By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I am most grateful to Bob Irvine, in a recent column here, for repeating a point that I have tried to make many times, to squeaks of futile protest from assorted busybodies and concern trolls: the total feedback response until 1850 should not, as at present, be allocated solely to the directly-forced reference warming from the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases.
It must be distributed in some fashion between that natural reference sensitivity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the emission temperature that would obtain at the Earth’s surface in the absence of any greenhouse gases.
As things now stand, official climatology describes the 32 K difference between the 255 K emission temperature and the 287 K observed global mean surface temperature in 1850 as the “natural greenhouse effect”.
It is assumed – see e.g. Lacis et al. (2010) – that a quarter of this 32 K, or 8 K, is natural reference sensitivity, while three-quarters, or 24 K, is natural feedback response.
Therefore, it is imagined that for every 1 K of reference sensitivity there will be 4 K final or equilibrium warming, or, to put it another way, that the closed-loop gain or system-gain factor is 4.
In that event, after feedback the reference sensitivity of just over 1 K to doubled CO2 concentration would become final warming of 4.1 K – and that, indeed, is the current mean midrange estimate in 21 sixth-generation models of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project:
How, then, should the “natural greenhouse effect” be apportioned? At present, climatology’s over-prediction of Charney sensitivity (equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2, the standard metric in global-warming studies) arises due to two mutually-reinforcing errors of logic and of physics.
First, the 255 K emission temperature is supposed to be the surface temperature without greenhouse gases, yet – bizarrely – climatology calculates it by assuming today’s albedo of 0.29, which largely comes from clouds, a greenhouse gas.
As far back as 1994, the redoubtable Professor Lindzen pointed out the illogic of this approach. He corrected it and found emission temperature to be 274 K. That fact reduces the “natural greenhouse effect” from 32 K to just 13 K, of which 8 K is natural reference sensitivity as before, leaving only 5 K as the total feedback response.
Climatology’s second mistake, first perpetrated by the accident-prone James Hansen at NASA in 1984, is to assume that the total feedback response is attributable solely to natural reference sensitivity.
Well, it isn’t. Elementary considerations establish that feedback responds not only to perturbations in temperature but also to the input signal itself, which, in the climate, is the emission temperature or some hefty part thereof.
In effect, puir wee Jaikie forgot the Sun was shining, and failed to recall the wise maxim that the feedback response that is sauce for the goose (natural reference sensitivity) is sauce for the gander (emission temperature).
At two-thirds of today’s 1363.5 W m–2 insolation, the entire tropics on an ice-ball Earth like the Jovian cryosatellite Europa, with albedo 0.62 (Veverka 1982; Pappalardo et al. 2009, Ashkenazy 2016) would be just above freezing, though global mean surface temperature would be less than 198 K.
Even under these conditions, some feedback response would be evident, but it would be small and will here be disregarded.
At four-fifths of today’s insolation, implying mean surface temperature of 207 K, the tropics and perhaps some of the subtropics would be ice-free, and feedbacks would be operating vigorously enough to produce a significant response.
Therefore, some 67 K of the 274 K corrected emission temperature would be capable of driving a temperature feedback response.
How, then, should the 5 K total feedback response be distributed between the 67 K active part of emission temperature and the 8 K natural reference sensitivity?
Illustratively, let us assign only 3 K feedback response to the 67 K active part of emission temperature and the remaining 2 K to the 8 K natural reference sensitivity.
In this example, the true natural greenhouse effect is not the 32 K that is currently imagined, but just 8 + 2, or 10 K. Therefore, the system-gain factor is not 32 / 8, or 4, as climatology profitably imagines, but only 10 / 8, or 1.25.
Accordingly, Charney sensitivity would not be 2.5 K, as Charney himself imagined in 1979, nor 3.35 K, as the CMIP5 models imagined in 2013, and certainly not the 4.05 K imagined by the CMIP6 models. It would be less than 1.3 K.
Ah, yes, said the physics professor from Düsseldorf who chaired a meeting at the local agricultural research station where I presented this strikingly elementary arithmetic at the weekend, but what about the possibility that unit feedback response may increase with temperature?
In the above example, the unit feedback response to the 67 K active part of emission temperature is 3 / 67, or 0.045. But the unit feedback response to the 8 K natural reference sensitivity is 2 / 8, or 0.25, which is 5.6 times greater.
There is no particular reason why the unit natural feedback response should be so many times greater than the unit feedback response to the sunshine. But even then there will be very little warming. The professor found this method satisfactory.
How rapidly does the ratio X of the unit natural feedback response to the natural feedback response to emission temperature increase as estimated Charney sensitivity increases?
The answer is shown in the graph. The curve of X against Charney sensitivity rises very rapidly if Lindzen’s estimate of emission temperature is correct. If, on the other hand, one takes the estimate of ~290 W m–2 solar forcing in Müller 2011 on the assumption that without clouds the albedo would halve to 0.145, the growth in X with Charney sensitivity is a little slower.
However, by the time one reaches 2 K Charney sensitivity – only two-thirds of the current models’ low-end projection – X has already risen to an unjustifiably high 17.
This rapid rise in X provides an incrementally more powerful constraint on Charney sensitivity: the more global warming one predicts, the self-evidently sillier the prediction becomes.
As to the maximum tenable value of X, far be it from me to prescribe it. However, given that it is here calculated after we have carefully removed the inactive part of emission temperature below 207 K, I submit that it cannot much exceed 5.
That means Charney sensitivity – and, a fortiori, the shorter-term transient climate response – cannot be anything like the egregiously overstated values on which scientifically illiterate governments worldwide are basing their heroically insane policies.
I end with an account of a maladroit and ultimately failed attempt by the malicious soi-disant “Greens” to have our meeting banned outright.
Together with the Social Democrats, the “ex”-Communist Leftist party and – to its eternal shame – the ruling once-Christian formerly-democratic party of the shady, East German Reichskanzlerin Angela Murky, the Reds (er, “Greens”) got in touch with the agricultural institute in Kleve and ordered it to cancel the meeting.
These thugs and bullies threatened the Institute that they would organize a mass demonstration so violent that even the placid herd of experimental cows at the Institute would be driven to yield sour milk. For the sake of the cows, said these passionate stewards of all things environmental, the meeting must be canceled.
However, Alternative für Deutschland, the center-right party that had invited me to speak, had anticipated the wannabe terrorists by tying down the institute with a written contract. When the institute tried to back out of the contract into which it had freely entered, the party went straight to court.
The court ordered the meeting to proceed, wryly commenting that the best way to protect the innocent cows was not to cancel the meeting but to make sure that any demonstration was peaceful.
In the end, just two disconsolate protesterettes from Fridays for Fascism (or some such title) turned up. Anyway, it was a Saturday. Their knowledge of what day of the week it was had proved to be no better than their knowledge of climatology. Mindful of the judge’s warning, the two brats protested silently. The cows chewed their cud unterrorized.
Two “Greens” attended the meeting and sat right at the front, twitching their egg-stained beards, muttering to each other and checking my references on their cellphones as I talked. As the very simple arithmetic that spells doom for the Thermageddon cult inexorably unfolded, they twitched and twittered and Tweeted less. They fell still and silent.
At the end, they said to the organizer of the event, who was sitting next to them, that I had made five logical errors in my presentation. “What errors?” he asked. Answer came there none.
“Why don’t you challenge Lord Monckton by asking him questions about his supposed errors?” Questions came there none. The two Trots slunk away dejected into the balmy late-October night. Good news for the planet was not good news for Them.
Often and often have my speaker-meetings been canceled as a result of criminal intimidation such as that which most of Germany’s political parties here saw fit to attempt. This is the first time the organizers have plucked up the courage to go to court to uphold freedom no less of speech than of contract.
In Germany, at last the worm is turning. While I was there, farmers demonstrated against the relentless attempts by the numbskulls in the Bundestag to destroy their industry in the name of Saving the Planet. Hint: The Planet was triumphantly Saved 2000 years ago and it doesn’t need to be Saved again.
At the regional elections in Thuringia, Alternative für Deutschland – founded only six years ago – took 25% of the vote, beating the shocked unchristian antidemocrats into third place. Ending the climate scam was AfD’s principal policy, ranked alongside its policy of allowing the voters to demand referenda on this and all matters on which the classe politique refuses to do what the electorate wants.
As for the “Greens”, they got barely 5% of the vote. Just about everyone is fed up with the cripplingly costly Energiewende, which has carpeted the once-beautiful valley of the Ruhr with solar panels and bird-bashing, bat-blending, bee-bothering windmills – 14th-century technology to fail to address a 21st-century non-problem.
The party is not going to take the intimidation from the goons in the other parties lying down. It is preparing a criminal complaint of intimidation against those who used threats of force, widely circulated in the regional news media, in the hope of either shutting down the meeting or frightening people into deciding not to come.
Despite the thugs and bullies and their poisonous attempts at intimidation, almost 100 brave souls attended.
Three cheers for the judge who was not cowed by the totalitarians. The climate Communists and Friday Fascists are no longer going to get a free ride. Stamping out free speech had cataclysmic global consequences a century ago. It is not going to be tolerated again.
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From the article: “In the end, just two disconsolate protesterettes from Fridays for Fascism (or some such title) turned up.”
Did one of them look like Jane Fonda?
I always try to boil everything down into the simplest terms when it comes to these subjects, as usually the discussions devolve into endless arguments backed up by mathematical calculations that are then refuted by more calculations. In short: if the Earth’s climate sensitivity/feedback were much more than 1, our climate and its history would be absolute chaos. Every slight change in one direction or another would spiral into Venus or Mars. Instead our climate is actually very stable, with repeating cycles over the last few million years corresponding to the Milankovich cycles, CO2 lagging temperature (like soda in your fridge), and shorter fluctuations correlating to changes in solar activity (Maunder Minimum, et. al.), El Nino, etc.
If only it were as simple as Mr Morton suggests. However, the elementary mathematics of feedback (see e.g. Bode 1945, ch. 3; Black 1934) shows that runaway feedback will only occur if the feedback factor is unity. In official climatology, it is about 0.67. In reality, it is a great deal less than that. There is, therefore, no danger of runaway feedback.
I love this site. So much better than banging my head against Desmogblog. I was blocked from posting there within a day.
I was called “despicable”, (for my comments about Greta) “gullible”, and accused of being an uneducated moron.
Whether everyone agrees with Christopher Monckton doesn’t matter. I am officially now a fan of his beautiful, clear, and humorously presented analysis, and am now glued to this website for the informed, intelligent discourse I’d been looking for. (There may be a few exceptions concerning contributors.)
In a real world, where a scientist was well aware of the exponential rise of water vapor-pressure with temperature, the idea of presenting a simple number as being representative of “climate sensitivity” (either transient, or equilibrium) would be considered ridiculous.
This is what happens when we let people get carried away with their models and abstractions of imagined constants that they create with them in a world presented as having a simple “temperature”.
Can someone please help me out here?
I’ve read articles several times on Whats Up With That which were written by Lord Monckton regarding Charney sensisitivity and other subjects. He seems to be an exceptionally intelligent and knowledgeable individual. However, it always goes over my head. I wasn’t good at physics or math in college so a well written simple explanation would be helpful to this general geologist!
If Rafiel Googles “Monckton UKIP” he will find a recent talk by me in which the main points are very simply stated in half an hour.
Both numbers, 255 K and 274 K, are correct depending on what you are trying to do. Contest is all important here. In this case I think Christopher chose the wrong one. Here’s the logic.
If we are trying to understand is how much warmer is the planet’s surface than it would be without an atmosphere then the 274 K would be the valid starting point. But, that’s not the question. We know we have an atmosphere and we know we have clouds that reflect a lot of solar energy.
Given these assumptions we also know only enough solar energy reaches the surface to keep it at 255 K. The real question we are trying to understand is why are we at 287 K with only enough energy to give us 255 K? Why is the surface 32 K warmer than the available energy would seem to dictate?
Don’t call it the greenhouse effect. Call it the Sally. What we have is combination of various physical forces that come into play. One of those is the absorption of radiation by the atmosphere and subsequent re-radiation in all directions. We also have convection, conduction, latent heat, etc.
My point is that the Sally effect is 32 K and that needs to be the base of this particular analysis.
“As things now stand, official climatology describes the 32 K difference between the 255 K emission temperature and the 287 K observed global mean surface temperature in 1850 as the “natural greenhouse effect”. It is assumed – see e.g. Lacis et al. (2010) – that a quarter of this 32 K, or 8 K, is natural reference sensitivity, while three-quarters, or 24 K, is natural feedback response. As far back as 1994, the redoubtable Professor Lindzen pointed out the illogic of this approach. He corrected it and found emission temperature to be 274 K..”
Entropy and Energy: A Universal Competition
By Ingo Müller, Wolf Weiss Bare earth The simplest model ignores the atmospheres and the temperature between day and night. What is not ignored is the albedo of 0.28. This results in a Te of 255 which is correct if we ignore that the bare earth would have a different albedo.
LM is right folks!
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Giving me a headache.
So when we talk about the emission temperature of the earth as 255C at a height of say 100 K as TOA with a known albedo somewhere about 0.3 this is not what Richard Lindzen is talking about?
You are saying that the bare earth surface , albedo zero has a temperature of 274C?.
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Lacis is clearly misleading as Wiki states “the fact that Cloud cover values only vary by 0.03 from year to year, On average, about 52% of Earth is cloud-covered at any moment. ”
In view of these two statements which basically say that the water vapor level in the atmosphere is as much of a constant just like CO2 [despite precipitation uptake keeps it constant], how can Lacis and Schmidt get away with calling water vapor a feedback and CO2 a forcing when both have an equal right to be called a forcing.
Furthermore can anyone explain why Water vapor as a feedback contributes 75% i.e. 3 C to warming whereas CO2 as a forcing contributes 1C in this paper for a doubling CO2.
The fact that water vapor is 75% of the GHG involved compared to 20% for CO2 and other GHG worries me greatly when you look at feedback to forcings calculations. Is this fair what Lacis et al are doing here?
It feels wrong.
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I sort of understand the point that if 274 to 288 is only 14 C and water vapor is 75% of this then Climate sensitivity is lower.
But both sides arguments are not clear.
The bare moon albedo 0.12 has a temp of 270.4 C. NASA moon fact sheet. So I guess 274C is possibly correct for a moon like albedo earth. It still depends on which albedo Lindzen chose, possibly closer to 0.10 but not a black-body obviously.It should be stated in your argument as it is very important.
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Assuming a moon like earth surface no atmosphere albedo 0.12 255C sounds good.
If with an atmosphere and water and green stuff and CO2 increasing the water vapor amount a little the albedo does rise to 0.28 or 0.32 or whatever giving a T of 288C at the surface I for one am prepared to admit a GHG effect and atmosphere effect of up to 32C, less the substantial non water vapor GHG albedo effects.
In fact the GHG effect of water vapor and the smaller amounts of GHGs could be higher than 32/3 C; sorry LM, as the correcting albedo effect of the clouds is quite strong and increases with increasing temperature increasing cloud amounts despite the decreasing cloud cover [heh,heh Nick].
The fact is the GHG effect is present but due to the increasing albedo effects of increasing water vapor in the atmosphere dampening its major GHG influence it is a lot less than the warmists say and a bit more than LM cares to admit.
In response to Richard M, one must logically exclude all greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to obtain the emission temperature that would prevail without them. Water vapor in the form of clouds is a greenhouse gas. Therefore, clouds must be removed. Therefore, emission temperature is 268 to 274 K, and not 255 K.
Greenhouse gases have two effects – of warming and of cooling. If one only counts the warming effect, one obtains excessive estimates of equilibrium sensitivity. One must count both effects. The cooling very largely offsets the warming.
”Both numbers, 255 K and 274 K, are correct depending on what you are trying to do.”
Yes.
”Water vapor in the form of clouds is a greenhouse gas.”
Water vapor is NOT in the form of clouds. Clouds are composed of liquid water droplets thus clouds are visible while water vapor is visibly clear.
Atm. liquid water is not a greenhouse gas so clouds do NOT need to be removed to get the median annual 255K which in field of meteorology is termed Earth’s median annual effective temperature as observed from space. T effective surface = 288K indicated give or take depending on choice of annual periods instrumentally measured.
A good way to think about Earth’s atm. so called GHE is using comparable measured annualized median values: Earth Teffective surface 288K – Earth Teffective space 255K (which includes the natural clouds) = effective 33K give or take in the period measured which is also calculable from observations and first principles (how? refer to a relevant 1st course meteorology text).
”The cooling very largely offsets the warming.”
The upper atm. cooling exactly offsets the lower atm. warming due atm. GHGs by 1LOT. Actually, measuring well enough to show this is not currently possible mostly due all the meteorological variables & since permanent thermometer fields in the stratosphere do not exist as they do near Earth’s surface.
Trick “Atm. liquid water is not a greenhouse gas”
Ah well it must be a greenhouse atmospheric liquid then. It still absorbs and re emits does it not?
Try arguing science rather than pedantry.
atmospheric liquid water or water vapor both have greenhouse effects and need to be removed.
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” permanent thermometer fields in the stratosphere do not exist as they do near Earth’s surface.”
Mumbo jumbo.
What is a “permanent thermometer field”, a rubbish tip near a hospital perhaps.
Satellites do provide pretty good stratospheric temperature measurements around the clock while they are up there if what you mean is the ability to measure the temperature of the stratosphere.
Earth surface assessments of the stratospheric temperatures suffer a lot of problems. Perhaps you have heard of clouds, they get in the way.
”(Liquid water) still absorbs and re emits does it not?”
All matter does so. Except not re-emit, all matter emits brand new photons.
”What is a “permanent thermometer field”
A set of weather stations. Google GHCN. Satellites measure effective temperature. Yes, clouds are complications.
“Satellites measure effective temperature.”
effective temperature? Semantics.
Rebutted so change the argument.
The question is whether they measure stratospheric temperature effectively.
despite all the meteorological variables.
They do an extremely good job of measuring it I believe.
No Mosher drive byes please.
”(Liquid water) in the atmosphere still absorbs and re emits does it not?”
“All matter does so. Except not re-emit, all matter emits brand new photons.”
More semantics.
It is a greenhouse water molecule in the atmosphere acting just the same as a GHG water vapor molecule despite your attempted spin.
Do they only absorb old photons and emit new ones?
Do they absorb new ones and emit old ones?
Do they absorb old ones and emit old ones ?
Do they absorb new ones and emit new ones?
They absorb the energy and then they emit that energy, old or new.
Or they emit energy, reabsorb energy and re emit it.
After a few million goes I am sure we are allowed to use the term re emit.
It is a common term for the discharge of energy having absorbed energy.
I do not think it is a brand new water molecule.
Driven by an old lady or not.
No mention of the Russian Climate model INM-CM4 which gets things the closest to right. Wonder why Monckton has not included it?
The INM-CM4 model was not included in the report that I saw. Sorry about that.
I have met the chief programmer for that model, and he is aware of our result. Perhaps he has factored it into the model, and perhaps that is why it is more accurate than everyone else’s.
Thank you very much. Perhaps you can explain why the model that fits the best is not the one quickly adopted or at least seriously looked at by the other climate modelers. My background is applied low temperature physics.
The fictional uniformly heated black body temperature of Earth with 30% albedo is 255K. We are led to believe that the radiative greenhouse effect makes up the additional 33K, as if heat capacity does not matter.
If the Lunar surface had negligible heat capacity, its global mean surface temperature would be around 47K lower, as the dark side would be approaching zero K. Because it does have some minor heat capacity, rotating it faster would mainly reduce the difference between dawn and dusk temperatures.
The Lunar sunlit side is roughly in equilibrium with solar irradiance. Twice the illuminated disk area gives a mean equilibrium temperature for the sunlit side of 331.3K, or 322.7K with 10% albedo. With a dark side mean temperature of around 95K (4.6W/m^2), that gives a global mean of 208.8K. Close to what is observed. The impossible uniformly heated body model discounts both night time and rotation, and results in an artificially high black body equivalent temperature, by +113K globally.
Earth has the handicap of 30% albedo on its sunlit side, but manages a far higher global mean than the Moon, by keeping its dark side so warm. Primarily by the huge thermal reservoirs of the oceans, and their hyper greenhouse effect of convecting to the surface at night, so that their surfaces barely cool during the night cycle.