By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Andy May’s splendid brace of articles about climate sensitivity, which gives a concise and elegant summary of close to half a century of scientific debate, concludes as follows:
“The ‘consensus’ estimates of the impact of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, on climate and global warming are the same as they were 42 years ago. The uncertainty has not narrowed. Observations invalidate the high IPCC modelled climate sensitivity today, just as they did for the National Research Council in 1979. …
“It is terribly sad that, after spending billions of dollars and untold man-hours, we have not narrowed the range of climate sensitivity to CO2 since 1979.”
In this essay, I propose to explain why it is that the range of predictions of future global warming remains so broad, and so excessive, and how it can be quite tightly constrained.
Andy’s words above echo those of the deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician Semenov, at a high-level meeting on climate sensitivity that I attended in Moscow at the invitation of the City Government two years ago. Academician Semenov opened the meeting by saying it was unsatisfactory that the interval of equilibrium sensitivities has remained as broad and as unconstrained as it is for as long as it has.
I replied that the reason why climate sensitivities had proven unconstrainable was the mistreatment of temperature feedback in climatology. Semenov drew me aside after the meeting, together with an IPCC representative, and I was asked to explain what I had meant.
Semenov, on hearing what I had to say, and on seeing that the IPCC representative could not refute it, called in the chief architect of the Russian climate model, who took careful notes.
Fig. 1. Rectangular-hyperbolic system response ECS to projected feedback fractions H > 0.5 entails excessive, ill-constrained ECS, while H < 0.25 constrains ECS well.
The problem is that unit feedback response (per degree of reference sensitivity), and hence the system-gain factor (the ratio of equilibrium sensitivity including feedback response to reference sensitivity excluding it), and hence equilibrium sensitivity itself, respond rectangular-hyperbolically to the feedback fraction (Fig. 1).
Because climatologists imagine (unjustifiably, as I shall show) that the feedback fraction is around 0.75, their predictions of global warming are both excessive and ill-constrained. The lack of constraint arises because the entire interval of overstated official global-warming predictions falls on the part of the rectangular hyperbola that soars away towards infinity.
I shall not be relying upon the climate models, because, as Pat Frank’s paper of 2019 on propagation of uncertainty in time-step models has definitively demonstrated, models cannot accurately predict global warming. They can tell us absolutely nothing – nothing at all – about how much warming we may cause. They may have many other purposes, but that is not one of them.
Pat – whose paper has not been refuted in the learned journals, though there have been one or two strikingly ignorant blog posts about it – has now written to draw the attention of the IPCC, via its error-reporting protocol, to its mistake in relying upon models for predicting future warming, For he has proven, using the standard validation technique of statistical propagation of uncertainty, that all the models’ predictions are no better than guesswork.
He has not received a reply, of course. For his paper – perhaps the most important ever to have been published in the field of climate-sensitivity studies – renders the entire basis for IPCC’s predictions, and for the pathetic pandemic of panic about warmer worldwide weather, null and void.
Instead, I shall use an earlier and inherently more reliable method of constraining equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity (ECS), which is approximately equal to the entire all-causes anthropogenic warming over the 21st century (the two radiative forcings being about the same, at 3.5 Watts per square meter).
That powerful empirical constraint on equilibrium sensitivities outside GCMs, still deployed today, is apportionment of the total greenhouse effect between three quantities: direct warming by natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gases and feedback response –
“The strength of the greenhouse effect can be gauged by the difference between the effective emitting temperature of the Earth as seen from space (about 255 K) and the globally-averaged surface temperature …” (IPCC 1990, p. 48).
Let us begin by agreeing some quantities. In my submission, the quantities in the following paragraphs are, broadly speaking, agreed by all sides in the climate debate.
First, as IPCC says above, the emission temperature that would prevail near the Earth’s surface in the total absence of greenhouse gases at the outset would be about 255 K.
As Professor Lindzen, the world’s foremost climatologist, said in a paper published in 1994, the true zero-feedback emission temperature, before allowing for any greenhouse-gas warming or feedback response, is more like 271 K once one has recalled that clouds would not be present in the absence of greenhouse gases. However, that is before allowing for Hölder’s inequalities between integrals, which might bring emission temperature back down to about 255 K.
As Professor Brown has written in these columns, establishing the true emission temperature is not a trivial problem. Here, ad argumentum, we shall consider an interval 255 [240, 270] K of emission temperature.
Today’s global mean surface temperature is about 288.5 K. Therefore, the midrange total greenhouse effect is 288.5 – 255, or 33.5 K. The 33.5 K greenhouse effect is the sum of three components: direct warming forced by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases to 1850, before we had any significant influence on climate; direct warming forced by anthropogenic noncondensing greenhouse gases during the industrial era from 1850-2020; and feedback response.
Table 1. Preindustrial greenhouse-gas forcings
Table 1, based on concentrations of greenhouse gases in 1850 from Meinshausen+ (2017), gives the preindustrial radiative forcing to 1850 from the principal radiatively-active species. CFCs and HFCs are excluded because in 1850 their concentration was negligible.
Since the Planck sensitivity parameter (the first derivative of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation) is about 0.3 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, the direct warming by preindustrial greenhouse gases was 0.3 x 25.3, or 7.6 K.
Anthropogenic forcing from 1850-2020 was 3.2 Watts per square meter (NOAA AGGI), with all non-greenhouse-gas anthropogenic forcings broadly self-canceling, so that direct period warming by anthropogenic greenhouse gases was about 0.9 K.
Therefore, the 33.5 K total greenhouse effect to date comprises 7.6 + 0.8 = 8.5 K direct greenhouse-gas warming, and 25 K feedback response.
We have also allowed for a 10% uncertainty (Cess et al. 1993) either side of the midrange 8.5 K estimate of total natural and anthropogenic reference sensitivity to date, and, simili modo, 10% either side of the midrange 1.06 K reference doubled-CO2 sensitivity (RCS: the product of the 0.3 K W–1 m2 Planck sensitivity parameter and the 3.52 W m–2 CMIP6 mean doubled-CO2 radiative forcing: Zelinka+ 2020).
Climatologists universally but erroneously assume that all of the 25 K feedback response to date must be feedback response to the 8.5 K direct warming by natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
In logic, climatologists’ position cannot be correct. For the feedback processes that subsist at any given moment in a dynamical system such as the climate are inanimate. They have no freedom to decide that they will not respond at all to the first 29/30 of the 263.5 K total reference temperature in 2020, but that they will respond only, and suddenly, and very vigorously, to the final 1/30. Where is the sense in that?
Therefore, at any specified moment, such as the present, the feedback processes subsisting in the dynamical system of interest, the climate, must perforce respond equally to each degree of the 263.5 K total reference temperature.
The unit feedback response is, at that specified moment, applicable equally to each degree of reference temperature, without distinction. To the inanimate feedback processes, a Kelvin is a Kelvin is a Kelvin, regardless of its origin.
Therefore, the unit feedback response is not 25 / 8.5, or ~3, as climate scientists imagine. It is 25 / (255 + 8.5), or less than 0.1. Their implicit midrange unit feedback response is overstated by a factor 30.
Thus, the system-gain factor (just add 1 to the unit feedback response) is not 33.5 / 8.5, or ~4, as implied by the midrange CMIP6 ECS projection. It is (255 +33.5) / (255 + 8.5), or <1.1.
ECS, then, is not 4 times the 1.06 K RCS: after correction, it is <1.1 times RCS: i.e, more like 1.1-1.2 K. The currently-imagined ~4 K mean midrange ECS in the CMIP6 models is thus a near-fourfold overstatement – another reason why we do not concern ourselves with the models.
Table 2 shows that, though the current method of deriving ECS by apportionment of the total greenhouse effect is very sensitive to quite small uncertainties in emission temperature and in reference sensitivity to greenhouse gases, the corrected method is far less sensitive, for the dominance of emission temperature in the corrected equations calms everything down.
Table 2. ECS derived from current and corrected apportionments of the greenhouse effect
Sure enough, the use of mainstream, midrange data for the industrial era, making due allowance for the currently-estimated Earth energy imbalance, gives midrange ECS of 1.1 K, near-identical to the midrange 1.2 K obtained straightforwardly by correctly apportioning the total greenhouse effect.
At any moment, the feedback processes subsisting at that moment must necessarily respond equally and without discrimination to each degree of the then-subsisting total reference temperature. Therefore, at that moment, the magnitude of the feedback response to each component in that reference temperature is necessarily and strictly proportional to the magnitude of that component.
Thus, in the midrange case, the three components in the 263.5 K reference temperature are the 255 K emission temperature, the 7.6 K natural reference sensitivity and the 0.9 K anthropogenic reference sensitivity.
Therefore the three components in the 25 K total feedback response are the feedback responses of 24.2 K to emission temperature, 0.7 K to natural reference sensitivity and 0.1 K to anthropogenic reference sensitivity.
Note that this strictly-proportional apportionment at any given moment does not necessarily entail invariance of unit feedback response and consequently of the system-gain factor with temperature: it is simply an Augenblick of the position obtaining at that moment.
However, given that the 3.2 W m–2 total anthropogenic forcing to date is equivalent to 90% of the 3.52 W m–2 doubled-CO2 forcing, and given that RCS is little more than 1 K, it is scarcely credible that ECS will fall on the currently-implicit interval 4 [2, 6] K, for that would imply, per impossibile, that the doubled-CO2 unit feedback response 3 [1, 5] would exceed the industrial-era unit feedback response 1.1 – 1 = 0.1 by a factor 30 [10, 50].
Climatologists, by not realizing that emission temperature is by far the largest contributor to feedback response, mistakenly added the 24.2 K emission-temperature feedback response to, and miscounted it as though it were part of, the 0.8 K feedback response to direct warming forced by natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
Thus, they exaggerated all the feedback-related quantities – including the unit feedback response (per degree of reference sensitivity), the feedback fraction (the fraction of equilibrium sensitivity represented by feedback response, and the system-gain factor. Table 3 shows the current and corrected calculations for these and other feedback-related quantities:
Table 3. Excess of current over corrected values of key feedback-related variables
There, then, is the answer to Andy May’s question. Suddenly, the hitherto-unconstrainable equilibrium sensitivities become constrained – and their entire interval turns out to be below the lower bound of the currently-imagined interval. Inserting the 255 K emission temperature in the equations for the relevant feedback-related variables calms the entire system down, and leads us to expect a small, slow, harmless, net-beneficial warming over the coming century.
Unless, that is, the solar grand minimum first adumbrated by Soon and Baliunas, Habibullo Abdussamatov, Valentina Zharkova, David Archibald, David Evans and others, and now beginning to be anticipated even by official climatology, cancels much or perhaps all of the 1.1-1.2 K 21st-century warming that is all that we can realistically hope for.
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We should express climate in RH instead of temperature.
We added 48% more CO2, and got 0.9 C in 100 years. Even attributing all of that warming to CO2, which we cant, given its inverse log effect we are looking at 1.2 max.
And if we dont attribute all that warming to CO2 it is less than 1.2.
In any case the warming is mild.
But what if it wasnt? Holocene Climatic Optimum, 2 C to 3 C warmer. The Sahara was green. If less desert is the ‘climate change’ incurred whats the problem anyway?
Not to mention a massively greener planet.
Lets face it, any way you look at it, CO2 is good for the planet.
Matthew Sykes is right on all counts. We are just not going to get the very large warming predicted by climatologists. If they’d realized that feedbacks respond not only to direct warming by greenhouse gases but also by emisision temperature they’d have realized that their existing projections of equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 are a massive overstatement. And, as Mr Sykes rightly points out, the extra CO2 and the mild extra warming will both be net-beneficial.
And even less worrying is water vapour.
Lets say it did increase, and amplify this 1 C rise in average temperature to 3 C or 4 C as the models suggest. What is the result of that?
Well we know deserts have a much higher daily temperature change than a neighbouring tropical zone for the same insolation, so clearly water vapour reduces maximum temperature and increases minimum temperature.
It is a stabiliser, a damper, it means less extreme temperatures, even if the average is higher. And this is good for life.
Anyway you look at this, any out come, turns out to be beneficial to the planet.
Mr Sykes is quite right. Many years ago I asked the world’s foremost climatologist, Professor Lindzen, whether 3 K global warming over a century would be net-harmful. On the whole, he thought not.
For one thing, the increased boundary-layer specific humidity with warming has been steadily reducing the total area of the Earth under drought. This was noticed as early as 1981 (Nicholson 1981). The most comprehensive survey of the global land area under drought (Hao et al. 2014) shows a steady decline in drought prevalence in recent decades, exactly as one would expect as a result of increased specific humidity.
Furthermore, as Professor Happer has pointed out, NASA’s satellites show the Earth as greening via CO2 fertilization, and plants and trees that are able to breathe in more CO2 from a more enriched atmosphere need fewer stomata on the undersides of their leaves, so that they lose less water and become more resistant to drought. All of this good news is, of course, widely unreported.
We also added a lot of aerosols and the EEI is still positive at +0.8 W/m2. So that 0.9C of warming you cite is the transient response to a far lower total RF than the 3.2 W/m2 figure cited in the article. In my post below I use 1.1C of warming from +1.5 W/m2. The +1.5 W/m2 comes from the +3.2 W/m2 anthropogenic GHG forcing, -1.0 W/m2 anthropogenic aerosol and land use change forcing, and +0.1 W/m2 of solar forcing with the EEI +0.8 W/m2 subtracted off. This yields about 0.7C per W/m2. Using both the +3.5 W/m2 (from the article) or +3.7 W/m2 (from Myhre 1998) as the 2xCO2 forcing this implies an ECS of 2.5C and 2.6C respectively. That is assuming the 0.7C per W/m2 sensitivity remains constant.
We do the industrial-era calculation of ECS as follows, where the radiative forcing from doubled CO2 is 3.52 Watts per square meter (Zelinka+ 2020); the anthropogenic fraction of the 1.04 K warming from 1850-2020 (HadCRUT5) and of the 0.87 W/m^2 Earth energy imbalance (von Schuckmann et al. 2020) is 0.7 (Wu et al. 2019, table 2 and conclusion); and the net anthropogenic radiative forcing is 3.2 Watts per square meter (NOAA AGGI, with non-GHG forcings broadly self-canceling).
Industrial-era equilibrium sensitivity parameter = 0.7 x 1.04 / (3.2 – 0.7 x 0.87) = 0.28 Kelvin per Watt per square meter.
ECS = 0.28 x 3.52 = 1.0 K.
Then we do a Monte Carlo distribution based on the uncertainties in the above quantities, and we find that ECS is closer to 1.1 K than to 1.0 K, with bounds of 0.8 and 1.4 K.
You are estimating the sensitivity at 0.28K/W.m2 using the 3.2 W/m2 figure as the basis (which is challenged) and reducing both the warming and outstanding EEI arbitrarily by a factor of 0.7 which makes no sense. Even assuming the anthropogenic contribution to the warming is 70% (it isn’t…you misinterpreted Wu et al. 2019) you’d still keep the factor at 1.0 because you want the ACTUAL climate sensitivity in K/W.m2; not some percentage of it. At the very least your sensitivity parameter should be 0.44 K/W.m2. Then any forcing of +3.5 W/m2 regardless of agent or natural vs anthropogenic is 0.44 * 3.5 = 1.5K. And that’s assuming the sensitivity parameter remains constant. If the 2nd half of the climate response is more sensitive (like might be expected with the activation of positive feedbacks) than the 1st half then the ECS could be higher.
No: one ought not to keep the anthropogenic factor at unity. One calculates from the anthropogenic fraction of total observed warming, the total anthropogenic forcing and the anthropogenic fraction of the Earth’s energy imbalance.
You’re estimating the climate sensitivity in K per W/m2. That is the response to any forcing regardless of whether it is classified as natural or anthropogenic
If you want to partition the temperature change in natural and anthropogenic buckets then you also need to partition the total radiative forcing into natural and anthropogenic buckets as well otherwise you’ll get a non-sensical result.
That’s still a bad way of doing it though because you’re only doing the analysis on part of the response and part of the forcing. To get the best estimate of the cumulative observed climate sensitivity (in K per W/m2) you should do your analysis with all of the response and all of the forcing.
bdgwx is of course quite right that one must apportion the total radiative forcing into anthropogenic and natural components. and that, of course, is what we have done. The 3.2 W/m^2 anthropogenic forcing excludes all non-anthropogenic forcings.
I should add that the reason for concentrating exclusively on the anthropogenic forcings is that there is a considerable and not easily quantifiable element of natural variability in the climate system. By concentrating solely on the anthropogenic element one is able to constrain the uncertainties somewhat.
Same post as below…instead of using 0.7 as the anthropogenic factor try 0.91-1.04 obtained from that Wu et al. 2019 publication.
Our current draft paper already considers the case in which all of the warming since 1850 is anthropogenic and, when bdgwx first asked this question, we did the calculation for him.
“We also added a lot of aerosols ” In developed countries we reduced aerosols. A lot, however, basic physics tells us that 3.2 watts extra causes only about 1 C of surface warming so I dispute your value.
I think I finally understand Christopher’s argument. Not sure whether its right or wrong, but at least understand what it is. I think this is what he is saying in the barest of barebones terms, in terms of simple arithmentic.
The zero feedback temperature is 255 K.
The current temperature is 288.5 K
Therefore there is a feedback component of 33.5 K
This 33.5 K is made up of
7.6 K direct warming by pre-industrial (pre 1850) GHGs
0.8 K direct warming by post-industrial (post 1850) GHGs
25 K feedback from direct warming of all GHGs
That is, we start out at 255 K. There are GHGs in the atmosphere. These have a warming effect, and that effect raises the temperature from 255.
255+7.6+0.8 =263.5 K
263.5 K is the temperature the planet would be if all that happened was that the GHGs had a direct effect on it of +8.5 K, and if there was no feedback in this planetary system to any direct warming. If, for example, the planet had an atmosphere with a certain level of CO2, which had a warming effect, but for some reason this warming effect did not produce any increase in water vapor content. Maybe it was a planet with no oceans.
However, the planet is not at 263.5, its at 288.5, so there must be a feedback effect of 25 K. The question is, what that is due to.
Christopher argues that this 25 K must be in response not only to the GHG warming but also to the base temperature of 263.5.
With no GHGs the temperature would be 255. With GHGs and no feedback the temperature would be 263.5. With both it is 288.5.
When we attempt to estimate what will happen if there is an increase in the GHG forcing, we have first to estimate what the direct effect of additional GHGs will be, and then to estimate what the feedback to that effect will be.
We are to do this by looking at the past record. A feedback of 25 K plus direct warming of 263.5 has produced 288.5. Direct warming must therefore produce a feedback response of 25/263.5 = 0.095 per degree of direct warming.
Assess the direct warming in degrees K due to human GHGs and multiply by this factor, and we get how much feedback effect the additional GHGs will have.
The answer is 3.2 K (the direct human GHG warming) x 0.095 = .304 K (since 1850). A trivial amount, and will remain trivial going forwards. In short, direct warming, according to the argument, is all we have to worry about. This is usually estimated about 1C for every doubling of CO2 ppm, so there is nothing to worry about there.
If Christopher has any comments I would really like to know if I’ve got this right as an account of his argument. Been trying to come to grips with it for some time.
At one point Lord Monckton actually did set forth his theory succinctly, in a single slide. I reproduced his slide in the post at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/11/an-electronic-analog-to-climate-feedback/. In that slide the R’s are what temperatures would be without feedback at various forcing levels, while the correspondingly subscripted E’s are what the temperature are with feedback at the same levels.
The graph that immediately follows Lord Monckton’s slide depicts its values graphically.
I am most grateful to Michel for having made a truly splendid attempt to summarize our argument so elegantly and succinctly. He is entirely correct until the penultimate paragraph. The direct warming by anthropogenic noncondensing greenhouse gases is 3.2 Watts per square meter multiplied by today’s Planck parameter 0.3 Kelvin per Watt per square meter: i.e., about 0.9 K. Multiply that by the unit feedback response ~0.1 and the feedback response to the direct anthropogenic warming is 0.1 K. Similarly, the feedback response to the 7.6 K direct warming by naturally-occurring greenhouse gases is 0.7 K, and the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature is 24.2 K. Thus, the three feedback responses are directly proportional to the magnitudes of the components in the 263.5 K reference temperature that engendered them.
It follows, exactly as Michel has rightly stated, that one may ignore feedback response altogether, without large error, when considering the very small past and future anthropogenic perturbations of surface temperature. For the system-gain factor – the ratio of equilibrium temperature or sensitivity including all feedback response to reference temperature or sensitivity excluding feedback response – is not about 4, as climatology’s current midrange equilibrium-sensitivity projections imply, but more like 1.1.
Thus, in response to the 1.06 K direct warming by doubled CO2 there will be about 1.1-1.2 K equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2, not the currently-imagined 3.9 K (Zelinka et al. 2020).
Michel has indeed seen that the argument is a very simple one. It has take us some years to refine to the point where we can be reasonably confident that it is that simple.
There are of course uncertainties in the underlying data, but, as the head posting shows, they do not much broaden the interval of equilibrium sensitivities.
There is also the question whether unit feedback response is invariant with temperature. To address that question, we carried out a second derivation of equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 (ECS) using the well-established energy-budget method first described in Gregory (2004) and nicely simplified in Lewis & Curry (2014), but making additional allowance for the fact that only 70% of the warming of the industrial era is anthropogenic (Wu et al. 2019, Table 2 and conclusion; see also Aixie Hu’s presentation slide of that year on the same topic).
Just as the greenhouse-effect apportionment method gave an ECS of about 1.1 K, so the industrial-era energy-budget method gives and ECS of about 1.1 K. So there is no reason to expect much variance in unit feedback response (and hence in ECS) with temperature.
And that is what one would intuitively expect in a system dominated by the sunshine temperature of 255 K that climatology had inadvertently omitted in its definition of temperature feedback and consequently in its derivation of the feedback response to greenhouse gases. The effect of including the 255 K in the relevant feedback equations – shown clearly in a table in the head posting – is to calm all the numbers down.
For instance, climatology says the system-gain factor is 33 / 8.5, or about 4. We say it is (255 + 33.55) / (255 + 8.5), or less than 1.1. The calming effect of the 255 K is self-evident.
Another way of looking at it is this. The entire anthropogenic influence on climate to date has caused direct warming of 0.9 K and feedback response of only 0.1 K, all of which occurred in the industrial era. So, if we were to double the CO2 concentration compared with today, there would be an additional direct anthropogenic warming of 1.06 K, hardly enough to alter the behavior of the atmosphere sufficiently to drive any detectable alteration in the unit feedback response. Therefore, one would not expect much more than another 0.1-0.2 K of feedback response as a result of our doubling the CO2 in the air.
I hope this helps.
This still doesn’t make sense. This is saying that the feedback is based only the absolute temperature according to the rule dT = 0.095 * T. In fact, that is exactly what is said “Christopher argues that this 25 K must be in response not only to the GHG warming but also to the base temperature of 263.5.” That’s how I interpret the article as well.
The problem…the 25K occurred because of the 8.5K; not because of the absolute temperature. If you turn off the GHE you remove the 25K feedback. What I think the article is implying is that 24.2K is still occurs whether the GHE is turned on or off. But that makes no sense because the 24.2K is part of the GHE. If you turn off the GHE you turn off all partitioning of it including the 8.5K, 0.8K, and 24.2K parts.
bdgwx is, with respect, simply not correct that the 25 K total feedback response is attributable exclusively to the 8.5 K direct greenhouse-gas warming. The 30-times-larger 255 K emission temperature necessaril contributes the overwhelming majority of the 25 K feedback response.
By what conceivable mechanism might the feedback processes present in today’s climate discriminate between the 255 K and the 8.5 K, deciding only to respond to the latter? They are inanimate, and can draw no such distinction.
Any agent that directly results in some K of warming will be amplified by X*K amount of additional warming regardless of whether the starting point is 255K or 288K.
I will say that discriminating factors are the feedbacks that are in play. 3K of warming at 255K will likely have a different feedback than 3K at 288K. Examples of this effect are the ice-albedo feedback, permafrost and carbon release feedback, biota feedbacks, among others. These feedbacks would very likely respond differently depending on the actual temperature. This is why using attribution or partitioning of the GHE as a basis for determining the ECS would be inadequate. These types of feedbacks which are certainty material to any discussion of ECS are not even mentioned as part of the GHE attribution and partitioning in the article. .
bdgwx is quite right that nothing in our apportionment of the total greenhouse effect at any given moment – such as today – in any way implies that the unit feedback response will be invariant with surface temperature. However, that is the value of doing the calculation based on today’s quite well constrained variables. Since we know that the entire anthropogenic feedback response to date is of order 0.1 K, and we know that the addition to today’s 263.5 K reference temperature caused by the direct warming by doubled CO2 is only 1.06 K (based on Zelinka+ 2020, supplementary matter), we may legitimately infer that one would not a priori expect much more than 0.1-0.2 K of feedback response to that additional 1.06 K reference temperature – which is only 0.4% of today’s reference temperature.
Indeed we do not discuss the values of individual feedbacks or feedback responses to those individual feedbacks at all. The reason is that to do so is entirely unnecessary if all we want to know is ECS. We can get a good estimate of ECS by the two distinct methods I have described – the apportionment method and the energy-budget method – without needing to know the values of any individual feedbacks in either method.
The problem…the 25K occurred because of the 8.5K; not because of the absolute temperature….
I don’t think this is quite right. I think Christopher’s argument is that on the planet on which we live, a temperature of 263.5 is not stable. The reason is that at a temperature of 263.5, at the level of warming from our sun, and given the way our planet works, there will be more water vapor than is compatible with keeping that temperature. The insulating effect will be too great. The temperature will have to rise to become stable.
How much? To 288.5.
A different planet might work differently even with a sun of the same strength. There are three variables:
— the heat of the sun
— the insulating effect of the existing GHGs at a given temp
— the propensity of the planetary system for increasing GHGs with increasing temp.
Its the interaction between the amount of heat and the effect of that heat on the planet with its actual atmosphere, and the propensity of that planet to have a level of GHGs that varies with temperature.
So to find out what the effect of increasing GHGs will be, you look back at what the effect of warmth has been on increasing them in the past, how much additional warming is due to that increase. And you find, the argument goes, that its very small.
Michel has neatly and fairly summarized our argument. In addition, one can look at the components in today’s global mean surface temperature and learn some most welcome fact from that study.
In a nutshell, today’s 288 K global mean surface temperature comprises 255 K emission temperature and 24.2 K feedback response thereto; 7.6 K direct warming by naturally-occurring preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases and 0.7 K feedback response thereto, and 0.9 K direct warming by anthropogenic greenhouse gases and less than 0.1 K feedback response thereto.
However, in climatology’s erroneous apportionment, today’s temperature comprises 255 K emission temperature and no feedback response thereto, 7.6 K direct warming by naturally-occurring preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases and 22.4 K feedback response thereto, and 0.9 K direct warming by anthropogenic greenhouse gases and 2.6 K feedback response thereto.
Therefore, climatology imagines that the system-gain factor, the ratio of the entire 33.5 K greenhouse effect to the 8.5 K direct warming by natural and anthropogenic noncondensing greenhouse gsaes, must be about 4, when it is actually less than 1.1.
Regarding the +3.2 W/m2 figure you mentioned in the article…this is not the total anthropogenic forcing. I believe it comes from here and only represents the GHG forcing. The total anthropogenic forcing is closer to +2.2 W/m2 when factoring -1.0 W/m2 forcing from aerosols and land use changes. We can throw another +0.1 W/m2 onto that for the solar forcing to get a total forcing of around +2.3 W/m2. And since we currently have an EEI of +0.8 W/m2 that means the climate system has responded by 1.1C to only +1.5 W/m2 of forcing. Using the +3.5 W/m2 figure you cited for 2xCO2 this implies the response to a doubling of CO2 of 2.5C. And that’s assuming the sensitivity to forcing in C per W/m2 is the same for the 2nd half of the response as it is for the 1st half. That’s a big assumption. Now I’m not saying the ECS will be greater than 2C, but I’m not seeing how that would be “scarcely impossible” either.
I’m also not understanding your partitioning and attribution of forcing and feedbacks using absolute zero as a baseline. The point of partitioning and attribution is to answer the question of the magnitude of the GHE relative to a hypothetical scenario in which the GHE and only the GHE is turned off leaving all other factors the same including albedo. That baseline is 255K not 0K so any partitioning should be done starting from 255K. If you start from 0K you won’t even get a GHE since the GHE requires an input of energy to work. No input energy means no energy to “trap”. This means your 25 / (255 + 8.5) = 0.1 calculation would actually play out as 0 / (0 + 0) = NaN if applying your rule that it should work for any starting temperature. But even if you convince me that using absolute zero is a viable baseline I’m still not sure why you would apply that 0.1 gain factor to the RCS and assume it is anything resembling ECS.
I do have one question though…you partition the 25K into 24.2K of emission temperature feedback, 0.8K of GHG feedback. Can you expound on this a bit more especially the 24.2K figure and what “emission temperature feedback” is exactly? .
Based on michel’s post above I think my question is answered. As I currently understand the “emission temperature feedback” is the feedback that occurs because of the actual temperature right?
In response to bdgwx, who is making a most welcome attempt to get to grips with our argument (and particularly welcome in that in some respects he disagrees with it), one should draw a distinction between feedback and feedback response.
A temperature feedback is a consequential forcing denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin of the temperature that triggers it and proportional to that direct or reference temperature.
A temperature feedback response, denominated in Kelvin, is the additional warming arising from the feedback forcing.
Therefore, the emission-temperature feedback response (not emission-temperature feedback simpliciter) is simply the feedback response to emission temperature as distinct from the feedback responses to direct warming by preindustrial and anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
bdgwx raises several questions, to which I shall respond seriatim:
First, he says anthropogenic forcing to date is more like 2.2 than 3.2 Watts per square metere. Well, the NOAA AGGI shows 3.2 Watts per square meter of greenhouse-gas forcing, and, as we point out in the version of our paper that is currently out for peer review, the latest estimates of the various non-GHG forcings broadly self-cancel. Even if they did not do so, if there is a countervailing and very strong negative albedo forcing, that counterweight is likely to continue in proportion to future anthropogenic emissions, reducing the warming effect of the GHG forcings.
Secondly, in calculating the forcing net of the Earth energy imbalance he is not making an adjustment for the fact that only 70% (Wu et al. 2019, table 2) of the total warming of the industrial era is anthropogenic.
Thirdly, he imagines that we are using zero Kelvin as the basis for our calculations. No, we’re not, except in the purely trivial sense that any nonzero temperature in Kelvin is different from zero Kelvin. The analysis in the head posting is based on the position as it is today. Today’s temperature has the following components: 255 K emission temperature and 24.2 K feedback response thereto; 7.6 K direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases and 0.7 K feedback response thereto; and 0.9 K direct warming by anthropogenic greenhouse gases and 0.1 K feedback response thereto.Thus, 263.5 K reference temperature plus 25 K feedback response thereto is equal to today’s 288.5 K global mean surface temperature.
The feedback responses to each contribution to the reference temperature are the products of the originating temperature contribution and the unit feedback response, which is 288.5 / 263.5, or less than 0.1.
The reason why the individual feedback responses are proportional to their originating contributions to reference temperature is that the feedback processes in the climate are inanimate. They cannot decide that they will not respond at all to emission temperature, the first 29/30ths of total reference temperature, but that they will suddenly and vigorously respond only to the perturbations of emission temperature that are the direct greenhouse-gas warmings. At any moment, such as the present, they must perforce respond equally to each Kelvin of direct temperature, from which the proportionality follows.
Fourthly, he asks why, if there is 0.1 K feedback response to 0.9 K reference sensitivity to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, there will be 0.1-0.2 K feedback response to doubled CO2 compared with the present. The answer is that the radiative forcings in the two cases are not all that different: 3.2 K and 3.52 K respectively.
Fifthly, he asks how the apportionment of feedback responses came about. That is answered above.
Sixthly, he asks in particular what is emission-temperature feedback – by which he presumably means emission-temperature feedback response. Since the unit feedback response in the industrial era is 25 / 263.5 = 0.095, the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature is 255 x 0.095, or about 24.2 K.
I am most grateful to bdgwx for asking about our research in such commendable detail.
My 1.5 W/m2 figure is derived as follows.
add +3.2 W/m2 GHG (NOAA AGGI)
add -1.0 W/m2 aerosol and land use change (IPCC AR5 and others)
add +0.1 W/m2 solar (IPCC AR5 and others)
subtract +0.8 W/m2 EEI
If you want to debate these values that is fine. I’m not married to anyone particular set of values here. I only ask that we attempt to arrive at the RF that climate system has transiently responded to so that we can quantify the C per W/m2 sensitivity.
I read the Wu et al. 2019 paper. It does not say that 70% of the warming is anthropogenic. What they say is that 30% of the variability can be explained by AMV and PDV. But the accumulated contribution of them is close to 0%. This leaves accumulated anthropogenic contribution at 100%. See figure 4.
The problem with basing the 25K on the actual temperature is that you are effectively saying that it was caused not be the GHE but by what the temperature actually is. That 25K only occurs because of the 8.5K. If we turn off the GHE we turn off not only the 8.5K but also the 25K. Remember, the exercise is based on quantifying the magnitude of the GHE by considering a hypothetical Earth where all things remain equal including but not limited to albedo with only the GHE turned off. This base state is 255K because TSI is 1360 W/m2 and sblaw(1360/4 * (1-a)) = 255K. We aren’t starting from a base state of 0K here so it makes no sense to calculate the feedback basis as (255 – 0) + 8.5 = 263.5K. We calculate our basis as (255 – 255) + 8.5 = 8.5K.
The 25K does NOT occur because of the 263.5K. It is NOT a 0.1C per 1C effect.
The 25K does occur because of the 8.5K. It is a 3C per 1C effect.
And furthermore, can you cite a publication that estimates ECS by using the feedback attribution analysis anyway? I ask because I don’t see how that could be effective methodology, but I’m willing hear you out if you can cite some literature to back it up.
The equilibrium-sensitivity parameter derivable from industrial-era data is calculated according to the energy-budget method as follows (see e.g. Lewis & Curry 2014):
First, derive the fraction of the 1.04 K total period warming that is anthropogenic. We interpret Wu et al. as saying what they mean: that only 70% of the temperature change (not of the variability) since 1850 is anthropogenic. See table 2 of that paper for an explicit division of the warming (again, explicitly not the variability) in each of several periods into anthropogenic and natural components (the latter being described as residuals).
In any event, an imminently forthcoming paper, written by those on both sides of the divide, finds that the anthropogenic fraction of period observed warming is only 50%. We shall replace Wu’s value with the updated value as soon as the new paper – which has been accepted – is made public.
Next, derive the realized component of the anthropogenic radiative forcing. It is simply the difference between the total anthropogenic forcing, which we find to be 3.2 Watts per square meter (since all forcings other than the greenhouse-gas forcings self-cancel) and the anthropogenic fraction of the 0.87 W/m^2 radiative imbalance.
The ratio of the anthropogenic period warming to the realized fraction of period anthropogenic forcing is then the equilibrium-sensitivity parameter, calculated as shown in my earlier response.
As to the influence of emission temperature on feedback response, we shall have to beg to differ. Our professor of control theory is quite clear about this. The laws of control theory, which are exceptionally well established and repeatedly demonstrated, require that at any given moment such feedback processes as then subsist in the dynamical system in question must necessarily respond equally to each unit of the total reference signal, and therefore proportionately to the magnitudes of each of the components in that reference signal. We have tested this proposition using test apparatus both constructed by one of our control theorists and at a national laboratory, which has also been kind enough to confirm that our interpretation of the results obtained on its test apparatus is correct.
The question of what the position might have been at 0 K or at any other temperature less than today’s 288.5 K is irrelevant to any apportionment of today’s surface temperature between the base signal (the 255 K emission temperature), the reference sensitivities to greenhouse-gas forcings and the feedback responses.
Today the position is as follows: emission temperature 255 K + feedback response 24.2 K; natural greenhouse-gas reference sensitivity 7.6 K + feedback response 0.7 K; anthropogenic greenhouse-gas reference sensitivity 0.9 K + feedback response 0.1 K.
To say that “The 25K does NOT occur because of the 263.5K. It is NOT a 0.1C per 1C effect. The 25K does occur because of the 8.5K. It is a 3C per 1C effect” is to assume that the inanimate feedback processes in the climate can by some magical process distinguish 1 K of emission temperature from 1 K of warming directly forced by greenhouse gases. Well, it can’t.
One of the tests we ran at the national laboratory was to see whether there was a feedback response if there were no greenhouse gases in the air but there was a 255 K base signal and a positive closed-loop gain factor or feedback fraction. There was, exactly as expected. But how could there have been, if all of the feedback response in the climate is attributable to the greenhouse gases and none to emission temperature?
As to the literature that establishes that climatology over and over again defines feedback as responding only to perturbations and not to the base signal, an earlier column here provided some two dozen references. It may be worthwhile to read, for instance, the definition of “climate feedback” in IPCC (2013, p. 1450), which refers to “perturb” or “perturbation” five times but does not refer to emission temperature at all.
We have been unable to find a single paper in climatology in which feedback is correctly defined as modifying not only perturbations of the base signal but the base signal itself.
Climatology’s usual method of deriving ECS is via general-circulation models which, however, are proven incapable of providing anything better than guesswork. As our paper puts it, the models’ midrange ECS is near-exactly consistent with the error of assuming that emission temperature cannot or does not engender a feedback response, when it obviously plays overwhelmingly the major part in engendering feedback response at every stage in the evolution of climate, explicitly including the present.
If the modelers, with some of whom we have discussed this, had been aware that the base signal in a feedback amplifier, as well as any perturbations thereof, is modified by the feedback block, they would have understood that the unit feedback response is not, and cannot be, “3 K feedback for 1 K reference sensitivity”. Instead, it is 0.1 K feedback response for 1 K reference sensitivity or temperature. And once that is realized, the likelihood of anything more than 0.1-0.2 K feedback response to the 1.06 K reference doubled-CO2 sensitivity becomes remote indeed, if not downright impossible.
One further point. It is not correct to state that the 255 K emission temperature is the temperature that would obtain after feedbacks. The correct SB calculation assumes current insolation of 1363.5 W/m^2, albedo of about half today’s 0.294 to allow for the fact that without greenhouse gases there would be no clouds, which accoiunt for two-thirds of today’s albedo, but then one must also allow for the fact that there would be more sea ice; emissivity (generally taken as unity) is in reality closer to 0.94. Using those values, emission temperature is 271 K before allowing for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals, which brings it back down to about 255 K. But that 255 K (or thereby) is the emission temperature before accounting for any feedback response to emission temperature. It is a direct temperature.
Our central point is that at any moment, such as the present, the inanimate feedback processes in the climate must perforce respond equally to each Kelvin of the reference signal (which is the sum of emission temperature and the direct warming by greenhouse gases). The rest of our argument follows from that consideration.
You’re missing the point here. The exercise is to imagine an Earth with the same ASR and OLR values they have today just without the DWIR backscatter radiation. If you change albedo then you change both the ASR and OLR. When you do that you no longer isolate the GHE.
Don’t hear what I didn’t say. I didn’t say the Earth would be exactly the same as it is today if the GHE were turned off. It would, in reality, be a very different world with no clouds no WV and with a far different albedo. It would be a world where more than just the GHE were turned off. But that world is not adequate for isolating and quantifying the GHE because it would have an entirely different energy budget with different ASR and OLR values.
The first step in using the apportionment of the 33.5 K total greenhouse effect as a constraint upon ECS is to derive emission temperature before any feedback has acted (i.e., before any part of the greenhouse effect has come into play). That emission temperature is 255 K or thereby, as previously calculated and explained. Water vapor, cloud and albedo feedbacks to that direct pre-feedback emission temperature would of course arise, and would do so very quickly, beginning in the tropics, the locus of the subsolar point (see e.g. Lacis et al. 2010).
However, we do not need to concern ourselves with the magnitudes of individual feedbacks (a futile exercise in any event, for not one such feedback can be measured directly or distinguished by measurement either from other feedbacks or even from the forcings that, via direct temperature, engendered it).
Instead, we do what control theorists do when they know the reference signal and the output signal at a particular moment, such as the present. We know that the reference signal is 255 + 8.5 = 263.5 K or thereby; we know that today’s temperature is 288.5 K or thereby and is sufficiently close to an equilibrium temperature for present purposes; therefore, we know at once that, in the climate of this particular moment, the system-gain factor is 288.5 / 263.5, or 1.095; we know that the unit feedback response is the system-gain factor less 1: i.e., 0.095; and we know that the feedback fraction today is 1 – 1/1.095, or 0.087.
Of course, the state of the climate today does not in itself tell us that unit feedback response and hence ECS will be invariant with temperature. However, given that the entire anthropogenic feedback response, up to the present, is less than 0.1 K, one would not expect much more than 0.1-0.2 K of feedback response to the 1.06 K direct warming by (or reference sensitivity to) doubled CO2 concentration compared with today’s atmospheric burden.
There are multiple ways estimate ECS. Yes, global circulation models are one avenue, but so are observation, energy budget, paleoclimate, etc. based methods as well. One method I’ve never seen used is the one you mention in the article where you partition the GHE contributions into components and project only the anthropogenic part forward. That is ignoring the fact that most experts and non-experts (like me) disagree with your partitioning in the first place. Nevermind that ECS is not just an anthropogenic concept. It is a concept applicable to any perturbation in the planetary energy imbalance whether it is of anthropogenic or natural origin.
Regarding the feedback discussion…are you saying that if you remove the 8.5K of direct warming that the 24.2K portion would still occur such that the final temperature would be 255 + 24.2 = 279.2K at a base state with ASR of 240 W/m2?
What I’m and everyone else are saying is that without the 8.5K then the other 25K would not occur. The base state is thus 255 + 0 = 255K with ASR of 240 W/m2. And with each 1C of direct warming above and beyond the 255K you get an additional 3C of feedback warming. This occurs even with different values of ASR so there is nothing magical about 255K nor the mechanism of the direct warming whether it is anthropogenic or natural.
BTW…Just to be clear…I’m not married to the 3C per 1C of feedback. This is really more of a attribution and partitioning of the GHE discussion. And while feedbacks are related they might not necessarily be the same in today’s world as they would for a world starting out with no GHE at all. And FWIW Schmidt 2010 pins 20% or 6.5K of the GHE on CO2 and cautions that extrapolations from these sort of attribution analysis are not adequate for determining climate sensitivity.
Bdgwx says he disagrees with our partitioning of the total greenhouse effect. Am I correct in assuming that he is content that our partitioning of the reference temperature (255 K, 7.6 K and 0.9 K for emission temperature, natural and anthropogenic direct warmings respectively) is in the right ballpark?
If so, then his difference with us lies in his opinion that, today, there is no feedback response whatsoever to the base signal, emission temperature, which accounts for very nearly all of the reference signal, and yet that there is a spectacularly large feedback response to the 8.5 K direct warming by greenhouse gases.
If that is his contention, how do the inanimate feedback processes in today’s climate decide that they will not respond to 255 K but will respond to 8.5 K? To those processes, at any moment a Kelvin is a Kelvin is a Kelvin. They don’t care where that Kelvin came from.
Bdgwx asks what would happen if we were to remove the 8.5 K warming by greenhouse gases from the climate. Would there still be a feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature? Yes, there would, but it would not necessarily be 24.2 K, as it is today, for the world would be somewhat different from today. There would, at the outset, be no water vapor in the air and, therefore, no clouds. There would be no lapse rate to speak of.
However, at emission temperature there would indeed be a feedback response, for (tell it not in Gath) the Sun is shining, and it would evaporate water without any assistance from the noncondensing greenhouse gases. The unit feedback response might well be somewhat different from today’s value. However, for present purposes we do not need to know what might have happened at emission temperature. All we need to concern ourselves with is today’s position, which is very straightforward.
Emission temperature, calculated by way of the SB equation with due allowance for difference in albedo and for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals, is about 255 K. There is direct warming of 8.5 K by noncondensing greenhouse gases. The remaining 33.5 K of today’s 288.5 K temperature is feedback response – and, in accordance with the long-established laws of control theory, that feedback response, at any given moment (such as today) must constitute a response to the entire reference signal, and not merely to an arbitrarily-selected, minuscule fraction of that signal.
We actually modeled this using two test apparatus, one constructed and operated by an experienced co-author who is a control engineer, and the other constructed and operated, somewhat following our control engineer’s design, by a national laboratory. One of the sets of test we ran was to have a base signal of 255 units, no perturbation (i.e. a gain-block value of unity) and then to measure the output in the presence of a feedback fraction H in the feedback block. With H = 0, the output was 255 units; with 0 < H < 1 the output exceeded the reference signal by the expected amount. Of course, the equations of control theory do not leave this result in doubt. The experiments were actually quite unnecessary. But we did them anyway, because we had realized that no one in climatology had the slightest idea that the 255 K emission temperature itself engenders a feedback response, and a large one.
Once one finally sees the error, it is self-evidently elementary, substantial and grave. But it does take some seeing. I suspected it was there for two years before I found it. It was only when, at the suggestion of a control theorist, I read Bode’s textbook of 1945 and saw the diagram of the feedback amplifier with the base signal large as life on the disagram that I realized at once what climatology had gotten wrong.
Bottom line, then: we don’t need to know exactly what might have happened in the absence of greenhouse gases, though we do know roughly what emission temperature would be under that circumstance. But we do know more or less exactly what is happening now: and, on the basis of what is happening now, ECS by the greenhouse-effect apportionment method is about 1.1 K.
I quite take bgdwx’s point that those who are not aware that the emission temperature makes a very large and very dominant contribution to today’s 25 K total feedback response will not believe that ECS can be quite reliably constrained by apportionment of the greenhouse effect. But the moment one plugs the 255 K emission temperature into the governing equations for the feedback loop, as in the head posting, everything calms down and it is quite easy to constrain ECS.
Thus, the corrected apportionment method acts as a very useful external yardstick against which to assess the various other methods of deriving ECS that bgdws speaks of. I do hope that this further explanation will have been found helpful.
Monckton of Brenchley, thank you for this update. Please keep on. I note a minor typo in the head posting. “Anthropogenic forcing from 1850-2020 was about 3.2 K (NOAA AGGI)…” Should instead read “Anthropogenic forcing from 1850-2020 was about 3.2 W/m^2 (NOAA AGGI)…” I see it is correctly stated in the one other place you mention this value.
Mr Dibbell is most kind and helpful. Moderators, please correct my dumb error and make the correction Mr Dibbell suggests: 3.2 Watts per square meter is correct; 3.2 K is of course wrong.
(Corrected) SUNMOD
It also should read “anthropogenic GHG forcing” instead of just “anthropogenic forcing”.
No, it should read “anthropogenic forcing”, for the net anthropogenic forcing is equal to the GHG forcing, since non-GHG anthropogenic forcings broadly self-cancel.
What positive non-GHG forcing cancels the negative aerosol and land use change forcing?
Midrange anthropogenic forcing from 1850-2020 was 3.2 W/m^2 (NOAA AGGI: Butler & Montzka 2020). The +0.4 W/m^2 total ozone forcing (e.g. Lewis & Curry 2018), the –0.8 W/m^2 midrange aerosol forcing (Dittus et al. 2020) and +0.4 W m^2 miscellaneous forcings self-cancel.
Sure. Fair enough. We can go with that. That would be 2.4 W/m2 of transient response after taking off the 0.8 W/m2 of EEI. That yields a climate sensitivity of 1.1 / 2.4 = 0.46 K per W/m2 which implies a +3.5 W/m2 response of 1.6K assuming the sensitivity remains constant. FWIW I think my previously cited figure of +2.3 W/m2 is probably too low. After reviewing the IPCC AR5 tables and graphs I would be willing to go +2.8 W/m2 which with the EEI adjustment is +2.0 W/m2. That is a sensitivity of 1.1 / 2.0 = 0.55 K per W/m2 and implies 2K of warming using the Myhre 1998 2xCO2 forcing of +3.7 W/m2.
Well, we do the energy-budget calculation as previoiusly described, which gives a rather lower ECS than bdgwx finds by doing it his way. But we are in the same ballpark. Using 0.8 K EEI and 2.8 K period anthropogenic forcing (the lower bound of our interval), and retaining the 70%-of-period-warming anthropogenic fraction, one would get ECS of –
3.52 x 0.7 x 1.04 / (2.8 – 0.7 x 0.8) = 1.0 K.
Note that the current midrange doubled-CO2 forcing estimate is 3.52 W/m^2 (Zelinka 2020, supplementary matter), down a little from the 3.45 W/m^2 in Andrews (2012). The Myhre estimate is long superseded.
Assuming that all warming was anthropogenic:
3.52 x 1.04 / (2.8 – 0.8) = 1.8 K.
Assuming that half of all warming was anthropogenic (in accordance with the forthcoming paper)
3.52 x 0.5 x 1.04 / (2.8 – 0.5 x 0.8) = 0.75 K.
All of these values are a long way short of the current midrange 3.9 K value. None of them would constitute any sort of a “climate emergency”.
I should add that if one were to take the 0.75 K or 1.8 K values derived by the energy-budget method, one would have to explain why the ECS was so significantly different from the 1.1 K found by the greenhouse-effect apportionment method. There just isn’t enough nonlinearity in the system to drive so large a change in the unit feedback response – in either direction. I must think some more about this.
Instead of 0.7 try using 0.91 as a lower bound and 1.04 as an upper bound which is obtained from the Wu et al. publication in table 2 and see what you get.
That is not only done in our paper but also in the calculations I have set out for bdgwx elsewhere. One gets about 1.6-1.8 K ECS. However, given that there is actually no agreement among climate scientists as to what fraction of global warming is anthropogenic (only 0.3% of published papers say more than 50% is anthropogenic), we shall probably base our result on the latest paper that demonstrates 50% as the anthropogenic fraction, by a far more direct method than that in Wu et al; but we shall, as in our present draft paper, demonstrate what difference it makes if one assumes that all global warming was anthropogenic.
The large and persistent discrepancy between modelled and observational ECS, suggests that the climate system is exhibiting emergent thermal homeostasis – a known phenomenon of such complex heat-dissipative systems.
Willis Eschenbach has described this previously for instance in regard to tropical thunderstorms.
Recent research in emergent thermo-regulation including Willis articles are discussed here:
Emergent Thermal Homeostasis: a new paradigm for e-pluribus-unum climate stability – Odyssey (wordpress.com)
No such “large and persistent discrepency” exists. Temperatures remain well within the projections of the CMIP5 multi-model mean:
I wasn’t referring to that trumpet graph. I meant the whole set of history based estimates of climate sensitivity, such as using palaeo climate proxies. For instance the faint sun paradox from which emerges ECS of 0.4 C / doubling.
And that trumpet graph does not take account of the recent la Nina: it conveniently stops short before that took effect.
It is simpler to state that the climate system is near-perfectly thermostatic, for many reasons, including the tropical afternoon convection studied by Willis Eschenbach, the absence of the mid-troposphere warming hot spot predicted in models, the large heat capacity of the ocean, the fact that the system is bounded by outer space, at a far lower temperature than the system temperature, etc., etc.
However, the system is not perfectly thermostatic. Therefore, one must do a little more work before concluding that our influence on climate is a lot less than is currently imagined.
The chief reason why the models are predicting three or four or even five or six times as much warming as is occorruing or likely to occur is that climatologist made the mistake of assuming that the feedback repsonse to emission temperature is in fact part of the feedback response to direct greenhouse-gas warming.
But “the models” aren’t predicting this. They are projecting a range, and observations are well within that range.
In 1990 IPCC predicted 2.8 K/century equivalent medium-term anthropogenic warming (in one place) and 3.4 K (in another). The outturn has been more like 1.4 K/century total warming, of which as little as half, or 0.7 K, according to a paper just about to be published, is anthropogenic. It appears, then, that IPCC’s original predictions, which got the climate scare going, were four or five times what has happened since.
No surprise, then, that IPCC, in response to pressure from its expert reviewers, including me, near-halved its medium-term projections, which, however, remain excessive.
However, inconsistently, IPCC did not make any reduction in its longer-term or equilibrium-sensitivity projections, as it should have done. Instead, it increased them.
I’m not enough of a mathematician or physicist to follow your arguments. But I applaud you for exposing science errors and the general rickety flimsiness of the prevailing climate group-think.
Mr Eggburn is very kind. And he touches on a real difficulty that we who have found errors in the official climate narrative face. Even though our argument is actually very simple, and requires no more than elementary arithmetic to grasp the main points, unless one has a sufficient knowledge both of climate science and of control theory it is very difficult to assess whether our result is well founded. That is why our approach is to try to get our paper accepted for publication in a learned journal.
As Dr Frank discovered, it is extremely difficult to get past the gatekeepers and receive anything like a fair and competent peer review. But we shall plug away at it.
I wish there was a reference for the very confusing terminology that is used in climatology.
If Monte Carlo were to contact monckton at mail dot com, I should be able to send him a useful document by the Strategic Threat Assessment Group, which has taken more than a passing interest in our result. The document has an excellent and very clear glossary of the relevant climatological and control-theoretic terms.
Thanks again.
CMoB
Do you have ongoing contact with the Russian climate research community? How would you characterise climate science in that country? Thanks.
Yes, I have connections with several Academicians. In general, the Academy is much more open-minded about the climate question than its counterparts in the West, who are now fearful of the totalitarian faction in the universities, the journals and the sciences generally.
Monckton of Brenchley, I note how your Fig 1 in this post gets across the same concept expressed in Schwartz 2009 “Feedback and sensitivity in an electrical circuit: an analog for climate models” linked below, in Fig 3. Estimated ECS will be poorly constrained as feedbacks are made stronger in the models.
https://www.bnl.gov/envsci/pubs/pdf/2011/BNL-93706-2011-JA.pdf
Again, thank you for pressing forward.
Mr Dibbell is quite right. I first came across the rectangular-hyperbolic curve of system response in the presence of various feedback fractions (or closed-loop gain factors) in a paper by the estimable Professor Lindzen. A recent posting on climate sensitivity by Rud Istvan shows that curve. Schwarz’s paper is excellent. And, as Mr Dibbell points out, if the feedback fraction goes about 0.5 it becomes impossible to constrain system response, exactly as the graph shows.
Here’s a challenge for any of you Monckton fanboys. Lord Monckton has been flogging his above-stated theory that “at any specified moment, such as the present, the feedback processes subsisting in the dynamical system of interest, the climate, must perforce respond equally to each degree of the 263.5 K total reference temperature,” for over four years now, at least since he introduced it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebokc6z82cg as a “mathematical proof” of a low ECS value. The challenge is to identify how that theory is in any way inconsistent with his “end of the global warming scam in a single slide” located at the end of his post at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/15/climatologys-startling-error-of-physics-answers-to-comments/ and graphed in my post at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/11/an-electronic-analog-to-climate-feedback/.
If you’re a critical thinker, your attempt will show you that my post explains in terms simple enough for any reasonably bright high-school analytic-geometry student to comprehend that Lord Monckton has made an elementary blunder. (You need not trouble yourself with my post’s electronics; its first slide and graph will suffice.)
If you peruse my post’s simple graph you will see that none of Lord Monckton’s word salad above refutes it. He merely calls me names and accuses me of criticizing a paper I haven’t seen yet. Of course, I haven’t done that; all I’ve criticized is what he’s published so far.
As far as I recall, Lord Monkton first introduced the instant head post’s bizarre notion to this site over three years ago, at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/19/global-warming-on-trial-and-the-elementary-error-of-physics-that-caused-the-global-warming-scare/. It was already clear at that time that Lord Monckton and his colleagues hadn’t even a rudimentary understanding of the control-systems theory they invoked. In the ensuing thread Bernie Hutchens, who actually taught this stuff at, I believe, Cornell, manned the laboring oar in attempting to show Lord Monckton his error.
And he was not alone. For example, I quoted Steve McIntyre in an attempt to set Anthony Watts wise to how running such drivel misled his readers. Unfortunately, Lord Monckton failed to see the light, and Mr. Watts seemed so in thrall the Lord Monckton as to attribute that attempt to ego on my part; he seemed unable to conceive of the possibility that someone would just want to give fellow skeptics the benefit of his control-systems knowledge.
So over the years Mr. Watts has run about a dozen of Lord Monckton’s posts repeating the same mistaken theory in various (and often inconsistent) ways. Eventually, for reasons I won’t speculate about here, he grudgingly ran my above-cited post—but appended a lame disclaimer that was totally irrelevant to what my post said. And now he’s run another Monckton post without any such disclaimer.
You may judge for yourself what this says about Mr. Anthony’s objectivity.
Again, I haven’t criticized a paper I haven’t seen. However, Lord Monckton’s been consistently incoherent for four years throughout a dozen posts and a couple of videos, so it seems unlikely that the unseen paper he yammers about will constitute a lucid moment. My guess is that it will be no less cringe-worthy than his paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095927316305448.
Monckton collaborated with control systems engineering professionals to form his view that the simplistic ECS story was flawed and that when temperature appears in an equation, you can’t arbitrarily cut it in half based on a lot of bla-bla-bla.
Conversely, you wheel out some great and mighty “Bernie Hutchens” of your own to apparently say the opposite on behalf of the same profession.
Why can’t your and Monkton’s control engineering people just fight it out directly?
Mr Eggburn makes a most useful suggestion. Our control theorists are simply not willing to deal with Mr Born, who is as vicious and mendacious as he is ignorant of control theory. He is, in fact, a retired lawyer not trained or experienced in the scientific method, who has, as far as we know, contributed nothing whatsoever to the peer-reviewed journals either on climatology or on control theory. One of our control theorists, who has read some of Mr Born’s ramblings, says that his style is repellent; that he is not amenable to reason; and that he appears to have an agenda that has nothing whatever to do with objective scientific truth.
You can see why our team takes this view of Mr Born. You have only to see the sneering petulance of his comment, which is, unfortunately, entirely characteristic of him.
Since my team, for very good reason, are not prepared to deal with Mr Born in any way, if Mr Eggburn were to find an independent but competent control theorist who would like to look at what we are saying and comment upon it we should be delighted to assist.
Since there is no science whatsoever in Mr Born’s comment above, which is merely a rant first directed at us and then – for no good or justifiable reason at all – at our kind host here, who indulges open scientific debate in a way that no one else in this field does and has allowed Mr Born to expatiate inexpertly and more than somewhat malevolently on our research in head postings of his own on several occasions, it may help Mr Eggburn to know that, as best we can discern Mr Born’s objection to our result (for he writes very badly and is very far from clear) is that in his untutored opinion we found our case solely upon what he is prone to call the “local slope” of the curve of system response with ambient temperature, by which he probably means what mathematicians call the point-slope: i.e., the slope of a line tangent to that curve at a given point.
Let us take two separate points on the curve. First the position in 1850. At that time, equilibrium surface temperature was 287.5 K and the direct warming by, or reference sensitivity to, preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases was 7.6 K, derived as shown in the head posting. The total reference temperature in 1850 was thus 255 + 7.6 = 262.6 K, implying a system-gain factor 287.5 / 262.6, or a little below 1.1.
Now, the position at the end of 2020. The equilibrium surface temperature was 288.5 K and the reference sensitivity to anthropogenic greenhouse gases was about 0.9 K, so that total reference temperature was 255 + 7.6 + 0.9 = 263.5 K. The system-gain factor was then 288.5 / 263.5, or a little below 1.1.
Our case is that a pre-existing method of constraining equilibrium sensitivity, the energy-budget method first adumbrated by Gregory (2004) and beautifully simplified by Lewis & Curry (2014, 2018) – which concerns itself with what Mr Born calls the “average slope” for the entire industrial era in the 170 years since 1850 – generates equilibrium sensitivities about one-half (in Lewis & Curry) to one-quarter (using more up-to-date climatological data and research) of the models’ midrange projections.
Using those updated data, it is not difficult to determine that for 1850-2020, and separately from 1990-2020 the system-gain factor is again approximately 1.1.
Despite numerous papers demonstrating this fact, official climatology continues to ignore the low-sensitivity values derived by the energy-budget method as an aberration caused by the admittedly large uncertainty in the Earth energy imbalance (the tiny difference between incoming and outgoing radiation at the top of the atmosphere).
Therefore, climatology adheres to its far higher midrange estimates of climate sensitivity. Its chief pretext for doing so, as I discovered when I wrote to Sir John Houghton about 15 years go to ask him why climatology imagined so large a difference between reference sensitivity before accounting for feedback response and equilibrium sensitivity after accounting for it, is its apportionment of the natural greenhouse effect, as explained in the head posting and illustrated with the 1850 and 2020 examples above.
Climatology defines “climate feedback” (which includes temperature feedback, the species of feedback at issue here) as responding solely to perturbation signals and not also to the base signal, which, in climate, is the 255 K emission temperature. That definition is unquestionably defective, but it is – as far as we can discover – universal in climatology.
On the basis of that defective definition, Sir John Houghton (who was IPCC’s first climate-science chairman), and most other climatologists, concluded that the system-gain factor, the ratio of equilibrium to reference sensitivities, is 4, when after including the emission temperature in the calculation, as shown in the head posting, it is more like 1.1. Since reference doubled-CO2 sensitivity is about 1 K, the system-gain factor is almost equal to the equilibrium sensitivity, which climatology thinks is 4 K, which becomes a harmless, net-beneficial 1.1-1.2 K after correction of climatology’s error of definition.
From the foregoing, it will be evident to you that the “local-slope” and “average-slope” values of the system-gain factor and hence of equilibrium sensitivity are near-identical at about 1.1, so that midrange equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity is 1.1-1.2 K in either case.
I have sketched out an outline of Mr Born’s position and ours so that you will be able to find both a climatologist and a control theorist who can, between them, review our work and let you and us know what they think.
As it happens, we have recently been conducting just such an independent review with two of the most eminent climatologists on the planet, both of whom began, as Mr Born did, by assuming that we must be wrong. One of these said we must be wrong because the models are not fit for their purpose. Well, the fact that the models are incapable of telling us anything at all about how much global warming we may in future cause is one with which we agree: but it has no bearing on our result. The other, having raised a series of objections, and having called in a control theorist to assist him, is still not convinced that we are right, but he and his control theorist have accepted that, in the specific areas in which they had thought we are wrong we are not wrong. The debate continues – and that is how the scientific method works.
If there were as gross an error in our method as that which Mr Born falsely imagines is present, you can be sure that the reviewers of our paper on the two occasions on which it was submitted and rejected did not advance Mr Born’s objection, for the question of variance of unit feedback response and hence of the system-gain factor with temperature is of course explicitly and competently addressed therein. Indeed, they advanced no objections that stood up to examination, and the editor of the second journal to whom we had submitted our paper, in response to our asking whether we had satisfactorily resolved all of their objections (none of which touched upon our main point at all) replied that we had indeed done so, but that his fellow editors would not permit this or any paper so fundamentally questioning the official narrative to be published. He was most upset about it and, when we suggested that we might in due course put the climate-science question in front of the fraud-investigating authorities, he kindly agreed that we should feel free to pass on our correspondence with him to them, and the he supported the need for investigation.
So there it is. If you would like to find a suitable climatologist and a suitable control theorist, we shall be very happy to repeat the independent review exercise that is already being conducted, while we wait for the journal currently reviewing our paper to come back to us. We selected that journal precisely because its editor is outspoken in his opinion that there are no credible skeptical arguments against the official narrative. He has now had the paper before him for seven months. If the paper had contained an error as gross as that which Mr Born (not having seen it) imagines must exist therein, one can be reasonably sure that it would have been slung straight back at us with a refusal to have the paper reviewed at all.
The editor has not done that. Inferentially, therefore, he has understood, as Mr Born does not, that in a dynamical system in which the base signal exceeds the reference sensitivities by a factor as large as 30 any sufficiently small alteration in any of the initial conditions will not be at all likely greatly to alter the slope of a line tangent to the curve anywhere close to the present position. Be that as it may, what Mr Born calls the “average-slope” and “local-slope” values of unit feedback response, system-gain factor and equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity are in fact near-identical.
I hope that this answer is not too long, and that you will find it helpful. If you would like to contact me directly, I am monckton at mail dot com.
Please continue despite the din from these crazed persons.
Monte Carlo provides much comfort. The attacks from the trolls are intensifying, which suggests that they, or those behind them, are becoming more than somewhat alarmed that our result, together with that of Dr Frank, will remove the entire basis for climate alarm from which they so handsomely profiteer at the expense of the rest of us.
Keep up the good work. I don’t totally agree with this whole theory due to thermodynamics but your assumption of using accepted hypothesis, rightly or wrongly, is a good starting point.
I would like to note, that at least scientifically, you have provided a hypothesis with associated mathematics, developed experiments to validate your hypothesis, and finally published all of the background information. This is following the scientific method to a “T”!
Mr. Born needs to cease whining and perform the same. All it takes is one experiment to validate a competing hypothesis and thereby show that yours is wrong. I would encourage him to do this exact thing and disprove your hypothesis!
I am most grateful to Mr Gorman for his very kind and constructive words. We have indeed done our best to follow the scientific method – which, of course, includes enduring the attempts (some genuine, most not) to knock our result down.
We may or may not be right, but the feebleness and ad-hominem viciousness of the handful of rebarbatively repetitive trolls who have done their worst to disrupt this discussion reveal to all how threadbare their arguments are and how unwilling they are to commission the independently-conducted experiments that we asked a national laboratory to carry out.
One of these trolls, a low-level trained Marxist, has even asserted – on no evidence – that we have not carried out any such tests. But of course we have, and the laboratory’s report is among the supporting documentation that we submitted well over seven months ago to a leading journal.
Mr Born’s hypothesis, insofar as any meaning can be discerned therein (for he is so busy sneering and making ad-hominem remarks that there is very little science in what he says) is to the effect that the segment-slope of a curve between two well-separated points and the point slope (the tangent to the curve at a single point) are clean different things, and that one cannot assume they are necessarily equal.
Well, that is not really a hypothesis at all, for it is self-evidently true for all curves other than the degenerate curve that is the straight line.
He imagines, falsely, that when we derive equilibrium sensitivity as the ratio of today’s global mean surface temperature to the pre-feedback-response reference temperature we are assuming that the resulting system-gain factor obtained from the segment-slope of the system-response curve can be automatically applied to the differential calculation for a warming forced by the equivalent of doubling CO2 compared with the present.
However, it is not we who make that assumption. It is climatology that makes that assumption. It assumes that the system-gain factor derived as the ratio of the total natural greenhouse effect to the reference sensitivity to natural and anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing to date is applicable to the differential calculation for doubled CO2. In both cases, climatology’s erroneous system-gain factor is about 4, because it neglects to account for the fact that 29/30ths of today’s reference temperature is the 255 K emission temperature, which it leaves out of account, not realizing that each Kelvin of emission temperature makes no less contribution to today’s total feedback response than each Kelvin of direct warming by doubled CO2.
We could rest on our laurels and say that since climatology assumes that what Mr Born calls the “average-slope” and “local-slope” system-gain factors are identical there is no reason why we should not do the same.Mr Born has been notably silent about climatology’s assumption of precisely the same thing as he falsely accuses us of.
However, we have not done that. We have instead applied the latest climatological data (which are constantly being updates as events unfold) to the established energy-budget method of deriving differential values of the system-gain factor and hence of equilibrium sensitivity, and we obtain much the same values as are obtainable from the corrected apportionment of the entire global mean surface temperature to date.
It is for this reason that not one of the reviewers of our two previous submissions to learned journals raised Mr Born’s elementary point – which they would certainly have done if we had made any error as crass as that which climatology itself makes (without any criticism from Mr Born, let alone the spiteful venom that he habitually directs towards us). What is more, the editor of the journal before whom our present draft has been for more than half a year would certainly have spotted any such error and thrown it back at us. Only climatology is allowed to make that erroneous assumption.
I don’t need Mr. Hutchens. I’m perfectly capable of taking Lord Monkton’s experts on myself. But none of them has dared face me.
Anyway, it doesn’t take a controls-systems guy to see through Lord Monckton’s theory. Just look at his “end of the global-warming scare in a single slide.” It treats the with-feedback temperature E as a function of the value R the temperature would assume without feedback.
If you took high-school analytic geometry, you should be able to see that at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/11/an-electronic-analog-to-climate-feedback/ I correctly graphed his slide’s values and correctly showed that he flubbed the extrapolation.
Instead of directly explaining why he thinks his single-slide theory is nonetheless correct, he evades the question, burying readers in a lot of verbiage and idiosyncratic nomenclature.
So you can either (1) blindly believe what he claims some purported experts say or (2) dust off your high-school math and perform your own analysis of his slide, which amounts merely to extrapolating a third, unknown point from two known ones.
Your call, but in my opinion someone who can think critically for himself would do the latter.
It will be apparent to Mr Eggburn that Mr Born has been wholly unable to address the reasoned argument I had set out in my previous comment in reply to Mr Eggburn’s useful suggestion of calling in an independent and competent control theorist to review our conclusion.
The burden of Mr Born’s whinge, insofar as any meaning can be discerned therein, is that the slope of a line tangent to a curve is not necessarily equal to the slope of a line passing through two sufficiently distant points on the same curve.
That is why I showed that whether one uses a point-slope or a segment-slope (the usual mathematical terms) the system-gain factor (a term standard in control theory, a science with which Mr Born is not familiar) is much the same. The rest of our argument follows.
Positive feedback has some narrow but useful implementations in electronics. Latch circuits, free running oscillators that need to kept in oscillation, etc.
Positive Feedback | Operational Amplifiers | Electronics Textbook (allaboutcircuits.com)
If the GHG sourced additional heat thrown down to the surface is such that one additional watt /m sq found its way to the TOA, and that resulted in a net solar flux at the surface of 2 watt / m sq, we don’t have long to live. This is in no way stable, unless the thermal heat capacity of the earth is such that it can shrug it off, which it can’t.
You also have to consider the alternative, where less of this = even less of that, inside the same system. So even less GHG effects would have the earth cooling off very fast in the end, and what or where would be the reset button ?
To understand things, I take functional relationships to their limits to see how physical things interact. More of this = even more of that types of relationships (non-linear) are very interesting, especially when there is no presence of a restoring force or function underlying the whole system.
In the climate there are many thermostatic processes: the vast heat capacity of the ocean, the Eschenbach cooling by earlier tropical afternoon convection with warming, the decline in mid-troposphere specific humidity with warming; the consequent absence of the predicted tropical mid-troposphere hot spot, etc., etc.
Of course, a system with a system-gain factor 2 is not necessarily unstable. But the system-gain factor in the climate – the ratio of equilibrium sensitivity after accounting for feedback response to reference sensitivity before accounting for it – is probably less than 1.1. And that, as the graph in the head posting shows, is conducive to stability, and to well-constrained equilibrium sensitivity.
Joe
Why use an electronic analogy of feedback, a bit of a stretch (climate processes don’t move at the speed of electric ⚡️ currents). There are perfectly good thermodynamic ones:
https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/alif2016/608/99454
1) You don’t need to look at the electronics to analyze Lord Monckton’s theory; his slide alone is enough.
2) It was Lord Monckton, not I, who introduced the “test rig” and based his theory on Bode; I just showed that the electronics doesn’t prove what he thinks it does.
Lord Monckton makes the perfectly logical point that the solar radiation itself would have produced some feedback itself.
Given that, one wonders why the other side doesn’t just make the argument that ECS is not a constant value. One gets the impression, that they are trying to argue against one estimate of ECS while having no idea of how the mainstream estimates are arrived at. I’m sure, however, that it is a complete coincidence that the estimated value for ECS can be reasonably estimated by 25K divided by 8.5. 😉
IAC, it seems trivial to say that feedbacks have been higher in the past than they are currently. For instance, when the equator was covered in snow – a small increase in temperature could cause a very large increase is sunlight absorbed at the surface. Also, water vapor would be broadly logarithmic in its forcing effect.
Best wishes all,
Sorry, Joe Born – I wasn’t replying to you specifically – I had just intended to reply to the OP,
Does C02 follow a natural log e falloff in energy reflection effect as a GHG with increasing C02 as a % of the atmosphere at the altitudes where it causes certain wavelengths of energy to reflect towards the earth ?
Now does all upward radiation that is absorbed by C02 and reradiated reflect downward (like a radio antenna with a specific gain in a particular direction (like a planar array) or does it just absorb the radiation and fire it randomly in all directions (radiation heating mass in all directions)?
If I understand what you’re asking properly, the way I would answer it as follows. GHG absorbs some *portion* of heat of atmosphere and radiates it in all directions. GH gases only absorb a portion of the total heat so some portion of each re-radiation is always escaping to space and some goes back to the surface.
Because there is a constant flow of solar energy to the Earth, an equilibrium will be formed where the energy in equals the energy out.
I believe there will be a logarithmic fall of in the CO2 GH effect as you rise in the atmosphere as there will be a decreasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere the higher up you go. I believe that this reduction is reasonably gradual so a logarithmic relationship is likely.
The simplest representation of the diminishing effect of each additional CO2 molecule on direct warming compared with its predecessors already in the air is logarithmic. This approximate logarithmicity is generally agreed. However, the diminishing returns it provides do not please the climate-change community: so they currently pretend to discern a linear relationship between CO2 concentration and equilibrium sensitivity, though it is possible that this lnearity arises because they think unit feedback response will increase a little with temperature.
Any longwave radiation in one of the wavebands of CO2 – whether incoming or outgoing – that meets a CO2 molecule will induce an artificial dipole moment in the molecule, causing it to resonate in its bending vibrational mode. That resonance at the molecular level is by definition thermal radiation – i.e., heat. The heat, therefore, radiates in all directions, causing a general warming of the atmosphere.
“Lord Monckton makes the perfectly logical point that the solar radiation itself would have produced some feedback itself.”
That point may be perfectly logical but it’s also perfectly irrelevant. You can see this in Lord Monckton’s slide at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/11/an-electronic-analog-to-climate-feedback/.
As you can see from that slide, Lord Moncton looks upon the temperature E with feedback as a function of the value R the temperature would have assumed without feedback. He contends that “climatology” uses the wrong approach to infer equilibrium climate sensitivity ΔE_2 from (1) the purportedly known temperature change ΔR_2 that doubling CO2 would cause without feedback, (2) the pre-industrial and current temperature values E_1 and E_2, and (3) the corresponding without-feedback values R_1 and R_2.
But think about that. You want to extrapolate, from R_1, R_2, E_1, and E_2, the after-doubling with-feedback temperature E_1 + ΔE_2 that corresponds to the value R_1 + ΔR_2 the after-doubling temperature would have without feedback. You’ve been given all those quantities except ΔE_2. How would your solution to that problem differ if you thought solar radiation doesn’t itself produce feedback?
Obviously, it wouldn’t differ at all. As the plot that follows the slide shows, you have two points in E(R) and you need to extrapolate the third one. You don’t care where the known values came from. And according to Lord Monckton, “climatology” solved this problem incorrectly and thereby obtained that plot’s green cross. He says feedback theory dictates the red cross instead. I say it doesn’t.
Oh, he goes on and on about my not knowing what’s in the paper he doesn’t divulge, and he says I’ve taken the slide out of context. But if you look closely you’ll see that he has nowhere demonstrated any way in which I have misrepresented that slide. It says what it says.
Think for yourself; analyze what he wrote. You’ll see that “whether the solar radiation itself would have produced some feedback itself” is a red herring.
Mr Born grossly misrepresents our positiion. He knows perfectly well that there is indeed a large feedback response to emission temperature; that, therefore, there is only a small feedback response to direct warming by greenhouse gases; and that, therefore, the total anthropogenic feedback response to date is less than 0.1 K.
Mr Born probably doesn’t know that climatology itself implicitly assumes invariance of the unit feedback response, of the system-gain factor and of equilibrium sensitivity with surface temperature. If one makes the same assumption as climatology does, then the system-gain factor is indeed simply the ratio of equilibrium to reference temperature.
However, we do not simply assume that these quantities are near-invariant with temperature. We demonstrate that they are, by reference to known climatological quantities for the periods 1850-2020 et separatim from 1990-2020.
Whether solar radiation produces feedbacks may be a red herring in terms of whatever argument you and Monckton are having but it is not a red herring in terms of determining what the *ECS actually is*.
I do not agree with the position advanced in the OP that the ECS would be constant over time. If I understand your position, it seems that we may agree on this point at least.
However, I think that it is pretty likely that the models themselves were simply tuned to correspond, more or less, to the 25K/8.5Wm2 value. In that context, Monckton’s presentation is a reasonable *critique* of the models. IOW, he seems to be taking the same basic approach that they do except he considers sunlight to be one of the perturbations to the climate (which of course it is).
In response to Shawnhet, climatology’s incorrect derivation of ECS by failing to take account of the emission-temperature feedback response is indeed all too evident in the peer-reviewed literature on climate sensitivity. Though the models do not explicitly incorporate feedback formulism, it is most unlikely that the modelers would have tuned the models to produce so large an equilibrium sensitivity if climate scientists had not repeatedly misdefined temperature feedback and had not repeatedly misapplied feedback formulism in their learned papers.
Aside from that Joe it does precisely nothing to deny AGW.
The climate is not an electronic circuit.
And does not behave like one.
Just again to highlife m’lord’s lifelong and entitled denial and obfuscation we have,…..
”Anthony Watts was unfortunately misled by the head posting into imagining – incorrectly – that the team of eminent researchers”.
“Anthony Watts was unfortunately misled by the head posting into imagining – incorrectly – that the team of eminent researchers
Which “eminent researchers”
Why can’t they speak for themselves?
In m’lord’s world they don’t’ have to coz he say’s so.
And that’s enough – don’t you know?
Just invented squirrels.
Saying stuff and never proving it.
Lies.
Just as Peter Hadfield exposed.
Snake-oil seller par excellence.
Mr Banton continues the climate-Communist campaign of vilification and denigration, more than a little childishly expressed. The moderators have already warned him once. I request that he should desist, and should concentrate instead on addressing the scientific case in a temperate and logical fashion.
Mr Banton says I have done nothing to deny anthropogenic global warming. Of course I haven’t, for it is likely that some fraction of the observed warming of recent decades is anthropogenic.
Mr Banton also says the climate “is not an electronic circuit and does not behave like one”. He is perhaps unaware that in control theory, the science of feedback, which has been well established for 100 years and has been repeatedly demonstrated in reality as well as in theory, is universally applicable to feedback-moderated dynamical systems, specifically including electronic circuits and the climate.
For this reason, climatology has itself used the electronic-circuit analogy (see e.g. Schwartz 2009), and so, for that matter – albeit inexpertly – has Mr Born.
“and should concentrate instead on addressing the scientific case in a temperate and logical fashion.”
What a hypocrit.
Not once have you addressed my “scintific points”
I have repeat posted them twice now m’lord
“He is perhaps unaware that in control theory, the science of feedback,”
More “H”
Neither are you m’lord so appeal to an authority that doesn’t exist dont count.
“That was why, when our national laboratory ”
What “National laboratory”
Where’s the peer-reviwed paper with their references and testimony?
Lies and an appeal to a non-existing authority.
Snake-oil salesman, even Anthony Watts calls out.
But we still get him answering absolutley nothing on here that asks critical questions – plenty of obfuscation, adhom and verbiage.
SO we end up precisely NOWWHERE. (what’s new with him)
Except m’lord gets to preen and revel in the hugs ‘n’ kisses.
Sorry again MOD but can you not see what he is doing —- even through your obvious sympathy with his cause.
This sort of behaviour should not be rewarded, expecially not in science which works by persuading people with evidence and curteus reply to questioning.
Mr Banton makes no discernible scientific point. He continues to make climate-Communist ad-hominem attacks that do not impress.
As usual Anthony Banton issues up nothing to back up his and other illogical alarmist claims that the trace gas, CO₂, being only between .03-.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere and 1.6 times more dense than the Earth’s atmosphere, is what drives the Earth’s climate and causes its temperature to rise. Carbon dioxide does none of that because there is no greenhouse effect caused by CO₂. The Earth is warmed due to the life giving rays of the sun. It remains warmed in the temperate zones and tropics due to the pressure of the gases in its atmosphere that is reflected in how much mercury that pressure will displace which amounts to the barometric pressure at various altitudes and that is directly reflected in the temperature range at that altitude. I know much about this relationship between altitude and temperature from having went over the 17,769 ft Tharong-La pass on the Annapurna circuit in Nepal and also on my hike to Everest Base camp in Nepal & also when on Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Then we have alarmist maintaining that; “This research has improved our understanding of how much the world will eventually warm if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is maintained at double the level of pre-industrial times”. Plus this nonsense; “There is much greater certainty that, if left unchecked, global warming would be high enough to bring very severe impacts and risks worldwide”, when in fact there is no evidence that CO₂ has anything to do with the Earth’s temperature or its climate. I enjoy seeing what other fable that someone who is so illogical and gullible to believe that the trace gas, CO₂, that is only .03-.04% of the total atmosphere of the Earth has the unbelievable ability to now do to the planet since it became a tool of the unscrupulous people to use to try to control the citizens of the world. In today’s world, who controls the energy controls the world’s population.
Altitude Above Sea Level Temperature Barometer In. Hg. Abs. Atmospheric Pressure
500 feet 57⁰F 14⁰C 29.38 17.48 PSI
15,000 feet 6⁰F -14⁰C 16.89 8.29 PSI
http://meteorologytraining.tpub.com/14269/css/14269_75.htm
Vacuum Implosion
Mr Eggburn asks why one uses an electronic analogue of the feedback amplifier that is the climate. The reason is that the laws of control theory are of universal applicability to all dynamical systems moderated by feedback. That is why numerous papers in climatology (Hansen 1984, Schlesinger 1988, Roe & Baker 2007; Monckton of Brenchley 2008; Schwartz 2009; Roe 2009; Lacis et al. 2010; Lindzen & Choi 2011; Lacis et al.2013; IPCC 2013; Monckton of Brenchley et al. 2015) and countless other papers on both sides of the climate-change divide have used the control-theoretic equations for the feedback amplifier.
That was why, when our national laboratory carried out the tests for us, it understood and accepted that the results were no less applicable to the climate than to the electronic circuit which had been designed to test – for instance – whether or not there is a feedback response to the base signal (emission temperature) even in the absence of any perturbations of the base signal (direct greenhouse-gas warmings). The answer was, of course, Yes, there is such a feedback response. Furthermore, at any given moment the feedback response is proportional to the entire reference signal (the sum of th base signal and any perturbations).
Yet points such as these come as a complete surprise to climatologists, which is why we carried out the tests. Feedback responses cannot be directly measured in the climate: but they can be directly measured in electronic circuits.
Mr Eggburn raises a sensible point about the light-speed of the electronic circuit compared with the far slower approach to equilibrium in the climate. However, that delay in equilibration following a perturbation is readily allowed for by the energy-budget method, which takes explicit account of the estimated Earth energy imbalance (the excess of incoming over outgoing radiation over a specified period). See Gregory (2004); Lewis & Curry (2014, 2018).
Time delays can be implemented in the OP AMP’s feedback circuit (positive or negative) with a series capacitor in line with the feedback signal, and even then this series capacitor can be arranged in parallel with a feedback resistor (for more complex delay signatures).
Charles raises an excellent point. However, we prefer to do things the very simplest way, and, as far as possible, as climatologists do things: and they allow for delay in system response by explicitly accounting for the Earth’s measured energy imbalance.
can someone point me to a calculation of the earths surface temperature if there was no water and an atmosphere of just N2 and O2 ?
Certainly. The total solar irradiation is 1363.5 Watts per square meter; the albedo without any clouds but with more sea ice than now would be 0.148; the emissivity would be 0.94; the Stefan-Boltzmann constant is 0.000000056704 Watts per square meter per Kelvin to the fourth power: therefore, a first approximation to emission temperature would be about 271 K (cf. 274 K in Lindzen 1994).
However, one must also allow for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals, because the insolation at each point must be diminished by the cosine of the solar zenith angle. That gives an emission temperature – i.e. the temperature with no greenhouse gases in the air – of about 255 K.