By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Regular readers of WUWT will know that some years ago my team of eminent climatologists and control theorists discovered that, remarkably, climatology had – at a vital point in its calculations of how much warming we may cause – forgotten that the Sun was shining.
Climatologists’ error arose from interdisciplinary compartmentalization. They borrowed feedback math from control theory, a mature branch of engineering physics, but without understanding what they had borrowed.
Their error was so large that, after correction, the near-certainty of future global warming large enough to be catastrophic vanishes, and the tawdry notion of “climate emergency” with it.
The climate activists hate our result not because it is wrong but because it is right. To coin a phrase, it is an inconvenient truth. They have been working overtime to try to suppress it, not least by writing inept, inaccurate, ignorant, intemperate or inspissate comments about it in the discussion threads here.
Likewise, the unlearned journals of climate “science” are doing their level worst to keep our paper from being properly peer-reviewed, let alone published. The journal to which we most recently sent it – well over a year ago – advertises that its average time from submission to decision is less than three months. We have been waiting four or five times longer than that.
One makes some allowance for the general chaos caused by the Chinese virus. However, the pandemic has now become endemic, so it is time for the journals to get on with their work. Yet a recent polite reminder to the editor of the journal has gone altogether unanswered. That, to say the least, is discourteous and unprofessional. It will be for the courts, in due course, to decide whether it is also corrupt.
Gary Pearse, in a comment on my recent posting about the lengthening of the new Pause to seven and a half years, where I explained some aspects of our research, wrote:
Christopher this is a jewel of an explanation of your thesis and I wish others could find such a touchstone for their technical criticisms of other aspects of the scam. I am an engineer, so had no trouble understanding the idea as originally presented, but the vast majority do not understand. These are the people we do not reach!
In this posting, I shall try to do as Gary suggests and reach the people we do not reach. I shall not succeed in reaching all of them. Some are determined not to be reached, regardless of the mere truth.
I propose to answer some of the questions that have been raised about our result. But feedback theory is not easy. If you are not technically minded, you may struggle here and there. However, I shall do my best to keep everything to simple arithmetic, and to explain necessary concepts as I go.
How can you prove that climatology forgot the Sun was shining?
One of the earliest methods of estimating equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity (ECS) – the warming eventually caused by a radiative forcing equivalent to doubling the CO2 in the air – was to look at what happened in 1850, before we had greatly influenced global temperature, which was then at equilibrium: thereafter, there would be no trend in global warming for 80 years.
In 1984 James Hansen at NASA, followed by Michael Schlesinger in 1988, Lacis (again at NASA) in 2010 and 2013 and countless others, carried out the following crude calculation.
Direct warming by the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases up to 1850 was about 8 K. But the total natural greenhouse effect was 32 K. It was the difference between the 287 K global mean surface temperature in 1850 and the 255 K emission temperature that would prevail near the surface if there were no greenhouse gases in the air at all at the outset, simply because the Sun is shining.
The 24 K difference between the 32 K natural greenhouse effect and the 8 K reference sensitivity to preindustrial greenhouse gases was temperature feedback response.
Feedback response is an additional warming chiefly driven by more water vapor, the condensing greenhouse gas, in warmer air. It is dependent upon and proportional to the direct temperature that engendered it.
Therefore, Hansen, Schlesinger, Lacis and many, many others imagined that the system-gain factor – the ratio of final or equilibrium warming after accounting for feedback response to direct or reference warming before accounting for it – must be about 32 / 8, or 4.
Wrong.
Direct warming by doubled CO2 (called reference doubled-CO2 sensitivity, or RCS) is 1 K. Climatology implicitly assumes (with good reason, as it turns out) that the system-gain factor today is very much as it was in 1850. Then, on the basis that the system-gain factor in 1850 was 32 / 8, or 4, it assumes the final warming by doubled CO2 (the equilibrium sensitivity or ECS), is likely to be 4 K.
Also wrong.
ECS of 4 K was the conclusion in Hansen (1984), and it remains climatology’s conclusion today: the mean midrange ECS projected by the CMIP6 models is 3.9 K (Zelinka et al 2020 supp.).
Yet, as my monthly postings on the latest of many Pauses in global temperature illustrate, the actual rate of global warming is a lot less than had originally been predicted. Astonishingly, the chief reason for climatology’s extravagant over-predictions of warming and of consequent Thermageddon is that Hansen and so many others after him had simply forgotten that the Sun is shining.
At any given moment – such as 1850 – the feedback processes then subsisting must perforce respond equally to each degree of the entire reference temperature, which, in 1850, was the 263 K sum of the 255 K emission or sunshine temperature and the 8 K reference sensitivity.
Therefore, those feedback processes must, at that moment, respond in strict proportion to the magnitude of each component in reference temperature, specifically including emission temperature, and not only to the 8 K reference sensitivity to preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases.
As will be explained later, this requirement of strict proportionality does not in any degree imply that the system-gain factor must be constant throughout the industrial era: i.e., that the system is in this respect linear in its behavior.
However, climatologists, in doing their rinky-dink 32 / 8 = 4 calculation, overlook the very large feedback response to emission temperature. In effect, they add it to, and miscount it as though it were part of, the actually minuscule feedback response to direct warming by greenhouse gases. Here, for instance, is Hansen (1984):
“Our 3D global climate model yields a warming of for either a
increase of [solar irradiance] or doubled CO2. This indicates a net [system-gain factor] of …
–
.”
Hansen goes on to say that emission temperature is 255 K and that today’s temperature is 288 K, from which the current 33 K greenhouse effect follows.
The system-gain factor for 1850, derivable from the quite well-constrained data for 1850, must be – but is not – applied not only to the 8 K reference sensitivity to greenhouse gases but also to the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature itself.
The system-gain factor in 1850 was not 32 / 8 = 4 but rather (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) = 1.09. In that simple correction, about which the trolls have been meticulously and cravenly silent, the sheer magnitude of climatology’s error can be discerned.
Since RCS is just over 1 K, ECS is not the 4 K imagined by Hansen and still imagined today by most of the CMIP6 models: it is a harmless and net-beneficial 1.1-1.2 K. End of climate “emergency”.
If, therefore, climatologists had remembered that the Sun is shining, they would have realized that, since the 255 K emission temperature is about 30 times the 8 K reference sensitivity to preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, very nearly all of the 24 K feedback response that climatology attributes to greenhouse gases – in fact, about 23.3 K of it – is in reality attributable to the fact that the Sun is shining (except in Scotland). Only 0.7 K is feedback response to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases.
There is no doubt about this result for 1850. Hansen, Schlesinger, Lacis and many, many others, including me in my first peer-reviewed paper on climate sensitivity, made the very same mistake. We were all simply wrong. There are no two ways about it. Oops!
I had made the mistake because I had asked Sir John Houghton, then IPCC’s science chairman, why climatology imagined that, contrary to common sense, feedback response was not just greater than the reference sensitivity that engendered it but three times greater.
Sir John had replied that in 1850 the feedback response to the 8 K direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases was 24 K, so that the natural greenhouse effect was 32 K, whereupon the system-gain factor was 32 / 8, or 4, so that ECS, then as now, was 3-4 times the 1 K RCS.
Sir John was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that although IPCC (2013) mentions “feedback” some 1100 times, in today’s conditions – without significant error – one may ignore feedback response altogether when deriving ECS. For ECS is not, after all, three or four times RCS. It is about the same.
What is the effect of data uncertainties on our result?
Using the corrected method, the ±15 K uncertainty in emission temperature and the ±10% uncertainty in natural and anthropogenic reference sensitivities (the latter from Cess et al. 1993) make practically no difference: ECS based on the data for 1850 is constrained to 1.1-1.2 K. However, forgetting the sunshine and using the erroneous method, ECS for 1850 may be anywhere from 2-6 K.
How can it be that, after correction of climatology’s control-theoretic error, a system-gain factor just 1% greater today than in 1850 would entail ECS today exceeding by 250% of the value implicit in the climate data for 1850?
The system-gain factor in 1850, using better-resolved values than the round numbers we have used so far, was 1.095. Multiply the 1.056 K RCS by 1.095 and you get about 1.2 K ECS. Increase the system-gain factor by 1% to 1.106 and, before correcting the error, you still get about 1.2 K ECS.
However, after correcting the error, if today’s system-gain factor were 1.106, just 1% above its value in 1850, then – taking today’s reference temperature as the 263.66 K sum of the 255 K emission temperature, the 7.6 K natural reference sensitivity, and the RCS of 1.056 K – ECS today would be equal to 1.106 (263.66 K) – 287.5 K, or 4.1 K.
On that basis, today’s ECS, then, the 4.1 K difference between today’s equilibrium temperature of 291.6 K and the observed 287.5 K equilibrium temperature in 1850, would indeed exceed the 1.2 K ECS derivable from the data for 1850 by about 250%.
The unattainable precisions to which RCS and the system-gain factor are here specified are adopted ad experimentum to illustrate the disproportionately large effect on ECS of a very small change in the system-gain factor, once climatology’s control-theoretic error is corrected.
But surely the very fact that a tiny increase in the system-gain factor that is the measure of feedback response can have so disproportionately large an impact on ECS means the current official estimates of ECS are a possibility?
Yes, high ECS is possible. However, after correcting the error one would no longer regard it as near-certain. The following are among the consequences of correcting climatology’s control-theoretic error –
First, the near-certainty of apocalyptic warming upon which public policy is currently predicated vanishes. That near-certainty was an artefact of climatology’s error of physics.
Secondly, given the assumption, implicit in official climatology’s midrange estimates of 4 K ECS on the 1850 data and 3.9 K today, that the system-gain factor in the industrial era is very close to constant, and given the continuing failure of global temperature to rise at anything like the predicted rate, high ECS is not possible after all.
Thirdly, the official estimates of ECS, rooted in and consequent upon climatology’s control-theoretic error, are predicated upon a currently-estimated system-gain factor so absurdly large that, after correction of the error, it would imply ECS of several hundred degrees. More of this later.
Fourthly, since climatology’s currently-estimated midrange system-gain factor 2.2 is derivable directly from its midrange estimates of individual feedback strengths, and since even the most fanatical climate Communists do not yet assert that ECS is several hundred degrees, those feedback strengths are manifestly excessive.
Fifthly, since climatology’s imagined feedback strengths are diagnosed from the outputs of the general-circulation models (which do not incorporate feedback math directly), and since those feedback strengths are unquestionably excessive and their intervals untenably broad, the models’ outputs are in this crucial respect unsound. They are, therefore, irredeemably valueless for predicting future warming.
Sixthly, the interval of climatology’s system-gain factor, implicit in the enormous officially-published uncertainties in individual feedback strengths, runs from unity to infinity. It is the least well-constrained quantity in the entire history of physics.
Seventhly, since climatology cannot constrain its system-gain factor, all of its predictions of global warming – predictions upon which scientifically-illiterate Western politicians have been inveigled into destroying their economies in the name of Saving The Planet – are no better than guesswork.
Can you explain in simple terms how the feedback loop works?
By all means. Consider the position in 1850. The system diagram below is based on a far simpler formulism than is used in control theory. The simpler formulism that we have developed, under the meticulous guidance of a tenured professor of control theory who is examining the latest draft of our paper as we speak, is functionally equivalent to the more complex formulism that is traditional. It produces the same output for the same inputs, but it is a whole lot easier to follow.
Simplified temperature-feedback formulism: Dark blue quantities are common to both climatology’s method and the corrected method; climatology’s erroneous quantities are italicized in red; and corrected quantities are in green.
Let us stroll around the feedback loop, beginning at the summative input-output node (marked with a “+”) at the top. We begin, as climatology does not, with the fact that the Sun is shining. Therefore, the 255 K emission temperature must be included as an input to the loop. Climatology, in its bottomless ignorance of control theory, ignores it altogether.
The only input that climatology feeds into the summative node is the 8 K natural reference sensitivity – i.e., the direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases.
Now we follow the arrows. Climatology’s output signal, ignoring the 255 K emission temperature and its large feedback response, is the 32 K natural greenhouse effect. The corrected output is 255 K + 32 K, the 287 K the global mean surface temperature in 1850.
Continuing clockwise round the loop in the direction of the arrows, we enter the feedback block. The feedback fraction, the value of that block treated as an operator at a given moment (here 1850), is simply the fraction of equilibrium temperature represented by feedback response.
However, again climatology ignores the big yellow elephant in the sky and omits the 255 K emission temperature and, therefore, the feedback response thereto. Accordingly, it imagines (nonsensically) that the feedback fraction is equal to 24 K / 32 K, or 0.75, an enormous value (explicitly stated in Lacis et al. 2010, for instance) that is wildly implausible a priori in an essentially thermostatic system.
Over the past 810,000 years (you’re too young to remember), global temperature reconstructed by Jouzel et al. (2007) from Greenland ice cores has varied by little more than your thermostat at home allows when the heating is on. That is how near-perfectly thermostatic the climate is – not that you’d think it if you have swallowed official climatology’s lurid predictions of up to 11 K warming this century from our sins of emission.
The corrected feedback fraction is not 24 / 32 but 24 / (255 + 32), or 0.08. Thus, the error has misled climatology into overestimating the feedback fraction by an order of magnitude (i.e., getting on for tenfold).
Two important quantities associated with the feedback fraction may now be derived: first, the crucial system-gain factor, the ratio of the equilibrium temperature signal after accounting for feedback response to the reference temperature signal before accounting for feedback response.
One troll has tried to imply that the term “system-gain factor” is not used in control theory. Well, it is. Get over it.
As we have seen, the true system-gain factor is not 32 / 8, or 4, but (255 + 32) / (255 + 8), a tad below 1.1. Climatology’s value is about four times what it should be.
But the full horror of the control-theoretic error perpetrated throughout climatology is best discerned by comparing the erroneous and corrected unit feedback responses. The unit feedback response is the ratio of the feedback response to the reference signal. The feedback response in 1850 is known to have been about 24 K. Climatology’s unit feedback response, then, is 24 / 8, or 3. Yet again, climatology forgets the sunshine. The corrected unit feedback response is 24 / (255 + 8), or less than 0.1. Note that the unit feedback response is necessarily 1 less than the system-gain factor, as the equations at bottom right of the diagram show.
The full measure of climatology’s horrific mistake can be clearly discerned once one realizes that its idiotically elevated unit feedback response is no less than 30 times the corrected value. No surprise, then, that climatology profitably predicted pandemonium. But it was wrong to do so. No expectation of catastrophe legitimately arises. Apocalypse? No!
Going on round the loop, the product of the output temperature signal and the feedback fraction is the feedback response in Kelvin. Here, since the 24 K feedback response is known and thus serves, unusually, as an input, both methods give the same answer: 24 K.
Returning to the summative input-output node where we started, the 24 K is fed into the summative input-output node, where it is added to the reference signal to give the output signal.
Climatology neglects the 255 K sunshine temperature. Therefore, its output is the 32 K sum of the 8 K natural reference sensitivity and the 24 K total feedback response. The corrected output, the 287 K equilibrium surface temperature in 1850, is thus 255 K greater than climatology’s 32 K.
And that, as a group of control engineers in Australia recently commented on seeing our simplified feedback formulism, is the simplest mathematical explanation of the operation of the feedback loop that you will see anywhere. It exposes the catastrophic effects on all the relevant variables if, as climatology does, one forgets the Sun is shining and does not input the emission temperature to the feedback loop.
Of course, one can do calculations based only on the deltas – the perturbationsin temperature before and after feedback response. But one must first apply the equations of the feedback loop properly, and that means taking explicit account of the base signal, emission temperature itself.
One final point. The climate activists try to maintain that system diagrams functionally identical to the one I have used here apply only to dynamical systems in which the system-gain factor is constant over time. In reality, however (and this is elementary), such a diagram may also serve to describe the state of any dynamical system – whether linear or non-linear – at a particular moment of interest (here 1850).
For when we say that feedback response at any given moment is strictly proportional to the respective contributions of the constituents in the reference temperature at that moment, we are saying nothing whatsoever about whether that system is linear or non-linear.
Ex definitione, where we describe the state of a system at a particular moment, we are not concerned at that moment with whether the system is linear or non-linear. We merely represent and reveal the relations and interactions between the relevant parameters as they stand at that particular moment.
Why must feedback response be close to linear after correction of climatology’s error?
One of the trolls commenting on our result is furious that we have adopted the apparently self-contradictory position of stating that the system-gain factor in a dynamical system such as the climate is not necessarily constant over time, but that in the real climate it is necessarily near-constant.
So let us explain. We have already shown that, after correction, a mere 1% increase in the system-gain factor compared with 1850 will engender a 250% increase in ECS today compared with the value derivable from the data for 1850.
But IPCC’s current midrange estimate of the system-gain factor is not just 1% greater than the value derivable for 1850. Based on energy-budget data in IPCC (2021), it is 2.2, approximately double the value in 1850. Once again, simple arithmetic is all we need in order to demonstrate that so large a system-gain factor is an impossibility.
To derive ECS today, we must multiply today’s reference temperature, including RCS, by today’s imagined (and imaginary) system-gain factor 2.2 and then subtract the 287 K equilibrium temperature in 1850, which was the product of the then system-gain factor 1.095 and the then (255 + 7.6) K reference temperature.
Today’s reference temperature, bearing in mind that the Sun is shining and that, therefore, the 255 K emission temperature engenders its own large feedback response, is the sum of 255 K and the 1850 reference sensitivity of 7.6 K plus the 1.06 K reference sensitivity to a forcing since 1850 equivalent to doubling the CO2 in the air.
So here goes: 2.2(255 + 7.6 + 1.06) – 287.5 = 292.6 K ECS. In the real world, though, ECS is not approaching 300 K. It is little more than 1 K.
That result shows just how abysmally excessive and utterly wrong are IPCC’s imagined values for individual and collective feedback strengths. It also shows why all existing methods of trying to derive ECS are doomed to fail. The models cannot do it, because the feedback strengths diagnosed from their outputs are massively excessive. The energy-budget method can’t do it either, for the same reason. A fortiori, one cannot derive ECS from paleoclimate observations, whose uncertainties are still greater than today’s.
The truth is that just about every word that has ever been written about climate sensitivity in hundreds of thousands of earnest but fatally misguided papers by climatologists, and in the interminable succession of interminable reports by the interminable IPCC, is utter nonsense.
Replace IPCC’s midrange system-gain factor 2.2 with the value 1.095 derived from the data for the equilibrium in 1850 and ECS comes out at 1.2 K, not almost 300 K. Replace it with the system-gain factor 3.7 implicit in the CMIP6 models’ current 3.9 K midrange ECS estimate and ECS approaches 600 K. That is how silly the models are.
Is a high ECS value consistent with feedback theory if the system is nonlinear?
Yes, but, as we have demonstrated, the nonlinearity is necessarily minuscule. Otherwise, on the basis of IPCC’s current midrange system-gain factor 2.2, by now global absolute temperature would have approximately doubled, and it hasn’t, and of course it won’t.
Why do you say that unless the system-gain factor is near-constant ECS will be hundreds of degrees?
The reason why current midrange estimates of the system-gain factor produce ECS values in the hundreds of degrees is that the system-gain factor (and thus any increase therein) will amplify not only the perturbation signal, reference sensitivity, but also the base signal, emission temperature itself. Global temperature has simply not risen at anything like a fast enough rate to be consistent – after correction of the error – with the high ECS predicted by official climatology.
Is your result merely bad extrapolation?
No. We do not extrapolate. We merely illustrate. It is climatology’s result that is bad extrapolation, based on miscounting the feedback response to emission temperature as though it were part of the actually minuscule feedback response to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, rendering that response and, therefore, ECS very much larger than is physically tenable.
Why is your result so obscure?
Control theory is hard (or, at least, it was until we derived the simplified but functionally equivalent formulism shown in the system diagram: the equations underlying that simple formulism are a whole lot simpler than the current equations).
Our professor of control theory tells us that at the end of each year, when he announces that nearly all his students will never have to wrestle with control theory ever again, he is met with thunderous applause. Control theory is hard work. We have done our best to carry out that work.
We have also done our best to try to make matters simple enough for any genuinely interested person to understand what we have found.
However, the efforts of the sullen climate Communists to confuse the issue, combined with some striking instances of flat-out ignorance on the part of people who have little or no qualifications, experience, publication record or knowledge of control theory and have not even bothered to consult those who have, has made our task somewhat harder.
For our result is fatal to the profiteers of doom. They will try to do whatever it takes to suppress it. But they will fail. For the truth is the truth, and it cannot be indefinitely fogged by artful obfuscation, interfered with, denied, repudiated or even concealed or suppressed. Journal editors and reviewers, please note.
Surely climatologists realized that the Sun was shining and, therefore, bore in mind the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature?
Just look at the system diagram again, and weep. It is abundantly clear from the patient, step-by-step calculations discussed above that at every material point in the feedback loop official climatology has persistently ignored emission temperature and its large feedback response. Therefore, its sums are wrong.
One or two have tried to suggest that because 255 K is about 18 degrees below freezing there would be no greenhouse effect at that temperature and that, therefore, climatologists were right to leave emission temperature out of account. Two answers to that:
First, it is an elementary schoolboy howler to try to derive emission temperature by a single, global application of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Instead, the equation should be performed over a series of annuli at various distances from the subsolar point, and the result integrated. A few years ago I did that exercise to see whether I could replicate the profile of surface temperature on the Moon as reported by the Diviner experiment. The curve I calculated by the annular method was more or less identical with that which – at a cost of billions – the Diviner satellite had spent years measuring.
One result of that interesting exercise was the discovery that – were it not for the numerous non-radiative transports of heat in the climate system – immediately beneath the subsolar point the oceans would boil, even if there were no greenhouse gases in the air. Therefore, even at a mean global emission temperature of no more than 255 K, the entire tropical ocean would be ice-free and water-vapor feedback would at once be present.
Secondly, and far more importantly, we do not need – after all – to try to imagine what the conditions on Earth would be like at emission temperature, and before the action of any feedback. For the starting-point of our calculations is 1850. That moment is of great interest, because it is far closer to the present, and because the climate was at that moment not significantly influenced by us, and because the climate was then at equilibrium.
At that time, like it or not, the reference signal was the sum of the 255 K emission temperature and the 8 K natural reference sensitivity, and the 24 K feedback response was a response to that entire reference signal and not, as official climatology foolishly imagines, only to the 8 K natural reference sensitivity.
Since feedback processes are inanimate, they cannot pick and choose which degrees of the temperature prevailing at a given moment they will respond to and which they will not. Therefore, at that or any particular moment, the feedback response must be apportioned in strict proportion to the values of the individual components in the reference signal.
The correct apportionment is about 23.3 K feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature and 0.7 K feedback response to the 8 K direct warming by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases – and not, as climatology imagines, 24 K feedback response to that 8 K natural reference sensitivity and 0 K feedback response to the 30-times-larger emission temperature. One has only to state the matter that way to see how silly the error is.
At 255 K emission temperature, is it not right that there would be very little water vapor, and, therefore, very little water-vapor feedback?
No. There would be a lot of water vapor in the tropics, right from the get-go. Do the Stefan-Boltzmann calculation for the subsolar point, and then for the tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, and for any point in between. The entire tropics would be ice-free under anything like modern celestial conditions if there were no greenhouse gases in the air at the outset. The water vapor feedback would begin operating immediately.
Surely your statement that “at any given moment – such as 1850 – any feedback processes then subsisting must perforce respond equally to the entire (255 + 8) K reference temperature, and hence proportionately to each component therein” implies that feedback in the climate system responds in a linear fashion?
No. Ex definitione, as noted earlier, if one is considering the system at a single particular moment of interest, one does not, at that moment, need to take any nonlinearities into account.
Surely you are incorrect to say that climatology’s high ECS estimates resulted from climate modelers’ failure to take the sunshine into account?
By now, if you have gallantly read this far, it will be entirely apparent to you that the chief reason why official climatology predicts high ECS is its elementary error of control theory.
Why have you written so often here at WUWT about the supposed error?
We have developed our ideas with no small assistance from WUWT and its army of informed commenters because many of them have sufficient expertise and knowledge of the facts and the data to be able to understand what we have found, and to assist us in refining our discovery.
Besides, just about every other avenue is closed off by the far Left in the media, in politics and even in ordinary conversation. They know they are wrong, but they cannot tolerate the loss of face that would arise if they admitted it. So they stifle debate. They no longer believe in freedom of speech, thought, research, publication or action, if ever they did.
So you’re saying that you’re right and the rest of the world is wrong?
No. I am saying that a team of specialists in all the relevant disciplines, after years of study and after wrestling with colleagues on both sides of the debate who are too profoundly embarrassed by the error ever to admit that they have perpetrated or perpetuated it, have concluded that the climate-change narrative is fatally compromised by climatology’s error, at a vital point in its climate-sensitivity calculations, in forgetting that the Sun is shining.
So… your statement that the system at any given point does not -effectively – have non-linearities amounts to taking the ‘slices’ of system behavior then integrating them? that non-linearities are a post-facto artifact? By the way, this is beyond fascinating and needs to be read a number of times (at least by a far dimmer than average bulb like me) to grasp.
One should distinguish between integrating the annular values given by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to determine emission temperature, on the one hand, and the distinct question of whether and to what extent the feedback regime in the climate is nonlinear.
Since the climate behaves as a mathematically chaotic object, one would expect nonlinear behavior. However, one can determine that the behavior is not very nonlinear by noting that even a very small perturbation in the system-gain factor, the ratio of the equilibrium to the reference signal, would cause a very much larger perturbation of ECS compared with the 1.1-1.2 K derivable from the data for the temperature equilibrium in 1850 than is consistent with the observed very small change in global temperature since then.
Now that this thread has been running for a few days and comments are approaching 300 – impressive given the head posting’s length and complexity – I should very much like to thank the existing and new commenters for the trouble they have taken to wade through the less-than-attractive Your Questions Answered format and to do us the kindness of taking the trouble to get to grips with our arguent and to understand it. Their kind contributions have greatly assisted us in clarifying our thinking as we continue our research.
Presuming whatever natural processes resulted in the temperature in 1850 are operating today is a basic science. The basic logic of Monckton’s argument as to feedback has no errors I can see.
Besides, he produces much the same estimate of TCS as Lewis and Curry, who were using radically different procedures, as did Lindzen and Choi.
I think you can add Howard Hayden to your list, who like the others uses ‘radically different procedures’ to demonstrate a low value for ECS. In a nutshell, his view is that the magnitude of the GHE at climate equilibrium can only change if there is a change in surface temperature and/or planetary albedo. So using the IPCC’s own estimate of 3.47 W/m2 per CO2 doubling for the change in forcing, and assuming no change in albedo, yields an ECS of 0.68C.
Logically that must be right even if radiative gases are the climate control knob.
However, I would aver that climatology has made more than one elementary error.
Additionally to the above they have not realised that the enhanced surface temperature for planets with atmospheres is a consequence of convective overturning and not radiative gases.
The implication is that even the residual ECS calculated by Christopher can be neutralised by an imperceptible alteration in the rate of convective overturning.
We would never be able to perceive it against the background of ever changing natural variability.
“Climate science” is GIGO computer gaming, not the science of climatology, as founded by the late, great Father thereof, Reid Bryson.
Quite so.
The late Hubert Lamb of the UK was a great climate scientist using proper science and there has been nobody like him since. Was one of the first meteorologists to point to changes of climate in human history.
Reading some of the ideas that the so called climate scientists have supposed to agree with. It is no wonder GIGO sums up climate model gaming.
There are all manner of hypotheses. What matters, however, is what can be proven. In our submission, we have proven our result. And that result, on its own, is enough to establish that just about everything that has ever been written in the learned journals of climate about estimated future global warming is profoundly incorrect.
I had made the mistake because I had asked Sir John Houghton …
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Didn’t he come up with the Global Warming Potential (GWP) numbers?
I heard that somewhere.
What is the name of the apparent warming due to the pressure gradient in the atmosphere?
Apparently unrelated to the composition of the atmospheres of various planets with an atmosphere, the temperature of the whole atmosphere acts as an extension of the black body – such that at an altitude where half the mass of the atmosphere is above you and half below, the average temperature is the usual black body temperature. And it doesn’t seem to matter if you are looking at Earth or red-hot Venus in spite of radically different atmospheres.
It looks as though the atmosphere as a whole absorbs an re-emits like a black body, but because of the gravitational gradient the heat is concentrated at the surface level.
Adiabatic?
In the absence of greenhouse gases, the atmosphere would be altitudinally isothermic. It is only because greenhouse gases are present that the lower strata are warmer than the upper strata.
I have seen experiments which do not support this. They do support a temperature gradient. Also, see the temperature profile of Saturn. It has only a tiny fraction of “greenhouse” gasses in its upper atmosphere yet has a temperature gradient.
I am afraid we take the ruthlessly simple approach of agreeing with all of official climatology except the points we can prove to be wrong. At present, official climatology is – rightly or wrongly – of the view that there would be no altitudinal temperature gradient to speak of in a world without any greenhouse gases in the air at the outset.
The head posting, therefore, concerns itself with the demonstrable error of control theory perpetrated by climatologists throughout the peer-reviewed journals. The error is large, and it is provable, and it is proven. That on its own is enough to bring the climate nonsense to an end.
Yes, you pick your arguments rather than becoming embroiled in an infinite mess.
So, take the following to be unnecessary for your line of reasoning but, if climatologists argue for an isothermal atmosphere, they’re wrong about that too.
An isothermal atmosphere is provably wrong. There will be conductive heat transfer between the surface and the atmosphere. (that’s how the heat sinks in your computer work) There will be thermal gradients between the equator and the poles as well as between day side and night side. Thus there will be convection and there will be thermal gradients in the atmosphere.
If the atmosphere were clear, the effective radiation temperature would be that which causes the energy received from the sun to equal the energy radiated back to space. However, the average surface temperature would be vastly different depending on whether or not heat is distributed.
The greenhouse effect is usually explained based on the average surface temperature. If heat were perfectly distributed so the surface were the same temperature everywhere, and we ignore albedo, the average surface temperature would be 279K. link
If heat were not distributed at all, the average surface temperature would be a lot lower. Therefore convection changes the average surface temperature by distributing heat.
When people talk about the greenhouse effect, I never see the heat distribution provided by the atmosphere taken into account. So, that’s one thing.
The other thing is that albedo is treated as a magic mirror that reflects energy but which has no other effects.
Albedo is predominantly determined by clouds. Because clouds interact with upwelling energy as well as downwelling energy, their net effect is cooling somewhere around 5K. So, that’s the other thing.
It is probable that the magnitude of the greenhouse effect is overstated.
“At present, official climatology is – rightly or wrongly – of the view that there would be no altitudinal temperature gradient to speak of in a world without any greenhouse gases in the air at the outset.”
If ΔQ = c * m* ΔT then ΔT = ΔQ / (c * m)
where c is specific heat and m is mass. For a gaseous atmosphere c is a function of pressure and absolute humidity, c(p,h). Same for a unit volume of atmosphere, m(p,h)
So what you get is ΔT = ΔQ / [ c(p,h) * m(p,h) ]
If the absolute humidity is 0, i.e. no water vapor) you still have
ΔT = ΔQ / [ c(p) * m(p) ]
indicating that there would be a temperature gradient throughout the atmosphere.
Now, you can ASSume that the gradient is small and ignore it but that should be stated explicity before using it.
I agree with you that if you show one part of the problem solution is wrong then the entire solution is wrong – which you have shown to be the case. But the consensus solution would still be wrong because of this faulty assumption as well.
An isothermal atmosphere is provably wrong based on the ideal gas law alone.
The only example of this that would be true would be in a vacuum.
Temperature is dependant on pressure and unless the atmosphere with no greenhouse gases weigh zero mass, than an isothermal atmosphere is impossible. Anyone that agrees with this is just supporting awful science and ignoring physcial chemistry.
Without this law for example a pressure cooker would become useless.
Heating water at 1atm on planet earth causes it to warm no more than 100c at boiling point. Increasing the pressure using a pressure cooker increases this heat to about 121c. This is controlled because the water volume/mass hasn’t changed only the pressure.
I am supportive in your efforts to end this climate nonsense, but it doesn’t help if we get parts of the science wrong. I do understand that resolving too many potential wrongs at the same time can be counteractive.
I did the analysis on this issue starting from thinking there couldn’t be isothermal conditions. The result showed that there could be such conditions if there were no mixing between different altitudes. However in the real world mixing is enough from latitude temperature variations, and rotation effects.
Leonard, if there were no mixing then the atmosphere would effectively be a solid and it could become isothermal. Since it is not a solid but a mobile gaseous medium it can never become isothermal.
That is why the Gas Laws are relevant.
No, there is an adiabatic lapse rate due to the gravitational field even for non-radiative gases. In an extreme case, if the atmosphere consisted of only one molecule that bounced straight up off a rock like a cannon ball, gravity would slow it down as it went upwards, cooling it down, since its velocity and temperature are related….
This was a topic of discussion going back to Loschmidt, Maxwell, and Boltzmann themselves. Most arguers lose themselves in semantics of perpetual motion machines. It is not a very strong effect, “heat” does not flow anywhere, arguments that a conductive medium in the gas column could be used to create a perpetual motion machine are not correct…the “machine” would have to be inside the column for the boundaries to still be adiabatic, and the operation of the machine would result in the column working itself towards isothermal, at which point the machine must stop….
Convection is a much stronger effect, the other is conduction “in disguise” and a tall column of gas is not a good conductor….
The effect was refuted once here at WUWT, unfortunately incorrectly….
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/24/refutation-of-stable-thermal-equilibrium-lapse-rates/
Interesting though all this is, it is off topic. Our paper does not attempt to answer every error made by climatology. It addresses one particular error, which can be proven to be an error. Once the error is corrected, it is no longer necessary to worry about global warming. There will be some, but there will not be enough to cause net harm. Instead, it will be net-beneficial.
I appreciate Christopher’s approach. His head post is correct and should be sufficient to rebut climate alarmism on its own.
However, it is not the whole story and Christopher is entitled to decline to comment in detail on other faults in climate science if he wishes to do so.
I am gratified that other commentators seem to appreciate elements of my comment about such other faults but I did not intend to derail this thread.
FWIW, Stephen, I reject the concept of ‘greenhouse gases’. T is a result of insolation and atmospheric pressure. There is no need to take into account specific gases.
That’s what I’ve been able to understand so far. Keep in mind I am not a scientist.
MoB, you were the one who brought it up, and stated one side of Loschmidt’s paradox to be a fact, when it is in dispute….so actually you started the OT (ha!)….yes very interesting, I have a whole file of articles published by Ph.D’s to quack-types that contain brilliant (and not) analyses…yes, off topic…
Constant temperature vs. altitude in a non-greenhouse atmosphere condition could only occur if there were not enough mixing.The equator to pole temperature difference and planetary rotation cause enough mixing to assure the gradient in all known planets with atmospheres. This is a separate issue from the feedback warming, which changes level of temperature but not lapse rate gradient.
The warming due to atmosphere pressure gradient is the adiabatic lapse rate, which is due to gravity and specific heat of gases and mixing of the gas levels. This occurs for all gases even without feedback warming, which is another effect altogether. However, without greenhouse gases or aerosols (clouds) all of the radiation to space is from the surface only. The lapse rate is a gradient and the actual level of temperature is found separately from where the average location of the radiation to space occurs.
Mars has also undergone climate change, global warming, over the same time span as Earth, the last 50 years or so.
I guess this must be our fault too, and we’ll have to double down on the climate transition hari kari.
It’s all Viking 1 and 2’s fault!
Martian atmosphere = 95% CO2, freezing cold, Venusian atmosphere = 95% CO2, boiling hot. The Terran (big Star Trecky fan) atmosphere is relatively stable. Ice-Ages last between 90,000-130,000 years, Inter-Glacials last between 10,000-15,000 years, Holocene started around 11,500 years ago, oops we’re in big trouble!!!
Don’t make it so!
Yep. We can do bog all about glaciation.
Why does climatology use the magic date of AD 1850? Barely out of the Little Ice Age, and in-between the last and next full ice age.
Why not say, 80 million years ago, when the temperatures were more stable and life was overflowing?
Temperatures were also about 10°C higher, but CO2 at 1500-2000ppm, which we’ll never reach. That should give an extreme upper bound to any climate sensitivity calculations, being mindful that the Sun seems to have been more powerful back then and they didn’t have ice covered poles reflecting a lot of energy back into space.
To ask the questions is to answer it…
Interesting to note that the hullaballoo of temperature rise seems to have gone quiet, yes peeps still say Climate Change but not Global Warming, but still insist temps are increasing with little or no evidence, with measurements quoted that no thermometer can measure outside their measuring tolerance in fractions of a degree!!! It’s all about Agenda 21, always has been, the creation of a Globul Socialist Guvment, run by the ruling intellectual (already wealthy) Elites, their wallets full of taxpayers cash, & the Socialism is just for the peasants!!! Lenin was right, there are “Useful Idiots” who will pull the triggers, but not the Elites, gosh no, they would never dirty their hands when they can get someone else to do it for them!!! Strangely my apartment temperature goes from just above freezing in the small hours to around 20C in the morning, that’s an amazing range but true, probably like most peoples homes!!! I still find people who are amazed with disbelief that British troops during the Second World War, suffered from frost bite in the Sahara Desert because temps plummeted during the night & rose dramatically in the morning!!! This planet is really weird!!! (Don’t tell the eco-bunnies).
This I can agree with. Nothing new under the sun if one only looks.
Well & truly nailed!!! 😉
That is one of the issues I have with this as well. The temperature had already been warming before 1850. To assume that as some base point or that the climate was ‘in equilibrium” , makes all these calculations useful for showing that climate doomsayers are wrong about ECS in their calculations. But it does not make Monckton correct either. We have far to much missing information to rely on models of past temperature. And the temperatures data we do have over the past 170 shows far more variability over that period than some kind of steady increase in average temperature.
I appreciate the fight. But you are still arguing on their terms.
Mr Kiro makes the fair point that I am arguing on climatology’s terms. But that is how I, or anyone Classically trained, will usually argue. One begins by agreeing with all that one can possibly agree with, and by agreeing ad argumentum with anything that one cannot disprove. That focuses the discussion only on those few areas in which we seek to disprove the official narrative.
In other words, be smart in your arguments. Base your arguments upon agreed facts, not your novel math. Are there any people here looking in the mirror?
I am not sure what Mr Fair is trying to say. He appears to be agreeing with me that one should base one’s arguments upon agreeing whatever one can with one’s interlocutor rather than trying to object to everything. But then he appears to be suggesting that the feedback formulism given to us by control theory, a long-established branch of engineering physics, is “my novel math”. It’s math, all right, but it’s not mine and it’s not novel. It is established, it is verified, without it we couldn’t have gotten to the Moon, and it is directly applicable.
Perhaps Mr Fair is saying he finds control theory hard to understand. Well, that is why we have done our best to simplify the formulism and the equations embodying it.
if it helps, I tried to summarize your thesis in just a few sentences above, hopefully without failing too hard
As I understand it, 1850 was still in the tail end of the Little Ice Age (the end of which is disputed) and the ~0.4 C warming between 1910 and 1940 is regarded by many cooler-headed climate scientists to be mostly a rebound from cooler LIA temperatures since human CO2 emissions weren’t significant enough to have much impact.
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/land-and-ocean-summary-large.png
From the warming zealots viewpoint, 1850 was before the Industrial Revolution began to vastly increase human CO2 emissions so it’s considered a sort of “ideal atmosphere” before humans pumped all that icky CO2 into the atmosphere (for which all flora on Earth thank them).
Humans also NEED CO2 to exhale !
I’ve often asked GAGW proponents why there was no thermal runaway or other disastrous outcome like mass extinction last time CO2 was above 500ppm. Sometimes they try to claim “it’s different this time”, but usually they go silent.
The biggest eye-opener for me is finding out from the botanists among us that plants would starve at about 180ppm, greenhouses like to maintain something like 1000-1500ppm for good conditions (would I be pushing things to say they would go higher if the propane to create the CO2 were free..) and of course the Earth, oh sorry Terra (just watched the new StarTrek TMP re-re-master so I’m getting my Trek on) was a paradise for flora and fauna alike during at least the reign of the dinosaurs, for over 200 million years where CO2 was always a lot more than now, and yes temperatures were a good solid 10°C hotter – but the biosphere was loving it!
Thank you.
It’s a good way to conceptualize the issues with ECS, well done.
However the critical confounding factor never discussed, and required to understand actual climate changes, is the emission temperature.
Satellite measurements show an OLR increase, and so the emission temperature is very unlikely to be what it was in 1850. Emission temperature has increased at least 1K.
It is commonly assumed that humanity could not influence the 255K reference emission temperature, but I differ on that assumption. Eroding billions of tons of soil organics has impacted the hydrological cycle in ways that have not yet been recognized, in my opinion.
A 1K increase to emission temperature is sufficient to characterize most observed global warming, by latent heat/albedo effects.
The emission temperature of 255 K plus or minus 15 K is indeed the crucial factor: for nearly all feedback response in the climate at any given moment is feedback response to emission temperature. However, once one has corrected climatology’s error the interval of ECS based on the quite well-constrained data for 1850 is 1.1-1.2 K, even if the value of emission temperature is allowed to range between 240 and 270 K. It is only if one gets the feedback math wrong, as climatology does, that it becomes essential to derive the emission temperature exactly.
I am not expert in control theory, so am unable to say whether this analysis is correct, or if there might be some subtle flaw.
I am troubled that the result here does not accord with several other methods, all of which return something around ECS 1.6-1.7 rather than about 1.2.
These three very different methods all yield about the same ECS result, which is at variance with the lower conclusion of this guest post.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, independent of the method whether CMB’s or the methods you described above, there is no climate crisis.
The Climate Cabal’s high ECS values can be questioned by the fact that warming has been limited (~1 K) over the last 100 years and the warming does not correlate well with ln(CO2). The warming rate from 1910 to 1940 was much higher than during the period from 1940 to 1970 despite CO2 rising faster in the later period. There’s no evidence of a step change in atmospheric aerosols, the phony argument forwarded by the alarmists to explain this inconvenient truth. A high ECS would be, by far, the dominant control knob but it clearly isn’t.
Precisely. I prefer robust observational methods of reaching that conclusion rather than arguing theory against theory. Remember, an ECS~1.65C does not get reached for centuries, by definition.
Mr Istvan is right in his instinct that one should start with observation. However, theory has its place too. It was not observation that led climatology to imagine that ECS must necessarily be of order 4 K. It was a gross and elementary error of theory. Sometimes it is necessary to concentrate on getting the theory right.
Yet this is used as justification for “catastrophic global warming” from the UN, politicians, NGOs and profiteers.
Mr Istvan makes a characteristically thoughtful and constructive comment.
In response, one should distinguish between ECS derived on the basis of the quite well-constrained data for the temperature equilibrium in 1850 and ECS as it is now. Based on the data for 1850, ECS given a climate identical to that year’s climate would indeed be 1.1-1.2 K, and not the 4 K on the basis of which climatology leapt catastrophically to the conclusion that ECS today must also be of order 4 K.
Climatology implicitly assumes that the feedback regime of the entire industrial era is constant: i.e., that there is a fixed system-gain factor (the ratio of the equilibrium signal including feedback response to the reference signal that engenders the feedback response). Hansen and many others (including Sir John Houghton in his correspondence with me) give 4 K ECS based on the position in 1850. The CMIP6 models (Zelinka et al. 2020 supp.) give 3.9 K ECS. Not much nonlinearity there, then. It has given my team no small amusement to see the climate-Communist trolls accusing us of treating the feedback regime as linear when we do not do so but official climatology does so.
However, one important part of our result is that even a very small change in the system-gain factor compared with 1850 will engender a very large change in ECS compared with that year. For instance, increase the system-gain factor from the 1.095 derived from the data for 1850 by just 1% and ECS goes from 1.1-1.2 K based on 1850 to 4.1 K, an increase of around 250%.
Two corollaries: First, one cannot rule out higher sensitivities than that which would obtain if today’s climate were in all material respects as it was in 1850. Therefore, the somewhat higher sensitivities found e.g. by Lewis & Curry using the energy-budget method are quite possible. Indeed, the very high sensitivities imagined by official climatology are also possible, even if the increase in the system-gain factor compared with 1850 is only 1%.
Secondly, all existing methods of attempting to derive ECS are holed below the waterline. They are manifestly inadequate. Take the energy-budget method as an instance. In earlier drafts of our paper we had shown that those using that method had neglected to incorporate in the energy-budget equation a term for the anthropogenic fraction of observed warming, which is somewhere between 50% (Connolly et al. 2021) and 85% (Wu et al. 2019). Taking the higher anthropogenic fraction on its own would bring the calculations by the energy-budget method into line with our result.
We even conducted a beautiful Monte Carlo analysis by the energy-budget method. But more recently we realized that the energy-budget method itself cannot provide useful information about ECS. For instance, based on current midrange data, it is perfectly possible to derive by the energy-budget method an estimate of the system-gain factor and hence of ECS that is identical to that which the data for 1850 show. However, IPCC (2021) has varied some of the input data to the energy-budget equation, in a manner that would lift the system-gain factor from 1.095 to 2.2. And that would entail about 250 K ECS.
The chief value of our result, then, is that it removes official climatology’s near-certainty that ECS will be above 1.5 K and is more likely to be around 4 K than anything else. In fact, one cannot calculate ECS with any precision if one assumes that the feedback regime of the industrial era is anything other than very near-constant, because any increase in the system-gain factor must be applied to emission temperature and not just to the perturbation signal in the shape of reference sensitivity to greenhouse gases.
Our result also makes it very clear that IPCC’s estimates of both the magnitudes and the intervals of the principal climate-relevant feedbacks (as Bates 2016 calls them) are grossly excessive – so much so that, since they were diagnosed from the outputs of the general-circulation models, those models are completely valueless in attempting to constrain ECS. They can tell us nothing whatever about it.
I hope this helps to resolve your concern about the small discrepancy between the ECS based on 1850 data and the ECS found by the energy-budget method – a method which, even if it had included a term for the anthropogenic fraction of industrial-era warming, is unfortunately useless.
While I agree with your conclusions, Rud, the difference is de minimums compared to the wild exaggeration of the UN IPCC CliSciFi fantasies. As a recovering engineer, I can’t differentiate between 1.17 and 1.2. Crap: Error bars are enormous given the varying assumptions by all the protagonists!
As a tax-paying human being I don’t care: Keep the Mother F***ers out of my life and prosperity. Mathturbation does not provide the stability with which to plan one’s future.
Yup. I agree. Whether 1.2 or 1.65, the climate alarm is still cancelled. I prefer to use the simplest, broadest appealing methods. Because it is a political, not a scientific anymore, debate.
Well, I was brought up in the Classical tradition, in which the tendency of totalitarians in politics to try to capture scientific questions is regarded as lamentable. At root, this is a scientific question. And climatology has made a giant scientific mistake. Correcting the mistake removes the near-certainty of high ECS (i.e., >2 K) upon which the notion of Thermageddon was predicated.
You used the words “estimate”, “about”, and ”around” to discuss a supposed important climate number.
Science tells us that Avogadro Number exactly to eight decimal places. You would think after decades we could do better than an estimate.
Maybe we are trying to come up with a value for something that doesn’t exist. The CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t cause any warming.
Not sure who you are addressing, But am well familiar with experimentally determined Avogadro’s number. More specifically, it was a then alternative definition (now official) of a coloumb of charge as (IIRC) about 10E+18 electrons that allowed me to mathematically redefine how ELDC actually works, and then prove it experimentally. Led to some basic materials patents.
Whether or not the CO2 in the air causes warming, we have assumed ad argumentum that it does, because we cannot prove that it does not. What we can prove – and what the head posting actually addresses – is that the absurdly exaggerated feedback-driven amplification of the small direct warming by CO2 is based on an elementary control-theoretic error.
“Whether or not the CO2 in the air causes warming, we have assumed ad argumentum that it does, because we cannot prove that it does not.”
This is the state of modern-day climate science. Anyone who tells you different is not telling you the truth. We have a long way to go to understand what is and what is not going on.
No, it is the normal process of Classical logic. One concedes to one’s interlocutor, even if only for the sake of argument, everything except the point at which it is necessary to disagree. This process is the essential first step in Socratic elenchus, the formal method of disputation that has stood the test of time and is better than any other at persuading a difficult or evasive or downright intransigent interlocutor that an untenable position must be abandoned.
This is just plain nonsense as has been pointed out main times before. A much better discussion about feedbacks can be found in the article by Roe “Feedbacks, Timescales, and Seeing Red” which shows quite clearly that in general terms
“the reference system takes a perturbation in the forcing, Rf , and converts it into a response, T0″ so in other words the feedback describes the response to a change in forcing not the
forcing itself. The paper itself can be found at:
https://climate-dynamics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/roe09a.pdf
That paper doesn’t seem to contradict this article at all.
Consider this quote from page 12:
It follows that the perturbation is not the only interaction. It does include the original background (the sun shining).
They interact with each other. And they do not know which bit to interact with because it is not sentient and thus not able to choose.
Again you are confusing what counts as the reference system and what counts as the perturbation. According to Roe you are free to chose whatever you like as the reference system but then that doesn’t come into the feedback analysis. As Roe states feedbacks are nothing more than a Taylor series in disguise.
What Mr. Monckton appears to want to do is to take as his reference system a barren earth with no sunlight and then consider the sun shining as a perturbation. No mathematically he is able to do this but a simple feedback analysis would not be valid since the size of the perturbation (1000W/m^2) is to large for a first order Taylor series to be valid.
In contrast if you take as the reference system the current earth with solar forcing of 1000W/m^2 then you using a first order Taylor series expansion to calculate the response to a perturbation of 3 W/m^2 is a much better approximation. In this case the fact that sun is shining is part of the reference system and not part of the feedback.
“What Mr. Monckton appears to want to do is to take as his reference system a barren earth with no sunlight and then consider the sun shining as a perturbation.”
With no input there would be no output and no feedback signal. The earth and its atmosphere would both be at absolute zero.
The sun is still an input and still causes an output which is acted upon by the feedback loop. Whether it is part of the reference system or not it must still be treated as an input. And *all* inputs are acted upon by the feedback loop, not just the perturbation of the input.
You are making the same mistake as CM observed. In a single stage system, both the signal and the feedback signal are summed (“+” feedback or subtracted “-” feedback). But the system gain operates on both the signal and the feedback. What you are trying to describe is a two stage system where the feedback signal is amplified in a separate second stage with outlandish gain and then that result is summed along with the original signal and applied to the original first stage.
Again you need to read Roe’s paper. The system gain is defined relative to an arbitrary fixed point. If you change the fixed point you change the system gain. As Roe states what counts as the feedback and what counts as the original signal is arbitrary and can change if you change the reference system.
A question for you. Point out where exactly the error in Roe’s paper is? Which equation is wrong?
I was going to reply to your comment to me but this is the same point made to me but more clearly. It is consistent and well presented so i prefer to respond to this.
The paper you linked does not say that system gain is arbitrary. It does not say that it can be chosen by an author via picking a reference point and thus made to be whatever they want. It does not say that system gain is not a physical property. It does not say that system gain is a socially created concept – reified by collective will.
System gain is a physical response. It depends on real things, not arbitrary setpoints chosen as a reference point.
It cannot distinguish between what was before a perturbation and what is added since the perturbation. It must respond to what actually is. All of what is.
This is science – not sociology.
Again look at the discussion following Eq. 18 in Roe. The gain and feedback depend on what you choose as the reference system. Furthermore “Gains and feedbacks calculated with respect to different reference systems cannot be directly compared.” Which is the error that Monckton is making — he is defining his own reference system and then comparing the feedbacks and gain defined for his reference system to those defined for a different reference system.
The system gain is a physical response but what what is included as part of the “system” and what is included as a “perturbation” is arbitrary.
Again consider a Taylor series expansion of cos(x) about x=0. This gives
cos(x) = 1 -x^2/2 +x^4/24+…
however if I take the Taylor series expansion of cos(x) about pi/2 I get
-x+x^3/6 + …
now cos(x) has not changed but the Taylor series is completely different because you are starting at a different point. The same is true with the system gain and feedback.
Mathturbation For Dummies.
Mr Courtney is right and Mr Walton wrong. Roe’s paper makes the same mistake as all of us who have published in climatological physics had made: he has not realized that any change in the system-gain factor will have a far larger effect on ECS than climatology imagines, because that change must be applied not only to any perturbation of the base signal (the base signal, in climate, is the 255 K emission temperature) but also to the base signal itself.
Therefore, in a dynamical system, such as the climate, in which the base signal is 30 times the sum of all perturbations thereto, even a 1% increase in the system-gain factor compared with 1850 would give a 250% increase in ECS compared with the 1.1-2.1 K derived from 1850 data.
One cannot ignore the fact that at any given moment the feedback processes then subsisting will act equally in response to each degree of the reference signal (the sum of the base signal and all perturbations: i.e., the sum of emission temperature and reference sensitivities to greenhouse gases), and consequently in strict proportion to the magnitudes of the components in the reference signal.
Feedback processes are inanimate. They cannot decide that they will refuse to respond to 255 K of the 263 K reference temperature in 1850, but will suddenly and excessively respond to the remaining 8 K reference sensitivity to greenhouse gases.
Again you do not understand Roe’s paper and his explanation of how feedbacks are defined. You need to start with a reference system which can be anything you like and then look at a perturbation to that. Feedbacks are then how the system responds to a perturbation and not how the system responds to the original signal (which is by definition part of the reference system). When you choose the reference system to be the climate in 1850 you have included all of the feedbacks operating at that point as there reference system. So then a feedback analysis only includes a perturbation to that system and thus by definition does not include the original signal.
I have corresponded with Gerard Roe (a pupil of the formidable Professor Lindzen), and have a good, workmanlike understanding of his paper.
It is of course true that one can arbitrarily define how much of a reference signal is the base signal and how much of it is the perturbation signal. What one cannot do, however, is ignore the base signal altogether. In the climate, the base signal is emission temperature. It is 255 K or thereby. The perturbation signal from greenhouse gases predating our sins of emission is 8 K. So the base signal is 30 times the perturbation signal.
At any moment, such as 1850, the feedback processes then subsisting must perforce respond equally to each degree of the reference temperature then obtaining. Therefore, they must respond in strict proportion to the magnitudes of the components in reference temperature. Accordingly, the feedback response to emission temperature was about 30 times the feedback response to the naturally-occurring, noncondensing, preindustrial greenhouse gases.
However, climatology assumes that the feedback response to emission temperature is zero and that, by some magic, the feedback processes that were present in 1850 altogether ignored the 255 K emission temperature and responded solely, and with exaggerated vigor, to the 8 K greenhouse-gas reference sensitivity. Therefore, given the 32 K natural greenhouse effect (the difference between the 287 K surface temperature in 1850 and the 255 K emission temperature), climatology came to imagine that the system-gain factor was of order 32 / 8, or 4, so that ECS is about 4 K.
What is more, climatology treats the system-gain factor as invariant over time, so that it still predicts about 4 K ECS today. And that is wrong. Very wrong. Correct climatology’s error of control theory and the near-certainty of high ECS vanishes away, and the climate “emergency” with it.
What you are arguing for is making the reference a system on at absolute zero – i.e. no input at all! With no input there can be no output and, therefore, everything on earth would be at absolute zero. The sun then becomes both an input as well as a perturbation from the reference system. As a perturbation it still gets acted upon by the feedback loop.
What you are trying to explain is a system with gain and feedback blocks for individual components. One block for water vapor, one for methane, another for CO2, another for aerosols, etc. Then you try to say that additional feedback is added to the CO2 block, i.e., a perturbation.
You must still deal with the fact that at the reference point in time the system gain is operating on all inputs including the shining sun. The output must include that temperature through the system.
I must tell you I am not a fan of feedback in this situation. The way climate science has done it requires a separate power supply of energy in order for the output to increase. This violates the conservation of energy unless the feedback is subtracted from the output. In this case you simply end up with what you started with. Which leads back to CO2 having little effect.
Where is the missing left parenthesis in eq 18?
Isaac,
Control can be based on an arbitrary reference, as you state, because perturbation are processed through the system equations and resolve to a related, perturbed output.
But what we are dealing with here is not arbitrary. It’s a thermodynamic system, and such systems are properly computed based on the reference where entropy is zero: 0K.
Once you decide to apply control theory to a thermodynamic system, the reference is no longer arbitrary: the perturbation for analysis must start at 0K.
The basis is identical to that required for computing, say, system efficiency. In practical heat engines entropy is never zero; therefore efficiency can never be 100%.
In like manner, the natural gain associated with thermal feedbacks must be referenced against a datum of 0K.
-BillR
Bill,
That just is not true. There is nothing in Thermodynamics that says that you have to start calculations at 0K. Suppose I have a pot of water at 50C and I want to know how much the temperature will increase if I add a certain amount of heat. Then I would just multiple the heat by the thermal capacity of water calculated at 50C to get the answer. If I started at 0K I would get the wrong answer.
Bill R is right and the furtively pseudonymous “Izaak Walton” wrong. Though it is of course permissible to conduct perturbation calculations only, one must apply the correct equations. One must not, for instance, do as climatology does and assume that, based on data for 1850, the system-gain factor is the ratio of the total 32 K natural greenhouse effect to the 8 K reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. One must take account of the fact that nearly all the feedback response in 1850 was feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature.
One can see that this is the case by realizing that a temperature of 8 K, on its own, could not engender a feedback response at all, though a temperature of 255 K could do so. At any given moment, such as 1850, the feedback processes then present must perforce respond equally to each degree of reference temperature, and not just to each degree of reference sensitivity.
Based on the data for 1850, the system-gain factor is not 32 / 8 = 4, as climatology continues to imagine. It is (255 + 32) / (255+ 8) < 1.1.
As our professor of control theory points out, the distinction between the base signal and the perturbation signal (the two sum to the reference signal) is an arbitrary distinction made by the observer. For this reason, and for the further common-sense reason that feedback processes are inanimate and must respond equally to each degree of reference temperature and accordingly in strict proportion to the relative magnitudes of the components in reference temperature, one cannot – even in performing a perturbation analysis – ignore the big yellow elephant in the sky.
To forget that the Sun is shining, and to add the emission-temperature feedback response to, and to miscount it as though it were part of, the actually minuscule feedback response to greenhouse-gas warming is to err, and to err fundamentally. But that is what climatology does. If it had not made that catastrophic and elementary error, no one would ever have imagined that global warming caused by us would be anything other than net-beneficial.
Again you are missing the whole point of Roe’s paper. Feedbacks are defined relative to the reference system. So all of the feedbacks that were in effect in 1850 are included as part of the reference system that converts a solar input into a ground temperature of 288 degrees. So next you ask what will happen if you perturb that system (including the feedbacks operating in 1850) and that is calculation that is done and is essentially the same as taking a Taylor series expanions about a non-zero point.
And if you take a Taylor series of the same function about two different points you get two different series with different coefficients. Both are equally valid but comparing the coefficients makes no sense. And what you are trying to do is compare a Taylor series expansion about 0k with one around 288K and not surprisingly you get a nonsensical result.
But I thought his results lined up quite well with independent work done by others and reality itself. How is that “nonsensical”? Climastrologists are so wrapped up in their models that reality hardly even matters.
Of course, like so many other Leftist notions, climastrology is just a pretext to help rationalize destroying western civilization. It must be a little embarrassing to be shown to have done such a lousy job at constructing the pretext, but it doesn’t matter anymore. The pretext has taken on a life of its own. Sadly, the “proper” paradigms have been successfully set in stone in the minds of millions of people.
Isaac,
You can do anything in mathematics you want. That is not the question. The thermal feedback in a system begins above zero entropy. That’s according to the Second Law.
As to your example, what you state is true because you defined the problem as a differential. But don’t mistake the math for physics. They aren’t necessarily the same. Stable temperature does not mean no energy flow exists. Every body that has positive absorptivity radiates energy above 0K. Equilibrium temperature simply means that the energy in and out are equal.
This comment is so spot on – and speaks to a pervasive problem that kicked in the 2nd half of last century: Mathematicians pulled off a stunningly successful coup, and took over physics. More than half a century has been squandered away because of it.
Another of my occasional reminders that Lord Monckton’s they-forgot-the-sun-is-shining theory is based on his groundless assertion that feedback theory requires equilibrium climate sensitivity to a linear or nearly-linear function of the “reference” value it would assume in the absence of feedback.
I have demonstrated that feedback theory imposes no such requirement.
I have also shown that his theory amounts to bad extrapolation.
Mr Born is relentlessly wrong. We do not extrapolate. We show that, based on 1850 data, ECS would be 1.1-1.2 K. Based on the very small warming since then, we conclude that there is no particular reason to assume that ECS will be significantly greater than 1.1-1.2 K, though of course anything can happen. What is certain – and this requires no extrapolation, as we have tried to explain to Mr Born before – is that ECS based on 1850 data is, after correction of climatology’s control-theoretic error, 1.1-1.2 K, and not the 4 K imagined by official climatology misled by the erro.
The question is whether feedback analysis is even valid for the climate. Hansen applied it, and did it wrong, which Monckton has amply demonstrated.
If you toss out the LTI (Linear Time-Invariant) constraint for feedback analysis, you end up with an intractable solution.
Since the climate is neither linear nor time-invariant, feedback analysis as it is usually practiced, does not apply.
I tend to disagree. Climate is a nonlinear dynamic system (AR3). All such systems have two basic mathematical requirements:
The problem is bounding the nonlinear dynamic results over relevant time frames. I tried to do so three different ways in the comment above.
Neither of those statements are true. Feedbacks can be linear or nonlinear and mathematically they can be instantaneously or delayed. Take the Lorenz system. It is three coupled nonlinear ODEs with instantaneous dynamics (i.e. there is no delay in it). Yet it is certainly a nonlinear dynamical system.
Alternatively linear system can have feedback. For example consider a current passing through a resistor – take the output and pass half of it back into the resistor. Now ask what happens if you input a fixed current to the system? There is feedback but no nonlinearity (the circuit just has a resistor).
And yet CO2 climbs and climbs. 70s were cold and 20s were warm. When do we get this warming?
2100 we are all dead and your kids are stuck with those stupid windmills and solar panels. But you don’t care…this is your religion.
2020s were warmer than 1970s, but models said they would be wildly warmer. Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
IOW, we don’t know crap.
Rud, did you get ECS > 2? 1.2? What?
Mr Istvan is not quite correct. The presence or absence of feedbacks does not in itself determine whether a dynamical system will respond linearly or nonlinearly to a perturbation. For the system response to feedbacks may be (and, in climatology, is implicitly assumed to be) very close to linear – a fact that our result confirms. Secondly though a dynamical system is ex definitione one that changes its state over time, sub specie aeternitatis the feedback processes that climatology regards as relevant operate on timescales of years at most, which is near enough instantaneous not to introduce much error. Indeed, the only feedback worth considering – the water vapor feedback, for all others self-cancel – acts within hours.
Feedback analysis is certainly applicable to the climate. For the climate is a dynamical system in which it is not at all difficult to demonstrate that feedback processes are present. The norms of control theory, the science of feedback formulism, apply universally to all feedback-moderated dynamical systems, of which the climate is one.
Our point is a very simple one. At any given moment, the feedback processes then subsisting must perforce respond equally to each degree of the reference signal (in climate, that signal is reference temperature, the sum of the 255 K emission temperature and the reference sensitivities to natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gases). Therefore, those processes must respond, at that moment, proportionately to the individual components in the reference signal.
However, climatology fails to realize that those feedback processes must necessarily respond not only to reference sensitivities but also to the 30-times-larger emission temperature. Since we are considering the climate only at a particular moment, we do not need to know at that moment what degree of nonlinearity may subsist in the system over time. It is necessary only to point out that climatology has failed to take account of the big yellow elephant in the sky. It has foolishly misattributed the large feedback response to the fact that the Sun is shining, and has added it to, and miscounted it as though it were part of, the actually minuscule feedback response to greenhouse gases.
The question of nonlinearity is a separate question, which we deal with separately.
That’s logical and should be the end of it. The apologists will come along and admit that the method was completely wrong but insist that the final conclusion was correct anyway. 🙁
There is another genius from your side of the pond, Iain McGilchrist. He describes the processes that cause one to lose contact with reality. One of the symptoms is unwarranted overconfidence.
My dream is that, if McGilchrist’s knowledge becomes common currency, decision makers will observe the braggadocio of our dearly beloved Dr. Michael Mann, and consign his opinions to the dustbin.
Or loony bin!
CommieBob is right. One must apply the correct system equations to the feedback loop in a dynamical object such as the climate. And those equations do not work if the base signal – and, therefore, its feedback response – is neglected and, in effect, added to and miscounted as part of the actually tiny feedback response to direct warming by greenhouse gases.
And the usual suspects will not be able to get away with saying that their equations were wrong but they got the right answer anyway. This is a grossly elementary error of physics, perpetrated profitably by people who told us The Science Was Settled.
The fact that we can reduce the error to simple arithmetic that a schoolboy can understand is going to prevent the forces of darkness from pretending that even though they were wrong they were right.
So why not present the equations instead of that messy diagram which does nothing to clarify what you’re doing. If that is the sort of diagram your ‘furtively anonymous professor’ uses in his class I’m not surprised his students cheered when the course ended.
The diagram is correct even if it isn,t in what I would call standard format. If you don’t like the format then change it yourself. Don’t ask someone else to do it for you.
Mr Gorman is right. “Phil.” can draw his own diagram if he wants. And if he would actually look at the diagram, which is a great deal easier to understand than the functionally-equivalent but needlessly complicated standard diagram, he would see that the equations showing the relationships between the key parameters are shown, albeit in the shape of the numbers for 1850. What is more, the diagram shows very clearly that the feedback fraction in the feedback block at the foot of the diagram must act not only on the perturbation signal (greenhouse-gas direct warming) but also on the base signal (emission temperature). And the diagram directly compares the erroneous values obtained by climatology with the corrected values after addressing climatology’s catastrophic error. Others here, more interested in the objective truth than “Phil.”, have found the diagram clear and helpful.
We make no assertion to the effect that feedback theory requires ECS to be near-linear. We have repeatedly tried to explain to Mr Born that one cannot consider these matters in isolation from the data. We conclude that, once one has corrected climatology’s error in forgetting that the Sun is shining, even a very, very small change in the system-gain factor would engender a very, very large value for ECS. In the real world, however, that very, very large ECS is incompatible with the very, very small rate of observed global warming since 1850.
Indeed.
My observation is that climate scientists produce results that depend on data that is precise beyond belief. Even a smallish change in the data completely changes the result.
CommieBob is right: our result shows that the climate system is far more sensitive to a tiny change in feedback strength than climatology imagines. Therefore, all climatology’s estimates of feedback strengths, diagnosed from general-circulation models’ outputs, are wildly, laughably excessive. Therefore, either the diagnostic process is wrong, or the GCMs are wrong, or both.
“In the real world, however, that very, very large ECS is incompatible with the very, very small rate of observed global warming since 1850.”
Yes, and if you go by the actual written, historical temperature records, the warming is *very* small to non-existant. For example, the United States has been in a temperature downtrend since the 1930’s.
This is not a criticism of you, Chris, it is just a statement of facts. I just wanted the alarmists to know it’s worse than they thought! 🙂
I am aware that you use the alarmist’s bogus Hockey Stick chart in your calculation of temperatures, just to show that even using a bogus Hockey Stick chart doesn’t help the alarmist case. But others might not know that and might think you are endorsing the bogus Hockey Stick distortion of the temperature record. So I thought I would jump in.
I am most grateful to Tom Abbott for his comment about the general unreliability of the interminable revisions of the global temperature record. One of the many happy consequences of our result is that the obsession with hundredths of a degree of global temperature that has gripped climatology can at once be seen as pointless, so that there is no need to waste any more taxpayers’ money on trying to fiddle the records to show a warming that is not happening at anything like the originally-predicted or currently-predicted rate. The climate system is so sensitive to small perturbations in feedback strength over time that none of the various tweaks and tamperings will make anything more than a negligible difference to the outturn. Once our paper is published, and once climatology realizes the game is up and ceases to try to suppress our result, the entire pre-existing “settled science” of climate sensitivity collapses. Fiddling with the temperature record won’t help Them any more.
I keep getting hung up on the presumed 255K temperature…If I understand how this is derived it is just an estimate if one treats the Earth as a radiating black body. Well, it isn’t. It is neither smooth nor black nor even a sphere (etc.). A scientific estimate needs a margin of error.
Earth also radiates heat from the decay of nuclear elements and likely a small amount from tidal forces. These are small so likely safe to ignore.
Assuming the Earth had no atmosphere, it should be radiating somewhere around 250K+/-10K. You run the high and low through the logic above and you still get a very much reduced sensitivity to CO2 changes. The concept presented here seems to hold up even given the uncertainties.
I do have some trouble understanding how temperatures cold enough to freeze CO2 would allow the gas to act as a greenhouse gas – in this case it would be a condensing greenhouse gas. Say the polar temperatures are always -10K below CO2’s freezing point and the tropics are always +10 or more above freezing point. CO2 gases would freeze and collect at the poles becoming ever less available to act as a greenhouse gas in the tropics. So can you really say that CO2 greenhouse effect should be a ratio against the full 255K? Or is it restricted to temperatures above 195K? If CO2 is frozen, it isn’t contributing to trapping heat. The same with water. So wouldn’t it’s heating effect always be in reference to it’s freezing point? I am missing something here. :-/
Robert of Texas is correct that even if emission temperature were greater or less than 255 K by up to 15 K the value of ECS would remain 1.1-1.2 K, based on data for 1850, provided that one had corrected the calculation to put right climatology’s enormous error. If one persists in the error, then it becomes necessary to constrain emission temperature to within 1 or 2 K, and that is not possible.
As to the rest of Robert’s comment, it strays from the point of the head posting. Briefly, we accept – sed solum ad argumentum – everything in official climatology except the points at which we are able to prove that official climatology is in error. That avoids muddying the waters, and narrows the focus to the question of the giant error that climatology has made. Without that error, the near-certainty of apocalypse vanishes.
Thank you for the reply, and I get your point about muddying the waters.
I am still left very curious and unable to explain how a condensing gas effects can range lower than its freezing point. It seems equally curious how the gas suddenly starts impacting temperature at precisely 255K – that seems completely wrong, so point made – the climatologists have an invalid assumption in their feedback.
I always enjoy your postings.
The answer to Robert’s question about how the 255 K emission temperature can engender a water-vapor feedback is simple. 255 K is the global mean temperature that would obtain on Earth in the absence of any greenhouse gases at the outset.
Even if the entire planet were icebound to start with, at 255 K mean temperature and under today’s insolation the entire tropics would be ice-free, and feedbacks would at once come into effect there. Now add 8 K direct warming from the naturally-occurring, noncondensing preindustrial greenhouse gases and your starting or reference or pre-feedback temperature is 263 K, just 8 K below freezing. So an even larger swathe of the Earth would be ice-free.
Here is where the 255 comes from.
The problem is the use of albedo in the equation. Albedo describes the amount of light reflected by a planet or a moon.
The Earth’s albedo is about 0.3. That means that 30% of the Sun’s energy is reflected away from the Earth without heating it up. Without albedo, the Earth’s radiation temperature would be 279K.
The predominant cause of albedo is clouds. Clouds have other effects than just reflecting energy away from the planet. They also interact with the energy radiating away from the planet toward outer space.
If the Earth didn’t have an atmosphere, its albedo would be the same as the moon, 0.12. Instead of 255 it would be 270.
The net effect of clouds is to cool the Earth by about 5K. link
Ignoring the greenhouse effect, the Earth’s temperature would be 279 – 5 = 274.
The Earth’s temperature is 288 so that gives a greenhouse effect of 288 – 274 = 14K.
That’s way different than 288 – 255 = 33K, which is the usually given magnitude of the greenhouse effect.
CommieBob’s argument is an interesting one, and it is one that I had originally made. However, after thinking about it further, I came to the conclusion that the 270 K emission temperature after correction for the fact that in the absence of greenhouse gases there would be no clouds must be corrected for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals, reducing the emission temperature back to 255 K. Since 255 K is climatology’s own figure, it gives the usual suspects one less thing to argue about when discussing our result.
“I do have some trouble understanding how temperatures cold enough to freeze CO2 would allow the gas to act as a greenhouse gas – in this case it would be a condensing greenhouse gas. Say the polar temperatures are always -10K below CO2’s freezing point and the tropics are always +10 or more above freezing point.”
Your problem is in your assumption that the temperature of ~250K is cold enough to freeze CO2 on the Earth, given the concentration of CO2 around 400ppm that is much warmer than the temperature necessary.
I suggest adding the word “pause” to the title to get the cast of climate clowns to comment.
Tricksy!
Commonly used assumption that just happens to be wrong. Doesn’t matter what the feedback is if the forcing does not exist.
The actual forcing above about 100 ppm is close to zero. The direct greenhouse effect is saturated with more than 99.94% of the energy in the CO2 15 micron band already being absorbed.
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
As CO2 increases you get a small increase in absorption by pressure broadening. It was only .17% for a CO2 doubling (in the above link) or about .02 C.
That gets us to the final part of climate pseudo science with something called “the enhanced greenhouse effect”. It supposedly comes about due to raising the effective emissions height of CO2 outward radiation to a higher, colder part of the troposphere. This is the source of the 1 K forcing mentioned above.
In reality, the CO2 effective emission height is fixed no matter what the concentration of CO2. This is due to a feature of the atmosphere called radiation exchange equilibrium.
“The concept of radiative exchange was the discovery of Prevost. It will be convenient here to define the term radiative exchange equilibrium between two specified regions of space (or bodies) as meaning that for the two regions (or bodies) A and B, the rate of flow of radiation emitted by A and absorbed by B is equal to the rate of flow the other way, regardless of other forms of transport that may be occurring” – Miskolczi 2010
Turns out CO2 radiation meets this description. This discovery eliminates the potential for any downwelling IR flux as well as locking in a fixed emission height. There cannot be an enhanced greenhouse effect.
In response to Richard M, the head posting confines itself to considering the actually quite simple and very large error that climatology has perpetrated and insists on perpetuating. That error is an error of control theory. It is a fundamental error of elementary physics.
Anyone Classically trained in disputation, as I am, will agree ad argumentum all points offered by the interlocutor except that which we can prove to be wrong. Therefore, though there may be many theories about whether CO2 exercises any forcing at all, we accept ad argumentum the value of that forcing that official climatology assigns thereto.
IOW, we accept our antagonist’s position, then show he is full of shit. Distillation of 2 paragraph’s of polite dissertation.
Yes, I understand what you are doing here. I just think that a far stronger argument come from debunking their basic assumptions.
The most basic of all the assumptions made by climatology is that only 1 K of direct warming arises if you double the CO2 in the air, and that another 3 K comes from feedback response. We have debunked that most basic of assumptions.
Knock them down one at a time – trying to go for all of them at the same time allows the climate zealots to obfuscate and divert attention.
Mr Page is right. If we succeed in getting out paper published, that will be the end of the climate nonsense in any event. Our result is fatal to just about every previously-published paper on the question of climate sensitivity, including my own first paper on the subject.
I agree with the strategy, but it appears we disagree on where to start. Falsifying the 1 K warming from doubling CO2 removes the need to ever worry about a feedback response.
Miskolczi 2014 shows that water vapor responds to increases in CO2 by reducing its portion of the overall greenhouse effect. The net result is we end up with a constant greenhouse effect independent of CO2 concentration. The 1 K of assumed warming disappears.
The reason this is never seen in radiation model analysis is they keep the water vapor levels constant or increase them.
A mechanism for why this will happen was described a decade ago by Dr. William Gray.
http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
The problem with trying to find fault with climatology’s estimate of reference doubled-CO2 sensitivity is that it is remarkably difficult to prove climatology wrong in that regard. Climatology itself claims an uncertainty of only +/- 10% in RCS, which is a lot better constrained, and therefore a lot harder to impugn, than the [1, infinity] interval of the system-gain factor that arises from an unholy concatenation of climatology’s elementary control-theoretic error and its absurd overestimates of the magnitudes and intervals of the principal feedback strengths.
Furthermore, trying to attack the notion of the greenhouse effect itself, one would have to range oneself against such formidable, and formidably honest, scientists as Professor Happer at Princeton. And one would be arguing against climatology on its own ground.
The beauty of concentrating on climatology’s error of control theory is that it is unquestionably an elementary error of the crudest kind; that climatologists know from nothing about control theory, and are immediately out of their comfort zone when it is mentioned; and that the norms of control theory cannot be reinvented by climatologists in the way that they have reinvented the temperature data.
Control theory is well enough established to hold its own against all assaults by the totalitarians who have take control of environmental-sciences departments throughout the West. They are deeply nervous of our result – and with very good reason.
Feedback in electronics I do understand, but then we know to a high degree of certainty contribution of every component in the system.
However, the above subject requires assumptions I have no idea are they valid or not so will say no more.
As far as sun shining from early 2021 to present, looks like it is shining more or less the same way as it was during most of 1914 and early 1915, but much different to what it did in 1811-12 and even more so than in 1850 (not shown in the attached graph below) that is considered in the above essay.
Has sun a memory to remember what it did a century ago?
Nope !
Is climate in the early 2020s to be similar to that of mid 1910s?
I doubt it, but time will tell.
Vuk is right that climate changes. But it is not our mission, in our sharply-focused paper, to consider every aspect of climatology. We consider only one aspect – the control-theoretic aspect. Has climatology gotten its feedback analysis right? Has it used control theory as control theorists would use it? The answer, alas, is No. We do not need to know anything about the very small changes over short periods of a few centuries in solar output in order to demonstrate that climatology has made a very substantial and very influential error.
The 2020s and 1910s can’t be compared this way because the global temperatures at the time were dependant on previous sun cycles and ocean cycles before. The sun cycles before 2020s and 1910s were both different. It may only be from 2020’s and 1910’s that they are similar, but both starting from a different global energy equilibrium.
I think of this using a small river or stream as an analogy. Imagine you have a riverside property. You dig a side channel next to the stream before it leaves your land, and using a series of pumps to get the water in the side channel upstream to where it enters your land. That’s your feedback. However, neither the amount of water in the stream entering your land, nor the amount of water leaving it, is going to change. And no matter how hard you run those pumps, you’re never going to burst the river banks either.
Not a bad analogy. The central point is that after correction of climatology’s error the feedback fraction – the fraction of equilibrium temperature represented by feedback response – is below 0.3. It is only if the feedback fraction goes well above 0.7 that one could in theory start to get runaway feedback.
That is not the right analogy. Rather take the same property and ask how much water you can store by digging a dam and slowly filling it up. Clearly if you dig a deeper dam you can store more water. The amount of water entering your property is irrelevant since that only determines how quickly you can fill up your dam not how much water you can store.
What? Are we both reading the same post? Have I missed something or have you cross posted from another topic entirely? Your analogy makes no sense whatsoever.
Indeed. There is this greenhouse effect calculation. It implicitly makes the assumption that heat is uniformly distributed over the surface of the globe. Thus the average surface temperature and the radiation temperature are the same. 🙂
On the other hand, the atmosphere and oceans do distribute heat even if we ignore the greenhouse effect. That, by itself, will reduce the magnitude of the apparent greenhouse effect.
My other big problem with the linked calculation is that it treats albedo as a magic mirror that reflects solar radiation and has no other effects.
Albedo is predominantly a result of clouds. Of course the question is how to treat clouds. Do they have a net cooling effect or a net heating effect? Just by asking the question, people admit that albedo is not, in fact, a magic mirror.
My point is that there is significant doubt about the actual magnitude of the greenhouse effect.
The basic GHE theory and climate models treat clouds as constant without any sensitivity to surface temperature. That is why the theory is rubbish and the models will always be wrong.
The persistence of clouds over tropical oceans responds sharply to the surface temperature such that they limit the ocean surface temperature to 30C – like any regulating system it can overshoot a bit but no open ocean surface exceeds 30C over an annual average. They will knock out any amount of sunlight to achieve that temperature. The clouds associated with deep convection control Earths energy input.
And you did not raise the question of sea ice. On average sea ice covers 17% of the ocean surface. The area changes to regulate energy loss such that the water below is maintained at -1.8C. A layer of ice 0.9m thick halves the radiating power of the water beneath it.
These temperature limits can be observed every day of every year across the globe:
CommieBob is right that there is significant doubt about the magnitude of the greenhouse effect. One might add that nearly all the doubt arises in exactly the areas he has pointed out – the feedback processes, and the magnitudes of and interactions between the responses thereto.
Of course, our result greatly increases that doubt, because we show that after correction of climatology’s error even a mere 1% increase in the system-gain factor, the measure of feedback strength, would engender a 250% increase in ECS compared with its value derived from data for the temperature equilibrium in 1850.
Christopher, have you corresponded directly with Hansen on this? He is getting on a bit and just may be interested in considering your maths – most people tend to admit mistakes as they get older when they have everything to gain and nothing to lose, rather than the other way around like the current crop of scientists who won’t have a clue about control theory.
You had a graphic a year or so ago that showed that the feedback only applies to the current changes in temperature that have the previous feedback included – that made it clear. It seems to me that the feedback is instantaneous mathematically but in reality is delayed by the time it takes to heat the atmosphere.
4 Eyes makes a most interesting suggestion. However, when I took Hansen’s paper and showed it to David Evans, who has 4 degrees in control theory and related scientific topics, he said it was clear Hansen knew nothing about control theory. At that time, we had not found the error. So I don’t think one would get much that was useful from the correspondence. But I shall consult my co-authors and see what they think.
I did have a substantial correspondence with an eminent skeptic. But he, too, knew nothing about control theory, and ended up tentatively concluding that emission temperature could not engender any feedback response at all. You should heard what our professor of control theory said about that.
One of the big problems we now face is that our result is a huge embarrassment to climatology. That so fundamental and so elementary an error could have been persisted in for so many decades is a testament not only to the heavy cost of excessive interdisciplinary compartmentalization and overspecialization but also to the even heavier cost of the suppression of academic freedom of discussion, research and publication by the climate Communists.
That Lord Monckton is hopelessly confused is readily seen in his statement that “the true system-gain factor is not 32 / 8, or 4, but (255 + 32) / (255 + 8), a tad below 1.1. Climatology’s value is about four times what it should be.”
Actually, “climatology’s” value is about 1.1, too, not four times that value.
Remember, Lord Monckton defines system gain factor as “the ratio of the equilibrium temperature signal after accounting for feedback response to the reference temperature signal before accounting for feedback response.” If you have (1) the value E of “the equilibrium temperature signal after accounting for feedback response” and (2) the value R of “the reference temperature signal before accounting for feedback response,” then according to his definition the “system gain factor” is E/R.
So if, as Lord Monckton contends, “climatology” gives pre-industrial values 263 K and 287 K to E and R, then it thereby says that the “system gain factor” is (287/263≈) 1.1 .
“Climatology’s” value for ΔE/ΔR is what’s about four times that “system gain factor.” Absent a linear-proportionality requirement—which feedback theory does not impose—there’s no reason why ΔE/ΔR must equal E/R. By insisting that “climatology” is wrong to have ΔE/ΔR differ from E/R, Lord Monckton is tacitly assuming that feedback theory requires linearity, no matter how much he denies it.
Nice comment. CMB argues must be near linear. But that cannot be mathematically true. Lorenz proved that decades ago with the ‘butterfly effect’.
And, all that theory stuff still ignores natural variation, whether ice ages/interglacials or MWP/LIA. The models CMB argues against cannot sort that problem at all because computational intractability forces them to parameterize, which by definition drags in the attribution (AGW or natural variation) problem. The AGW ‘only’ assumption is why models run hot (reference to previous posts explaining the issue here).
So one cannot believe what the UN IPCC CliSciFi practitioners tells us huh, Rud?
No, we can’t believe the IPCC. They have been lying to us all along.
It’s power politics, not science, at the IPCC.
Hopelessly 😉
You guys have been pushing this global warming…climate change now climate extinction for nearly 40 years. It’s a religion.
Mr Born is on a losing wicket batting uphill against the wind with a hangover in bad light with a thunderstorm coming. He persists, wilfully, in ignoring the actual climatological data, and in ignoring what climatology actually says.
Climatology, in dozens of influential papers, says that, based on the temperature equilibrium in 1850, to obtain ECS one must multiply any reference sensitivity – such as the 1 K direct or pre-feedback warming by doubling the CO2 in the air – by the ratio of the 32 K natural greenhouse effect in 1850 to the 8 K reference sensitivity to the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases present in that year. In other words, climatology says that on the basis of the system-gain factor it incorrectly derives on the basis of for 1850 ECS is about 4 K.
What is more, climatology (CMIP6 models: Zelinka et al. 2020 supp.) still says ECS is about 4 K. It is official climatology that implicitly assumes near-invariance of the system-gain factor over time. We make no such assumption.
We do, however, point out that after correction of climatology’s elementary error of physics a mere 1% increase in the system-gain factor compared with its value in 1850 would lead to a 250% increase in ECS compared with that year. Higher percentage increases in the system-gain factor would engender ECS in the hundreds of degrees. Since global temperature is not in fact rising by hundreds of degrees, anyone but Mr Born would infer that the system-gain factor must necessarily be very, very close to its value in 1850. Even IPCC’s high-end estimate of ECS would imply little more than a 1% increase in the system-gain factor.
Mr Born, as we gradually reveal more of our work, finds himself more and more often trying to put into our mouths things that we do not say, or repeating things we have said in the past without providing the full context. He is wasting his time.
Again, Lord Monckton confuses ΔE/ΔR with E/R.
As I said in my post, I’m averting my eyes from the questionable nature of various assumptions such as that anyone actually knows what the temperature would be without feedback or that there’s a one-to-one relationship between values with and without feedback—or, indeed, that there really is such a thing as an equilibrium global-average surface temperature in a nonlinear, chaotic climate system.
For the sake of focusing on those admittedly questionable assumptions’ mathematical implications, though, I’d agree arguendo with “climatology” that neither ΔE/ΔR nor E/R has likely changed much since pre-industrial times.
But “climatology” believes that the “near-invariant” ΔE/ΔR is considerably greater than the “near-invariant” E/R. I may disagree with that, but nothing in that “climatology” belief proves that “climatology” forgot that the sun is shining. “They forgot the sun is shining” is just something Lord Monckton pulled out of the air.
Mr Born is again wrong. He simply cannot bring himself to understand that at any given moment – such as the temperature equilibrium in 1850 – the feedback processes then present must perforce respond equally to each degree of reference temperature, and thus proportionately to each component therein. The question of whether one is considering the absolute or differential system-gain factor does not, in that context, arise at all.
And yes, there are many uncertainties in the underlying data. But those uncertainties do not in any way excuse climatology’s misunderstanding of how a feedback loop works.
Climatology forgot the Sun was shining because it decided that in 1850 the system-gain factor was the ratio of the 32 K natural greenhouse effect to the 8 K reference sensitivity to the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases – i.e., 4. From that, it drew the conclusion that ECS was four times the 1 K direct warming by doubled CO2 – i.e., 4 K.
What climatology did not realize was that in 1850 the Sun was shining and that, therefore, even without greenhouse gases the temperature would have been about 255 K. It might have been anywhere from 240 K to 270 K, but 255 K will do for now. For 255 K is about 30 times 8 K. So very nearly all of the 24 K feedback response in 1850 was feedback response not to greenhouse gases but to the neglected but surely not uninfluential fact that the Sun was, after all, shining.
Therefore, the system-gain factor in 1850 was not 32 / 8: it was (255+32) / (255 + 8). It was not 4, but less than 1.1. If climatology had remembered that the Sun was shining, it would have been able to work that out, and it would not have imagined that ECS must be as great as 4 K. But it had forgotten that the Sun was shining, and that has proven to be the most expensive lapse of memory in human history.
Climatology has never forgotten that the sun was shining. Nor does it use control theory to estimate the climate sensitivity. For an alternative approach consider the paper by W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer discussed here multiple times. From simply using the mod-tran database they find that a doubling of CO2 will result in an increase of temperature of about 2.2K in line with the IPCC estimates. The paper is at
https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03098
and you can see that there are no feedbacks or use of control theory involved.
Climatology first forgot the Sun was shining when Arrhenius first tried to estimate ECS. He made an allowance for water-vapor feedback, but in doing so he chose a system-gain factor so large that if – as that factor should be – it was applied to the entire reference temperature (including the emission temperature arising from the fact that the Sun is shining) it would imply ECS of several hundred degrees.
Arrhenius may be forgiven for his error, for control theory had not at that time been formalized. But Hansen et al. (1984) ought to have known better. So should Schlesinger (1988), and the many, many papers since that have made the same error.
Mr Walton is not correct, therefore, in his assertion that climatology does not use feedback formulism in its derivations of ECS. It does, as the above papers demonstrate. It is the models that do not use feedback formulism. But that fact is of no assistance to Mr Walton, for the models have been tuned to match the expectation of elevated climate sensitivity that the error of control theory had engendered. The very smallest alteration in any of tens of thousands of parameters will lead to a very large final outcome, as anyone with even a smattering of chaos theory or of statistics would at once understand. Pat Frank has already splendidly, irrefutably and unrefutedly demonstrated that the models are valueless as predictors of global warming: for all the trillions squandered on them, they are no better than used tea-leaves, and a lot less tasty.
As for Happer & Wijngaarden, their ECS is very much in the right ballpark, implying a growth of about half of one per cent in the system-gain factor compared with 1850. What our result shows, though, is that there can be no certainty that ECS is as high as H & W say it is, and still less that ECS is as high as the usual suspects profiteer by saying it is. The system is so very sensitive to small changes in the feedback regime, as encapsulated in the system-gain factor, that prediction of future temperatures is not available by any method.
Once the certainty of Thermageddon is swept from the board – and that is what our paper does – there is no longer any good reason to suspect that a small perturbation in the greenhouse-gas forcing will necessarily engender a large feedback response. That becomes merely one of a spectrum of possibilities – and not a particularly likely part of that spectrum.
The point is that, even though the models do not use feedback formulism, and though to some extent H & W did not use it either, feedback formulism is nonetheless applicable to the climate, as it is applicable universally to all feedback-moderated dynamical systems. It can, therefore, be used as a yardstick to scrutinize the attempts by official climatology to make predictions about climate sensitivity. And what it shows is that just about every paper that has ever been writtten on the subject of climate sensitivity is flat-out wrong, because its methods or results or both are incompatible with control theory. H & W is an honourable exception to this stricture. They made a valiant and meticulous attempt at deriving ECS. However, control theory tells us that since even a very small perturbation of the system-gain factor caused by a change in the feedback regime can have a disproportionately large influence on climate sensitivity, no prediction of global warming – unfortunately including theirs – is any better than guesswork.
Off topic—but in the world of reliability Arrhenius is sometimes jokingly referred to as “Errornius” because of a common assumption activation energies and failures (I forget the exact relation ATM) that is attributed to him.
Lord Monckton assumes linearity but primarily to advance his theory about what led Hansen and others to conclude that change in E over change in R is 4 times what it was in 1850. As I understand him (and I’m a total amateur with no math or climatology skills) he’s saying they assumed linearity too, but did the feedback calculation for the situation in 1850 wrong. His theory that climatologists made the elementary math error he alleges is looking pretty compelling to me. Some on this thread dispute the inputs Lord Moncton uses in his calculation but those disputes raise different issues. Again, if I understand him, he’s assuming agreement by Hansen and others with those inputs. He’s laser focussed on alleging a specific error he believes was made by the climatology community, and whether the climatology community made that error or instead has a different explanation for the huge difference between 2022 feedback responses they ascribe to CO2 and the 1850 feedback response properly derived by assuming an 8K direct warming, a reference temp of 255K and an equilibrium temperature of 287K is a factual question that can only be answered by looking at evidence ( such as their writings) that bears on the question.
Mr Cockrill is almost completely right. We are indeed laser-focused on isolating and proving a single catastrophic error, whose effect is to render all previous calculations and predictions of global warming meaningless, to remove the near-certainty that global warming will be large enough to be dangerous, and to show that there is no need to do anything about global warming, for there will be too little of it to matter.
However, he has been misled by Mr Born’s ravings into imagining that we assume the system-gain factor is linear. We make no such assumption. It is climatology that implicitly makes that assumption, which is why Mr Born’s attempts to blame that assumption on us provide such amusement here. Indeed, we point out that one consequence of our result is that the climate is about 30 times more sensitive to even tiny changes in the system-gain factor than climatology itself imagines.
At one level, this means that the high ECS predicted by climatology remains a possibility, though it is not a very likely one, and it is no longer near-certain. At another, precisely because the temperature has not risen by hundreds of degrees, as it would have had to do if climatology’s hilariously exaggerated guesstimates of feedback strength were correct, we can be sure that climatology’s estimates of feedback strength, diagnosed from the models, are unsound and that, therefore, the models are unsound too.
Thanks. I know that you do not assume linearity in the real world and that you are instead simply pointing out the result they should have arrived at on their own assumption. You say so directly. I meant that it’s assumed in the calculation you use, but only for the purpose of illustrating the error you allege. Isn’t your point that the IPCC modelers assume an ECS of about 4 because that is what they wrongly calculate the ECS was based on the situation in 1850 and that instead, on their own assumption of linearity, they should assume going forward the ECS correctly calculated by the inputs they used for the 1850 situation? I’m probably just confused.
Welcome to control theory. Anyone coming across it for the first time is likely to be confused. Even the simple – and much simplified – circuit diagram of the temperature-feedback loop in the head posting is more than enough to baffle 99% of the population, even though every equation is set out explicitly and the corrected and incorrect values for 1850 are directly compared and then explained.
The position, in summary, is this. Climatology, having forgotten that the Sun was shining, neglected altogether the large feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature and thought that all the 24 K feedback response in 1850 was attributable to the 8 K direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. Therefore, they thought that for every 1 K of direct warming – such as the 1 K direct warming by doubled CO2 in the air – there would be (24 + 8) / 8, or 4 K, final warming after allowing for feedback response. What is more, climatology implicitly assumes that the system-gain factor is invariant throughout the industrial era (an assumption which is not unreasonable). Therefore, just as climatology had found in 1850, today’s (CMIP6) models predict very close to 4 K global warming for each doubling of CO2 today.
However, in reality the system-gain factor in 1850 was not (24 + 8) / 8 = 4. It was (255 +24 + 8) / (355 + 8) = 1.095. Therefore, ECS based on the data for 1850 was not 4 K but 1.1-1.2 K. Therefore, if – as climatology implicitly assumes – the feedback regime and hence the system-gain factor is invariant throughout the industrial era, then climatology should be predicting 1.1-1,2 K ECS today, and not close to 4 K. Bottom line: All of climatology’s predictions are nonsense, for they are rooted in or influenced by its massive error of control theory.
Tough crowd here. Not sure what I said that earned the downvotes, but hey I’m new to this. Thanks for the response Monckton of Brenchley, but I trust you’re not including me in the 99% you mention. I think I understood the diagram and the error you are describing.
Your comprehension puts you in the 1%, not the 99%. The diagram is just about the simplest you will find anywhere.
Actually, the way I understand the UN modeling is that ECS is derived from the model outputs. Because of the wide variations in the outputs, the ECS numbers are correspondingly disparate.
I understand that’s the assertion, but with model tuning how can you tell if ECS is derived or chosen?
I don’t know; a histogram of the ECS values reported for IPCC #6 is decidedly non-normal (two peaks at either end) which means they do not “sample” a single value. Also, they become linear extrapolations of whichever CO2 “scenario” is selected by the operators.
The unfortunate truth is that the uncertainty interval in the prediction of ECS is simply made up. As Pat Frank has unchallengeably demonstrated, the uncertainty in the value of just one of the hundreds of variables that bear upon ECS is so large that the true bounds – just on the basis of that single uncertainty, exceed the officially-guessed bounds by an order of magnitude.
Models these days are capable of deriving ECS directly, though in earlier times ECS had to be diagnosed from their outputs.
However, the models are not capable of estimating feedback strengths directly. These are diagnosed from their outputs, just as ECS used to be. But the feedback strengths, and their intervals, are also guesswork, as our own result demonstrates.
All utter tripe. You are debating unscientific rubbish.
Earth’s energy balance is regulated by two temperature limiting processes based on the formation of ice. Persistent reflective cloud as a result of deep convection limits ocean surface temperature to 30C.
Sea ice formation limits heat loss from ocean water at -1.8C.
These two temperature limiting processes are the reason water remains as liquid on the Earth’s surface.
If you want to really understand Earth’s energy balance then you have to understand deep convection and the processes that enable and produce CAPE.
At least there is a growing awareness of the importance of CAPE:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=cape/orthographic=-242.05,-11.76,316/loc=120.032,-17.102
Not 100% accurate but at least they are trying.
One day, deep convection will be recognised as the reason water has remained on Earth’s surface and why Earth has been able to sustain the current lifeforms.
RickWill perpetrates the Error of the Ignoramus: he knows nothing of control theory, nor of its centrality in the derivation of estimates of future warming, and, therefore, he assumes that what he does not know is not worth knowing.
The question why there has very nearly always been some open water on Earth, even during the ice ages, has been well studied in climatology. If, for instance, one applies the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to any point in the tropics, one finds that even if the surface had been ice to start with it would melt, leaving a belt of open water approximately coextensive with the tropics, given today’s insolation.
But that is not the topic of the head posting.
MoB
The regulation of the ocean temperature limit is a near perfect feedback control system with immense power. Something I know a lot about and have published a good deal of data on the topic.
Read through Part I of the linked paper and you will see how the tropical ocean surface temperature is regulated to a limit of 30C. The charts in Figure 5, based on measured data from tropical moored buoys shows the system response. The same process occurs across all tropical oceans.
http://www.bomwatch.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Bomwatch-Willoughby-Main-article-FINAL.pdf
The attached chart shows the regulating system response in a Pacific warm pool. As soon as the temperature exceeds 30C, the shutters close up to reduce sunlight and the cooling water comes down. This is a real, easily observed control system that anyone living near tropical oceans has actually observed. Your “control system” is pure imagination having no relationship with the real world – unphysical claptrap. You can have your religion – I observe and quantify the real world.
Rick Will is rather ponderously describing the Eschenbach effect – the onset of earlier tropical afternoon convection with warmer weather, so that the clouds and rain provide earlier cooling and thus keep the mixed-layer temperature fro rising above about 30 K. That is a classic feedback mechanism, one of a couple of dozen that are significant in the climate.
I am disinclined to get into the age-old and largely futile debate about whether observation or theory are more important. One must begin with observation, and one must not propound a theory that is contradicted by observation, unless one is able to explain the contradiction. Beyond that, I do not go.
Climatology’s decision to imagine ECS of order 4 K arises not from errors of observation but from an error of theory. While observations are tending to confirm that its predictions of global warming are absurdly excessive, they do not tell us why they are excessive.
Control theory tells us why they are excessive. I can quite understand that Rick Will does not understand or enjoy control theory. Like it or not, though, it is a well-established and well-proven branch of physics, without which we could not have reached the Moon.
As a matter of record, climatology – in paper after paper after paper, including one by me – simply misunderstood control theory and consequently imagined that high ECS was near-certain when in fact it is not certain at all.
It is always irritating to those who put their boots on the ground to collect the observations on which the theoreticians draw their conclusions that the theoreticians do not also get their feet wet.
Well, there’s no point in being jealous of the theoreticians on my team. They know what they are about. They are professors in all the relevant disciplines. And they are dedicated to discerning the truth, whether you like it or not.
This is just nonsense.
I am describing and quantify the well known meteorological process of deep convection. My contribution to the science is quantifying the conditions for formation of a level of free convection 30mm TPW; the condition for cyclic convection 45mm TPW and the persistence of reflective cloud as a function of surface temperature. The cloud persistence sets a thermal balance between surface sunlight and surface heat loss at 30C.
Read the paper I linked to and then ask sensible questions. You will learn something ratrher than gibbering on about ECS and “greenhouse effect”.
No they’re not. They are dedicated to getting an income. The vast majority toe the AGW line for fear of getting the sack. Peter Ridd is one of the few who put integrity and science above the need for an income.
You have not made any relevant comment on the technical details of my comment on the deep convection and the the surface temperature limit – just gibbering on.
You clearly are in need of a clue – where did 30K come from?
There are only two feedback processes that are involved in Earth’s energy balance.
Deep convection prevents water boiling off by limiting ocean surface temperature to 30C.
Sea ice prevents all the water going solid because it limits heat loss.
Both these processes are so powerful that they actually limit surface water temperature to and upper limit of 30C and lower water surface temperature limit to -1.8C.
Deep convection is the most important atmospheric process and generally poorly understood. No climate model has the vertical resolution to reproduce the physics of deep convection. The easy way to parameterise is it to set a hard limit on ocean surface temperature of 30C, which is reality. Once that is done, the whole notion of AGW is dead.
The notion of an ECS is just claptrap. Why entertain claptrap. Lets get back to real science.
As I have said, it is up to each researcher to pursue and publish his own research. Rick Will’s research is just that – his own research. It is beyond my pay-grade to say whether he is right. But his research, interesting though it is if it is correct, is off topic here.
And he does his case very few favors by being rude about our research – or, rather about the notion that there is such a thing as equilibrium climate sensitivity, a notion that belongs no less to official climatology than to our research.
The idea that 300 K (I dropped a 0 by mistake) is the upper bound on tropical ocean surface temperature is not new, and it is not exclusive to Rick Will. It may or may not be correct. If it is, then so much the better: but it does not in any way invalidate our research, which adopts the powerful method known as Socratic elenchus.
We adopt ad argumentum – as Rick Will does not – all of official climatology, ECS and all, that we cannot prove to be unsound. Like it or not, there is a greenhouse effect. Therefore, the possibility of enhancing it by radiative forcing cannot be high-handedly dismissed. Therefore, we hold our noses and accept this and much else in climatology for the sake of argument. That clears the decks and obliges our detractors to concentrate on arguing against our result – and, as can be seen in this thread, they are having a lot more difficulty with it than they had expected.
As Mao Tse-Tung used to say, let a hundred flowers bloom. As the Prophet Muhammad used to say, you shall have your religion and I shall have my religion. Do not try to silence ideas that are not your own, and certainly do not do so by trying to argue against the premises. For the premises are those of official climatology. If you want to argue against them, you must direct your argument not to us but to official climatology.
I agree that there is a “greenhouse effect”. It is a religious belief unrelated to anything to do with Earth’s energy balance or climate.
GHE should be discussed as a religious doctrine not as anything related to science or discovery/understanding of physical processes.
The fact that you are incapable of understanding the technical details of deep convection is enough said. You education on climate is sadly lacking.
If you do know an independent thinking atmospheric physicist get them to review my work on deep convection. They may have the competence to understand it.I am willing to answer any questions on the paper I prepared.
Deep convection is literally the fundamental reason liquid water remains on Earth’s surface and supports current life forms. It is the most important atmospheric process by a long margin. It is the reason there has never been runaway global warming on Earth and never will be.
Rick Will is entitled to his opinion, but he is not entitled to his habitual discourtesy. If he is so sure of his result, let him write it up as a scientific paper and get it out for peer review. I have already explained to him that his notions, right or wrong, are off topic here. Our paper considers a particular and, as it turns out, readily provable control-theoretic error perpetrated by official climatology over the past century and more. Banging on about some theory, however elegant, that has nothing to do with the topic at hand is a device often deployed by climate Communists in these threads when they realize they are losing the scientific argument. Rick Will’s bad temper, discourtesy and refusal to engage properly or sensibly with the topic at hand do seem to fit that disfiguring pattern,
If “when we say that feedback response at any given moment is strictly proportional to the respective contributions of the constituents in the reference temperature at that moment, we are saying nothing whatsoever about whether that system is linear or non-linear,” then what, exactly, are they saying?
Lord Monckton traffics in meaningless word salad.
Now word salad Bob owns that moniker. The climate religion is strong with you. Meanwhile I have to wait until Saturday for warmth.
If one is considering an object at a particular moment, one is not, at that moment, considering the question whether the behavior of that object, over time, is linear or non-linear. One is considering the object as it is or was at that moment. It follows that any statement about the state of the object at that moment is not a statement about whether the object behaves over time in a linear or nonlinear fashion.
So what does “strictly proportional” mean? Does the proportionality change as the respective contributions change?
Consider the position at the temperature equilibrium in 1850. The 263 K reference signal comprised 255 K emission temperature plus 8 K reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. But the surface temperature was 287 K. The total feedback response to the reference signal was thus 24 K.
To assist Bellman in understanding the mathematical concept of proportionality, let us do the math.
In 1850, the feedback response to the 8 K warming by greenhouse gases was not 24 K, as climatology imagines. It was 24 x 8 / 263, or 0.7 K.
The feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature was 24 x 255 / 263, or 23.3 K. It was more than 30 times the feedback response to greenhouse-gas warming, because the 255 K emission temperature was more than 30 times the 8 K greenhouse-gas warming.
Of course, the proportions will change as the respective contributions change. But we shall get nowhere unless we begin by agreeing that the system-gain factor derivable from the data for 1850 is not 32 / 8 = 4, as climatology had deluded itself into imagining on the basis of its error. It was (255 + 32) / (255 +8) < 1.1.
A lengthy response to my question, which doesn’t provide an answer.
I know what the mathematical concept pf proportionality is. If y is proportional to x then
y = kx
for some constant k. This also means there is a linear relationship between y and x.
So when you say “Of course, the proportions will change as the respective contributions change.”, are you saying k isn’t constant? Because if it isn’t constant I don’t see how you can claim the response isn’t linear.
I suspect the response will be this is all explained in the post, but it’s very very long, written in an extremely irritating style, and I simply don’t have the time or expertise to go through it line by line. This seems to be such a fundamental part of the problem that is seems there should be possible to explain this without jibes or obfuscation.
Can you never stop whining?
(Sigh) If only climate Communists such as Bellman were interested in the objective truth rather than helping Mr Putin to fund his special military massacre of women and children in Ukraine, and helping Xi Jinping to corner the global market in lithium carbonate for electric-buggy batteries that weigh so much that each electric buggy consumes 30% more energy than a real car, they would be able to discern the truth, rather than merely opposing every fact and every argument, however true or sound, that in any way contradicts the Party Line to which they so robotically conform.
As every schoolboy who is not a Communists knows, if one is considering the state of an object at a particular moment, any statement about the state of the object at that moment is not a statement about whether the state of the object will change linearly or nonlinearly over time with respect to a variable of interest: for at that moment the question of linearity or nonlinearity over time is not an issue.
Me: Would it be possible to answer a simple question without rambling and making personal attacks..
Lord Monckton:
Don’t whine, and don’t be silly. “Bellman” is a furtive pseudonym. One cannot direct a personal attack at someone who knows he is well paid to spout the Communist party line on the climate question but, like many others of his ilk, does not want any of us to know who he is.
Missing my point. I’m not claiming to have been personally damaged by your lies. Just that your logarriah is a good way of indication you don’t have an answer. If you thought your logic was sound, you would have just answered the question.
Don’t whine. If you make constructive contributions rather than merely trotting out climate-Communist talking-points and generally being objectionable. you will be tret better.
Yes, there’s nothing us communists like talking about more than why proportional implies linear.
“As every schoolboy who is not a Communists knows, if one is considering the state of an object at a particular moment, any statement about the state of the object at that moment is not a statement about whether the state of the object will change linearly or nonlinearly over time with respect to a variable of interest: for at that moment the question of linearity or nonlinearity over time is not an issue.”
What has time got to do with this. The linearity is in respect to the temperature. If you say that y = kx then that is linear if you mean it applies to all x and k is a constant. If you are saying k changes as x changes than that is not a linear relationship, nor is it proportional. And if k does change you have to explain how you come to choose that particular value of k for that particular value of. If your answer is that the value of k was determined to get the correct result for that value of x, you are implying the relationship was linear up to that point.
Anyone reading these threads will understand that Bellman is mathematically challenged. At any one moment, and at any one place, only one temperature obtains. Temperature may change over time, and the feedback regime may consequently change to. But not at a particular moment. Chapter 1 of an elementary pre-calculus course should be of assistance to Bellman here.
“Temperature may change over time, and the feedback regime may consequently change to.”
Could you be specific about what you mean by feedback regime? Are you talking about a changing ratio, i.e. k changes with x, or are you saying that k remains constant and it’s just y that changes with x?
I’m also still not sure what time has to do with this. Are you saying that k also changes with time, or are you just saying that temperature will only change over time? It seems needlessly confusing to bring time into this if the feedback ratio will always be the same for a give temperature.
Who says k is a always a constant? k is a constant AT ANY POINT IN TIME but doesn’t have to be at all points in time.
You can still use any point in time to analyze what is happening AT THAT POINT IN TIME.
As usual your biases are shining forth!
Because that’s what proportional means in mathematics. It’s possible that Monckton has some different definition in mind, which is why I asked the question.
Of course you can say at a different point in time the proportional relationship might be different, assuming the world is a different place then, but that has nothing to do with this issue. Monckton’s claim as far as I understand it, is that you can calculate the feedback as a proportion of temperature by looking at the world in 1850. This implies the relationship between absolute temperature and feedbacks is proportional, which implies it is linear. If the ratio isn’t a constant than it’s just a meaningless number and cannot be used to predict what the feedback response will be with the next degree rise.
Proportional at that moment in time doesn’t mean that is linear or non-linear. It is simply what it is. Why is that so hard to understand? I’m not sure why you think proportional at that point in time makes the proportion a constant. It is something you can investigate and show that CM’s hypothesis is in error.
There is no time involved in the calculation. It very well may change in the next increment of time and it may have been different in the preceding increment of time. So what?
“Proportional at that moment in time doesn’t mean that is linear or non-linear.”
Of course it means it’s linear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(mathematics)
Simple, emergent phenomena. Things that occur occasionally. How many times does CM need to say, “a moment in time”. At the next moment clouds may form, PDO may change.
This is one of my pet peeves. If you want to use averages like climate science does, you are doing it so you can focus on one moment in time whether it is correct to average or not. Averages means those locations where the sun is at zenith don’t show up with their true radiation. The points at the poles who get no sun, still get the average. The average radiation concept is all hosed up. You end up with huge “feedbacks” from GHG’s to make up the difference lost in the averaging.
“Simple, emergent phenomena. Things that occur occasionally. How many times does CM need to say, “a moment in time”. At the next moment clouds may form, PDO may change.”
Yes, that’s what I find problematic with this whole thesis. Feedbacks are emergent phenomena. They don’t occur equally at all temperatures. Which is why the initial assumption seems wrong whatever control theory says. The assumption that the ratio of feedbacks at a given temperature is proportional to the absolute temperature implies a linear response.
You missed the point. It isn’t only CM’s faulty thesis, as he has pointed out, he is using the consensus climate science theories to prove they have made a mistake and need to go back and reanalyze.
Part of the problem in using “feedback” with radiation is that there is that bugaboo term of “T^4”. When you solve for temperature you are taking the 4th root of the remaining variables, of which radiation intensity happens to be one. If you use an average radiation value, you are basically saying that the poles receive the average and radiate the average right along with the tropics. That is stupid and doesn’t capture the proper gradients that are involved for both temperature and IR.
Actually, since we are concerned in climate-sensitivity studies with the first derivative of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, if we assume that the emissivity is constant (from which little error will arise) we may take the differential as being simply the ratio of the surface temperature to four times the net incoming top-of-atmosphere radiative flux density, which gives a Planck response pretty close to linear.
My only beef is that TOA is not a constant average over the earth. You basically said this in your essay.
This should, according to GHG theory, produce a “hotspot” in the troposphere above the tropics. It still hasn’t. Something is in error here too.
No, the fact (not the assumption) that at any given moment the contributions to reference temperature contribute to feedback response in strict proportion to their magnitudes tells us nothing whatsoever about whether the system is linear or nonlinear over time: for we are considering only that moment. An elementary pre-calculus textbook would be of assistance to Bellman here.
I think this is where the confusion arises. If you say that “the contributions to reference temperature contribute to feedback response in strict proportion to their magnitudes”, you are saying the relationship between reference temperature and feedback response is proportional and hence by definition the relationship is linear. By linear I mean feedback response is linear to reference temperature.
I am not saying is linear with respect to time. If there was a proportional relationship between reference temperature and feedbacks in 1850, then it must mean that that linear relationship held in 1850. Even if the relationship changes over time, you still have to assume it was there at that moment in time. You need it to be linear to extrapolate what the proportion will be as temperatures rise.
The problem is, if as seems reasonable to a non-expert like me, feedback responses are not going to be linear, then the proportionality you calculated in 1850 cannot be used to extrapolate into the future. But here your defense seems to be that you don’t even think the linearity holds over time, so how is it possible to use it to predict future rises?
I’ll say this once. When evaluating at a moment in time, you are evaluating a function without a “t” (time) involved. You don’t need to know if the total feedback is linear, exponential, or non-linear. All you need to know are the values at that point in time.
Emergent phenomena can arise from linear, non-linear, exponential, or any other combination. Yet, at a moment in time, who cares.
You can’t determine the feedback function with a time variable without a lot of experimentation. Which is what you should really wonder about. Why hasn’t climate science been able to define and publish any function for the emergent clouds, ocean cycles, water vapor, etc.
“You don’t need to know if the total feedback is linear, exponential, or non-linear. All you need to know are the values at that point in time.”
But Monckton is assuming linearity at that point of time. He’s assuming the feedback is proportionate to the entire temperature range. Moreover, he’s than extrapolating that proportion into warmer temperatures. He’s saying the feedback was around 10% of the total temperature, and that means for every 1K rise there will be an additional 0.1K feedback.
Bellman has been told and told and told that to state that at any given moment the feedbacks then subsisting must perforce respond equally to each degree of reference temperature and thus proportionately to each component therein is to make no statement at all about the linearity or nonlinearity of the system response to feedback over time, for only a single moment is under consideration. He should get his Komsomol kindergarten mistress to explain that one cannot determine either the shape or the slope of a curve from a single point thereon.
Monckton still doesn’t get that I’m not interested in the system response to feedback over time. It’s the assumed linearity of the feedback response to temperature, that’s the problem.
Your buddy bdgwx says the atmospheric response has lots of different factors. And you think the combination of all those factors should be linear?
Once again your lack of real world experience just shines through.
No, I think the response is non linear. It’s Monckton who is assuming there’s a linear response.
You need to go back to calculus and limits. All you are saying is that the response to a feedback at a single point in time is some type of exponential yet for the reference temperature the response is different, i.e., a simple constant. For you to make that argument you also need to provide some references that indicate that. Good luck since T^4 is involved in all cases.
This is much simpler than calculus, it’s just algebra. Monckton says that if at some point in time we know temperature is x and the feedback is y, that means there is a constant k, such that y = kx. This implies a linear relationship, though he denies it. If it isn’t a linear relationship then it’s not possible to extrapolate what a rise in x would mean. The relationship between y and x could be y = kx^4, or y = k2^x.
Troll comment.
You have no idea what you are talking about. You are just asking hypothetical questions with no mathematical justification. You want an answer, base your question on math that you have done. Show your work!
I’m not claiming any relationship is correct. I’m just asking why you would assume the only possibility is a linear one, and then keep denying that’s what you are doing.
Read this and pay close attention to what the derivative is at a point.
Introduction to Derivatives (mathsisfun.com)
The derivative will tell you the slope at a point. Is the derivative linear, exponential, or even a trig function? Who knows? What you can do is find out the values of the point. Without knowing the function, there is no way to predict what the next point will be. No one in climate science has any idea or we would already have a mathematical basis for knowing moment to moment what the temperature will be.
No idea why you keep going on about derivatives, when I say this is nothing to do with calculus. If you have a point please state it rather than going through this patronizing “read this” routine. I mean,
“Without knowing the function, there is no way to predict what the next point will be.”
is my point. Monckton assumes he knows the function and tries to predict the next point.
Do you have evidence contradicting that assumption? Remember, climate science assumes the same thing, that there is a linear response to CO2, that reflects in the ECS.
You should I need evidence. It’s Monckton’s assumption – he need’s the evidence it if he wants to use it claim everyone else is wrong.
My only observation is it seems highly unlikely to me that feedbacks would work uniformly at all temperatures. You don’t have to worry about clouds if it’s too cold for an atmosphere.
How does an inanimate object differentiate between inputs? It must act on all inputs based on their proportion to the total input. If the gain is 10 and one input is 60 and the other is 40 then the output is 60. * 10 plus 40 * 10 = 1000. The same as the total (100) * 10 = 1000.
Why do you always have such a hard time with real world situations?
If the proportions change (e.g. 40/60) the same thing applies. If the gain changes in the next second that new gain still acts on all inputs the same.
“Climatologists’ error arose from interdisciplinary compartmentalization. They borrowed feedback math from control theory, a mature branch of engineering physics, but without understanding what they had borrowed.”
I have written much about the sheer nuttiness (and ignorance) of this corruption of feedback math. Here i’ll just comment on this basic premise. Climatologists did not do that. As I explained here, feedback talk is just a way of conceptualising the behaviour of linear equations. Occasionally climate scientists undertake that, but it is in no way the basis of climate science. After all, Arrhenius had it all worked out in 1896, long before any electronic analogues. Lord M is fixated on a couple of mentions of feedback in the 1980’s.
Feedback analogue is no part of the workings of GCMs.
If there is one thing we get from Nick it’s obfuscation. Hopefully this winter you can ditch your extra blanket so you don’t have to touch the thermostat.
Mr Stokes is characteristically disingenuous. Whether he knows it or not, control theory – the theory of feedback – is of universal application to feedback-moderated dynamical systems, such as the climate. No exceptions.
IPCC (2013) mentions “feedback” >1000 times. The notion of feedback is central to the notion of elevated ECS. To an error of +/- 10%, the radiative forcings from most of the climate-relevant greenhouse gases are well kent. On the basis of those forcings, and given the known industrial-era value of the Planck sensitivity parameter, it is known that direct warming by – or reference sensitivity RCS to – doubled CO2 in the air is about 1 K. Yet the current midrange estimate of equilibrium sensitivity is close to 4 K. Feedback processes, therefore, are imagined to multiply RCS by 4 to obtain ECS.
It is precisely because Arrhenius tried to work out feedback response – to the water vapor feedback in particular – long before feedback mathematics had been formalized that he got it wrong. That point is made in our paper.
As the head posting makes plain, GCMs do not implement feedback formulism directly. Instead, they try to solve the notoriously refractory Navier-Stokes equations for a million atmospheric cells, in a series of time-steps, and to a resolution far below that which would capture the sub-grid processes.
Whether Mr Stokes knows it or not, the estimates of feedback strengths relied upon by official climatology are diagnosed from models’ outputs (see e.g. Vial et al. 2013 for an explanation). Since the feedback strengths thus derived are manifestly excessive once climatology’s error is corrected, one may deduce either that the process of diagnosis was incompetent, or that the models themselves are incompetent, or both.
Nor should he imagine that the errors perpetrated by climatology occur only in one or two papers. They occur throughout the climatological literature. And the original papers in which the error was perpetrated set the trend of expectation. People were misled by the error into believing that ECS was necessarily 3-4 K, and that became the “settled science”. Models were tuned to produce ECS of that order. After correction of the error, however, it becomes evident that all existing methods of attempting to derive ECS, including GCMs’ are incapable of constraining it.
If someone is using linear equations, they are at fault to begin with. Temperature has a decidedly non-linear term to say nothing of radiated area. This isn’t an algebra 1 type situation even though much of the basics touted by climate science would like people to think so.
A laudable goal: “In this posting, I shall try to do as Gary suggests and reach the people we do not reach”. I get that the gist of the article is that the alarmists are using incorrect factors and formulas in their calculations but the people we do not reach are the lower school grades, English, gender studies, journalism, etc., majors in college and most politicians. They don’t speak in Kelvins. Is it possible to translate Kelvin into Fahrenheit or Celsius (or both) in your article? You know, make it warm and fuzzy. Until I converted some of your numbers to Fahrenheit, 300K seemed, to my ingnorant non-scientific mind, somewhere between a griddle ready for pan cakes and the surface of the Sun. How many Kelvins to boil (373.15K) or freeze (273.15K) water? Would my tongue stick to a flag pole if the ambient temperature was around 260Kelvins? Whoa, it’s supposed to get down to 293Kelvins after sundown, better put on a sweater! More touchy-feely. Also, please put conversion formulas at the beginning or end of the article with examples of each, so the mathmatically challenged in the audiences can follow along if they wish (K to F), (K to C), (F to K), (C to K).
In response to Chain Vara, we are chiefly concerned at present with explaining climatology’s error to those with some climatological knowledge or interest. To them, a Kelvin is not unfamiliar. In due course, once our result has been published, we shall translate it as best we can. For now, though, we are aiming at those who are capable of looking up what a Kelvin is, and of understanding that we use Kelvin because the relevant equations would go wrong if they were attempted in Celsius.
Monckton of Brenchley, I appreciate how well you have stuck to your central point for several years now – that climate feedback as a concept has been greatly exaggerated and that the nature of the core error can be identified and illustrated. Thank you for this new round of explanation, especially the Q&A.
I comment from the same perspective as Gary Pearse, quoted in your post, “I am an engineer, so had no trouble understanding the idea as originally presented…“
Your point has always been conceptual, describing Earth as a single emitter for the purposes of analyzing the feedback issue. This is consistent with how the climate claims have been publicly portrayed for persuasion.
That said, we all know that the planet is not a single emitter. It is a huge array of variable emitter/reflector elements. It is impressive to me how wide a range of outputs is achieved. How is this best visualized? The images and the animations from the geostationary satellites provide a high-resolution view of the final result of all the energy input, feedback, and motion. I have been pasting this link in comments on other WUWT posts recently, so I apologize to those who have seen this already from me and might be getting tired of it.
This link below is to an eight-hour animation of the Band 16 visualization of the full disk of the planet from GOES-16. This is the “CO2” band centered at 13.3 microns wavelength. In other words, it is the same range of wavelengths from which concerns about greenhouse gas warming arise for CO2, where the absorption and emission add to the partial absorption and emission of water vapor. A “brightness temperature” scale is used to convert radiance into colors for visualization. In this case a brightness temperature of 50C is for a radiance value that is 13 times stronger than that for -90C (Calculated from the equation and constants in the user manual for GOES-16, band 16.) So you can see the emitter elements are variable over a huge range. Clouds are a huge influence on how strong the emission to space ends up. The resolution is 2 km.
Where are the “coldest” places in this image (i.e. weakest emitter output)? The tops of convective cells in the tropics. Where are the “warmest” places (strongest emitter output)? The dry land areas, e.g. northern Chile, and Mexico during daytime.
The link gives the most recent eight hours. You can set the animation for longer or shorter.
Ultimately, I think these visualizations will help folks grasp that the overall result of increased CO2 concentration is not being described realistically in the news, by climate spokespersons, and by government and intergovernmental agencies. The warming could be entirely natural, and you would never know it from what can be observed from space. So my view continues to be that ECS for a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial times cannot actually be distinguished reliably from zero by any means we have available to us. This is the real output, as best we can “see” from space at high resolution.
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=G16&band=16&length=48&dim=1
Deep convection is the energy control knob and with the current atmospheric mass, it limits open ocean water to 30C. It is a temperature limiting process.
Deep convection is why Earth has retained water over the surface. The limiting temperature has been higher than 30C when the atmospheric mass was higher but not much above 30C.
The GHE theory fails because it treats clouds as constant and unresponsive to surface temperature. Clouds regulate the energy balance not “gasses”.
When cyclic deep convection kicks in at 45mm precipitable water, there is persistent ice above 500kPa that starts out as cumulonimbus cloud and then persists as cirrus cloud. Cloud tops over tropical oceans around 250K are the radiating source for heat loss from tropical oceans.
Convective overturning within a gaseous atmosphere is indeed the energy control knob for that atmosphere because it controls the amount of kinetic energy (heat) retained as potential energy (not heat) within that atmosphere.
Furthermore, atmospheric mass bearing down on the ocean surface is indeed the factor controlling the maximum temperature that the oceans can achieve.
However, that is separate from Christopher’s head post.
Taking the climatologist’s incorrect assumptions about the significance of radiative feedback on their own terms he shows that they got the numbers wrong in an elementary schoolboy way such that when the error is corrected there is no climate emergency even if radiative gases were the climate control knob.
He’s been told this again and again, but just can’t let go of his bone.
Grrrrrrr!
I am unable to rotate that global view. Should I be able to do that?
My view shows mainly Africa. Would it be possible to see the Indian Ocean, Australia and the western Pacific?
This is from GOES-17, centered over the Pacific.
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=G17&band=16&length=48&dim=1
I realize it does not show Australia or the Western Pacific, but it does provide a shifted view based on the satellite location.
Mr Dibbell makes a most interesting and constructive point. it is indeed possible, given the complexity of the system and its remarkable thermostaticity, that ECS is little more than zero. However, we have confined ourselves to nailing down the single, enormous control-theoretic error without which no one would ever have tried to maintain that our sins of emission could be anything other than net-beneficial.
Another reason that the climatologists forgot about the sun is that when they tried to correlate global atmospheric temperatures with solar activity they could find no correlation.
But that is the equivalent of correlating the temperature inside of an air-conditioned house with the sun. Such an analysis would find find either no correlation, or even a negative correlation (because some people keep their air-conditioned house cooler in summer than in winter).
Indeed, the earth, like this house, has a very powerful air-conditioning system. It’s called ENSO. The harder the sun shines, the harder the air-conditioner works (El Nino). When the sun is weak the air-conditioner shuts off (La Nina).
This is why the earth’s temperature is so remarkably stable.
I do not have a dog in this fight.
I have seen and heard Monckton make this presentation live and afterwards have seen Monckton and Roy Spencer quietly discussing it in a private corner of a conference center (they do not agree).
Regardless, climate sensitivity is obviously too high in the models and it has led to climate madness.
The whole concept of “greenhouse effect” is a belief and unrelated to Earth’s energy balance. Madness is an apt description.
Even if Rick Will were right that there is no greenhouse effect – and he is not, as the elementary calculation based on data for 1850 amply demonstrates in the simplest and most compelling fashion – he has failed to understand that our argument is rooted in formal logic. The existence of a greenhouse effect is a premise advanced by our interlocutors in climatology. We accept that premise, as we do all of climatology’s premises except those that are demonstrably false. Then, as far as possible, we leave climatology no choice but to concentrate on examining our reasons for finding its principal conclusions to be unjustifiable.
We argue from climatology’s ground, leaving it nowhere to go in opposing us except to address the essence of our argument. In that context, it actually does not matter whether there is a greenhouse effect. It is enough to posit such an effect ad argumentum, and then to show that that premise, along with other premises with all of which climatology must in the end agree, lead to a contradiction if climatology’s conclusion is accepted. Therefore, either climatology must abandon one or more of its central premises, or it must abandon its conclusion.