. One implication that the Connollys draw from a paper published by Albert Einstein exactly 100 years ago is that, provided that a gas is in thermodynamic equilibrium, as they have now shown it is, the greenhouse effect – though it is present – cannot cause warming (except for a minuscule photo-emission effect applying to only 4% of emissions from particles in collision with passing photons).

Naturally, I asked where the observed warming had arisen. There are two answers to that. One is natural variability, for the warming we have seen is small enough to be consistent with it. The other is that an increase in solar radiation between about 1925 and 1995, according to an analysis by the Connollys of 16 distinct published reconstructions of a century of solar variability, could have caused somewhere between none and all of the observed warming.

But if the Connollys are right that the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium, and if they are right that in an ideal gas the greenhouse effect cannot cause warming, the climate scam is at an end, for greenhouse gases are not causing warming and cannot do so.

Third reason: The economic case for climate inaction is overwhelming

The economic consequences of the current acceptance of global-warming projections that have proven excessive are severe. Stern (2006), in the first attempt by a civil servant to justify the heroic lunacy of spending anything on mitigating global warming, done on behalf of the then Socialist government in the United Kingdom, took a 3 K mid-range estimate of warming by 2100 as driving a welfare loss of 0-3% of global GDP (cf. 0.2-2%in IPCC 2013). The 11 K upper bound in Stern (2006), assuming a 0.1% pure rate-of-time discount rate that gave “a 1 in 10 chance of the planet not seeing out this century” (Dietz et al. 2007), drove a 20%-of-GDP extinction-level loss. Adding 1.3% per-capita consumption growth without climate change gave a 1.4% mean social discount rate (cf. 1.35% in Garnaut 2008), against a 5% minimum market discount rate (Murphy 2008; Nordhaus 2008).

Since the probability of extinction is actually nil, submarket discount rates such as these are wholly unjustifiable. At the midrange 7% commercial discount rate applied over the 21^st century, Stern’s 3%-of-GDP welfare loss would become only 0.3% (or 0.1% given no net loss until preindustrial temperature is exceeded by 2 K), while his 20%-of-GDP high-end welfare loss would fall to just 2% (0.6%).

Then one must take account of the fact that increased CO₂ concentration saves lives, as the European tyranny-by-clerk discovered to its dismay when it commissioned some research to try to prove that global warming would kill its subjects in large numbers. The results of the research are shown below. Far more cold-weather deaths were prevented than warm-weather deaths caused.

Even if there were almost 1 K warming per decade from 2020 to 2080, about seven times the observed rate, the calculations carried out for the hated, unelected Kommissars who hold all power in the EU showed that there would be 94,000 more subjects to obey and to serve their successors in 2080 with 5.4 K global warming compared with today than without it:

The World Bank cites global warming as its reason for refusing in principle to fund coal, oil and gas projects in developing countries, where denying electricity to 1.3 billion people shortens lifespans by 15 years.

Fourth reason: Science is not done by consensus – and there is no consensus

The very existence of “denialism studies” is predicated upon the false assumption that there is a scientific “consensus” on global warming. “Consensus” is a totalitarian political construct that plays no role in true science. The notion that one must defer to a Party Line handed down by a supposedly near-unanimous body of “experts” [x, an unknown quantity; spurt, a drip under pressure] is a conflation of two Aristotelian logical fallacies: argument from headcount and argument from appeal to authority (or, as the medieval schoolmen dubbed them, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam).

In any event, the official “consensus” proposition as defined by IPeCaC does not even say that unmitigated global warming would be dangerous. It says no more than that recent warming is chiefly manmade. Yet even that milquetoast “consensus” proposition enjoys negligible support in the peer-reviewed journals of climate and related sciences. As Legates et al. (2015) demonstrated, of 11,944 climate papers published in the 21 years 1991-2011, only 41, or 0.3%, stated that recent warming was mostly manmade, or words to that effect. There is no “consensus”.

True, there are dozens of me-too climate policy statements by scientific societies worldwide, but the common characteristic of these statements is that they were cobbled together by small, activist groups and were not put to the entire membership for approval. They are, in any event, scientifically valueless, because most such societies follow the Royal Society in having an absolute rule that they do not take positions on scientific questions. All these position statements, therefore, defy and deny the very purpose of scientific societies, which is to stimulate scientific debate rather than attempting, for reasons of social convenience, political expediency and financial profit, to shut it down.

What you can do to help

Write to Martin Hultman, Associate Professor in Science, Technology and Environmental Studies at Chalmers “University” (his email address, martin.hultman@chalmers.se, is given on the homepage of the “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism”), and explain to him that you are sceptical of the climate-Communist Party Line not because you are a “right-wing nationalist”, nor because you are paid by the coal, oil, gas, logging or farming lobby, nor because you have the effrontery to belong to a non-Communist think tank, but because the profiteers of doom have flagrantly exaggerated their predictions, because They did so though perpetrating elementary errors of physics when They borrowed mathematics and methods from other disciplines without understanding what They had borrowed, because the welfare loss arising from attempting to mitigate global warming exceeds the welfare loss arising from adaptation to it by orders of magnitude; and because the much-vaunted “consensus” would be scientifically meaningless even if it did exist – which it does not.

All of these sound – indeed, pressing – reasons for questioning the Party Line on climate owe nothing to politics and everything to science. It is time that those who infest the ill-conceived “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism” were given the opportunity to realize that it is They, not we, who are the true repudiators of the scientific method; They, not we, who are allowing Their totalitarian political predilections to get in the way; They, not we, who are profiteering at the expense of the jobs of working people, the existence of energy-intensive industries in the West and the very lives of the tens of millions annually who die in the world’s poorest countries because the World Bank, citing global warming, denies them access to domestic electrical power; They, not we, should be the distasteful objects of academic curiosity.

Why does this matter? Simple. If the climate Communists get their way, we shall soon be silenced forever. They are working themselves up to a frenzy of fabricated fury against us for having dared to raise proper and legitimate scientific questions such as those that I have outlined here.

Already, the Connollys have suffered the same fate as so many of us: outright blacklisting in a manner not seen since the 1930s. When the Connollys were recently invited to speak at a university, the climate Communists protested to the dean of the faculty and the vice-chancellor and threatened violence. Then the university said it could only allow the meeting to take place if the Connollys, at their own expense, took out public liability insurance. So they did. The university, thwarted, waited until close of business on the Friday before the Monday morning on which the Connollys had been invited to speak and then announced that they also needed personal insurance, which it knew they could not obtain in time.

Thus it is, by little and little, by shoddy devices, and by the shameful inaction and feebleness of libertarian politicians, that freedom of scientific research is being taken away. A new Dark Age is at hand. I, for one, propose to fight for the light, and for freedom of inquiry, of research, of speech, of thought and of action, whether the totalitarians that are now a plague upon academe like it or not.