The new Pause lengthens: now 7 years 6 months

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The new Pause has lengthened by another month. On the UAH satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset, seven and a half years have passed since there was any trend in global warming at all. As always, if anyone has seen this surely not uninteresting fact mentioned in the Marxstream news media, let us know in comments. One of the best-kept secrets in what passes for “journalism” these days is that global temperature has not been rising steadily (or, since October 2014, at all). It has been rising in occasional spurts in response to natural events such as the great Pacific shift of 1976 and the subsequent strong el Niño events, rather than at the somewhat steadier rate that one might expect if our continuing – and continuous – sins of emission were the primary culprit.

To forestall the usual whingeing about “cherry-picking” from the climate-fanatical trolls, here is the entire HadCRUT4 record of monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies for the 172 years 1850-2021. The trend is a not particularly catastrophic half a degree per century equivalent. Oo-er! Stap me vitals!

The HadCRUT4 dataset, now at last updated to the end of 2021, shows no global warming for almost eight years:

The significance of these long Pauses should not be underestimated. IPCC (1990, p. xxiv) confidently predicted 1.8 K global mean anthropogenic warming from 1850-2030. Of this, 0.5 K (HadCRUT5: Morice et al. 2021) had occurred by 1990, so that the projection was equivalent to 1.3 K over the four decades 1991-2030, or 0.34 K decade^–1. However, observed warming from January 1991 to December 2021 as the mean of the monthly UAH lower-troposphere and HadCRUT4 surface monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies, was 0.5 K, or 0.18 K decade^–1. Even if all warming since 1990 was anthropogenic (which it was not), IPCC’s finger-in-the-air prediction has proven to be almost twice outturn.

Meanwhile, soi-disant “leaders” on both sides of the Atlantic, having half-wittedly committed themselves to the Party Line on climate so sedulously peddled for so long by the Desinformatsiya directorate of the KGB (now FSB) and by the many Chinese agents of influence (such as the “Confucius Institutes” at many Western universities), dare not lose face. They cannot bring themselves to admit that they have been wrong, that they have been fooled, and that they have needlessly and expensively ended the free market in energy supply. They cannot brin themselves to change their catastrophic and unaffordable energy policies, even in the face of the fact that it was their eagerness to suppress competition from coal-fired power-stations in the name of Saving The Planet that was the chief source of funding for Vlad the Invader’s special military massacre in Ukraine.

On this side of the pond, Boris Johnson – than whom no previous prime minister has ever known less about science and mathematics – is about to publish an “energy strategy” that is widely expected to remove the now-formidable zoning constraints that have, for a few blissful years, prevented the installation of almost all new onshore unreliables.

I am now in Scotland on a walking holiday, but it is a lot less of a holiday than once it was. For every hillside is infested with whomping windmills – 14^th-century technology to address a 21^st-century non-problem. Birds, bees and bats by the billion are being blended or batted out of the sky. Yet few politicians dare to challenge the climate-Communist Party Line for fear of being unpersoned by savage, organized and persistent reputational assaults.

For instance, in a further attempt to damage my own reputation (for our research is more than somewhat challenging to the Party Line, and there are increasing signs of panic in the ranks of the ungodly), some wretched climate fanatic has asked the overpaid, under-responsible numbskulls at the office of the Clerk of the Parliaments, the senior bureaucrat at the House of Lords, to order me to stop using my well-kent logo, the portcullis (a generic heraldic charge) surmounted by the coronet vicecomital, a hat to which I and just 28 other Viscounts are entitled. I ran up this design on my architectural drawing program, I have been using it for well over a decade, and I shall continue to use it:

The House of Lords uses a badly-drawn, puke-red, 2-dimensional representation of the portcullis, with chains droopily pendent rather than triumphantly volant, and surmounted not by my coronet vicecomital, distinguished by the nine visible pearls, but by the Crown Royal. As the cuisses-de-cuir will discover to their dismay when they consult Garter King of Arms before shooting their mouths off again in their eagerness to advance climate Communism, a coronet vicecomital and a Crown Royal are clean different things. I have never used the latter, for I am not really royal. I am merely the Queen’s seventh cousin twice removed (“Kindly remove him a third time”).

The dusty dolts will also discover from Garter (who will, no doubt, much enjoy this nonsense, just as I do) that no one else has registered my device and that, therefore, I am fully entitled to use it. How lucky you are, across the pond, that your wise Constitution altogether prohibits titles of nobility. That is one more thing the bureaucrats in your country can’t try to mess up and use against us as they try to do here.

The gnomes of Westminster are also proposing to consult the Lord Chamberpot, whose original job, before Thos. Crapper Esq. came along, was to empty the night soil from the Royal porcelain each morning. For they do not like me to call myself a member of the House of Lords (which I am, for the letters patent granted by Her Majesty to my late beloved grandfather have not been withdrawn or repealed by the special Act of Parliament that would be necessary). Indeed, I was in the House only the other day, giving a briefing to a group of my peers, one of whom even voted for me in a by-election for a vacant hereditary seat.

By vice of the House of Lords Act 1999, passed by a Communist administration, nearly all hereditary peers have no seat or vote. But we remain members of the House until hundreds of individual special Acts are passed, to annul our letters patent. And that won’t happen anytime soon.

It is time to start building coal-fired power stations again. That would cut electricity bills by five-sixths. It is also time to reject electric buggies. Otherwise we shall make exactly the same mistake we made in shutting down the coal-fired power stations that generated electricity at less than half the unit cost of Siberian gas. As things now stand, we shall ban production of all internal-combustion engines and replace them with electric buggies very nearly all of which, throughout the world, will utterly depend upon lithium carbonate whose production is owned or controlled by Communist China. Enjoy your personal transport while it lasts. Even if you can afford to run the present one, you won’t be able to afford a new one.

This strategic double-whammy – replacing our own coal with Kremlin gas and our own petroleum with Peking lithium carbonate – is a self-inflicted and, if not reversed, potentially fatal wound to the economies as well as to the freedoms of the West.

It will make no difference to global temperature. Even if all the nations bound by the Paris discords actually achieved net-zero emissions by 2050, as Mr Johnson fatuously proposes, the global warming abated would be little more than a twentieth of a degree, for most countries are not bound by it. The cost to the free world – and the profit to Communism – would be in the quadrillions. Is that really what we want to achieve?

Well, no, we don’t. The global warming scam was based on an elementary mistake. Consider the position in 1850. Climatologists forgot the Sun was shining. They took the whole 24 K feedback response up to that year and attributed all of it to the 8 K direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. Therefore, they imagined that because the 32 K sum of these two values was four times the 8 K reference sensitivity to the preindustrial gases the 1 K direct warming by doubled CO₂ today would become, at midrange, about 4 K (CMIP6: Zelinka et al. 2020).

They had forgotten the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature that would obtain at the surface if, at the outset, there were no greenhouse gases in the air at all. They had misallocated it to, and miscounted it as part of, the actually tiny feedback response to the 8 K direct warming by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. At any given moment – such as 1850 – any feedback processes then subsisting must perforce respond equally to each degree of the entire (255 + 8) K reference temperature and hence proportionately to each component therein.

For 1850, the system-gain factor, by which one multiplies a direct warming (or reference sensitivity) to allow for feedback response and derive final warming (or equilibrium sensitivity) is not, as Hansen (1984), Schlesinger (1988) or Lacis (2010, 2013) absurdly imagined, 32 / 8 = 4. Instead, it is (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) < 1.1. Their error is as elementary as that.

The feedback-loop schematic below represents not only a linear feedback system (such as climatology imagines the climate to be, for CMIP6 models’ midrange prediction implies a midrange system-gain factor today identical to, or even somewhat less than, that of 1850). It also serves to represent a potentially non-linear system at a particular moment of interest, here 1850. Note that the simplified feedback formulism shown in the diagram gives outputs identical to the more complex formulism in the textbooks, if based on identical inputs. But the simpler formulism is a lot easier to understand than the original formulism developed by Black (1934) and codified by Bode (1945).

The 255 K emission temperature erroneously neglected by climatology in its derivation of feedback response and hence of equilibrium doubled-CO₂ sensitivity (ECS) is shown in gold. Dark blue values are common to the erroneous and corrected methods. Erroneous values consequent upon forgetting that the Sun is shining and thus neglecting the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature are italicized in red. Corrected values, in green, are below the italicized erroneous values.

Since reference doubled-CO₂ sensitivity (RCS) is about 1 K, ECS is approximately equal to the system-gain factor. For 1850 – and for today, if, as is very likely, climatology is at least right in taking the system-gain factor as invariant in the industrial era – the 4 K predicted midrange ECS in the CMIP6 models is about 4 times the corrected 1.1 K ECS.

If the system-gain factor were to be just 1% greater today than it was in 1850, then ECS would exceed the value implicit in the data for the climate in 1850 by 250%, because that 1% change must be applied not only to reference sensitivities but also to emission temperature itself. Yet global warming is not even occurring at the rate originally predicted on the basis of climatology’s error. It is occurring at little more than half that rate – and that is before making any allowance for the fact that not all warming in recent decades was anthropogenic.

Accordingly, the absurdly elevated feedback fractions imagined by climatology based on diagnoses from the outputs of the wretched climate models cannot possibly be correct. Which means, in turn, that the climate models themselves cannot possibly be correct. For if the feedbacks diagnosed from their crazy outputs were correct then ECS would be somewhere between 450 and 600 K, and it just isn’t.

Our paper explaining these inconvenient truths has been languishing at a leading journal, marked on its author tracking system as “With Editor”, for well over a year. While I am in Scotland, I am hoping to consult a very senior police contact about the numerous fraudulent aspects of the climate scam in general, and about the misconduct of the journals in particular.

If a journal says it will usually give a response within x days but no response is forthcoming even after 5x days, and if that journal says it brings the latest science to its readers and generally represents itself as publishing properly-peer-reviewed science, and if its editor is sitting on our paper because he cannot refute its argument but is not willing to publish it because he has previously gone on record as saying that we skeptics have no credible arguments against the Party Line, then that is fraud by false representation. We have had enough of it. For it is – as the late Nils-Axel Mörner used to say, the largest fraud in human history.

The tens of thousands of gallant Ukrainians slaughtered by the brutal advance of clapped-out Communism would perhaps still be alive today if we had been able to prevent the climate fraud that has, in no small measure, paid for Vlad’s reconstruction and expansion of his armed forces. For that reason, I suspect we may well now get a fair hearing from the police and, in due course, from the intelligence services of the West.

For our own nations’ protection, as well as for that of the myriad past, present and potential future victims of Russian and Chinese Communism, the most murderous form of government the world has known, we can no longer tolerate this nonsense from which the Marxists so mightily profiteer. Our politicians are too thick and too frit to stop it, but the police, the intelligence services and eventually the courts can – and will.