And now it’s time for Children’s Hour

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Hello, children! Are you all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Greta, dear, do wipe that nasty, frowning sneer off your face. If the wind blows on it, you’ll look like that for the rest of your life, and that wouldn’t be very nice, now, would it?

Once upon a time, some very naughty grown-ups made up a wicked story to frighten all you little ones with. They said it was going to get hotter and hotter and hotter. It was going to be ever so hot. Really, really hot. Yes, Alexandria, hotter even than Brad Pitt, if that’s possible.

But, you see, children, you can’t always believe what grown-ups say. Part of growing up is learning to work out when you are being told the truth and when you are not.

So today, children, I’m going to have to tell you that quite a lot of what dear old Ms Snorkel, your science teacher, has been telling you about global warming turns out not to be true. Not true at all. Dear me, no.

You see, Miss Snorkel thinks that just because someone says something dreadful is going to happen, then it’s going to happen. Just like that.

But just because someone says they think something bad is going to happen, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It might not happen. So you mustn’t just believe it’s going to happen. You must check what you are told. Don’t just believe it.

Miss Snorkel has told you the experts say the weather is going to get a whole lot warmer. So I’ve drawn a nice picture for you, so that you can see whether they’re right.

Observed warming (HadCRUT4: dark green cursor) due to 2.49 W m^–2 net anthropogenic forcing from 1850-2011 (lower scale: IPCC 2013, figure SPM.5) scaled to 3.45 W m^–2 2xCO₂ forcing (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, CMIP5: upper scale: Andrews 2012). The 3.35 K CMIP5 (red cursor) and 4.05 K CMIP6 (purple cursor) midrange Charney sensitivities imply 2.4 K and 2.9 K transient warming from 1850-2011, three or four times the observed 0.75 K and almost thrice the 1 K period equilibrium warming expected from net forcing and radiative imbalance to 2011 (orange cursor). Revised projections (green) accord with observation and expectation.

Deary me, it really doesn’t look as though the experts Mrs Snorkel trusts were right about how much warmer the weather was going to be. My oh my, they seem to have overshot quite a bit, don’t they?

The very first question you should ask when grown-ups like Ms Snorkel tell you the world is going to get hotter is this. In the nicest and perfectest of all possible worlds, what would be the ideal temperature for all the cuddly creatures and pretty trees and flowers?

Has Ms Snorkel told you what that magic, ideal temperature would be? No, I didn’t think so. But look at it this way. If she hasn’t told you that, how can she know that warmer worldwide weather would be a bad thing?

Yes, Greta, dear? What about the cuddly polar bears? Won’t all that melting ice mean they have nowhere to live? Here’s another picture for you.

Lots and lots of lovely polar bears! Isn’t that nice, children?

By now, kiddiwinks, you’ll be wondering why all those experts got it so wrong. Well, here’s the thing. They made some big mistakes. Yes, Greta, I’m saying they screwed up, but we don’t use language like that in class.

There’s that face again, Greta. Just relax. Yes, of course, I’ll tell you what they got wrong.

You see, they forgot the Sun was shining. But if you look out of the window you can see for yourself that it is. Yes, I know it seems strange that they forgot the Sun was shining, but that’s exactly what they did. Silly of them, wasn’t it?

Yes, Greta, there are “feedback loops”. But that doesn’t mean the feedback loops will make the climate run away to a “tipping point”. What it does mean is that the feedbacks don’t just respond to warmer weather caused by the fact that there are greenhouse gases in the air. They have to respond to the fact that the Sun is shining. Not much choice about it.

But the experts more or less completely forgot about the feedback response to the sunshine. They made the mistake of counting it as part of the feedback response to greenhouse gases. And that made them think there would be a whole lot more warming from greenhouse gases than anyone sensible would ever expect.

How do I know? Well, here’s another picture. What it shows is that if there were 4 K global warming, which the experts now predict, the feedbacks would have to make 350 times as much more warming for each degree of greenhouse-gas warming than they did for each degree of the emission temperature that would keep the Earth warm even if there were no greenhouse gases and no feedback loops. And they can’t do that. It’s impossible.

Here’s a picture to show you how silly the experts are.

Unit-feedback-response ratios for Charney sensitivities on [1.0,4.05] K and emission temperatures of 255.6 K (IPCC 1990) and 274 K (Lindzen 1994). The CMIP5 3.35 K and CMIP6 4.05 K midrange Charney sensitivity estimates (solid yellow) imply, per impossibile, that the unit-feedback-response ratio is 80 or even 350.

Why are there two curves on the graph? That’s an excellent question, Nancy. The reason is that no one quite knows how big the emission temperature would be without any greenhouse gases or feedbacks.

But the trouble with the official figure of about 255 K is that the experts calculate it by imagining that the Earth is flat. Then they divide the sunshine by a kludge-factor of 4 in a clumsy attempt to adjust their sums for the fact that the Earth is round. Not very clever, are they, acting as though the Earth was flat?

But that’s not the only mistake they make when they try to calculate emission temperature. They calculate it by imagining there would be clouds in the air, just as there are today, reflecting almost a third of that lovely sunshine harmlessly straight back into space.

But clouds are made of water vapour, and water vapour is a greenhouse gas, and it is only in the air because of feedbacks. But at emission temperature there would be no water vapour in the air and no feedbacks. Oops! Aren’t the experts silly, children?

No, Greta, I’m not an expert. But Professor Richard Lindzen is. He’s the very expertest of all the experts. And here’s what he says about it:

“In considering an atmosphere without greenhouse substances (in order to get 255 K), clouds are retained for their visible reflectivity while ignored for their infrared properties. More logically, one might assume that the elimination of water would also lead to the absence of clouds, leading to a temperature of about 274 K rather than 255 K.”

If the Earth is not flat, and if the emission temperature is really 274 K and not 255 K, then the natural greenhouse effect, which the experts think is 32 K, is really only 13 K. And, since the Sun is shining even though the experts pretend it isn’t, most of that “natural greenhouse effect” is actually the feedback response to the sunshine and not to the greenhouse gases.

And that’s not all that the experts got wrong. You see, children, you can’t just spend, spend, spend without working out whether what you spend is going to make any difference. So the experts did their sums and worked out that the only way it would be worthwhile to spend any money on making global warming go away was to pretend there was a 1 in 10 chance the world would come to an end by 2100 because of global warming.

Yes, Greta, that’s what they pretended. You can look up Dietz et al. 2007 after class. That’s where they admitted they had pretended that global warming might end the world by 2100.

The truth is that there’s no chance the world will come to an end by 2100 because of global warming. After correcting all the experts’ scientific mistakes, there will only be about 1 K of global warming this century, and sea level will rise by about 4 inches, and the world will carry on spinning much as it does now, even if we do absolutely nothing at all to make global warming go away.

Well, that’s all we have time for today, children. But don’t worry, Greta: your future will be a rosy one. The world will be a little warmer, but that’s a very good thing, not a very bad thing. Now, stop worrying about the weather, go out and play, and enjoy the sunshine!