By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Nature [2020 (586), 335] has now openly and finally abandoned any attempt at either scientific or political objectivity. In a scientifically semi-literate editorial, it writes: “Joe Biden’s trust in truth, evidence, science and democracy make him the only choice in the US election.” Pass the chunder-bucket, Alice!
Ignoring the steaming piles of highly-politicized yah-boo with which the article is soggily laden, Nature’s criticism of President Trump concentrates chiefly on his removal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement and from the World Death Organization.
So let us look at the Paris accord today, and the Chinese virus on another day. What difference has Paris made? What difference have decades of intergovernmental hand-wringing and trillions upon trillions of taxpayers’ money made? The blunt answer is “Nada. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis.” Or (sin of cultural appropriation) “Unh-unh!”
Let us suppose that the totalitarian politicians who are the chief worshipers at the altar of Thermageddon were really serious about making the planet colder. They would first and foremost ensure that the contributions of coal, oil and gas to total global energy consumption would fall sharply and continuously. But here is what actually happened in the quarter-century of hot air at global gabfests from 1993 to 2018. Coal, oil and gas accounted for 88% of total energy consumption in 1993 and – wait for it – 87% in 2018. Progress, Comrades!
World leaders would also have reduced total energy consumption – after all, we’re told we face certain extinction otherwise. Yet, as BP’s chart shows, total energy consumption rose by two-thirds in just that quarter century, notwithstanding five IPCC reports and endless me-too political statements from scientific institutions and once-respected journals such as Nature about turning off the wee standby lights on our TVs.
But surely world leaders have at least ensured that most new energy consumption is subject to the restrictions in the Paris climate agreement? Er, no.
Some 90% of new contributions to energy growth in 2018 were in nations exempt from the Paris agreement (or in the US, which is rightly leaving).
And those leaders would surely have sought to verify whether the IPCC’s originally-projected anthropogenic global warming rate, equivalent to a third of a degree per decade, confidently advanced in its 1990 First Assessment Report, has actually come to pass. But no.
The up-in-the-air half of the graph above shows that, assuming that Wu et al. (2019) were right to find that about 70% of recent global warming was anthropogenic, the true anthropogenic contribution to the 1.63 degrees/century equivalent global warming from August 1990 to July 2020 was just 1.15 degrees/century equivalent, or little more than one-third of the 3.4 degrees/century equivalent rate that IPCC had predicted.
The all-at-sea half of the graph shows that, notwithstanding this threefold overstatement of medium-term warming compared with mere observation and measurement, currently-projected equilibrium climate sensitivity is actually greater than the earlier projections. As Nature would know if it still had any connection with science, if one’s original predictions have proven in the real world to be a threefold exaggeration one does not double down by making still more exaggerated predictions.
The bottom left of the all-at-sea part of the graph shows how much equilibrium climate sensitivity should actually have been predicted, in order to be consistent with observationally-derived sensitivity. The true equilibrium sensitivity turns out to be about 1.25 degrees, not the 3.7-3.9 degrees predicted in the current (CMIP6) general-circulation models. And 1.25 degrees is not enough to be net-harmful.
Curiosity lies at the heart of true science. The genuine scientist does not say, “I believe!”, as Nature does. He says, “I wonder!” and then, “I wonder?” For he is in awe of the universe. He is fascinated by it. He is full of wonder. But then he observes or measures something that he cannot at first explain. Then the exclamation mark becomes a question mark. Why were the original medium-term warming predictions proven by mere real-world observation to have been such an enormous exaggeration? Why were the later predictions of equilibrium sensitivity not divided by three to bring them into line with observed medium-term warming? Why were they instead perversely increased?
The objective scientist, whose allegiance is solely to the truth, would not concern himself for a single instant with what Mr Trump or Mr Biden or some schoolchild or a jailhouse lineup of agitprop scientific associations thought about global warming. He would wonder whether, perhaps, climatology had made a systemic error serious enough to lead to these over-predictions. He would do a little historical digging and a little theoretical reading, and this is what he would find.
He would discover that in 1896 Svante Arrhenius (not a meteorologist but a chemist) had estimated in Table VII of his paper on global warming that doubling the CO2 concentration in the air would cause 5-6 degrees of warming, a prediction bracketing the current models’ high-end predictions.
However, on digging a little further he would find that ten years later, in 1906, Arrhenius, who, not being a climatologist, was able to change his mind when faced with evidence, had published a second paper on the subject, this time in German, in which he revised his estimate thus:
Which, being translated, sayeth –
“Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 Cº or +1.6 Cº respectively.”
That revised prediction is very much within shouting range of the 1.25 C° observationally-derived equilibrium climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 that my team has found.
The enquiring scientist (but not the true-believing Nature) would dig a little further. He would find that in 1938 Guy Stewart Callendar (not a meteorologist but a steam engineer) had written a paper making his own predictions, which are encapsulated in this graph:
In 1938, CO2 concentration was about 300 parts per million by volume, shown as 3 parts per 10,000 in Callendar’s graph. Today, concentration is 415 parts per million by volume. On Callendar’s graph, that reads across as about 0.8 K warming.
The true scientist would be curious about how much warming had actually occurred since Callendar’s 1938 paper. He would find that, on the HadCRUT4 dataset, there had been 0.78 degrees’ warming from August 1938 to July 2020: i.e., very nicely in line with Callendar’s prediction.
The scientist (but not Nature, of course) would then ask how much global warming Callendar would predict if the CO2 concentration were to double compared with the 300 ppmv in 1938. The figure can be read off from the graph: it is 1.5 degrees, very much in line not only with Arrhenius’ revised calculation but also in line with what we should today expect on the basis of observed warming and officially-estimated radiative forcing and measured Earth energy imbalance from 1850-2020. But 1.5 degrees is a long way shy of climatology’s 4 degrees.
The scientist would read Callendar’s conclusion with amazement and delight:
“In conclusion it may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel, whether it be peat from the surface or oil from 10,000 feet below, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. For instance, the above-mentioned small increases of mean temperature would be important at the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favourably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure Brown and Escombe, 1905). In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.”
The questioning scientist would by now begin to wonder at how it came to be that today’s climatologists are not only predicting thrice as much warming as Arrhenius and Callendar but are also saying that the modest increase of 0.8 degrees in global temperature that Callendar had correctly predicted had proven to be a bad thing rather than the good thing Callendar thought it would be. He would wonder why non-climatologists such as Arrhenius and Callendar were so much better at climatology than climatologists. He would begin to read the more recent climate literature, this time with amazement and distaste.
The scientist (but not Nature) would notice that in 1984 – an appropriate year – James Hansen had written a paper predicting 4 degrees’ warming, almost thrice Callendar’s or Arrhenius’ 1.5 degrees, in response to doubled CO2 in the air. He would soon find the reason why Hansen’s prediction was almost thrice that of his two distinguished predecessors.
Hansen had borrowed the mathematics of temperature feedback from control theory, a now-mature branch of engineering physics that was not yet developed when Arrhenius wrote and was in its infancy when Callendar’s 1938 paper was published. Hansen had concluded that, chiefly thanks to more water vapor in warmer air, feedback would double or triple the small direct warming from doubled CO2 concentration.
One of the earliest papers to provide a formalization of feedback theory had been written in 1934 by the formidable Harold S. Black of Bell Labs, then in New York. The notion of negative feedback, for instance, had come upon Black one morning when he was on the Lackawanna Ferry going into the labs to work. He jotted down the equations on his copy of the New York Times, then a newspaper, and Bell Labs retain that copy on display to this day.
The diligent scientist (but not Nature) would read Black’s paper, and would come across the first figure in that paper.
The scientist (but not Nature) would think a little. He would realize that e at top left is marked as the “Signal input voltage”), that the triangular object is the signal amplifier, that there is then a loop in the circuit, the feedback loop, which modifies the signal via the feedback circuit and then passes the amplified and then feedback-moderated input signal to the output node (amusingly marked E+N+D”) at the right:
Then the true scientist would go back to Hansen’s paper of 1984. Therein, he would find a long discussion of feedback. He would find all the terms unfamiliar, because Hansen understood feedback theory so little that he muddled the terms. The scientist would do a little homework and would find that Stephens (2015) had estimated that with no greenhouse gases there would be no water vapor and hence no clouds, so that far less of the Sun’s irradiance would be reflected harmlessly back to space than today, where the cloud tops are the chief mirror for that irradiance. Just look at the image through half-closed lashes and you will see Stephens’ point at once:
There! You have conducted an Experiment. That is more than most climatologists ever do.
The scientist would do a calculation to discover what the emission temperature would be at the Earth’s surface without all those greenhouse gases and clouds. He would find that it was about 267.6 degrees absolute. He would see that the formidable Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT had written a paper as far back as 1994 saying that emission temperature might even be as much as 274 degrees absolute. But let us be nice, and work with the lesser figure.
The scientist would then look up the global temperature in 1850, and would find that it was 287.6 degrees absolute. He would thus deduce that the natural greenhouse effect – the difference between the 267.6 degrees’ emission temperature without greenhouse gases and the 287.6 degrees’ measured temperature in 1850, was 20 degrees.
The scientist (but not Nature) would note that Hansen estimates the emission temperature as only 255 degrees absolute, implying a 32-degree natural greenhouse effect. He would realize at once that Hansen, like countless others writing in climate journals, had assumed today’s albedo of about 0.294 would prevail in the absence of greenhouse gases, whereas according to Stephens it would be half that. Therefore, Hansen had estimated the natural greenhouse effect as 32 degrees, an error which in itself overstates the natural greenhouse effect, and hence by implication the warming effect of greenhouse gases generally, by 60%. But that is by no means the most serious error in that and countless subsequent climatological papers.
The true scientist, having established that the emission temperature was large enough to be only 20 degrees shy of the temperature in 1850, would wonder how much feedback response Hansen had attributed to emission temperature. The scientist (but not Nature) would look and look to find any quantification – or even mention – of the feedback response to the input signal. In the climate, the input signal, e in Black’s diagram, is emission temperature. And emission temperature, at 267.6 degrees, is getting on for 50 times bigger than the directly-forced warming from the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases.
The scientist (but not Nature) would be horrified to find that Hansen had not accorded any feedback response at all to the substantial emission temperature, but had assumed that all the feedback response component in the natural greenhouse effect was attributable solely to the 50-times-smaller direct warming from the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. He would wonder whether Hansen’s extraordinary error had been replicated throughout climatology. And he would find that it had.
The scientist would discover, for instance, that Lacis et al. (2010), in an influential but fatally misguided paper, had copied Hansen in imagining that the difference between surface temperatures with and without greenhouse gases in 1850, the natural greenhouse effect, was 32 degrees. Lacis said that 8 of the 32 degrees was direct warming by preindustrial greenhouse gases and 24 degrees was natural feedback response, mostly from more water vapor in warmer air. Thus, Lacis thought the unit feedback response – the extra warming for every degree of direct warming by greenhouse gases – was 24 ÷ 8, i.e., 3. That is why, given 1 degree of direct warming by doubled CO2 today, climate models still predict, just as Hansen and later Lacis and many others did, that there would be as much as 4 degrees’ final warmingor equilibrium climate sensitivity. They naively assume that feedback response is linear with temperature.
The scientist (but certainly not Nature) would work out the true position. He would discover that of the 19.9 degrees’ true natural greenhouse effect, 6.1 degrees was direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, driving a feedback response of only 0.7 degrees. The 24 degrees imagined by Lacis and countless others was 33 times too large. That is two orders of magnitude. It is a gross error.
The remaining 13.1 degrees of the 19.9 degrees’ true natural greenhouse effect was the feedback response to emission temperature that climatologists had neglected. Climate scientists, at this vital point in their calculations, had forgotten the Sun was shining. They had mistakenly added the large feedback response to the Sun’s heat to, and miscounted it as though it stood part of, the actually very small natural feedback response to direct preindustrial greenhouse-gas warming. And that is how they came to predict large, fast, dangerous warming today rather than small, slow, harmless, net-beneficial warming.
The true preindustrial unit feedback response per degree of directly-forced warming from the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases was 0.7 ÷ 6.1, or just 0.12. Climatologists’ imagined unit feedback response of 3 was 25 times too large, or 15 timestoday’s unit feedback response, which we reckon is about 0.19. So, given 1.06 degrees’ direct warming by doubled CO2, there will be 1.06 (1 + 0.19) or 1.25 degrees’ equilibrium sensitivity. That is only a third of climatologists’ 4 degrees. And that is the end of their “emergency”. For, as we have seen, real-world, observed manmade warming since 1990 has turned out to be just a third of what they had predicted that year. After correcting their error, there will be far too little global warming to do net harm. Climate concern arose solely from an error of physics.
Let us have a diagrammatic look at climatology’s clusterfork – an error so titanginormous that it has been hidden in plain sight all along. The upper panel, (a), shows climatology’s apportionment of its overstated natural greenhouse effect between just two components: 8 degrees’ direct warming by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases and the absurdly large imagined 24 degrees’ feedback response thereto.
The lower panel, (b), shows the corrected apportionment of the true 19.9 degrees’ natural greenhouse effect between not two but three components, starting with the largest: the 13.1 degrees’ feedback response to emission temperature that climatologists had overlooked. See how small the feedback response to the direct warming driven by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases becomes.
We were able to calculate that feedback response numerically, having first prescribed the three nonlinearities in the curve of feedback response with temperature. Those nonlinearities are caused by the Clausius-Clapeyron-mandated increase in specific humidity with atmospheric temperature (in the atmospheric window only), and below the mid-troposphere, at which altitude, contrary to all the models’ predictions, no such increase has occurred); the increase in the Planck sensitivity parameter with temperature; and the rectangular-hyperbolic response of the system-gain factor (the ratio of equilibrium sensitivity to the directly-forced warming that had triggered the feedback response) and hence of all equilibrium climate sensitivities to the feedback fraction (i.e., to the fraction of equilibrium sensitivity represented by feedback response).
Having thus derived the feedback responses to emission temperature and to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, we were able to calculate forward, bearing in mind the pre-established growth curve of feedback response with temperature, and so to derive the true equilibrium climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentration compared with today. It is 1.25 [1.05, 1.5] degrees. But, if one were to assume that anthropogenic aerosol forcing were to continue to be negative in the same ratio to greenhouse-gas forcing as at present, the effective equilibrium climate sensitivity, the amount of global warming that would actually occur, would be only 1.05 [0.9, 1.2] degrees.
Now, Mr Trump (but not Nature)knows all this, because I sent a note to him to explain it. One week later, he took the United States out of the pointless but cripplingly expensive Paris climate agreement. He was right to do so. He had been elected to put America first. That is what he has done. He has, in fact, shown a commitment to democracy far in excess of anything offered by the now-totalitarian “Democrats”. On issue after issue, he has actually done what he said he would do. He has brokered a sounder, solider peace between Israel and some of her Arab neighbours than 20 years of the vapid Tony Blair swanning about in an agreeable palace in the region had achieved. He has pulled out U.S. troops from various pointless wars in far-flung places. He has held China and others to account for asymmetric trade deals disadvantaging the rust-belt workers who had turned to him in droves in 2016.
Climatology itself is also gradually becoming aware of its monstrous error – the error that has led to such prodigious and costly over-prediction of past as well as future global warming. For my team have been submitting a paper about it to learned journals. Neither of the two journals to which the current paper was submitted was able to state that our central point was incorrect: namely, that, since there is in reality a large feedback response (and one that we can now respectably quantify) to emission temperature, the previously-imagined large feedback response to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases must become commensurately smaller. And so on up to the present and beyond. Feedback response, and hence greenhouse warming, is a whole lot smaller than climatology had invited us to imagine.
The reviewers had failed to land a blow on our paper. They nevertheless rejected it, not because it was wrong but because it was right. On the second occasion, I asked the editor to read the reviewers’ comments and our responses and to tell us if in any material respect we had failed to answer the reviewers’ inconsequential and largely unsubstantiated criticisms.
The editor replied that we had fully satisfied him on all points, but that his fellow-editors were not prepared to allow any such paper to appear under any circumstances.
I had already consulted a senior police contact after our previous and similarly baseless rejection. He had advised us to submit the paper thrice and get rejected thrice on the basis of reviews that were plainly dishonest. He would then get the fraud squad in so that I could brief them. We are now polishing the final version of what has now become a substantial and solid paper, and, if it is treated cavalierly, we shall put the entire bulging file in front of Mr Plod, who in my experience is a whole lot smarter than your average academic scamster thinks.
I wrote to the editor to ask his permission to forward the correspondence to the fraud police and to Interpol in due course. He agreed with alacrity, saying that it was high time the fraudulent aspects of climate science were scrutinized. Interestingly, Interpol already has a climate-change fraud division – and it is not investigating skeptics.
Once we were ready with our paper, I wrote to Nature’s editors to make a pre-submission enquiry. My letter said no more than that my team had been working for some years on a large error that had led to a considerable overstatement of projected equilibrium climate sensitivity, and that in view of the importance of the result we wondered whether Nature would be interested. The editor wrote back promptly to say Nature would not be in the least interested. That response will in due course go to the fraud police.
Meanwhile, Nature cares no more for democracy, or for peace in the Middle East, or for bringing brave soldiers home from Obama’s vanity wars, or for making sure that America’s workers have a fair chance to work, or for climate science, than Joe Biden does. The world has been lucky to have Mr Trump over the past four years. Let us hope that it will be even luckier to have him for another four years, tormenting the Communist Press and entertaining the rest of us while keeping America great and the world free. Nature will hate that. Good.
And so to the Chinese virus. But not today. I shall return to that in a few days’ time. For I have had the virus, which is why I have been out of action in recent months. And what I have discovered is fascinating, and will allow the pandemic to cease to have any more harmful effect than the annual flu within a month, if the various profiteering vested interests maintaining the current increasingly absurd global response can be neutralized so as to allow a couple of simple and inexpensive steps to be taken. Watch this space. It will be worth it.
I wonder how much Joe paid them for that using his Ukrainian and Chinese millions from his half share of Hunter’s influence peddling.
I apologize for the incorrect spelling of “Clapeyron” in the head posting, and for the omission of the first diagram.
Sadly CoB uses pages of unfathomable literary waffle to argue something that could probably be presented in about 3 lines of maths. This may well be a good strategy for confounding any peer review criticism and I thoroughly commend his efforts in bring these fraudulent anti-science crooks to account.
The problem with the “amplifier” analogy presented in Black’s symbolic circuit sketch is that it also requires an external source of power to do the amplification. You also need to have the same quantities in and out with a scaler, non dimensional gain.
The climate model has power flux ( W/m2 ) as input and temperature ( energy ) as output. That means it is an integrator. You cannot then feed a proportion of the output back to the summing input since it is not physically of the same units: you cannot add power to energy !
I do not know how this is presented in his latest paper since the manuscript seems to be a secret until submission is finished. It is very unclear from the verbal description given what is going on. That’s why we invented maths along side classical literature.
Biden cannot. Control his family (perhaps it’s monkey see monkey do? )And now the stupid ,repeat stupid, want to have him give the keys to the bank to his drug addict son bye bye America
“bye bye America”
And it’s not just Joe Biden, either. There is a whole Democrat Criminal Enterprise behind Biden, or any other Democrat who becomes president. The Fix will be In if the Democrats win. We have seen that they are corrupt enough to try to sway an election using the power of the Federal Government, and if a Democrat is elected president, the same Criminal Enterprise that attempted a Coup against Trump will be put right back in the driver’s seat, and they will make sure they cover all the bases this time.
They will turn the United States into Communist China, where a few Elites rule over, and dictate to, the Peons. The “Chinese Model” is just what the radical Democrats are aiming for here in the USA. And they are not far away from being able to impose their will. An overwhelming victory by Trump and Republicans is needed to correct this situation
Mr Goodman is, as usual, calculatedly unconstructive and lacking in judgment. If it were possible to overturn 125 years of erroneous climatology in “about 3 lines of maths”, no doubt someone would have done it by now.
The feedback amplifier circuit from Black (1934), like the similar circuit in Bode (1945), shows very clearly that feedback processes in a dynamical system respond not only to perturbations of the input signal but also to the input signal itself. Mechanistic squabbles about what powers which bit of the circuit are simply irrelevant.
Mr Goodman seems unaware that temperature feedback responds to temperature or temperature change.
And, if he had ever published a peer-reviewed scientific paper with colleagues, he would know that the norms of scientific courtesy require that the colleagues be entitled to finish reading and commenting upon the draft before it is either submitted or shown to any third parties.
That is why science is grown-up enough, unlike Mr Goodman, to be a process intended, by civilized methods of investigation, measurement, theory and disputation, to attain the objective truth.
Chris, I was at your Australian presentation with Alan Jones some years ago (when you were pilloried for daring to show a Nazi reference aligning the “climate-change’ hysteria infecting Australia- and still does…
Hopefully you will fully recover from this will fully constructed RaTG13 cloned bat viruses with furin inserts, etc and nit suffer any of the on-going effects (brain, liver, kidneys, etc) now being reported and well studied.
May hope that you will report in detail over the coming months & years ahead, any recurring maladies due directly to this evil virus. Same spike-head containing HIV segments is still being researched for affixation to ebola, Nipah, hendra viruses, etc…
God’s speed with yr recovery.
Joe Biden should have retired long ago, Hunter’s activities could not have been kept in the dark forever. Maybe his political epitaph will be: HE DID NOT BIDE HIS TME.
This morning, middle of October, it is snowing with below-freezing temperatures in Montana, North Dakota, and northern Minnesota. With that in mind, exactly what is the problem, and what is causing it?
same – snowing here in Northeast Kingdom of Vermont
But Vermont isn’t the world…
Would you say the same thing if it were scorchingly hot in Vermont today? If not, why not?
This summer griff was citing warm temperatures in a couple of Siberian towns as proof of global warming.
But Vermont IS the world of die-hard warmunist senator Bernie Sanders. Surely, by now he should have outlawed untimely snow?
“But Vermont isn’t the world…”
Then you agree that there’s no “global” warming.
poor griff,, your padded, tin-foil-lined basement isn’t the world either.
And here, griffy-
http://www.karstenhaustein.com/climate.php
Neither is Siberia, but that never stopped you from citing warm temperatures there.
10C in ‘sunny’ South Australia this fine Sunday morning (10AM) and the heating was required to be on last night.
Vermont may not be the world but perhaps it is influencing us on the other side of it.
Hullo Griff! You should have taken my Arctic ice bet. You would now be £100 richer. Arctic ice has now bottomed out at just below four million square kilometres twice in thirteen years. Any takers for 2021?
6″ of snow on the ground this morning in W MT and the 3 day forecast is for more of the same.
Where did my global warming go? I need it back..
I have things to get done before ol man winter gets here. At least the fire season is over
for the year..
You need to get plane tickets for you and you wife to someplace like Aruba.
My advice: Book ’em, Dan-O!
4 degrees was settled upon the number in the 90’s and has not changed since then. It was as bogus a claim then as it is now although for different reasons. In the 90’s that 4 degrees was the Pinatubo eruption (I kid you not, we had a kool aid drinker come to the office to spread this misinformation that when Pinatubo erupted it reduced the core of the Earth by 4 degrees and released it upon the surface—lets just say that in that meeting were a bunch of us budding scientists who started laughing and we left without hearing anymore).
So they’ll use anything to fulfill that 4 degrees they arbitrarily set back in the late 80’s, early 90’s. It is now 30 years later and they haven’t changed a single thing except to drop methane and add an oxygen molecule to CO.
This argument was always political, it infested our schools, it invaded our workplaces and it perpetuates on social media, print media, and TV shows. The problem isn’t that they aren’t right, it’s that they aren’t going to give up on that 4C until doomsday and they will reinvent some other excuse to pound home they decided 4 degrees C.
Lets be honest here, the climate changes. It is only with the vulgarity of human arrogance and this BS foundation that humans are inherently evil that gave rise to this notion that we are the problem on the Earth. We are part of the Earth, we do not control it, nor do we do anything relatively major to it. We can of course wipe out our entire species if we so desire to do so through our own inventions but we don’t control the entire Earth–not temperature, not water, not land, not air, nor the sea. Mother Nature will strike you down if you take her for granted and place your arrogance against survival. We KNOW THIS and yet we are so disconnected from it because we have been very clever to define a way to survive by changing our environment around us and believe we can impose our will upon the entire Earth.
Instead of being willfully arrogant, lets try some humility and realize that we are not dominate no matter how hard we stand there beating our chests telling the world around us that we are and predicting doomsday with the number of 4C.
Off my soapbox.
And, the “global average temperature” =/= climate.
And is a completely bogus thing.
Do as “they” do…..repeat and repeat even to people with their eyes glazed over and incapable of understanding, that ECS is 1.25 and that tripling it for water vapour feedback is simply unjustifiable as total water content of the atmosphere remains unchanged…..repeat until it becomes a media meme…..terrible impositions on people worldwide, mostly poor people, are being made as a result of the ongoing climastrology cult.
M Mackenzie is right: we should repeat that 4 K equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 is far too large.
Well said just Jenn!!
Trust ………. and verify. Ronald Rayguns
Always believing of unvalidated assertion is not what any President should be.
Does Biden ‘know” anything for himself?
Hasn’t he learn anything from decades of politics?
Rhetorical question. Sorry.
Politicians make bad leaders and decision makers. They have never been held responsible for their actions for long.
PS Definition of terms. When I said ‘know’ something I meant know because you proved it beyond reasonable doubt for yourself by checking the observations of reality/nature as Feynman and others defined it, versus believing in received opinion. Let him explain the importance of how hard it is to know something – versus how much easier to make it up or believe such fabrication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
Firstly the feedbacks are negative. In the Holocene Optimum there was very little El Nino activity, then El Nino activity increases when the globe begins cooling from around 5500 years ago. During glacial maximum states there are near permanent El Nino conditions.
Now from 1995, the solar wind ,driving warmer ocean phases, with increased El Nino conditions and a warmer AMO, which reduces low cloud cover and increases lower troposphere water vapour. So the negative feedback is amplified and produces a considerable overshoot. The 1970’s global cooling was the corollary of that, the fastest solar wind states of the space age, driving colder ocean phases. This is why climate tipping points are unphysical.
As for the CO2 forcing, if doubling its level from 280 to 560 ppm provides 3.7W/m^2, a surface would have to be at -34°C for 3.7W/m^2 to warm it by 1.2°C, which is the IPCC net warming figure. Something at a mean 15°C would only warm by about 0.6°C.
correction: from 1995 weaker solar wind drove warmer ocean phases.. etc
Ulric,
The amplifier circuit in the figure above has two positive inputs. That’s not how feedback typically works. The feedback is usually applied to a negative terminal. As the output signal goes up, more feedback is subtracted thus forcing the output back to its nominal value. As the output signal goes down, less feedback is subtracted thus forcing the output back to its nominal value.
If the feedback is positive, this implies a runaway condition. As the output goes up, more feedback is added driving the output even higher. This happens over and over till the amplifier saturates.
For this to not happen then beta has to be a non-linear function that is essentially negative when the output is above the nominal output and positive when the output is below the nominal value. I know of no real condition in the Earth system that would be equivalent to such a beta factor.
In response to Mr Gorman, it is common among engineers to imagine that positive feedback necessarily entails runaway feedback. Actually, it doesn’t. To reassure them on this point, in our paper we have included a one-page annex that explains mathematically why you don’t necessarily get runaway feedback response if the feedback-sum is net-positive. One can derive the conclusion in a few lines of linear algebra, or by summation of infinite series (indeed, by summation of the first-ever infinite series known to have been summed). Our one-pager includes condensed explanations of both approaches, so as to convey to engineers the reasons why one would not necessarily expect net-positive feedback to entail runaway conditions.
The reason why there is not a run away postive f/b is because the true feedback is AWAYS negative because it is dominated by the plank feedback.
Any talk of “positive” feedbacks is a word game: a typical climatologist’s trick.
What they are really discussing is factors making the dominantly negative Planck f/b LESS NEGATIVE. It’s like ocean “acidification” all over again. The ocean is not acidic and never will be, it may become slightly less basic, just as the net f/b to temperature change may be slightly less negative.
I pointed this out to our resident member of the British aristocracy about 5y ago, as did several others, when he started his venture into feedback theory. Sadly to no avail. However, I wholehearted support his efforts to bring these fraudulent gatekeepers of the climate orthodoxy to justice for their blatant hijacking of the peer review scientific processes.
Lacis, who is part of Hansen’s circle jerk of rotating lead authorships, was doing what looked like honest attempts at physical modelling back in Lacis et al 1992. However, by Hansen et al 2002, any attempt at “basic physics” had gone out of the window in favour of arbitrarily tweaking model parameters to get the best fit to the climate record. What they called “reconciling” the model output.
In essence this meant abandoning any physical basis for the scaling of AOD ( a measure the opacity of the atmosphere due to aerosols such as produced by stratospheric volcanoes ) and using whatever value was most consistent with the exaggerated sensitivity to CO2 they wished to use in the models.
In 1992 Lacis, Hansen & Sato derived from observational data from El Chinon eruption a scaling of 30W/m2 for AOD. In Hansen et al 2002 it had been reduced to 21W/m2.
The cooling was the known and did not change but the forcing supposed to produce it had been reduced significantly. Thus “sensitivity” had been spuriously reduced and the link to basic physical modelling and observation had been quite simple abandoned.
An increased sensitivity to AOD allows an exaggerated sensitivity to CO2 , as one balances the other maintaining a vague reproduction of the later half of 20th c. surface temps.
I discuss this in full detail on Climate Etc. :
https://judithcurry.com/2015/02/06/on-determination-of-tropical-feedbacks/
Mr Goodman is, as usual, incorrect. Given that the natural greenhouse effect is 20 K, of which only 6 K is directly-forced warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases and 13 K is strongly-positive feedback response to the 268 K emission temperature, and 1 K is positive feedback response to the 6 K greenhouse warming, it is perverse to seek to maintain that temperature feedback is net-negative.
Tim Gorman
I have built op-amp circuits, the ratio of the feedback resistor to an earth resistor simply set the gain of the circuit. It’s not an appropriate analogy for the climate system, which is far more like a servo control with overshoot.
In response to Mr Lyons, negative feedbacks certainly exist, but given that the natural greenhouse effect is 20 degrees, of which just 6 degrees is directly-forced warming by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, the remaining 14 degrees is net-positive feedback response. Of that 14 degrees, 13 degrees’ feedback response is to the emission temperature, and less than 1 degree is feedback response to the greenhouse gases. In both instances, our calculations – as well as the underlying causes of feedback in the climate – would lead us to find that the feedback, overall, is net-positive – just a lot less strongly positive than climatology had erroneously imagined.
Total feedback is less strongly positive than climatology would like us to believe because of factors such as those which Mr Lyons rightly mentions.
Feedback analysis can’t apply to the climate system. Hansen started the malfeasance with his 1984 paper that referenced Bode and then declared the wrong equation after the dubious line ‘it follows that’. Thereafter, the rest of his paper was complete junk.
It wasn’t so much Hansen, but Schlesinger who added the many levels of obfuscation attempting to bury Hansen’s errors, which unfortunately, he was quite successful at. Schlesinger showed the work to ‘derive’ Hansen’s ‘corrected’ gain equation (with feedback and gain properly reversed) in a vain attempt to make the rest of Hansen’s paper relevant. In this derivation, he incorrectly applied the feedback factor where the feedback fraction should have been applied as he derived the gain equation. Ironically, the proper gain equation was on the page in Bode’s book following where he explained that the feedback factor is the feedback fraction, Beta (a DIMENSIONLESS number between -1 and 1), times a DIMENSIONLESS open loop gain, mu. Schlesinger incorrectly asserted that the feedback factor was the value between -1 and 1.
The feedback factor is only between -1 and 1 when the open loop gain is 1, which was an implicit assumption that was never disclosed. The reason was that the error of confusing the feedback factor and the feedback fraction essentially took what was claimed to be the open loop gain that converts W/m^2 to degrees out of the loop.
Furthermore, he incorrectly assumed that approximate linearity around the mean satisfies Bode’s requirement for strict linearity across all possible inputs and outputs and then went on to claim that the average not accounted for by the incremental analysis was the implicit power supply Bode also clearly assumes.
The first assumption isn’t even close to conforming to strict linearity. The second assumption is equally wrong where the Joules of forcing not accounted for by the incremental analysis are already consumed maintaining the average temperature which is also not accounted for. These 2 errors do not offset nor do they preclude the requirement to conform to the only 2 preconditions stated by Bode for using his analysis.
The proper gain equation for a feedback amplifier is g = 1/(1/G – f), where g is the closed loop gain, G is the open loop gain and f is the feedback fraction. Note than when G = 1, the equation Schlesinger’s ‘derived’, g = 1/(1-f) emerges. It was the conflation of the feedback factor with feedback fraction by assuming unit open loop gain that ended up canceled the open loop gain, G, from the gain equation.
In response to co2isnotevil, there is indeed a lot of nonsense and confusion in the Hansen and Schlesinger papers, which everyone else copied. It was only when a control theorist who saw that I had raised a red flag about the handling of feedback in climatology in a paper published five years ago in the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences sent me Bode’s textbook that I realized the Forces of Darkness had neglected to take account of the fact that the Sun was shining and that, therefore, there was necessarily a substantial feedback response to emission temperature.
Our work over the lockdown has enabled us to quantify that feedback response to the fact that the Sun is shining and deduct it from the total preindustrial feedback response to derive the very small feedback response to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases.
It’s more than just nonsense and confusion. Since the errors have persisted for so long, despite being widely known, I would characterized it as purposeful obfuscation with nefarious intent. Originally I thought it was just the result of incompetence and confirmation bias, but after several exchanges with Schlesinger, I pointed out the specific error of conflating the feedback fraction and feedback factor that led to canceling out the open loop gain, invalidating his and Hansen’s papers. He got very angry and stopped communicating with me. I’m absolutely certain he understood his error, but he never disclosed this before he died.
My interpretation of events is that the Hansen paper was hailed as the holy grail that provided theoretical legitimacy to the massively over-estimated ECS they needed to justify the formation of the IPCC. After committing to massive positive feedback as their justification and during the preparing AR1, Schlesinger discovered Hansen’s most obvious error of flipping the gain and feedback terms. In a rush to fix this, Schlesinger wrote a correction paper that was first published in a DOE journal with minimal peer review. One formal reviewer was from LLL, who has since died, and the other was Mike MacCracken, who’s more of a political operative connecting the DNC to the IPCC. Neither reviewer was proficient in Bode and I suspect the LLL reviewer was recruited in order to ease the way into the DOD journal without attracting too much scrutiny.
Schlesinger’s core expertice was as a mathematician, who should have recognized the error unless the goal was to skillfully fabricate a false foundation to justify the formation of the IPCC. Either way, it’s a subtle math error that incorrectly infers that feedback analysis is relevant to the climate system.
Both the Hansen and Schlesinger papers are referenced together in AR1 as representing the only theoretical justification for a climate sensitivity as high as they required and it’s been considered ‘settled science’ ever since.
The main problem with these attempts to use triangular electronic amplifiers as an analogy, is that they omit two very important wires: the power supply.
The “op amp” style diagrams assume an infinite input impedance, which draws no power from the input signal and an indefinite power supply being available to amplify the input to a scaled up output of the same quantity ( eg volts in volts out ).
The climate model would see the input as the power supply ( W/m2 ) resulting in a temperature output: ie and energy term, the INTEGRAL of power not a scaling of the input. All attempts at an analogy at that point have been abandoned.
A linear amplifier cannot be an analogy of an integrator.
Greg,
Yes, the implicit power supply that doesn’t exist is the origin of the Joules replacing the impossible amount of surface emissions claimed to arise from forcing. I’ve also tried to use the impedance argument, which is absolutely correct, but this makes most peoples eyes glaze over and unfortunately, if someone can’t grasp a concept as basic as Ohms Law, they have no chance of understanding gain, feedback and COE relative to LINEAR feedback amplifiers. To the uninformed, a valid feedback amplifier would connect the power supply input to the signal input.
An even more obvious flaw is the intrinsic non linearity arising from the T^4 dependence of W/m^2. To anyone who has ever designed an amplifier, a model with Wm^2 in and a temperature out is unambiguous evidence that Bode can’t be applied. Just imagine how distorted the output of your stereo would be if the output of the amplifier was proportional to the input raised to the forth power. The blatantly incorrect assumption of approximate linearity around the mean has been more generally applied to cancel out the T^4 dependence across all W/m^2, not just the next one, and this has led them to be so wrong by denying the relevance of the Stefan-Boltzmann LAW, it’s an embarrassment to all legitimate science. The only counter argument I’ve heard is that there can be amplifiers with voltage in and current out, which is true, but you can’t apply Bode until you pass the output current through a constant load impedance and produce an output voltage.
In response to CO2isnotevil, temperature feedback responds to temperature or to temperature change, not to radiative flux density directly.
And it is not appropriate to be too mechanistic about the analogy between an electronic feedback circuit and the climate feedback circuit. The point made in our paper is in essence simple: if the small reference sensitivity to preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases engenders a temperature feedback, then so a fortiori does the reference temperature that would apply at the surface even without greenhouse gases, simply because the Sun is shining. The feedback response to emission temperature must, therefore, be deducted from the total preindustrial feedback response, greatly reducing the influence of greenhouse gases on equilibrium warming.
CM,
What you’re considering to be active system feedback is just the temperature dependence of some part of a passive system. In a passive circuit this would be accounted for as a temperature coefficient on a components value. Feedback analysis would only have relevance if that component was within an active feedback loop. BTW, temperature is not the actual output of the climate feedback model. The actual output is W/m^2 because the math error of confusing the feedback factor with the feedback fraction implicitly assumed dimensionless unit open loop, thus the output must have the same units as the input. As a result, any conversion to temperature can only be outside of the feedback loop and is fundamentally just an incremental application of the SB Law.
A central point is that the Earth is not an active system, where the difference between a passive system and an active system is that in a passive system, all of the output power originates from the input power, thus COE must apply between the input and output while in an active system all of the output power originates from an implicit power supply and none originates from the input, thus COE between the input and output is implicitly ignored. The disconnection of the COE requirement is one consequnce of Bode’s precondition for an implicit power supply and is assumed to simplify the analysis. Whether or not the implicit supply exists, feedback analysis will still implicitly violate COE between the input and output.
Not only is forcing power consumed to produce output emissions, feedback power is also consumed, thus output power from the gain block of the climate feedback model can either contribute to the final output or become feedback, but not both. This ties in to Greg’s impedance argument as Bode assumes an infinite input impedance, thus the input and feedback are not consumed by the gain block and the feedback doesn’t need to be subtracted from the output.
In further response to CO2isnotevil, his quarrel is not with me but with official climatology. Whether he likes it or not, official climatology denominates the reference temperature or sensitivity in Kelvin, the feedback response in Kelvin, and the equilibrium sensitivity in Kelvin. As I have repeatedly explained throughout this thread, we adhere to official climatology wherever we can because that minimizes the opportunities – from both sides – to muddy the waters with irrelevancies and inconsequentialities.
Here is how it is actually done – again, like it or not. First, the radiative forcing in Watts per square meter is estimated. The forcing is the change in the net (down-minus-up) radiative flux density at the top of the atmosphere, driven by a perturbation of the system. The product of the radiative forcing and the Planck sensitivity parameter in Kelvin per Watt per square meter is then the reference sensitivity in Kelvin. The Planck parameter is the first derivative of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation; and, because it is the first derivative of that fourth-power equation, it may be expressed as the ratio of the variable prevailing surface temperature to four times the net incoming radiative flux density, which will vary only to the extent that the Earth’s albedo varies. This first derivative, then, is quite close to a linear parameter.
In climatology, feedbacks are denominated – again, like it or not – in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the reference temperature or sensitivity to which they are responding. The product of the feedback sum and the Planck parameter is then the unitless feedback fraction. The system-gain factor is the unitless inverse of the complement of the feedback fraction. The equilibrium temperature or sensitivity is the product of the reference temperature or sensitivity and the system-gain factor. The unit feedback response is 1 less than the system-gain factor.
On our author team, we have not only a professor of climatology (who is now a senior member of the U.S. Administration) on our team, but also a professor of control theory, who is quite amused when he reads the well-meaning but strikingly misguided comments by people in these threads who regard themselves as, but are not, experts in control theory. We also have several experienced control engineers.
Our point, however, can be made without going into all these weeds. The truth is that emission temperature engenders a substantial positive-feedback response; that that feedback response is currently mishandled by climatology and counted as though it were part of the actually small feedback response to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases; and, therefore, the warming effect of those gases, on all timescales, is currently imagined to be about thrice what it actually is, and has actually been proven by observation and measurement to be.
One should not get obsessed by details of how an electronic circuit works. The electronic circuit is useful for working out the relationships between the different variables in the feedback loop, so as to provide empirical confirmation of results that can be derived quite easily by theoretical methods. And we did those experiments, with the assistance of a leading governmental physics laboratory. The experiments confirmed – though no such confirmation was necessary, for the math is long proven – that, to within a tenth of a degree, equilibrium sensitivity in 23 distinct experiments was exactly what we had predicted it would be.
If CO2isnotevil would like to produce his own paper recommending corrections to climatology, telling it that it should not quantify temperature feedback responses as temperatures, then he should feel free to do so. But we see no useful outcome from that approach. Climatology has quite enough difficulty in understanding the elements of feedback theory as it is.
Monckton
You have neglected the main agent of the greenhouse effect, water vapour. That’s a not all a positive feedback to CO2 forcing, it is intrinsic to a water world.
A simple thermodynamic model is not how the climate system behaves. Ocean phases act as negative feedbacks to net changes in climate forcing, from seasonal to Holocene scales. Go back to my original comment and try to understand what I have written.
In response to Mr Lyons, of course I have not neglected water vapor. I have carefully distinguished it, throughout, from the noncondensing species. It is the noncondensers that supply the greenhouse-gas forcings, and water vapor that supplies the principal temperature feedback response. Go back to an elementary textbook of climate science and try to understand what is there written.
Our metbod does not require us to know anything about the relative magnitudes or even signs of individualk temperature feedbacks: which is just as well, because not a single feedback can be definitively quantified by measurement, or even distinguished quantitatively from the forcings that engendered it. All sorts of people here have individual theories about individual types of feedback, and they are of course welcome to them: but what we are interested in is the overall feedback response, whose magnitude can be least unreliably estimated by studying the preindustrial period in the manner that we have developed.
There is a proposed thermal positive water vapour feedback from rising CO2 forcing, that does not preclude water vapour as a primary greenhouse gas forcing.
The sign of the feedback to net changes in climate forcing is critical, as that water vapour amplification of rising CO2 forcing may not exist.
MofB
“because not a single feedback can be definitively quantified by measurement, or even distinguished quantitatively from the forcings that engendered it”
I found the main one. While the GPWF were betting £2000 on continued global cooling due to low solar, I had predicted post 2014 global warming as I could see the increase in El Nino and renewed warming of the AMO that would be occurring, and I had correctly predicted the regional changes in drought and floods globally.
It astonishes me that people can’t work it out when it is so simple. With periods of low solar activity we get colder weather in Europe, which is dependent on negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, which are directly associated with slower trade winds. So naturally there should be increased El Nino conditions during centennial solar minima, which is exactly what the historic data shows. And that simple explanation is exactly why Piers Corbyn removed the claim from his website saying that there would be less El Nino during his mini ice age. He’s still got the North Atlantic backwards though, that is also normally warmer during each centennial solar minimum. And during the warm AMO phase, surface wind speeds over the oceans increase, low cloud clover is reduced, and lower troposphere water vapour increases. So the warm ocean phase response to lower solar forcing, is amplified by the changes in water vapour and low cloud cover which they drive. Huge amplified negative feedbacks and with considerable overshoot. The 1970’s had the strongest solar wind states of the space age, driving much colder ocean phases, amplified by increased low cloud cover and reduced lower trop water vapour.
The CO2 forcing of water vapour is lost within all that, it cannot keep up.
And how much does 3.7W/M^2 really warm a surface at a mean 15°C?, it’s not 1.2°C.
And another thing, Viscount M.
The best, cheapest, safest, lowest resource use hence most sustainable , zero CO2 if that matters, solution to enrgy supply IS nuclear energy. On any scientific assessment energy intensity wins.
They don’t like that because, like the other pretend limits to growth Malthusian non problem of famine that GM crops solve w/o pesticides, it solves the supposed probelms of future energy supply without providing easy subsidy money to lobbyists to support an overtly bogus solution, and to justify laws that control how people live. The whole objective of the real Agenda (21),. We know the game now.
Catt
I have much sympathy with Mr Catt’s suggestion that nuclear energy is a good thing, but obsessive over-regulation tends to make it almost as costly as wind and solar. So our approach is to compel climatology to get its science right, whereupon none of us would need to worry about greenhouse-gas emissions, for in truth they are not only harmless but almost certainly net-beneficial.
So my recommendation is that, once the 33-fold exaggeration of the natural feedback response to preindustrial greenhouse gases is corrected and equilibrium sensitivities derived therefrom are consequently divided by 3, we should stop subsidizing so-called “renewables”, which have a far greater environmental as well as financial cost per TWh generated than coal, oil or gas, and then leave it to the free market to decide what is the best and cheapest way to generate electricity cleanly.
Unfortunately, Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima Dai-Ichi have not proven to be good advertisements for the safety or reliability of nuclear power generation. At Sellafield, disaster was averted because, while the chimney was being built, the danger of an internal containment failure was noticed and an extra filter added three-quarters of the way up. It was that last-minute filter – startling to see in the photographs – that prevent the deaths of thousands when the internal containment indeed failed.
At Chernobyl, the Russian Communists had failed, when transferring military reactor technology to the civilian power-generation sector, to tell the civilians that at low power the reactor was unstable. Therefore, when the director of the plant decided to conduct an experiment to determine whether the reactor could be safely shut down if all external power had been cut off, he was unaware that both powering down the reactor and cutting off the external power would trigger precisely the instability that the military had withheld when profiting by transferring the technology.
At Fukushima Dai-Ichi, the International Atomic Energy Authority had previously inspected the installation and had commented that the backup diesel generators were vulnerable in the event of a tsunami. It had recommended that the generators should be moved to the roof of the building, above any foreseeable tidal wave. The Japanese were thus given an explicit warning of what would happen in the event of tsunami, and were told just how to make the relatively simple and inexpensive modification that would have prevented disaster, but had failed to act on the IAEA’s recommendations.
Accordingly, nuclear power will not really come into its own until problems such as these are designed out of the industry. That’s not easy. The best approach would probably be to go for small, local, modular reactors that are buried well below ground in stable terrain well isolated from any water table or earthquake zone, fueled up and then earthed over forever. Systems such as that are inherently far safer than large, above-ground reactors; they require no maintenance; they run until their fuel is exhausted, which takes about 40 years, and then one leaves them where they are, below ground and in no one’s way.
Or one could wait for nuclear fusion, which, when I visited the Joint European Donut at Culham in Oxfordshire on behalf of the Prime Minister in the 1980s, was confidently predicted to be less than 30 years away. Now we are told it is 50 years away.
With modern coal-fired plants, one can generate large amounts of electricity with minimal pollution (other than CO2, which is not a pollutant anyway) for $20 per MWh dispatched. Were it not for Communist interference by the global-warming fanatics, that would be the most economical as well as the most environmentally-acceptable solution: large amounts of power from a small footprint. With hyper-supercritical combustion of pulverized or pelletized coal on fluidized beds (invented by a colleague of mine at Churchill College, Cambridge), together with flue-gas scrubbing and fly-ash trapping, producing downstream products such as house-bricks, coal-fired power would be as profitable as it would be environmentall friendly.
You know Lord Acton’s aphorism, ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. It’s not really true. What really happens is that corrupt people are drawn to power. It’s called the Asshole rule. Every institution or position that has even a modicum of power is soon filled with people who want power, Assholes. It is a fundamental law of nature like positive charges being attracted to negative charges. Assholes are attracted to power. It is why journalism is corrupt. Journalists have the power to spin the message of politicians. Why be a politician when you can be a journalist. By now most (maybe all) journalists are politicians who are too lazy to get elected. The Noble Peace prize is corrupt and so it seems are scientific journals. Science is corrupt because the word has some authority. Lots of people claim to be scientists and do science just to get in on the power that comes from the word. It’s the Asshole rule in action.
There’s feedback involved in power acquisition, as well. Once an AH comes to power, using that power makes him hungry for more, turning him into a mega-AH. Putzi Hanfstaengl said that his friend AH was relatively approachable until he took power in 1933. “It was the experience of power that turned AH into an irreconcilable fanatic; it took me most of 1933 to realize that the demon had entered into him.”
Uh huh, interestingly indeed, one has to wonder exactly what they’ve been doing for the past 32 years besides nothing.
In response to Mr Case, the Interpol climate fraud unit was set up three or four years ago. Its first target was carbon-trading fraud (the whole system is, in essence, a scam).
Am I the only one that didn’t know what the “chunder-bucket” is?
In response to Mr Case, we’re in the groove, us aristocrats. We know our urban slang. Just Google “chunder-bucket”.
Or, you’re simply browsing the Urban Dictionary.
No: I have visited Australia often and am familiar with its language.
Yep. Just you. Aussie slang.
* Their 1983 GRAMMY award spread “Strine” to a global audience! 😉
Great song! Anyone got a link to a clip?
Thirty years on, and that’s the first time I’ve seen that salient point made.
Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, in fact the overwhelming one in Earth’s atmosphere today, the statement “. . . with no greenhouse gases there would be no water vapor . . .” is self-referential, and thus non-sensical.
Mr Dressler misses the point. Emission temperature is, ex definitione, the temperature that would prevail at the Earth’s surface in the absence of greenhouse gases. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, it would not be present in the atmosphere at emission temperature. Therefore, there would be no clouds. Therefore, the Earth’s albedo (or reflectance) would be half what it is today. Therefore, the Stefan-Boltzmann equation mandates that emission temperature is 267.6 degrees absolute, and not 255.3 degrees absolute, as is currently imagined on the basis of attempting to calculate emission temperature using today’s albedo, which is, however, derived on the basis that water vapor and hence clouds are present.
Accordingly, the natural greenhouse effect is not about 32 degrees, as climatology imagines, but more like 20 degrees. Of this, 13 degrees is feedback response to emission temperature, currently omitted by climatology, 6 degrees is directly-forced warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, and less than 1 degree (not the currently-imagined 24 degrees) is feedback response to the warming by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases.
Therefore, greenhouse-gas warming engenders an order of magnitude less feedback response today than climatology had wanted us to believe. Therefore, equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 is not, as is at present imagined, close to 4 degrees: it is only 1.25 degrees. That is the elephant in the china-shop. Arguing about the gilding on the Crown Derby falling from the shelves will not stop the damage. One must first acknowledge and then remove the elephant.
Lord Monckton,
With all respect, I did not miss your overall point. Rather, I was just pointing out that the reference sentence, as structured, seems to imply that (a) water vapor is not a greenhouse gas, and (b) that the existence of water vapor is dependent on the existence of other greenhouse gases.
I am sure that you did not intended to offer these possible interpretations based on the excellent content and arguments that you presented elsewhere and throughout your above article . . . it’s just that the subject sentence is worded strangely/incorrectly, IMHO.
Mr Dessler should concentrate on the elephant, not on the gilding on the smashed china.
Lord Monckton—elephant notwithstanding—should be mindful that Mr. Dressler’s OP regarding the confusing sentence structure with respect to the referenced Stephens (2015) work was made with the intent of constructive criticism, in the hope that such a sentence would not be propagated forward as-is into a widely published article (Nature or elsewhere) whereupon harsh critics might seize upon it to the detriment of his and his co-author(s)’ larger body of work.
To the extent that Mr. Dressler’s OP and subsequent comments on this matter missed their intended mark, Mr. Dressler apologizes.
🙂
In response to Steve Case, the credit goes to Dick Lindzen, who as far back as 1994 pointed out in a paper that emission temperature was 274 K, not 255 K.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.
Joe Biden selling his office to the high bidder is just what the environmental movement needs. All these environmental groups simply have to hire Hunter for millions a year.
Nice to hear that CMOB is alive and well, as is climate.
How kind you are! It’s good to be back. But I used the time productively, turning our paper on climatology’s central error of physics into an 80-page behemoth intended to cover all the bases and leave as little wriggle-room as possible for the Forces of Darkness. The main paper is 10,000 words long, but there are then a number of annexes, the largest of which contains the mathematics – a cascade of 64 simple equations that describe what is in effect a simple climate model designed to act as a benchmark against which the climate-sensitivity outputs of the general-circulation models can be Popper-falsified by way of Socratic elenchus.
Once my distinguished co-authors have finished commenting on the draft, it will be circulated quite widely for comment. Then we shall try to get it peer-reviewed and published. If the reviewers find faults we can correct, we shall correct them. If they find faults that are irremediable and touch upon the central point of the paper, then that will be the end of it. If they do what the last two sets of reviewers did – rejecting the paper without having any legitimate scientific (as opposed to political or financial) grounds, we shall put the file in the hands of the fraud police.
Normally, any such submission would be ignored, of course. But I have already jumped that hurdle by engaging the interest of a powerful senior police contact, who fully understands the death and destruction that this, the largest fraud in human history, is causing. He will act if I ask him to do so, and there will be a proper investigation of this and related frauds in the field of climate extremism.
Al Capone found that he was not above the law when the authorities went after him not for murder or racketeering (he was too crafty for them) but for simple, easily-demonstrable tax evasion. We are proposing to use a similar approach, going for the simplest elements in the fraud and getting just a couple of prosecutions. Then, like rabbits, the climate Communists will run for cover and that is the last we shall see of them. No one will lament their passing.
Good, lord!
Welcome back, Christopher! I always enjoy your posts. Clearly, whatever the Chinese plague did to you it didn’t affect your brain, I’m glad to see.
“Joe Biden’s trust in truth, evidence, science and democracy make him the only choice in the U.S. election.”
Are these people nuts? Have they been living under a rock? According to the news, with his father’ blessings his son Hunter Biden was taking money from Chinese intelligence services and from a Ukrainian energy company and then admitted in a private letter to his sister that he was kicking part of the money back to Joe Biden. All while Joe Biden was Vice President. I’m just repeating what I’ve read in the news, and maybe the news is incorrectly reported. Or perhaps I don’t understand what I’ve read in the news. Maybe it never happened.
But I’m from Chicago and in Chicago we call that bribery and we also call it a serious crime.
“But I’m from Chicago and in Chicago we call that bribery and we also call it a serious crime.”
Well, Chicago citizens should certainly know.
You bet. As people say around here we’ve got the best politicians money can buy.
Joe chooses Truth over Facts.
https://youtu.be/15RjcRJ3Z70
I thought it was called “Tuesday morning”?
Bravo, Monckton!
Welcome back. Your absence has not gone unnoticed.
Thank you Lord Moncton for another very insightful response to the inappropriate advocacy and unscientific conduct of the scientific elite.
Once it was the church that had overarching control on the lives of citizens. It probably seemed reasonable given the Church’s power and wealth, and it came in a nice package of lessons about good behaviour, respect for others and promises of postmortem benefits for which the church would never be held accountable. But it also came with a severe loss of autonomy and a real threat of loss of wealth, health and life if one should choose to think other than as the church directed. We know the history of letting the unelected, self-interested sociopaths of the religious elite run society and we rejected it when we separated the church from governance in western democracies. None of that is meant as a critique of the larger lessons of religious teaching about the best of human behaviour.
More recently we have allowed a new “religious” elite to grab power as modern society bloomed. They are the experts – the purveyors of science and technology and their propagandists of the published media. I know because I am one of them – a scientist and physician – a class of individuals given far more authority and control over the lives of people that is deserved.
Nature and other “scientific” journals can no longer be seen as objective sources of discovered truth. While, on rare occasions, their pages contain incredibly interesting and useful insights into how the natural world functions, it is money, power and prestige that drives everything in these journals. They wear objectivity and scientific practice as a thin veneer over their underlying motivations of avarice, hubris and political lust.
As a practicing physician I hear more truth from my patients every day than I find in most of the published research literature. Why is that? It is because the truth serves the purposes of my patients’ goal of preserving or returning good health. The goals of the scientific elite, the media and the political pundits are all self-serving with a few prominent exceptions.
November 3 will be a pivotal date in history. People who hate the Republican candidate, when asked why, will list his appearance, his manner of speech, his demeanor, and even his hair and his complexion. They’ll repeat talking points about his hidden agenda and racist core that are entirely sourced from the left and the media with no supporting evidence. They will fail miserably to recognize his achievements which Lord Moncton has so well summarized.
People who want the Democratic candidate to lead the worlds wealthiest and most powerful country will ignore all of that candidate’s history, his racist pandering to minorities, his misogynistic on-camera behaviour with women, the exploding scandal of selling influence in the Oval Office to corrupt corporate interests and despotic dictatorial regimes with horrible human rights records. They will ignore the far left core driving policy that want to erect global warming and the policy antidotes as a new religion to control all of human society.
In all of this there is a profound lesson. We should choose our leaders always on merit. We should question every authority and let only evidence guide policy, not belief. We should reach our conclusions with effort and skepticism, not by fashion and sloth. We should fight to preserve that right to chose our leaders and never give an inch on the right to fire those who fail us.
When Americans vote on November 3 they have every right should they chose to elect a bumbling, half senile, political careerist who shows every sign of being at heart a racist, misogynist pawn of a new radical left clerisy. – a man who has spent his political career using whatever influence he gained to enrich himself and his family at the cost of the American Republic and its citizens. In the alternate, they can elect a President who achieved more in four years for his country and the global community than any other president in recent memory, and who did so for $1 a year, and with almost no assistance, but rather considerable resistance from both the legislative and the judicial branches of government.
Whatever happens Nov. 3, it will bring extraordinary change. We can all be thankful that if a bad choice is made this year, a better choice can be made four years later – but only if those who choose understand what is at stake and learn how to separate the propaganda of experts from the truths of nature.
If the Democrats take control of both House and Senate and the WhiteHouse, they fully intend on eliminating the Senate filibuster completely.
That will free them to “California” the rest of the USA with laws directing the states to accept mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting schemes, and elimination of any requirements to demonstrate citizens or ID prior to voting or voter registration. And if the Supreme Court tries to stop them on those issues or anyone they want (Green New Deal energy diktats to the States, gun confiscation schemes, elimination of public school choice, i.e eliminating Charter Schools, by the States etc), interference with parental rights over their underage children via homo- and transsexual “rights” to underage children, and they will pack the SCOTUS with 4 liberal Justices in order to get their way in any SCOTUS rulings that threaten to stand in their way of those agendas.
This election is not about Trump or Biden. It is pivotal to maintaining a Constitutional Republic. It has far, far more dire consequences than simply climate policy or maintaining an abortion diktat to the States.
I am fearful of a Biden win Joel. For the reasons you describe and because it won’t affect only America. Australia isn’t doing too well, if Biden gets in then we may as well be declared a third world nation. We are trashing our economy and our environment at a rapid rate. Our politicians allow the UN and any other AGW inclined organisations to bully us, and we comply without question. Follow the science they say, like a country with a population of 25 million could make any difference, even if there was any iota of truth in the scam. What are we trying to prove?
I’d like to see Trump hold on to the presidency, to return some sanity to America. He can hopefully give the leaders of other nations the confidence to reconsider being entrenched in the whole AGW, and it’s renewables ‘cure’ scam.
I agree there is a bigger threat – the potential loss of a legitimate and fare way to chose government. I don’t doubt there are a lot of folks on the left who would do anything to maintain control of policy including many measures the majority of sane people would see as cheating and fraud. This is why, if Tump has four more years it must be used to frame this issue for all voters to understand and to reinforce the rules of fair elections.
Lord Monckton of Brenchley,
Thank you for a beautifully written and presented, well researched and documented, and well argued paper.
The graphics that you’ve used are superb in clearly reinforcing your points.
I would just add the following observation for, as it were, the final “nail in the coffin” for the claim that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the predominate cause of global warming:
The true scientist would closely examine the plotted MEASURED data of HadCRUT4 global mean temperature change (the fourth figure in your article) and notice the global cooling that occurred from about 1945 to 1975 and the documented hiatus (aka “pause”) in global warming that occurred from about 1998-2015, and compare these long intervals against the constantly-increasing rate of rise is atmospheric CO2 that was MEASURED over these same time spans (i.e., the Keeling curve).
That scientist might reasonably conclude, based on these two sets of DATA, that speculation that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration is the major driver of global atmospheric warming is wrong because it is NOT supported by hard evidence. There is some other driver (“forcing”) or combination of such that can overwhelm, for multi-decade time spans, whatever global warming effect atmospheric CO2 concentration might contribute.
That scientist would also conclude from that same HadCRUT4 data that global warming is a real process, presently occurring at an overall linear rate of 1 C per century based on the last 80 years of observation. Looking back into paleoclimatology data, that scientist would conclude fundamentally that global warming at various rates over various time spans is a natural, repeating pattern as Earth exits glacial periods (stadials) and enters into interglacial periods (interstadials), as is today’s state of Earth.
And finally, that true scientist, might just point to the wisdom displayed by Nobel prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman in his pertinent and succinct summary regarding science:
“If it disagrees with experiment (observation), it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Nature has provided the “experimental” data for all of us to see and use.
I am most grateful to Mr Dressler for his kind comments, particularly about the graphics, on which we have been sweating long and hard to try make climatology’s astonishing error of physics clear.
One cannot, however, draw too strong a conclusion from the fact that temperature has not risen monotonically in step with CO2. There is a great deal of internal as well as external natural variability, which confuses the issue. That is why, when thinking about the periods we should consider, we decided on the emission temperature (a fixed starting point); then the pre-industrial era all the way to 1850; then the industrial era from 1850-2020; then the period from 2020 to a doubling of CO2 concentration compared with 2020. Taking those periods powerfully averages out the ups and downs caused by internal variability and allows us to take a clearer view of what is really going on.
Mr Dressler is, of course, right about Feynman’s quotation. As our graph of actual temperature change against predicted medium-term warming shows, the models in 1990 predicted three times as much warming by now as has actually occurred, which is why IPCC was compelled in 2013 to halve its medium-term predictions of global warming. Inconsistently, however, it did not halve the long-term, equilibrium-sensitivity predictions. Noticing that, I began to realize they were either hiding something or misunderstanding something or both. We can prove they were misunderstanding something: for we have not been able to find a single climatological paper that explicitly states there is a large feedback response to emission temperature, still less one that attempts to quantify that response, still less one that deducts that response from what climatology currently imagines to be the large feedback response to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. Not one. This is not just a grave error; it is one that has been, until now, universally perpetuated throughout the climate journals.
Our difficulty, therefore, is that every climatologist who has made or repeated that error will be most reluctant to admit it. The reputational damage would just be too great. That is why, albeit with reluctance, we have begun the slow, cautious, meticulous process of instituting a reference to the fraud investigating authorities.
To justify any such approach, we must be very sure that we have – in substance – gotten the science right. We think we have done so, but, once my co-authors have had the chance to read through the 80 pages of our scientific paper and its various annexes, we shall be circulating the paper widely among skeptics so that, if anyone wants to correct anything we may have gotten wrong, there will be every opportunity to do so.
The challenge most often put up against us by the skeptical community is that we appeared to have assumed that feedback response with respect to ambient temperature is linear. In fact, climatology makes that assumption, but, having listened to these criticisms, we have considered three specific nonlinearities in feedback response with respect to temperature. By prescribing the evolutionary curve of feedback response with temperature (doing so on the basis of mainstream, midrange data and methods), we are able to remove that objection altogether from the board.
“And finally, that true scientist, might just point to the wisdom displayed by Nobel prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman in his pertinent and succinct summary regarding science:
“If it disagrees with experiment (observation), it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”
That’s right and with regard to climate science, the Observations (actual temperature readings) do not agree with the the bogus, bastardized Modern-era Hockey Stick charts, including HadCRUT4. HadCRUT4 is wrong.
If a global temperature chart does not show that the Eartly Twentieth Century was just as warm as it is today, then it has been fraudulently bastardized. HadCRUT4 does not show the warmth of the Early Twentieth Century as being equivalent to the present day. HadCRUT4 does NOT represent reality. Making projections based on using this chart is not going to give you any real-world information.
Explain this then, Lord M
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2975.0;attach=288764;image
Looks like an opportunity to get even more fossil fuels and resources from the area might be opening. The five countries who own the area set to profit being USA, Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway.
Griff
Why are you referencing weather in the actic over two days to make a point?
Tonyb
Griff asks me to explain, in effect, why warmer weather melts ice. Any textbook of thermodynamics will assist him. It is no part of our case that there has been no warming: merely that there has been one-third of the anthropogenic warming that IPCC had predicted in 1990.
Our researches have led us to conclude that the reason why climatology over-predicts warming threefold is that it has made the elementary and significant error of physics described in the head posting. Correct the error and redo their calculations and the warming they should be predicting is indeed only a third of what they predict today. That coherence between theory and observation is evidently present in our analysis, and is just as evidently not present in climatology’s analysis. Climatology’s error of physics has misled a generation. We are now going to correct that.
“Our researches have led us to conclude that the reason why climatology over-predicts warming threefold is that it has made the elementary and significant error of physics described in the head posting.”
You’re assuming they made an “error”..
Good point, Jeff. Blatant fraud is not the same as making an error. One is deliberate, and the other is a mistake.
I doubt any information will assist griff. Sadly.
No, Griff has his mind made up already. He wants to change *our* minds to his way of seeing things.
It’s a Fool’s Errand, Griff. You have no substantive argument. All you have is how much of the artic is ice free. The arctic was just as ice free in the 1930’s as it is today, and then the Earth starting cooling for decades and more and more ice started accumulating in the arctic, to the point that in the 1970’s some climate scientists were starting to sound the alarm about a possible new Ice Age coming..
It’s not any warmer today than in the 1930’s. Temperatures dropped after the 1930’s, all the way down to the beginning of the 1980’s. The temperatures may do the same thing after this current warm period which ended in 2016. The weather is cyclical, afterall. The Earth is currently 0.3C cooler than in 2016. Griff thinks temperatures will continue to increase because of CO2. I say: Not so fast! 🙂
There is warming over periods of time, but I don’t see proof of anthropogenic warming; theories and correlations, yes, I see.
“It is no part of our case that there has been no warming: merely that there has been one-third of the anthropogenic warming that IPCC had predicted in 1990.”
Another IPCC core theory error is the assumption that all of the increase in CO2 is human caused. Lord Monckton’s work demonstrates the error in the IPCC calculation of feed backs. Salby, Harde, and Berry show that human emissions only have a small effect on the atmospheric content. Thus the human caused warming is about 3% of that one-third of the predicted anthropogenic warming.
Why, it’s visible, open your eyes.
Krishna, did you steal that from Greta Thunberg?
WOW there really is ONE HECK OF A LOT of sea ice up there , isn’t there griff
FAR MORE than for most of the last 10,000 years
Di you know that this drop in Arctic sea ice from the EXTREME HIGH levels of the LIA and 1970’s has been HIGHLY BENEFICIAL for Arctic marine life..
Or is it just that YOU DON’T CARE about Arctic sea life, and want to see it SUFFER from loss of habitat due to overwhelming amounts of sea ice , as in the LIA and late 1970s. ?
Griff
The explanation for this
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
is this
It’s called interhemispheric heat piracy.
North warms, south cools, zero sun game.
Explain this then, Lord griff
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.”
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817 [13]
*13 President of the Royal Society, Minutes of Council,
Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London.
20th November, 1817.
Griff doesn’t take into consideration anything that happened before 1978 (the beginning of the “satellite era”). As a result, Griff has a distorted picture of reality in his head.
“What difference has Paris made? What difference have decades of intergovernmental hand-wringing and trillions upon trillions of taxpayers’ money made?”
Well I guess it keeps putting the final dooming tipping point off regularly for another decade and the grants flowing copiously to settle the settled science. Is this a trick question?
In response to Observa, no, it’s not a trick question. it is a question which, having been raised, is then answered in the head posting by the demonstration that the percentage of total energy consumption powered by coal, oil and gas has barely changed in a quarter of a century, notwithstanding all the hooting and hollering by climate Communists; and by the further demonstration that in that quarter of a century the consumption of energy has increased by two-thirds across the world; and by the further demonstration that 90% of all energy consumption is not subject to any regulation or limitation under the Paris agreement, which is by these methods demonstrated to be a costly, pietistic and empty exercise in egregious futility.
“Trust in…democracy?” Biden won’t say whether or not he will pack the Supreme Court. On top of that, says voters don’t deserve to know until after the election. His supporters are pushing for the end of the Electoral College, which was instituted to protect democracy.
The constitutional provisions were to promote and protect a republican — limited powers — government (not to be confused with the republican party). The founders were very much against democracy as is easily verified by reference to their writings on the subject.
Over at the Department of Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania, USA some scientists are looking for the Superhabitable Word. For a start they used earth as an example and considered the conditions that would support the highest biomass and biodiversity. Their findings suggest that earth should be 5 C warmer to meet those condition.
Question is why can extraterrestrial aliens have a nice warm habitable planet according to science and we humans should freeze our b__ off?
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2019.2161
It is the height of scientific hubris (well, maybe slightly less than claiming one is a god) to judge that life elsewhere in the universe has any “reason” at all to be like (human) life on Earth, and thus to prefer temperatures or other climate parameters that humans view as supporting “the highest biomass and biodiversity”.
“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” —Bible, KJV, Book of Proverbs, 16:18
“The scientist would then look up the global temperature in 1850…”
lol
Juice, well, maybe that sentence merits just a chuckle instead of a full LOL. To wit:
“The oldest continuous temperature record is the Central England Temperature Data Series, which began in 1659, and the Hadley Centre has some measurements beginning in 1850, but there are too few data before 1880 for scientists to estimate average temperatures for the entire planet. Data from earlier years is reconstructed from proxy records like tree rings, pollen counts and ice cores. Because these are different kinds of data, scientists generally don’t put proxy-based estimates on the same charts as the “instrumental record.” — https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/21/why-does-the-temperature-record-shown-on-your-vital-signs-page-begin-at-1880/
“International recommendations for SST measurement were first established at the Brussels Maritime Conference of 1853. The conference report proposed that the temperature of surface seawater be measured using wooden buckets (Woodruff et al., 2008). Folland and Parker (1995; referred to as FP95) describe a 19th century ship’s wooden bucket of 12 L capacity. It has been suggested that the buckets used transitioned from predominantly wooden to predominantly canvas between the 1850s and 1920s. As discussed by Jones and Bradley (1992), that such a widespread changeover actually occurred is highly uncertain, with canvas buckets known to have been used since at least the 1840s (Parker, 1993).”
— https://os.copernicus.org/articles/9/683/2013/os-9-683-2013.pdf
From the article: “The true scientist would be curious about how much warming had actually occurred since Callendar’s 1938 paper. He would find that, on the HadCRUT4 dataset [well, there’s the first problem], there had been 0.78 degrees’ warming from August 1938 to July 2020: i.e., very nicely in line with Callendar’s prediction.”
Meanwhile, the United States has *not* warmed since 1938, it has cooled. I wonder what Callendar or anyone else who claims it has warmed, would have to say about that?
In fact, regional Tmax charts from around the world also show it has not warmed. They show, just like the United States, that it was just as warm in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today. Real temperatures recorded don’t show anything like 0.78C warming since 1938.
So much for the ECS guess.
Seventy percent of current warming is human caused? Ridiculous! Another guess based on nothing.
Mr Abbott appears to imagine that the United States is the world. The global temperature datasets show warming since the 1930s. Whether or not those datasets are true representations, by using those official numbers I am removing one of the grounds of contention that opponents would otherwise advance. If there has indeed been no warming globally since the 1930s, then our argument for low equilibrium sensitivity is made a fortiori. Either way, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by accepting ad argumentum as much of our opponents’ data and methodology as we can. That is the standard – and immensely powerful – approach that has been deployed in Classical argumentation since Socrates.
And no, our equilibrium sensitivity is not a “guess”. It is calculated on the basis of the data and methods that our opponents use. We make only one substantial correction: we take account of the fact that most of the feedback response that they ascribe to preindustrial greenhouse gases must necessarily be ascribed to the emission temperature itself. From their data and methods, with our one substantial correction, we have demonstrated that equilibrium sensitivity is in the region of 1.25 K per CO2 doubling. If we were to use Mr Abbott’s unreferenced notion that there has been no global warming since the 1930s, the climate sensitivity would be still lower than that, proving our point a fortiori.
And if Mr Abbott were to do me the kindness of reading the head posting, he would see that we did not estimate that 70% of recent warming was manmade. That figure was attributed to Wu et al. (2019). That paper was chosen because its authors are well-known mainstream climate scientists. It is their estimate we are using, so they cannot argue about it. Well, just in case they do, we base our midrange estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity on 90% of the warming since 1850 being anthropogenic, for we have bent all the numbers as far as we can in their direction to minimuze excuses for avoiding our main point, which is that even on their numbers and on their methods, subject only to the single major correction we make, which is to take into account the feedback response to emission temperature, equilibrium sensitivity is low enough to be harmless and net-beneficial.
Perhaps Mr Abbott would at least like to read Wu et al. before deciding that their estimate is “another guess based on nothing”. It is based on something, and it is a mainstream estimate, so they cannot argue if we base our calculations on it, or on an even more generous estimate of anthropogenic warming.
It is a shame that Classical argumentation is no longer routinely taught. It is only because it is not taught that nonsenses such as high-sensitivity global warming have gone scientifically unchallenged for so long. We aim to change that.
Lord Monckton; while I agree with almost everything you wrote I am extremely uneasy about accepting your comment
“Either way, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by accepting ad argumentum as much of our opponents’ data and methodology as we can. That is the standard – and immensely powerful – approach that has been deployed in Classical argumentation since Socrates.”
Simply because what I have seen is that AGW proponents are quite capable of (and indeed have) falsifying data massively to the point where the falsified data does match their predictions. Giving them free reign to define reality in the end cannot be accepted. They have also shown themselves more than willing to do this falsification step by step with each step being small enough to make objection seem nitpicking, yet by accepting these steps, in the end we find we have accepted a massive distortion of reality. One large enough to utterly change the argument.
Mr Hammer will have to wait for our paper. There, he will see that we can use their own made-up figures and still demonstrate that equilibrium sensitivity – and by extension all other long-run sensitivities – are about a third of what climatology would have us believe. If their figures have indeed been tweaked to overegg the pudding, then our argument is made a fortiori. That is why it is so powerful.
No, Christopher, I don’t imagine the United States is the world. I have regional temperature charts that show the whole world agrees with the U.S. temperature chart, that the Early Twentieth Century was just as warm as today, and in the particular case of the United States, it is actually cooler today than in the warm 1930’s.
I submit that the United States surface temperature chart profile is the global temperature profile. All unmodified regional temperature charts resemble the U.S. chart profile. None of them resemble a Hockey Stick, hotter and hotter, chart, such as the HadCRUT4 chart.
The U.S. chart and all regional unmodified charts show the warming of the Early Twentieth Century as equivalent to today’s warming. The HadCRUT4 chart does not show this equivalence. The U.S. chart and the regional charts are of actual temperature readings taken at the time. The HadCRUT4 is a compuer-generated distortion of reality.
Chris wrote: “If there has indeed been no warming globally since the 1930s, then our argument for low equilibrium sensitivity is made a fortiori.”
There you go. Your argument is even better if you use the real temperature record. I’m not trying to harangue you Chris, I know you are just using the tools (HadCRUT4) that the alarmists use as a way to refute their claims, but I feel it is very important to remind everyone that we are dealing with a lot of made up numbers when dealing with alarmist climate science, and the bogus temperature record they have created out of thin air is the best example of made-up numbers and is the only thing the alarmists can point to as making their alarmist point, so it’s good to shoot down their premise. That’s my purpose.
Chris wrote: “And if Mr Abbott were to do me the kindness of reading the head posting, he would see that we did not estimate that 70% of recent warming was manmade. That figure was attributed to Wu et al.”
That criticism was not directed at you, it was directed at the person who made the claim. Since I don’t consider that it has warmed since the 1930’s, and since the 1930’s warming was not considered to have been 70-percent caused by humans, even by the IPCC, then it stands to reason that if the current warming period is of the same magnitude as the warming of the 1930’s, and has warmed to the same level as the 1930’s, then whatever caused the warming in the 1930’s could have caused the warming beginning in the 1980’s, so I think claiming that the current warming was 70-percent human caused is ridiculous. There is no reason to claim humans are the cause. Mother Nature is the cause of the warming of the 1930’s, and Mother Nature is the cause of the current warming, until shown to be otherwise.
And I’m happy to hear you weathered the Wuhan virus storm. I’m a little behind in my reading, I look forward to seeing your story about the Wuhan virus. 🙂
Yes indeed,a Biden-Harris Administration would be a disaster for Middle East peace and a esurgence of US involvement in that region in the coming decade of the 2020’s.
If a Biden-Harris Administration does come to pass, it is certain US energy dominance of the past 4 years will wane. Biden openly asserts (first) Federal land oil leases will be halted by Executive Order, then severe EPA-driven regulatory burdens placed on oil and gas Fracking operations (driving up domestic prices dramatically), then finally stopping of GoM offshore leases under federal control would cease. This destruction of national energy security by the US President would unavoidably re-shackle the US and it foreign policy back to meddling in Middle Eastern geopolitics. The resurgence of substantial Persian Gulf oil imports to meet total US demand would thus drive the need to keep substantial US military forces in the region once again. The Defense-Industrial complex is quietly cheering on this Biden Clinton-esque type meddling in Middle East affairs to keep defense spending in the region high.
The US’s new found freedom from Middle East oil is the reason the US is able operate there more freely and take or not-take actions free from domestic concerns of oil supply shocks. This is now allowing the removal of 4 decades decades long military force presences, and that pushes the Persian Gulf sheikdoms to face their real threat — Shi’ite-run Iran allied with Russia and Syria. This drives them to make peace with Israel (the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend), a state which they admittedly loathe but which does not threaten their sovereignty or oil wealth.
Thus a Biden-Harris Administration, besides destroying US energy security, would also be a disaster for Middle East peace and US remaining militarily and geopolitically mired there in the coming decade of the 2020’s.
Such a Biden-Harris re-shackling of US regional interests and continued tying-down of US military resources to the Middle East region couldn’t make Beijing, Moscow, or Pyongyang any happier.
Mr O’Bryan’s analysis is spot on. The transformation of America by energy self-sufficiency has had a wholly beneficial geopolitical effect, and one that the Communists would – if they were elected – destroy.
It is wonderful to see that Lord Moncton is apparently returning to good health, despite his need of a chunder bucket. One hopes that our aristocrat has not recently visited Caracas for his cure.
(cf. recent posting regarding Venezuelan ozone hole)*
I have one quibble with the post. Why should we be so overly charitable as to ascribe to mere incompetence such an egregious error? Do you not think it is more probable that Hansen’s original intent was to deceive? Or is it merely incredibly convenient that the wrong answer serves the narrative so well?
—
* https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/10/16/venezuelan-miracle-covid-19-cure-ozone-rectal-therapy/
In response to Mr Davis, I have read Hansen’s and Schlesinger’s papers on feedback many times. They are both hopelessly muddled. I do not think that the muddle was deliberate. The ancient kindness is right here: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Yes, but Hansen’s global temperature profile looks completely different than the regional temperaure chart profiles. None of the regional temperature charts look like a modern-era Hockey Stick chart.
So Hansen and the alarmist go with a chart that looks nothing like the real world. One would have to ask why they would do this.
Hansen has a lame excuse for this on the NASA website:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/
All the unmodified regional temperature charts from around the world have the same basic temperature profile as the U.S. surface temperature chart shown on the left. They all show it was just as warm in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today. None of them look like the modern-era Hockey Stick chart on the right, which fraudulently cools the 1930’s into insignificance, and of course, that was the purpose of creating the Hockey Stick, because if it was just as warm in the 1930’s as it is today, then the alarmists could not claim that CO2 is causing the temperaures to rise out of control.
There has to be an unprecedented situation for alarmists to be able to alarm the people, so they created an unprecedented situation by creating a Hockey Stick chart that shows the temperatures are getting hotter and hotter and hotter for decade after decade and have risen to the highest point in human history And this is what they use to scare people. It’s all a Big Lie, of course.
But if the 1930’s were just as warm as today, then there is no unprecedented warming and no unprecedented crisis. The alarmists can’t have that, so they changed the official temperature record to create an artificial crisis using computer-generated temperature charts.
No, this wasn’t an accident, or a mistake, it’s deliberate fraud.
Claimed to be scientific organizations and their products have no business in politics, and such a shortsighted view is difficult to understand. The once valued Scientific American, also endorsing, caused confusion with American Scientist, published by Sigma Xi, the National Research Honor Society. Sigma Xi got lots of complaints which they tried to correct, but finishing up with this (“However, we feel that it is important to reiterate the Society’s commitment to scientific research and the role it plays in the formulation of reliable and equitable policies to address technical, social, and economic problems. We encourage all candidates to make science and scientific evidence central to their policy proposals and we enthusiastically support candidates who lift up science and use it for the purpose of improving the human condition.”
Unfortunately, they have been pushing politics on their sleeping membership, which seems to be waking up. They have not gone the route of Scientific American, but American Scientist is on the edge. One recent book review stated that information had to be “regulated” because us peasants [my word] weren’t smart enough for a democracy. Sigma Xi leadership doesn’t seem to be smart enough to understand the difference between science and policy.
There’s a very simple view that explains much of the warming we have seen:
https://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6/from:1979/to/plot/uah6/from:1979/to/trend/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1979/to/offset:-0.2/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1979/to/offset:-0.2/trend
Since the oceans dominate the atmosphere in terms of heat capacity there’s no way the atmosphere could be the driver in this short time period. It MUST be the oceans that are driving the warming. CO2 could only be a bit player.
The key question then becomes … “what is causing the oceans to warm?”. The answer is very likely changes in salinity. It takes more energy to evaporate more saline water. Since evaporation is a cooling effect, higher levels of salinity will reduce evaporation and allow the oceans to warm.
I know, too simple. Maybe, maybe not. According to Thirumalai et al 2018 the salinity has been increasing for the past 400 years which correlates very well with the warming out of the LIA.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02846-4
This could very well be the background warming that is then enhanced or reduced by natural cycles such as the ENSO/PDO and AMO.
The salinity argument raised by Richard M is a most interesting one, but I fear that it may suffer from an insufficiently-resolved and insufficiently-long dataset of global ocean salinities. That is a common problem in speculative climate “science”.
Richard; I do not understand your comment “Since the oceans dominate the atmosphere in terms of heat capacity there’s no way the atmosphere could be the driver in this short time period. It MUST be the oceans that are driving the warming.”
What has ocean heat capacity to do with warming atmosphere? What would be relevant would be the degree of thermal coupling between the atmosphere and the ocean. If high, then the oceans thermal mass would act to increase the warming time constant (ie: slow down the warming). If low then they are largely irrelevant. But if the oceans were to DRIVE the warming they would have to warm first and of course AGW advocates would claim that was due to CO2 – back where we started.
The warming of the land/atmosphere is driven by an imbalance between absorbed solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation. AGW theory states this is due to a drop in OLR. Experimental evidence shows there is no measurable effect of rising CO2 on OLR but instead warming it is due to a rise in ASR.
I would argue that the total contradiction between the central tenant of the AGW theory and experimental evidence means the theory of AGW is falsified. Further the experimental evidence suggests the time constant between energy imbalance and restoration of the balance by a change in global temperature is extremely short – months to maybe a year or two which further makes ocean heat content irrelevant.
Michael, not sure whether you looked at the graph. It shows a very tight correlation between the ocean warming and the atmospheric warming. The claimed energy imbalance due to CO2 might be able to warm the atmosphere but there’s not enough energy to also warm the oceans as the data shows.
It’s back to a comment made quite often on this site. Try to warm a bathtub of water with a hair dryer. Since we are seeing the oceans warm then something is causing it. There are other possible choices but salinity changes also matches the peer reviewed paper I provided.
Of course, the energy input is actually solar energy. It is the energy out that decreases due to increases in salinity. Yes, the oceans are warmed first but there’s very little lag with the atmospheric warming as it occurs almost immediately via LW radiation and conduction.
Actually Lord Monckton, the impact of no green house gases would be even more profound. Earth’s atmosphere generates mechanical energy. It raises water to high altitudes powering hydroelectric generators, while wind can blow down trees and buildings, raise waves and drive wind turbines. So, where does this energy come from? Clearly from absorbed solar energy. That means earth’s surface and atmosphere is converting thermal energy into mechanical energy, the definition of a classic heat engine. Heat engines are governed by very well understood natural laws. A working fluid (in this case the atmosphere) cycles between a hot junction (where heat enters the system and is injected into the working fluid) and a separate cold junction (where heat is extracted from the working fluid and leaves the system). The maximum efficiency possible is the carnot efficiency ((Thot-Tcold)/Thot). Typically the hot junction is the hottest point in the system and the cold junction is the coldest point in the system.
In the case of earth, the hot junction is clearly earths’s surface and especially the surface in the tropics but where is the cold junction? There are 2 candidates, the first is the tropopause and the second is the poles. However the working fluid has to cycle between the hot and cold junction and because the earth is a rotating sphere the atmosphere rising at the equator cannot get to the poles. Firstly air rising at the equator is moving at the speed of earth’s surface 1600 km/hour but as it tries to move towards the poles the radius of rotation of the surface and thus the surface velocity is reducing. The equatorial air, moving faster, is thrown outwards in the plane of rotation. That can be resolved into an outward force normal to Earth’s surface and a force tangential to the surface pushing the air back towards the equator. It is why we do not have an equator to pole circulation but instead 3 coupled circulations – the Hadley cell, the Ferrel cell and the Polar cell. The second reason is that even if the equatorial air could get to the pole it would have to descend to transfer heat energy to the surface but if the pole is the cold junction by definition the pole would be colder than the descending air so there would be a temperature inversion inhibiting the air from falling. The cold junction of our climate heat engine is the tropopause not the poles.
Given the cold junction is the tropopause, heat energy must be leaving earth (to space) at this point and that is only possible by radiation. However, by definition a gas capable of radiating thermal infrared radiation is a green house gas. If there are no green house gases the tropopause cannot radiate energy so a necessary requirement for a heat engine is not met. In practical terms, the rising air cannot cool so it cannot lose energy which it needs to do in order to descend again. Thus convection stops and with time the entire atmosphere becomes vertically isothermal. Water vapour cannot condense because it needs to lose energy to do so (lose energy to where?) thus no clouds would form. If there is no condensation there can also be no evaporation otherwise the oceans would end up in the sky, the entire atmosphere would become saturated with respect to water vapour. Without convection no dust would be raised and what was in the atmosphere would eventually settle out so the sky would probably not be blue but closer to black. There would be no clouds, no wind, no rain, no significant waves on water, a completely static vertically isothermal atmosphere. The temperature would vary with latitude according to the solar energy absorbed by the surface at that latitude. Given a near transparent atmosphere Earth’s albedo would be close to the surface reflectivity. That is 70% water with a reflectivity of about 0.04.
In near Earth space the solar energy intensity is 1370 watts/sqM. For the Earth as a whole the average solar energy at the surface is 1370/4 * (1- albedo) but at the equator it is 1370/pi *(1-albedo) which, in the absence of convection will be close to 430 watts/sqM- maybe around 400 watts/sqM. Applying the Stefan Boltzmann law gives a surface temperature of 290K or 17C. Worse however, during the day the peak energy reaches close to 1300 watts/sqM (at noon). The surface temperature will depend on the thermal time constant but if you think about how hot beach sand, exposed concrete, metal surfaces can get on a warm summers day that time constant can be quite short- well under 1 hour. Again from Stefan Boltzmann law the temperature of those surfaces could then get to 389K or 116C. The air over those surface would be heated and rise. Of course at night the surface cools considerably but that creates a temperature inversion precluding convection and in the absence of green house gases the hot atmosphere could only cool by conduction back to the surface. Conductive heat transfer in air is extremely slow, much slower than convection. The atmosphere would end up at an equilibrium temperature much closer to the noon surface temperature than the average temperature! At such temperatures and without any rainfall land life would be very unlikely to exist or endure. Ocean life could possibly still be OK.
Due to the day/night surface temperature variation there could still be some conductive heat transfer allowing dew to form at night and some corresponding evaporation during the day but the effect would be tiny and limited to only the air very close to the surface. Dew but no rain.
Of course, away from the equator the temperature would not be quite as extreme but even where I am at latitude 37 south, the temperature inside a closed car in summer, which heats up because convection is prevented, can and alas too often does kill children in minutes (60C+)!!! This is not conjecture or modelling it is sadly proven fact. Without convection, the entire environment at that latitude would be in the same position as a closed car.
Without greenhouse gases the earth would not be 33C colder. Much of the atmosphere and land mass would be far hotter at least in summer (60% of Earth’s surface area lies between latitude 37N and 37S). Temperatures which really would destroy life on Earth.
Mr Hammer is of course right about the altitudinal isothermality of an atmosphere without radiatively-active gas species. However, the authorities on albedo put the mean ocean albedo at closer to 0.07 than his 0.04, and the albedo onl land would be more like 0.15. There would also be some ice at the Poles, though less than now. By taking the cautious figure of 267.6 K for emission temperature, rather than the 274 K derived by Lindzen (1994), I am being as kind as possible to the climate Communists, pushing the numbers as far as I can in their direction. And yet the contradiction that demonstrates their grave error still arises.
In Classical argumentation, there is no more useful word than “Concedo”. Whatever one can possibly concede to one’s interlocutor one should cheerfully concede, for that cuts away his grounds for opposing you. Where one cannot concede, the next most useful word is “Distinguo”. One draws a distinction, and one which the interlocutor is likely to accept. By such courteous but powerful methods, one compels the interlocutor to identify and then to face the contradiction inherent in his argument. And once he has seen that contradiction and has been unable to resolve it, his original position is lost.
I do not need to push every number in a skeptical direction to defeat the official high-climate-sensitivity argument. I can and do push the numbers in a climate-Communist direction, but the climate Communists still lose. That is why they are angrier with me than with just about anyone else on the skeptical side. That is why they have spent millions trying to trash my reputation. That is why they produce all manner of attempts at distraction and diversion. For they know quite well by now that they have made the error we have identified. They know that error has a large effect. They know it is only a matter of time before everyone else knows it too.
And thus no longer does the ancient kindness apply!
Never mind. I know it does even though I don’t want it to …
Lord Monckton; I concede your points about ocean albedo and land albedo, but they are of only minor relevance to the thrust of the argument (which I think we agree on). It has been pointed out to me the closest reference to what I claim is the moon which is after all the same distance from the sun and indeed its albedo is roughly what you claim for the land. In this context the lunar surface at “mid day” is around 110C which is very much in keeping with what I claim for the equator. The only bone of contention could be time constants since the lunar “day” is 28 earth days not 24 hours. If the time constant was very long what would prevent the surface of the Earth rising to such high temperatures. However as I think I pointed out, our everyday experience shows us concrete and bare earth/sand heats up extremely rapidly reaching burning temperatures (to bare feet) in well under 1 hour.
Nitpicking but in the spirit of your reply, I cannot resist claiming distinguo with your comment that there would be less ice than now at the poles. If the “average” temperature of the planet was lower I would expect somewhat more ice than now. But as I say completely nitpicking and irrelevant. Just my attempt at a form of humour.
I agree with your point that it is not necessary to push every number in a skeptical direction; the AGW theory can easily be proven false by far more scientifically rigorous means as I think we already discussed.
Monckton of Brenchley said
BINGO!
Jesus said
Yes, agree that we are in a warming trend and point out that it should come as no surprise that the recent years are warmer than the past. Agree that sea level is rising and has been doing so for the 200+ years that tide gauges have been active, and agree that the water must be coming from somewhere – The loss of ice in the polar ice caps is the best bet for that. But don’t buy into the arguments that CO2 is pollution and that we need to reduce its emissions and suggest ways to do it. Don’t make silly arguments that it snowed in Minnesota yesterday. And don’t exaggerate or cherry pick the data.
As Sgt Joe Friday said. “Just the facts ma’am.” Just the pertinent facts to be more precise.
One of life’s lessons, is getting the important agenda item done. Going to a meeting with an agenda consisting of a laundry list of issues, will almost certainly ensure that the important issue won’t get addressed.
In response to Sycomputing, the ancient kindness still applies. They know they have made the error, and they know it has a large effect. But that does not mean they knew they made the error at the time when they made it. My reading of Hansen (1984) and Schlesinger (1985) is that they were hopelessly confused and out of their depth. As can be seen from some of the comments by feedback bores here, control engineers seem to take a perverse delight in endlessly introducing irrelevant and unnecessary complications, which is why in the end I recruited not only several such practitioners but also a tenured professor of control theory to keep us on the strait and narrow. But Hansen and Schlesinger genuinely thought they understood enough about feedback, and they didn’t, and the feedback bores who tried to correct them were unable to make their point in a simple enough and accessible enough way to convince them.
By the time they realized their mistake, the embarrassment of admitting they were wrong was too great to bear. Hansen, for one, is so close to Communist that his attachment to the truth is at best tenuous. And Schlesinger, who played Box and Cox with him on the feedback question in 1985, is no longer with us.
Michael
Given the cold junction is the tropopause, heat energy must be leaving earth (to space) at this point and that is only possible by radiation. However, by definition a gas capable of radiating thermal infrared radiation is a green house gas. If there are no green house gases the tropopause cannot radiate energy so a necessary requirement for a heat engine is not met.
Thank-you for your thoughtful comments. These point to the false assumptions on which the whole radiative story of CAGW is built. If we assume that only “greenhouse gasses” CO2 and water are active in IR, and assume that heat movement in the atmosphere is by IR only, this leads to impossible absurdities. For instance removing the trace CO2 altogether from the atmosphere would cause it to rise to an infinite temperature since there would be no emission at the “emission height”.
But both assumptions are false. Long ago scientists were able to test this. They simply performed IR spectroscopy of the sky. They found in the IR sky shine plenty of emission from nitrogen species (e.g. a molecular triplet), oxygen and OH species. But not a lot from CO2.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/08/15/twos-company-threes-a-crowd-a-nitrogen-threesome-joins-the-ir-party/
Phil; I cannot agree with much of what you wrote. Heat movement in the atmosphere is not by IR alone, it is also, at least at present, by convection and by evaporation and condensation of water vapour as well. If there are no GHG’s then as I tried to show, the atmosphere becomes essentially uncoupled from the surface. Both convection and evaporation/condensation stop and there is no IR absorption or emission from the atmosphere. The atmosphere does NOT however rise to an infinite temperature. It simply rises to roughly the hottest point on the surface. That can occur quickly by convection but once established, convection stops so the atmosphere only cools by conduction back to the surface which is very slow hence it equilibrates at close to the hottest surface temperature.
You mention IR emission from nitrogen, oxygen and OH species. At the temperatures of our atmosphere nitrogen and oxygen are NOT GHG’s so by definition they do NOT absorb or emit IR radiation. We made the initial hypothetical assumption that water vapour was not a GHG which would also encompass OH species. To suggest that there is not a lot of IR emission from CO2 is simply wrong. CO2 will emit strongly in a wavelength band centred around 14.7 microns. Since the atmosphere up to say 5 meters is more or less at the same temperature as the surface the downward emission from CO2 in this wavelength band will be about the same as the upwards emission from the surface. That’s around 30 watts/sqM which is not insignificant.
That however does NOT mean the AGW thesis is proven because we need to look at incremental impacts not total impact and as Lord Monckton so rightly points out the feedbacks are also critical.
Heat movement in the atmosphere is not by IR alone, it is also, at least at present, by convection and by evaporation and condensation of water vapour as well.
Exactly. That’s what I said too. I quoted the assumption of heat moving only by IR, in order to refute it as false.
Further to my reply Phil; the central tenant of the AGW theory is that rising CO2 reduces Earth’s energy loss to space which creates an energy imbalance (more in than out) which causes Earth to warm. An almost just as strong tenant is that such warming causes water vapour content of the atmosphere to rise, reducing Earth’s energy loss even further and thus contributing positive feedback thereby changing the impact from significant to alarming.
However, NASA’s measurements of energy loss to space (outgoing longwave radiation) show that it has been rising steadily since at least 1985 not falling. Further, the rate of rise is exactly what one would expect given a climate sensitivity of about 3 watts/sqM/C. This rise tracks temperature very closely, following even short term temperature perturbations. There is absolutely no discernible contribution from rising CO2. The warming is apparently coming from an increase in absorbed solar radiation (slight fall in albedo) which appears to be due to a drop in cloud cover from 69% in 1985 to 66% today. But the theory of AGW does not even mention any link between CO2 and cloud cover. As a scientist, I was taught that if the central tenant of a theory is contradicted by experimental observations the theory is falsified.
Does the scientific principle not apply to AGW? Does prejudice now define reality?
You’re mistaken, the scientists you refer to only measured radiation up to a wavelength of 1 micron. In order to detect CO2 emission they needed to go to rather higher wavelengths, CO2 peaks at 15 microns.
Anything matter that has a temperature radiates; the surface everywhere radiates. With nothing absorbing that radiation (i.e. no greenhouse gases), it would leave the planet very rapidly. How much of incoming solar energy would that be?
Even “non-greenhouse” gases radiate. Satellite measurements of the atmosphere measure that radiation for information (e.g. O2 microwave frequencies for temperature). This may be a small quantity relative to H2O IR radiation but it does radiate away some of the solar energy that has been absorbed by the atmosphere. How much?
Michael Hammer posted: “However, by definition a gas capable of radiating thermal infrared radiation is a green house gas.”
This is absurdly wrong. For example, nobody considers N2 and O2 as greenhouse gases. However, they most certainly radiate thermal energy in the infrared spectrum due to their inherent temperature being above absolute zero (ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation#:~:text=Thermal%20radiation%20is%20the%20emission,atoms%20and%20molecules%20in%20matter. )
A “greenhouse” gas is defined by its ability to ABSORB LWIR radiation from Earth’s surface, not by its ability to re-radiate such as LWIR. In fact, most of the LWIR energy absorbed by greenhouse gases is quickly, within the order of nanoseconds to microseconds, “thermalized” to N2 and O2 molecular energy instead of being re-radiated as LWIR.
The basic science matters.
Given this, there is no reason for me to respond to the rest of Mr.Hammer’s post.
Gordon; your reply strikes me as having a degree of conviction that I suspect is not backed up by knowledge. For example you say
“A “greenhouse” gas is defined by its ability to ABSORB LWIR radiation from Earth’s surface, not by its ability to re-radiate such as LWIR. ”
Yet if I go to the very wikipedia site you mention I find the statement “Absorptivity, reflectivity, and emissivity of all bodies are dependent on the wavelength of the radiation. Due to reciprocity, absorptivity and emissivity for any particular wavelength are equal – a good absorber is necessarily a good emitter, and a poor absorber is a poor emitter.”
Your own site contradicts you. Further your claim that N2 and O2 “certainly” radiate energy in the thermal infrared is wrong. You again did not read your own reference correctly. Without doubt thermal radiation is governed in part by Planks law but as your reference states “The characteristics of thermal radiation depend on various properties of the surface from which it is emanating, including its temperature, its spectral emissivity,” In fact the emission at any wavelength is given by the product of Planks law and the spectral emissivity of the material at that wavelength. For solids and liquids, spectral emissivity is normally a smoothly progressive property with wavelength (because the molecules are in such close proximity) but for gases (where the molecules are far apart and thus have little interaction with each other) spectral emissivity varies widely with wavelength being essentially zero at some wavelengths yet high at others. In fact it is just as valid to define a GHG as a gas that has a significantly non zero spectral emissivity at some wavelengths within the thermal infrared spectrum (between about 4 and 50 microns). N2 and O2 have emissivities very close to zero throughout that spectral range and thus do not emit or absorb.
Maybe its time I mentioned that while my original degrees are not in spectroscopy I spent the last 40+ years working as a research scientist/engineer for a large multinational spectroscopy company.
Michael,
I only need reply that gases are not material surfaces and gases do not radiate as “black bodies” or even “grey bodies”, but instead in multiple discrete spectral lines as allowed by their various molecular bending, stretching, and rotational modes in addition to their Boltzmann distribution of kinetic (i.e., translational) energies at a given statistical average temperature. Fundamentally, Plank’s law does not apply to non-condensed gases. These facts are readily discoverable on the Web.
You yourself reference Wikipedia as stating “. . . but for gases (where the molecules are far apart and thus have little interaction with each other) spectral emissivity varies widely with wavelength being essentially zero at some wavelengths yet high at others”, while apparently not recognizing that at tropospheric conditions the molecules in the atmospheric gas mixture are NOT “far apart” but instead have collision frequencies on the order of 1E+10 to 1E+8 per second (dependent on the Boltzmann energy distribution at a given temperature).
The fact that you do not recognize the difference in radiation from dense gases as opposed to solid or liquid surfaces speaks volumes as to your claims for work for a “multinational spectrometry company” . . . I can only hope that such was not in the capacity as a technical representative.
And, FWIW, the Wiki page on thermal radiation is correct as far as it goes, but it specifically does not address factors (such as molecule-molecule collision-induced thermalization with other molecules in a gas mixture continuum) that intervene in the characteristic time between a gas molecule absorbing a LWIR photon and it being able to re-emit a photon at the same wavelength as the one absorbed (aka, photon “relaxation time”, typically on the order of milliseconds to seconds).
Wikipedia’s statements, that you reference, refer to the ideal case of a single molecular species, absent a mixture of gases and absent a Boltzmann energy distribution. They were never meant to describe radiation emissions and energy exchange under tropospheric gas conditions.
Gordon; I note that in your desperation you seem to have abandoned civility. I realise that you feel the knowledge you have gained from a casual read of a few wikipedia pages which you did not understand correctly far outweigh 40+ years of experience in the field. Forgive me if I don’t agree.
Planks law does indeed apply to thermal emission from gases. Sorry if you are unable to accept that.
Where I said that in gases the molecules are far apart and thus have little interaction with each other , I was not quoting Wikipedia as you claim. I was making a statement from my own knowledge. In solids the separation between molecules is of the order 10^-10 meters whereas in gases at STP it is around 30*10^-10. That makes a big difference. Maybe look up some theory on coupled resonators to see how close proximity to other resonators reduces Q and broadens the emission/absorption peak.
The chiefio word press link you mention claiming it shows that N2 is an emitter of LWIR (IR after later correction by you) simply highlights your lack of understanding. The emission being discussed is not thermal emission, it is emission stimulated by bombardment by high energy charged particles – solar wind. I would have thought the mention of Aurora and green light emission might have alerted you. There is a reason Aurora occur mainly at the poles are are brighter during solar flares. Or do you also believe that N2 can generate thermal emissions of green light?
I could go on but there is little point. You are clearly so convinced of your beliefs that it closes your mind to any sort of discussion. I have experienced this sort of behaviour before and learnt the hard way that further discussion is utterly futile.
The following link provides information documenting that atmospheric N2 and O2 are indeed active atmospheric radiators of LWIR despite their asserted inability to ABSORB LWIR emitted by Earth’s surface:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/nitrogen-active-in-the-ir-a-ghg/
Actually it does not, the key term being LWIR, N2 absorbs at wavelengths below 5 microns, that link refers to emissions at 1 micron which is not long wave. The Earth’s emissions are higher than 5 microns so there’s nothing to absorb at those short wavelengths. In any case between 4 and 5 microns the absorptivity of N2 is about 10 orders of magnitude less than CO2.
Phil,
You are, of course, correct. I was careless, and therefore wrong, when I typed “. . . active atmospheric radiators of LWIR despite . . .”
I should have typed in “IR” instead of “LWIR”.
Thank you for catching that.
Pleased that you are well, LMoB.
Clearly back with a vengeance too, given that enjoyable article.
Monckton of Brenchley, I was pleased to see your post, confirming that you seem to be well. There are a few contributors to WUWT which I consider must-read, and I thank you for being one of them. I see how the central point of your team’s paper can be and will be an effective line of attack against the claims of doom based on an erroneous notion of feedback. I greatly respect this approach, as it first accepts the basic claim and terms of analysis, that CO2 ought to cause some warming, then dismantles what was done wrong in respect to feedback. This is all still in play, as you have reported it, but well played so far.
On the other hand, I take it that conceptually you would still also accept that ECS could indeed turn out to be zero, or indistinguishable from zero, as nature proceeds to add years and decades to our experience. I say this to keep it in mind that the real climate is not a single circuit with calculated factors for feedback. Any point on the globe experiences energy flows and transformations in the atmosphere which are thousands of times greater than the incremental increase of the static radiative coupling with the surface one might calculate in response to increases in CO2 concentration. This high-performance heat engine feeds energy and mass to the highly variable emitter/reflector above us, and we experience the composite result. Additional CO2, in this concept, merely adjusts the strength of the radiative coupling at the hot end of the heat engine (the surface) and boosts the radiative effectiveness outward to space at the cold end (higher up.)
Progressives demand totalitarian form of government.
Nothing unusual there.
I am most grateful to Mr Dibbell for his very kind and generous words. And yes, it is perfectly possible that equilibrium climate sensitivity is less, and perhaps a lot less, than we have found it to be: for we have tended to bend all the numbers as far as possible in the direction of the climate Communists, so that they are given as few reasons as possible to dispute our central conclusion. To establish that nothing need be done to stop further global warming, all we need to establish is that even using their numbers and data, with our single major correction, the warming will be a third of what they have tried to make us believe it will be.
For this reason, we stick as closely as possible to the climate Communists’ line of argument, as well as to their data and methods. We do not advance interesting theories about thermodynamic engines, for they introduce too many complications that the climate Communists can challenge or bluff their way around.
That is why we have constructed our paper in such a fashion as to compel them to face the fact – and it is an undeniable fact – that it is wrong to add the large feedback response to emission temperature to, and to miscount it as though it stood part of, the actually very small feedback response to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. It is very clear from the literature that the chief reason why climatologists originally imagined that one should multiply directly-forced warming by 4 to allow for feedback was that they had taken the large feedback response to emission temperature as part of that small greenhouse-gas feedback response, and had then assumed that what they thought had happened in the preindustrial era would also happen in the industrial era.
This is a very large error, and – once one understands how a feedback amplifier circuit works – it is a very obvious and glaring error. Climatologists, however, tend to know very little control theory, and it is because of this pernicious interdisciplinary compartmentalization that they have gotten away with the error so profitably to them and so expensively to us for so long.
They did not know they had made a mistake, and control theorists did not know the mistake had been made. Soon, though, everyone will know that the mistake has been made, and that the climate “emergency” is over.
A point I have often made, is that a Chemist might complete an experiment in less than week. A keen PhD student may get to do some experiments in less than a day, even without whipping from an aggressive supervisor (mine was as good a teacher as could be wished for.)
This means that the aspiring Doctorate can get to have their worse-than-he-thought scientific excursions of the mind proved wrong several times a week. This teaches a certain amount of humility in a scientist.
Climatists who might have to wait until after they are dead to realise that they were wrong, are at a considerable disadvantage in their intellectual development.
You falsely assume they seek intellectual development. I see no evidence of that.
Nature are simply following their marching orders from their paymasters Holtzbrink & Bertelsmann:
https://principia-scientific.org/holtzbrinck-bertelsmann-agents-of-german-climate-imperialism/
“Joe Biden’s trust in truth, evidence, science and democracy make him the only choice in the US election.”
The journal’s statement on the election is in the same category of mistake as that old chestnut-those who confuse and conflate ‘ought’ with ‘is’. (My favourite is: ‘science says this land ought to be a National Park’. No, science says the land has trees, hills, birds, and the like, it is humans who decide it ‘ought’ to have a land tenure status, based on values (drilling versus conservation, what types of developments are allowed etc); science is completely neutral on such things. It can’t tell you what to do with a piece of land, this is in all cases a human value decision.
Scientific errors/scientifically meaningless statements:
1. claiming ‘trust’ without quantification.
2. claiming ‘truth’, without any description. (insert ‘God’ for a comparison)
3. claiming a single person does certain things (trusts in ‘truth’, trusts in ‘evidence’, trusts in ‘science’, trusts in ‘democracy’) without any description or data. These terms are so vague as to be meaningless, does it mean he ‘trusts’ the ‘evidence’ of a chair when sitting in it that it won’t break-as do other candidates in the election.
4. ‘the only choice’ in the election. Actually there are about 200 million others of appropriate age who are citizens. This is an unscientific statement. If they mean, in their opinion, such and such is the best candidate, that is an opinion, it has nothing to do with ‘science’. If by it they mean scientific values are better served with such and such, then they need to provide qualifying evidence, which would be contestable on multiple levels in any case. What they do is come to a firm conclusion which is not based on any hard data, which for editors of a science journal is quite astonishing. Their own rules make their statement non-publishable.
Any such statement is socio-political, breaks the rules of science, and has nothing to do with science. The reason journals in the past didn’t make statements on political elections is all of the above, they are just personal opinions, which on various levels are also unscientific. The editors have lost this understanding, largely by confusing ‘ought’ with ‘is’.
Wow, I had no idea that you had Covid-19, Lord Monckton, but am very glad you’ve recovered.
I’m curious, though – given the strict precautions you had been taking, how would you rate the effectiveness of just wearing a mask?
In response to Mr Kelly and many others who have been kind about my recovery from the Chinese virus, I am most grateful for their kind words. Wearing a mask provides very little protection to the wearer: its purpose is to limit the viral load shed by the wearer and the distance over which the virions are carried through the air, thereby reducing both the numbers infected and the degree of illness in those who become infected.
I suspect the virus reached me through a visitor to my household. Either way, it had very little effect other than making me deafish in one ear. I had no other symptoms and, without that one, I should not have known I had had it.
That is why they are angrier with me than with just about anyone else on the skeptical side. -CM
I’m not angry with you, just mystified how you think you know what is ‘nature’. CO2 is all a matter of the mathematics of the ocean and Henry’s Law; Arrhenius was wrong, he had it backwards, and so does everyone else. ML CO2 is a measure of outgassing, not MME, and the annual reduction is not from northern uptake.
Twenty-five years ago I was an electrical engineer with more than a dozen years already of practical experience designing, building and testing linear feedback amplifiers, power supplies, and heat sinks.
One of the more important component parameters in selecting integrated op amps is whether the slew rate is fast enough for the intended signal, fast so the amplifier will respond to both the change in input and feedback quickly enough to minimize output distortion.
Realize here that your imagined climate feedback signal from CO2 is actually delayed by five months from it’s real driver, the ocean temperature. See the second link below, plot #7, the 12mΔ ML CO2 lags by 5 months the 12 mΔ ocean area >=25.6°C – R=.84 compared to R=.28 for the 12mΔ MME.
Since the ocean temperature doesn’t thereafter respond to changes in CO2 after the lagged five months, it is not in control of the ocean temperture via feedback later on either. There is no feedback. This is the reality, so Christopher Monckton that means you are talking about utter non-reality again with basically imaginary CO2 feedback: there is no ECS to CO2.
The sun’s annual insolation cycle warms/cools the Nino3 region, driving the annual ML CO2 cycle.
CO2 outgasses above 25.6°C; the ML CO2 trend is driven by the ocean area above 25.6°C.
It can’t be any clearer – the ocean completely controls ML CO2 despite MME.
Mr Weber is of course quite within his rights to advance his own climate theory, but unless he has managed to get it peer-reviewed it remains just his theory, and it remains at odds with the current understanding – right or wrong – that the reason why the annual CO2 concentration anomaly peaks in May is that that is spring in Siberia, where the great forests begin the process of taking up the CO2 in the atmosphere.
And it is no good trying to maintain that there is no feedback, because there rather obviously are feedbacks operating in the climate, as in nearly all dynamical systems. The question is how to quantify them. We consider that our approach is fair, and it is close enough – except in respect of climatology’s error – to what is already done that we have some hope of convincing the usual suspects that the game is up. The more we use their methods and data, and yet arrive at low equilibrium sensitivity, the harder it is for them to wriggle away.
that the reason why the annual CO2 concentration anomaly peaks in May is that that is spring in Siberia, where the great forests begin the process of taking up the CO2 in the atmosphere.
No sir, you are spouting dogma. The great northern forests’ CO2 uptake is small compared to tropical uptake, and don’t forget the true sizes of northern countries are much smaller than shown on these area-distorted maps:
https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2017165/figures/4
What is your understanding of Henry’s Law wrt the ocean? How do you think it works?
And it is no good trying to maintain that there is no feedback, because there rather obviously are feedbacks operating in the climate, as in nearly all dynamical systems.
Now you’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t claim feedback doesn’t exist. I claimed there is no CO2 feedback to ocean temperature because the change in ML CO2 happens 5 months after the change in ocean temperature, consistently following the trend in ocean area >=25.6°C.
What do you Christopher Monckton say about that 5 month lag? Can you the mathematician convince me the engineer that there is actually real CO2 feedback at all under these circumstances and what is the mechanism? How does CO2 that has left the ocean 5 months ago that is supposed to be well-mixed in the atmosphere have the ability to then warm the ocean to drive the next CO2 spike after being taken up by forests etc? Don’t you realize CO2 feedback theory is therefore mathematically unsound circular thinking?
…have some hope of convincing the usual suspects that the game is up
Everything’s relative – to me you are among the ‘usual suspects’.
The game is up not because of your inappropriate application of Bode’s Law, no, the gig is up because CO2 doesn’t drive temperatures and MME doesn’t drive ML CO2. What’s it going to take to convince you that you’re not doing the right math?
Mr Weber is losing the thread not only of what I have said but also of what he himself had said earlier. Of course, many people want to try to disprove our result, from both directions, and a great deal of misdirection arises. But there are certain rules of argument that must be followed by our antagonists if they are to retain any credibility.
The first rule is that one should not be gratuitously discourteous. I had gently pointed out that Mr Weber’s account of the annual CO2 concentration cycle is at odds with the current position – right or wrong – that the annual concentration peaks in May because that is springtime in Siberia, and that we preferred to adopt the current position [without necessarily warranting its truth] wherever possible, so as to minimize opportunities for disagreement about matters inessential to our argument. With all respect, it is discourteous of Mr Weber to characterize my statement in that regard as “spouting dogma”. One who spouts dogma does not allow for the possibility that what he is spouting may be wrong, but I had explicitly stated that it might be right or wrong, the implication being that as far as our argument was concerned it was simply not relevant.
Next, Mr Weber – a regular user of boldface – says he had not previously claimed that feedback does not exist. Yet, in his immediately preceding posting, again in boldface, he had written the words “There is no feedback”. Since there obviously is feedback in most dynamical systems, including the climate, let us agree that it was, to say the least, injudicious of him to use the words “There is no feedback”, for those words give the impression that what he meant was that “There is no feedback”.
Next, Mr Weber
At this point you are dissembling. There is no CO2 feedback was the point I was making which should be very obvious to others as I said it explicitly when you take my whole quote in context, not that feedback didn’t exist which is now your strawman argument made up to get out of answering, after all Christopher, it was I who opened this discussion by acknowledging feedback systems and my practical understanding of them by working with them. So how can you misconstrue what I said, regarding CO2 feedback, which should be pretty clear:
“There is no feedback. This is the reality, so Christopher Monckton that means you are talking about utter non-reality again with basically imaginary CO2 feedback: there is no ECS to CO2.” <<< CO2 feedback was the topic Christopher.
If there is really CO2 feedback as you claim then you should have no trouble answering the simple questions I asked.
CO2 dogma includes ignoring the real effect of Henry's Law on ML CO2. Apparently you can't muster any actual knowledge about it, so no wonder you're still a CO2 feedback believer. What about that 5 month lag Christopher?
Christopher, let me tell what I spent my day and part of yesterday doing, distracting me from writing better-said comments. I’m listening to a webinar right now.
I listened for hours all day to people from the National Academy of Medicine, Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, and many others who consider CO2 human-induced climate change talk about climate change as a threat to health, and how they, carrying on thinking as you do to a lesser degree, that MM CO2 is driving the weather, climate, and extreme events; along with them linking racial injustice to the environment and cv19.
Donna Shalala just said all the governments and health agencies and climate agencies all have to tell the same story in the public with repetition. [Let the brainwashing continue…] “We need more of that” they say. They just all look at this triple crisis as they put it “as a great opportunity”. “Why don’t we treat climate change like an infectious disease?”
It’s sad that people who should know better don’t understand and are willing to fight over natural climate change when the billionaire club is right now today breathing down our necks pushing for a Biden win because of what they think and fear CO2 can do. Someone else on webinar just said we need to take advantage of this crisis.
The whole science community is rallying around man-made climate change because they don’t understand natural CO2 outgassing and solar forcing.
The billionaire club is driving big pharma to big government, involved in the same global governance efforts from those who you’ve characterized before as communists. So it is not encouraging to see you pushing a lighter-weight version of the same ideas they have. We as a country don’t have time to mess around thinking we can control climate change, but everyone I heard wants to do that, by committing the whole world together again under the Paris Agreement under a ‘new administration’.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission spoke today about her starting the European GND which she hinted she wants to make as a basis for a New Trans-Atlantic alliance. Judith Rodin, past President of the Rockefellar Foundation said “Tackling climate change is the best global health opportunity of our generation.”
They are very organized and we aren’t because you can’t decide what is natural.
Mr Weber continues to argue petulantly, ignorantly and discourteously. That is no way to convince an interlocutor.
He continues to fail to appreciate that our approach is to accept ad argumentum all of official climatology except what we can disprove. Therefore, even if there were no feedback response to direct global warming driven by rising CO2 concentration, as Mr Weber tries to maintain, official climatology says there is a feedback response to that or any direct warming. In that respect, our opinion is that official climatology is correct and Mr Weber is flat-out wrong.
Indeed, the process he describes – outgassing of CO2 from warmer oceans in accordance with Henry’s Law – is known in the scientific literature as “the CO2 feedback”, though quantifying it is subject to great uncertainty, cited as an order-of-magnitude uncertainty in IPCC’s documents.
Furthermore, any warming, whether or not caused by atmospheric CO2 enrichment, will enable the lower atmosphere to carry more specific humidity. This is the water-vapor feedback.
But our method does not require us to study the magnitudes of individual feedbacks, which is just as well because no feedback response can be directly measured, and feedbacks cannot be readily distinguished quantitatively by measurement either from one another or even from the forcings that led to the reference sensitivity that engendered them.
Our analysis is confined to a single, simple point. Because the feedback response to emission temperature (though neglected by climatology) is necessarily large, the feedback response to reference sensitivity to the direct warming forced by the presence of the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases is necessarily small – about 33 times smaller than official climatology imagines.
Climatology has thus made a frank error – and a two-orders-of-magnitude error at that. By refusing to be distracted, we are beginning to succeed in compelling climatology to face the consequences of its error, not the least among which is that global warming in response to doubled CO2 will not be 4 K, as at present imagined, but more like 1.25 K, and that is too small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial to require any action to prevent it.
It is a matter of great regret that the Classical methods of courteous, competent argumentation are no longer taught. Central to the Classical approach is the word “concedo”. If one can concede a point to the interlocutor, even if one disagrees with it, one should do so, because that point is then removed from contention, compelling the interlocutor to face the main point. Here, the main point is that climatology, in borrowing the mathematics of feedback from engineering physics, misunderstood what it had borrowed and, as a direct result, tripled the true amount of warming it should have been predicting. Correct that single large error and the global-warming “emergency” vanishes. We have absolutely no need to get into the weeds by trying – as futilely as official climatology has tried – to quantify individual temperature feedbacks. That is a fool’s errand.
Lord Monckton
The most intriguing part of your post and subsequent comments is about the “fraud squad”.
Wonderful.
Your connections in this regard might know the critical definition of a promotion from the old and speculative Vancouver Stock Exchange.
The climate hysteria has surely been the biggest and most prolonged promotion in history.
I’ll post it to be sure they know:
“In the beginning, the promoter has the vision and the public has the money.
At the end of the promotion, the public has the vision and the promoter has the money.:
Lord Monckton, I reiterate the sentiment of others here who are pleased to see your return to good health and of course to posting articles on this site.
Just to make it clear I am a layman. Though, I have learned a great deal from this site in the past year or so I’ve been following the articles from contributors such as yourself, and also from the comments.
I understand that the science is complex, to me at least, but is the CO2 issue an honest error that has been perpetuated? Or was that error recognised at some point, by someone with political influence, and seen as an opportunity, a ‘problem’ that needed a cure?
When did politics and science become so intertwined? Maybe it’s always been the case. Was it around thirty years ago that high level politicians and ex politicians used their positions to promote that there was a CO2 ‘problem’ and that there was a cure? That renewable energy, mainly wind turbines and solar panels were the only way to reverse this dangerous problem and that it would take a global effort to make it happen? They effectively launched a marketing campaign.
Wasn’t that about the time that pyramid schemes were popular? And the people at that top of the pyramid stood to make the most money. They knew that the scheme couldn’t last forever, but the longer they could convince people down the line that their was a lot of money to be made, the richer they became.
I know that this will seem simplistic to the scientists on this site, but sometimes you just need to make it less complicated. This was also about the time that science lost it’s transparency. How were a handful of scientists allowed the power to block scientific debate? The cornerstone of science, surely. Transparency and scientific debate gone.
When the science we, the public, have been fed for the past three decades fails to deliver answers as to why none of their calamitous predictions have come true then it’s hard for us to believe ‘the’ science. Scientists on this site debate issues that we the general public deserve to know about. Scientists can change the world in ways that affect us, the general population. We want to see ‘public’ debate, we may not be highly educated but that doesn’t mean we’re stupid.
We no longer trust the BoM/CSIRO. These were once highly regarded institutions. But when they change historical records to fit the AGW then, like the hockey stick, they become a marketing tool for the pyramid scheme. No better than the marketing conferences lead by Greta, all to keep the pyramid scheme going as long as possible.
This may seem absurd to many of you but as you well know renewable energy has become big industry in financial investments. Here in Australia our Industry Superannuation Schemes are heavily invested in renewables. The collapse of the industry will have a huge impact on ordinary people, many of whom have no idea of how their super is invested. The existing ‘consensus’ scientists, or non scientists, if I need to make it clear as to whom I referring to must be exposed. They have already caused enough damage, environmentally and economically. Scientific integrity needs to mean something. Is it possible to separate science and politics? Would that go some way to ending the corruption?
Good luck, I will watch with interest, though I fear you are in for a battle. No need to respond Lord Monckton, rhetorical questions, just wanted you to know what an ordinary Australian was thinking.
Respectfully
Megs
Megs’ most interesting and heartening comment deserves a fuller reply than I can give here. I am proposing to do a head posting to reply to it properly.
“He would thus deduce that the natural greenhouse effect – the difference between the 267.6 degrees’ emission temperature without greenhouse gases and the 287.6 degrees’ measured temperature in 1850, was 20 degrees”
The difference is 20 degrees, but this is made up of a +ve forcing from GH gasses, and a -ve forcing because of the now present cloud albedo.
So surely this should be +30 C due to GH gasses -10 C due to cloud albedo. Or some such. You cant have it both ways.
In response to Mr Sykes, the apportionment of the natural greenhouse effect is made plain diagrammatically in the head posting. The 20 K natural greenhouse effect comprises three elements: a 13 K positive feedback response to emission temperature, a 6 K reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, and a <1 K positive feedback response to the 6 K.
One can derive the 6 K directly by using the formulae for the preindustrial greenhouse gases given in IPCC (2007). Uniquely, those formulae allow calculation of forcings compared with zero initial concentrations.
Christopher’s argument has finally been made in a form of words in which I can understand it!
The point is made in the head posting also, for example, and at greater length, here:
Well, I finally understand what Christopher is saying, and what the argument is. I don’t know whether its correct or not, that will take quite some more thought. But just to let him know, this is the first time in the various postings that I have seen the point made in such a clear way so I could grasp exactly what it was.
Its essentially a simple point of logic: the argument is that there is a basic logical fallacy in the way the consensus has approached warming and feedback. Correct this, and the consensus argument will lead to a much lower estimate of climate sensitivity.
If correct it is surprising, but its not to be ruled out as impossible. Such things have happened in the history of science before this.
I look forward to seeing the 80 page paper, but if I have understood it correctly, the core argument will fit in one paragraph.
Michel is very kind to say that he now understands the main point we are making. We have given a great deal of thought to how to explain it clearly and simply and yet without loss of scientific rigor. I am glad that we have succeeded in making it comprehensible. It is indeed a large error of logic, and one which arose when climatology borrowed feedback mathematics from control theory without understanding what it had borrowed.
Michel is also right that the undetected existence of so large an error for so long is at first sight surprising. However, there are two reasons for it. First, interdisciplinary compartmentalization (it is no longer possible for the Renaissance mind to know enough about all the distinct and increasingly separate realms of science); and secondly, the adoption of the global warming meme as the Communists’ chief weapon to destroy the West from within.
The last time I had the chance to present these ideas in an academic setting was at the mathematics department at my alma mater, Cambridge, three years ago, when I presented an outline of it on the blackboard to two of the world’s most eminent mathematical logicians. They got the point at once. But such meetings are now rarer and rarer, as Communism takes complete hold of the universities.
There are still some institutions not wholly under the control of Communists. The U.S. Supreme Court is one. It may well be worth our while to submit an amicus curiae brief telling the Court of our result the next time a major climate case goes before it. The Court could then require the climate Communists to produce an answer to our brief. They won’t find that easy.
The thing I have never understood, its a related point, is what stops warming if there is high feedback. The theory is that any warming of any kind should lead to feedback which amplifies it. Doesn’t make any difference what the warming comes from, or even if we know why it started. Any warming will increase water vapour and thus trigger the increase.
So what was it that made the RWP and MWP first stop, and then reverse? The theory surely would imply they should continue to get warmer up to at least some point, and then stay there?
In further response to Michel, the inputs to a feedback loop are the original or input signal (in the climate, this is the 267.6 K emission temperature whose large feedback response climatology miscounts as part of the actually small feedback response to reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases), the direct amplification driven by a perturbation (such as the reference sensitivity to a radiative forcing), and the feedback amplification driven by a feedback process (such as the increase in atmospheric specific humidity with temperature). If any of these three inputs changes, the characteristics of the entire circuit will change and, therefore, the output will change.
It is a common mistake (particularly among control engineers) to imagine that net-positive feedback will necessarily lead to runaway feedback response. They tend to think this because most of the feedback circuits they design have net-negative feedback built into them. However, the equations governing the feedback loop – in particular, the rectangular-hyperbolic relationship of the system-gain factor and hence of equilibrium sensitivity to the feedback fraction – ensure that where there is modest net-positive feedback the climate will be stable.
But that stability is no less transient because feedback is present. Alter the input signal or the perturbation thereof and the system will adjust to a new stability with a different output.
Yes, John Maddox turns in his grave.
The reason why Arrhenius changed his mind is illuminating. His original predictions were partly based on his bolometric experiments measuring the downward IR flux in the 15 micron passband. At the time this was an extremely difficult experiment to perform. His calculations were based on the assumption that it was radiation from CO2 that he measured. What he did not know of at the time was the presence of some very strong emission features by water vapour which count for 3/4 of the emissions. Once he realised that, a decade later, he immediately understood that his original estimates were a factor 3 to 4 too large. And being a real scientist he was not afraid to say so.
Mr Zuiderwijk’s comment is most helpful and informative. It is interesting how seldom the climate Communists mention Arrhenius’ second paper, and how often they mention the first.
I’ve read m’Lord’s argument a number of times and I think it makes sense, but I still can’t exactly enunciate it in simple terms. I’d like to see if this is what it is.
Take a black body the size of the earth and add a nitrogen atmosphere and sunshine: you get 267K.
Add oceans and you get water vapor feedback and a cloud albedo feedback and your temperature goes to X
Add preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases and you get to 287K — overall 20K greenhouse effect.
Is this correct and what is X?
I think this is correct, and that X is 287K. I think this is the whole argument, if I have understood it. There is already in the 287K a feedback mechanism. That is the temperature you get with all the forcing and feedbacks which happened before the industrial revolution.
We then add a small amount of forcing from adding CO2, and this in turn has a very small feedback due to increasing water vapor… but its negligible.
I am not quite sure if this is how it works, have to do as you have and write it out carefully. And then not sure if its correct! But I think your summary of the argument is right.
Perhaps Christopher will tell us?
In response to Captain Climate, the emission temperature without greenhouse gases is 268 K; the feedback response to emission temperature is 13 K, giving an equilibrium temperature without greenhouse gases of 281 K; the directly forced warming from the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases is 6 K, plus another 1 K for feedback response to the 6 K, giving the 1850 equilibrium temperature of 288 K.
The natural greenhouse effect thus comprises three components, not the two imagined by climatology. The three components (in round numbers, of course) are the 13 K, the 6 K and the 1 K.
Thank you Lord Monckton. That’s makes sense and I understand why they’re off by so much on their ECS. What a travesty!
I think there are simpler ways of explaining this to the average idiot (I’m educated but still took a few reads before I grasped it).
It might be helpful if you anecdotally describe what the feedback response of 13K is. You’re describing it in terms of control theory but maybe if you described it in a few pictures— and maybe these are the wrong ones.:
Black body earth with sun shining
Earth with nitrogen atmosphere (same as above?)
Earth with nitrogen and water vapor and clouds
Earth with nitrogen and water vapor and clouds and CO2
Earth with nitrogen and MORE water vapor and clouds and CO2.
And then show that the Hansens of the world are taking everything from water vapor and clouds to CO2 and attributing it all to CO2—- hence, absurdly high sensitivity to CO2.
If I got any of the above wrong, apologies.
For I have had the virus, which is why I have been out of action in recent months. And what I have discovered is fascinating, and will allow the pandemic to cease to have any more harmful effect than the annual flu within a month, …
I’m glad I read to the end; you have my attention!
Watch this space!
Thank you Lord Monckton. That’s makes sense and I understand why they’re off by so much on their ECS. What a travesty!
I think there are simpler ways of explaining this to the average idiot (I’m educated but still took a few reads before I grasped it).
It might be helpful if you anecdotally describe what the feedback response of 13K is. You’re describing it in terms of control theory but maybe if you described it in a few pictures— and maybe these are the wrong ones.:
Black body earth with sun shining
Earth with nitrogen atmosphere (same as above?)
Earth with nitrogen and water vapor and clouds
Earth with nitrogen and water vapor and clouds and CO2
Earth with nitrogen and MORE water vapor and clouds and CO2.
And then show that the Hansens of the world are taking everything from water vapor and clouds to CO2 and attributing it all to CO2—- hence, absurdly high sensitivity to CO2.
If I got any of the above wrong, apologies.
In response to Captain Climate, the head posting explains that emission temperature would prevail at the Earth’s surface in the absence of greenhouse gases. Since the Earth is covered by an ocean, the emission temperature would at once drive evaporation at least in the tropics, so that a water-vapor feedback and a cloud feedback and an albedo feedback and a lapse-rate feedback would come into being at once. These feedbacks would, between them, engender a feedback response adding some 13 K to emission temperature, even if no preindustrial noncondensing species had yet been introduced. Now add the noncondensers. The directly-forced reference sensitivity to those noncondensers, before feedback, would add another 6 K. And the feedback response to that 6 K would be less than 1 K.
It is simple to state, but it was not so simple to calculate. First, we had to prescribe the evolutionary curve of the feedback fraction with temperature. Then we had to try numerical values of the feedback response to emission temperature until two separate expressions for the feedback fraction became equal. The method allows us to take the exaggerated official estimates of equilibrium sensitivity as inputs to our algorithm, which then works its way back along the curve to the preindustrial era, to show whether the assumption of high equilibrium sensitivity leads to a contradiction. In all cases, it leads to not one but four distinct contradictions, demonstrating high equilibrium sensitivity to be altogether untenable.
Thank you!
Lord Monckton, can you outline the differing assumptions underlying Hansen’s estimate of 255K and the other one of 268K?
In further response to Captain Climate, the head posting explains that the 255 K emission temperature is based on the assumption of today’s albedo. However, the albedo would be half today’s in the absence of greenhouse gases, for there would be no clouds. That puts the emission temperature up to 268 K, by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Dick Lindzen’s estimate is even higher, at 274 K.
Thank you again.
Lord Monckton, my comment is peripheral to your fine mathematical analysis but may relate somewhat to the legal situation you envisage. It concerns only the history of the AGW theory before Hanson. I offer it because I am old enough and experienced enough to know how these histories work. Having been involved in the development of new theory myself, I know that they hardly ever develop in the linear fashion laid out in the final justifications. More often you get a bright idea, work through the implications and then do a literature search for priors. At that point you have considerable flexibility in the write-up. You may emphasize your own contribution or you may emphasize the prior work, or you may ignore some prior work for essentially ideological reasons. You may even set out some sort of fake narrative that suits your agenda. This is what I think happened here. The line of development from Arrhenius probably had little to do with the actual history and was probably added to enhance credibility.
In 1975 I had a bachelor’s of science in physics and was half-way through a master’s program in environmental studies. One of my interests was climate and in particular the twenty-year trend of cooling climate, which was thought due to particulate air pollution, but which coincidentally reversed shortly thereafter. Feedback theory was the exciting new development of the age, and having found an article suggesting how particulates might form raindrop nuclei and cause drought, I formulated a computer model, with feedbacks, to see if I could explain it. The model failed, not because it failed to produce droughts but because there seemed to be no way to get out of them. It also failed on a personal level because the Fortran card technology was too primitive and frustrating and I soon gave it up and went on to other things.
So in 1975, I was sitting in a graduate seminar when my professor quite out of the blue announced that the real problem was not global cooling but global warming and that if industrial burning of fossil fuels continued to increase we were destined to end up fried to death like the planet Venus with runaway global warming caused by increasing CO2. Now at the time I was understandably not too impressed, being concerned with cooling, but ten years later I was thinking what a stunning prediction it was. I became a warmist and remained so for some 25 years. Thinking back it seems that but for the accidents of history you might be challenging me instead of Hanson.
The references to Venus have subsided in recent years in discussion of Earth’s climate but those of us who lived through this little paradigm shift will remember they were the dominant and overbearing argument for quite a few years. Runaway warming is still the accepted explanation in astronomical discussions for that planet’s 400 degree temperatures. It took me some years to figure out the origin of the postulate but now I have little doubt. 1975 was the year after the famous AAAS conference in which Carl Sagan took down Velikovsky.
I bring up Velikovsky with trepidation because I’m aware mention of him is not generally permitted on this blog. I would agree he is not relevant to many of the issues here but as I say things may well change when alleged criminal behavior is at issue.
Sagan had but two strategies to deal with Velikovsky’s prediction that Venus, postulated as newly ejected from Jupiter would be hot, a prediction that was stunningly corroborated by the first probes sent to that planet — a prediction that was opposed by unanimous agreement that Venus would be but little warmer than Earth. First he developed (from about 1960) the notion of runaway warming and then he traced it back to one Rupert Wildt to deny any claim of originality to Velikovsky. In a 1940 paper in the Astrophysical Journal, Sagan said, “Wildt argued that the surface of Venus was much hotter than conventional astronomical opinion had held because of a carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect.”
Sagan’s attribution of credit to Wildt appeared to be quite flexible. Sometimes he gave him much credit while at other times he ignored him. Isaac Asimov and Dr. Francis D. Drake also both overlooked and seemed unaware of Wildt’s contribution. So it seems quite likely Sagan came up with the idea quite independently and fudged the history depending on his purposes at the time.
How does this relate to your case? It seems to me that your opponents would be quite capable of telling a judge to take judicial notice of Sagan’s theory about Venus. They would then use that to both justify their approach to Earth’s climate and to denigrate yours as not explaining that observation. You might well be able to counter this, but not unless you have worked it through comprehensively.
In any case we can thank Velikovsky for global warming theory.
Mr Sloan’s account of the Venus story is most interesting. However, I do not think that the Forces of Darkness would answer our amicus brief by referring to Venus, because our argument simply accepts (right or wrong) the current official estimate of the radiative forcing attributable to CO2. Privately, we agree with Professor Will Happer that the true reference sensitivity to CO2 – i.e., the warming before taking account of temperature feedback – is only 0.6 K, rather than the currently-estimated 1.05 K, and still less then 1.2-1.3 K imagined by Hansen in 1984. However, the current estimate is 1.05 K, and that is the estimate we adopt.
In our present paper, we differ with official climatology in finding feedback response to reference sensitivity to be considerably smaller than has hitherto been imagined. The reasons why we find it smaller are set out in the head posting. The calculations are long but simple, and we think our methodology is fair. The only possible challenge to us is to attack our detailed calculations, which are set out in full in an appendix containing a cascade of 64 equations. We have broken down the calculation into very small stages so as to make explicit exactly what we have done and where we have obtained our methods and data from. There are 144 references to learned papers of the prior art. Therefore, anyone wanting to overthrow our amicus brief is going to have to obtain a copy of our paper – the current draft of the brief offers this facility to all parties and to the Court – and then to go through it, and then to find something wrong enough with it to nullify our conclusion that official climatology, in miscounting the large feedback response to emission temperature as though it were part of the actually small feedback response to reference sensitivity forced by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, has erred, and that in consequence of that error its estimates of future equilibrium warming are three times too big, and that after correction there will not be enough warming to require any action other than sitting back and enjoying the sunshine.
“Runaway warming is still the accepted explanation in astronomical discussions for that planet’s 400 degree temperatures.”
Yes, it is.
Astronomers should stick to astronomy and quit playing at being alarmist climate scientists.
“Astronomers should stick to astronomy and quit playing at being alarmist climate scientists.”
They should, but from their point of view, it may be a ‘sticky wicket.’ They use the same type of Global Circulation models, the same sorts of data and the same priors. A recent synthesis of Venusian climate science cited Wildt (1940) and Sanger (1960) for their theoretical bases — just as I outlined above.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-018-0525-2
Again, from their point of view they only have perhaps two choices to explain Venusian temperatures if they are to avoid Velikovsky: either the greenhouse-gas model or a pressure-density model. They can’t invoke solar heating because, “Due to its high albedo the planet absorbs only 157.6 6 W m−2 on average, less than that deposited on Earth (∼240 W m−2), despite the fact that Venus is 30% closer to the Sun.” Further there is little water on Venus so the options there are limited. And so they attribute a full 400 degrees K of warming just to CO2. I have no idea what sort of ECS they can spin that to, but I have no doubt about their ability to make it sound apocalyptic.
In response to Mr Sloan, we pay no attention to the jejune apocalypticism of the climate Communists. We simply accept ad argumentum that their estimate of the forcing and hence direct warming effect of CO2 is correct. We do not think it is correct, but we cannot prove it is incorrect, so we remove one ground of argument against our result by simply accepting it. Therefore, the entire Venusian argument has absolutely no bearing upon our paper whatsoever.
We have found a single, large, significant error in climatology’s calculation of the feedback response to any direct global warming. That error, and that error alone, is the focus of our paper. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Venus.
“Therefore, the entire Venusian argument has absolutely no bearing upon our paper whatsoever.”
That is quite true and I did not advance it as such. What is does have possible bearing on, IMHO, are the hopes you expressed of referring the actions of certain warmists to the authorities for investigation of fraud. These people, you might agree, are weasels of the first order and the British justice system has recently demonstrated a remarkable capacity for evading pretty much all logic.
So I was just trying to imagine how these weasels would slip through the logical trap you have so carefully set for them. The obviously dubious (but unchallenged) greenhouse-gas theory as it applies to Venus seemed to me the obvious crutch they could run to in a pinch. But I’m sure you have attorneys who can advise you better than I.
By the way, when they attribute 400 degrees K of warming to CO2 on Venus, my admittedly limited math skills tells me that is equivalent to an ECS of above 30 degrees K. If accurate, how does such an incredible figure remain unchallenged?
CO2 at the concentrations and pressures that exist on Venus have a different response to those on Earth. The response under Earth’s conditions is logarithmic whereas on Venus it will follow a square root response so a simple extrapolation doesn’t work. See Curve of Growth.
Thank you for this Phil, I think. I say “I think” because I am not qualified to evaluate your assertion, which is really but the skeleton of an argument and moreover just the beginning of such. As near as I can determine, you made the same assertion, with much the same level of detail, several times in a 2013 WUWT post about the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas and in the context of a discussion about Venus. Your point had to do with the broadening of spectral absorbance lines under conditions of concentration, pressure and temperature:
“It’s called ‘the curve of growth’, at very low concentrations the absorption is linear (B-L) at high concentration it’s square root, in between it passes through logarithmic which is where our current atmosphere is for the 15 micron band of CO2.
See e.g.:http://astrowww.phys.uvic.ca/~tatum/stellatm/atm11.pdf
Science of Doom did a piece on the curve of growth too.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2011/04/30/understanding-atmospheric-radiation-and-the-“greenhouse”-effect-–-part-twelve-curve-of-growth/
Relevant to this thread he has also showed the problems in Miskolczi’s analysis:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2011/04/22/the-mystery-of-tau-miskolczi/”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-greenhouse-gas-becomes-ever-more-marginal-with-greater-concentration/
Now you did not at that time, at least, convincingly elaborate your argument, IMHO (nor did your citations). So perhaps I could ask you to do that elaboration now. Could you explain, for instance, how the top part of the Venusian atmosphere, above the one-bar level is so much like Earth’s atmosphere, how your model differs from the logarithmic model in practice, and why Mars, with apparently 20-30 times as much CO2 above its surface than Earth, is so cold. (No points for invoking its distance from the sun).
Actually the impression I got from the post comments was that neither pressure nor greenhouse gases could account for the Venusian temperature profile. Bob Armstrong has made this argument explicitly, suggesting that Venus must have an internal source of heat. Perhaps you could also address that argument.
http://cosy.com/Science/DigestedGrayBalls.htm
By the way, it seems I should have factored in the density of CO2 on Venus for my estimate of ECS. When I do, it comes out to roughly 20 degrees K.
Now you did not at that time, at least, convincingly elaborate your argument, IMHO (nor did your citations). So perhaps I could ask you to do that elaboration now.
My links explained why weak absorbers have a linear response which transitions through a logarithmic response to ultimately a square root dependence for a strong absorber. It’s a complicated relationship which is well established, not an assertion.
Could you explain, for instance, how the top part of the Venusian atmosphere, above the one-bar level is so much like Earth’s atmosphere,
That’s an assertion which is nowhere near reality, 1bar on Venus corresponds to a temperature of ~340K, where in Earth’s atmosphere is that temperature reached? The 8km above that elevation consist of sulphuric acid clouds!
why Mars, with apparently 20-30 times as much CO2 above its surface than Earth, is so cold.
The pressure of the Martian atmosphere is much lower than the Earth’s so far less broadening and therefore less GHE (5K).
Actually the impression I got from the post comments was that neither pressure nor greenhouse gases could account for the Venusian temperature profile. Bob Armstrong has made this argument explicitly, suggesting that Venus must have an internal source of heat. Perhaps you could also address that argument.