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.
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.
Kip, yup. My point was to relate as much as possible to history and observation, as more convincing than theory. We want to ‘win’ most convincingly, not most theoretically or abstractly. And a win is a win, no matter how precise.
Rud ==> Global Warming is a Science War that has slopped over into a political and social war. The science, as we know, is controversial but with one side claiming consensus and settled.
Same with the Salt Wars, the Sugar wars, etc.
Mr Istvan should not underestimate the power of a formal proof that climatology’s imagined Apocalypse arose from an elementary error of physics. Among scientists generally, as news of the error slowly spreads, more and more are beginning to realize that the entire edifice of nonsense is built upon sand. A couple of years ago I gave a seminar on our result to the world’s most eminent mathematical logician and some of his colleagues. They were fascinated.
Of course, the journals will try to keep our paper from ever seeing the light of day, not because it is wrong but because it is right. But we shall persist, and we shall prevail. Once everyone realizes the scale and sheer idiocy of the error, climatology will be laughed at and we can start building coal-fired power stations again. Neither Mr Putin nor Mr Xi will like that. But we shall get electricity at one-sixth of the current price.
You are sustaining the nonsense about “greenhouse effect”. CO2 has no direct influence on Earth’s energy balance.
There are two temperature regulating processes.
The upper temperature limit on open ocean surface is 30C.
The lower temperature limit on water below sea ice is -1.8C.
The concept that “gasses” play a role in the energy balance is nonsense. It is ice on the surface or atmosphere – a solid.
Rick Will is entitled to his opinion, but it is wildly off topic. The head posting is about a large, embarrassing and elementary error of control theory perpetrated by climatology over the past century and more.
In order to contribute usefully to scientific discussion, we accept – sed solum ad argumentum – all that official climatology proposes, except what we can disprove. We cannot disprove the greenhouse effect, because we are more than competent to perform the simple calculations on the temperature equilibrium in 1850 that establish beyond doubt that the greenhouse effect exists.
If Rick Will wishes to write a paper to assert that there is no greenhouse effect, in that paper he will have to explain, with quantitative analysis based on observation, why it is that the temperature in 1850 was 32 K greater than the temperature that would have obtained on Earth without any greenhouse gases in the air at the outset.
He is entitled to do his research, and we are entitled to do ours.
Lord Monckton’s (by all appearances, failed) attempt to convince Dr. Spencer begins at time stamp 21:45 of Lord Monckton’s speech.
I unpack that attempt in connection with Fig. 7 of my post.
Joe ==> They just disagree about this — both think they are right. Other than that, they get along and sit at the same table.
One thinks 1 + 1 = 2, the other thinks 1 + 1 = 3. They just disagree.
Seriously, we really are talking about objective mathematical facts. I know how Lord Monckton’s impressionistic language can obscure this truth. But once in a while he slips up and says something clearly; if you look at his “end of the global warming scam in a single slide,” for example, you can recognize with nothing more than high-school math that his theory boils down to bad extrapolation.
Lord Monckton denies above that what he does is extrapolation, but, again, even a high-school kid could see in my diagram that he’s wrong.
He also sputters that I have taken that slide out of context. But here’s what context is:
In 2018 he had described his they-forgot-the-sun-is-shining theory in two videos and six WUWT posts, in the first of which he had described his theory as the product of research that had been going on for eighteen months. Then WUWT ran yet another of his posts, this one presenting the theory in an objection-and-response style.
At the end of that post he summed the theory up with the “single slide,” describing it thus: “Here’s the end of the global warming scam in a single slide. The tumult and the shouting dies: The captains and the kings depart … Lo, all their pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.”
That’s the context. The slide wasn’t some throwaway. He had used essentially the same slide before, and it was his triumphant summary of all that had preceded it. It was “the end of the global warming scam in a single slide.”
Except that it was wrong.
It showed how he said Hendrik Bode and control-systems theory dictated that ECS (“ΔE_2”) be calculated from pre-industrial and current temperature values E_1 and E_2, the values R_1 and R_2 that those temperatures would have taken without feedback, and the temperature change ΔR_2 that doubling CO2 concentration would cause without feedback.
As any high-school analytic-geometry student would be able to verify, the two black dots and the red cross on my post’s first plot represent that slide’s quantities graphically, the vertical distance ΔE_2 between the red cross and the lower black dot being the ECS value Lord Monckton said the “Bode equation” required. The student could also see that the method thereby illustrated boils down to bad extrapolation.
And what Lord Monckton called climatology’s “startling error of physics” is represented by the green cross. That “startling error” is what high-school kids all over the world would recognize instead as proper linear extrapolation.
Once I had thus laid his error out graphically for all to see, Lord Monckton dismissed the slide as being three years old. But why did its age matter? What had happened in the previous three years to change things? Had they repealed what Lord Monckton called the “Bode equation”?
And, if he no longer stood by his “end of the global warming scam in a single slide,” when had he discovered his mistake? At what point had he told his gushing fanboys they’d been misled?
The fact is that, with slightly different numbers, Lord Monckton continues to make the same basic math error: he confuses local slope with average slope. Or, in electrical-engineering lingo, he confuses small-signal analysis with large-signal analysis.
Yes, Lord Monckton and Dr. Spencer both think they’re right. But one of them is objectively wrong.
Roy Spencer once insisted to me that an atmosphere with no radiative gases would become isothermal. With that level of flawed knowledge I can see why he might not be capable of recognising the simplicity and significance of Christopher’s proposition.
He is great with the UAH satellite sensors though.
Actually, statistical mechanics does tell us that an adiabatically isolated column of gas in a gravitational field cannot at equilibrium have a detectable thermal gradient maintained by gravity. (Theoretically there would a minuscule gradient, but it would be in the range of something like picokelvins per megaparsec.) Although I have quibbles with his approach, Duke professor Robert Brown gave a thermodynamic explanation here.
So Dr. Spencer’s position is much to his credit.
The problem with Robert Brown’s rather silly ‘explanation’ is that he used columns with constrained sides which removes the effect of declining density with height around a spherical object with a gravitational field.
The clue is in the nonsensical term ‘adiabatically isolated’.
In reality a system is either isolated OR it is adiabatic.
Three comments for the benefit of any lurkers whom Mr. Wilde may have confused:
First, the point of Dr. Brown’s post was that the principal cause of the lapse rate—i.e., of the rate at which the tropospheric temperature declines with altitude—isn’t gravity; it’s the adiabatic expansion that warm air undergoes as it rises. So he showed that without such convection a perfectly transparent atmosphere would be isothermal despite gravity.
Second, although he used a column in a uniform gravitational field for the sake of simplicity, his result extended also to a thin annular atmosphere. Density decreases with altitude in a column just as it does in a thin annulus subject to centripetal gravity; Mr. Wilde is simply wrong.
Third, there’s little point in arguing whether phrase adiabatically isolated is redundant; Dr. Brown’s point remains true either way.
Mr Born is, as usual, wrong. He carefully omits the context, which is that it is official climatology, not we, that implicitly assumes linearity in industrial-era feedback response. Therefore, since ECS based on the quite well-constrained data for 1850 was 1.1-1.2 K, climatology should assume ECS of that order today.
And all of Mr Born’s hate-filled, twisted, petty, maggot-ridden word salad does not alter the fact that Dr Spencer found my energy-budget calculation had satisfactorily addressed his concerns about the nonlinearity question.
Joe ==> Well, you obviously have a strong opinion and a high opinion of yourself.
Dr.Spencer is maybe not so certain anymore that Monckton is wrong.
Whether Monckton is right or wrong on this particular issue, he is both a top flight scientist and a top flight mathematician.
I look forward to your links to your own work on the issue,so others can check it out.
So what. Your maths have failed to keep up with C02.
Control knob my a$$!
Meanwhile we are covering the earth in stupid windmills and solar panels. Make the madness stop.
Actually, Roy Spencer has now accepted that we have dealt with his point about taking proper account of the nonlinearity of the climate system.
Monckton ==> Terrific … can you add a bit to the essay above explaining how that resolved? Leaving out personal details just the science bit.
By all means. Our first method was to use the energy-budget method to demonstrate that the system-gain factor for today, derived by that method, is identical to the well-constrained system-gain factor 1.095 derived from the relevant climatological data for 1850. However, IPCC (2021) came along and tampered with all the inputs to the energy-budget equation, with the effect of doubling the system-gain factor from 1.1 to 2.2.
What that means is that, after correcting climatology’s error, ECS would be in the hundreds of degrees. That deals with Roy’s point about nonlinearity in spades. After correction of climatology’s error, the climate system is potentially more nonlinear, not less nonlinear, than with the error. However, in reality the temperature today is not hundreds of degrees above what it was in 1850. It is 1 degree above what it was in 1850. So the system-gain factor must be very, very close to what it was in 1850.
I haven’t discussed that with Roy Spencer yet, but am looking forward to doing so when next I see him.
In general, even among skeptics, there is a disinclination to look into the small print of our research, because skeptics are if anything more embarrassed than true-believers once they realize that they have allowed themselves to be fooled by this extraordinarily elementary error.
Monckton ==> Nicely said. Without skin in the game I will wait for the dust to settle. I know you read here at WUWT occasionally and may have read some of my essays. I quite agree that there are errors in the consensus approach and I hope you are vindicated in the end.
The beauty of our argument is that it is so simple. For 1850, climatology says the system-gain factor is the ratio of the 32 K natural greenhouse effect to the 8 K direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. But that method assigns all the 24 K feedback response to the 8 K greenhouse-gas warming, and none to the 30-times-larger 255 K emission temperature.
Emission temperature is no less capable of engendering a feedback response than the greenhouse gases. The true system-gain factor, which converts direct warming before feedback response to final or equilibrium warming after feedback response, is not 32 / 8 = 4: it is (255 + 32) / (255 +8) < 1.1.
That’s it, in a nutshell. Even Nick Stokes has just come very close to admitting that Hansen et al. (1984), Schlesinger (1988) and Lacis et al. (2010, 2013) got it wrong when, by forgetting that the Sun is shining, they thought the system gain factor based on the data for 1850 was 4, when it is only 1.1.
What is not appreciated is how powerful that wrong-headed calculation has proven to be. When I wrote to Sir John Houghton, IPCC’s first science chairman, more than 15 years ago to ask him why it was imagined that feedback response in the climate could be larger – a lot larger – than the tiny greenhouse-gas warming that engendered it, he replied with the 32 / 8 = 4 calculation.
That was why the climate panic began. Everyone in the trade knew that the emission temperature was 255 K, that surface temperature in 1850 was 287 K and that the difference was 32 K, of which only 8 K was direct warming by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. Since 32 / 8 is definitely 4, they thought that the 1 K direct warming by doubled CO2 in the air over the 21st century would engender a final warming of 4 K – and that remains their midrange estimate to this day.
But their method of arriving at that estimate is nonsense, though they do not want to admit it. One of the many valuable features of our result is that it can be reduced to simple arithmetic that one can perform on a pocket calculator. In the end, everyone, whether they have skin in the game or not, is going to be able to understand our result.
If you really accept that Dr. Spencer has had a Damascene conversion to the belief that the models’ high ECS estimates result from modelers’ failure to recognize that the sun is shining, then there’s a bridge over the East River I’d like to talk about selling you.
The now utterly defeated Mr Born resorts to his default position: mere yah-boo. Dr Spencer would not necessarily use the colorful language that I use in order to explain a scientific point to audiences not all of whom are scientists – I shall be giving a lecture at Oxford on this subject at the beginning of the Michaelmas term later this year. But, like it or not, he was kind enough to say to me that, on the question of whether I had made due allowance for nonlinearity in the feedback regime over the industrial era, I had satisfied him.
So, no, he doesn’t agree with your theory.
Don’t be petty.
After reading all the comments I’m left with the age-old aphorism: Assholes are like opinions, everybody has one.
although, some are a bit more palatable than others.
Phew, you are what you eat, I suppose!
Mr. Monkton, I am without a doubt math challenged (which appears to be at least in part because I can’t remember ‘names’ for squat, and all those symbols you math wizards deal with so well are effectively names to me (as well as the numbers, which are the ”
names” of quantities ; )
In the real world, the actually physical one, I do quite well though, where I can sense the effects of various forces, and make “calculations” that do not involve quantization, but rather just how things will likely respond/behave in the real world. (Clearly, it seems to me, that is how our minds naturally deal with the “physics” of realityland.) Therefore, it is generally through analogy to real world “physicals” that I can best grasp what you mathers are talking about.
So, I suggest if one wishes to communicate what this apparent error under discussion involves to us math challenged types (and perhaps “mathers” as well to get the ball rolling, so to speak), it might best be accomplished through analogy to perhaps, someone trying to understand what effect a change in slope might have on a car that has been traveling “at equilibrium” with its engine propelling it at a constant speed (overcoming wind and rolling resistance) over level ground.
(To me, a mere physicalist, the car is not really at “equilibrium”, because the engine is constantly causing it to go faster that it would based on the wind/rolling resistance in relation to the slope of the ground it is on. Equilibrium for a car on level ground is no movement at all . unless there is a strong wind blowing.)
And I would liken this proposed error under discussion here, to someone effectively “forgetting” that the engine of the car in question is running, and so trying to calculate what effect a given downslope would have on the speed of the car, thinking an increase in speed would be calculable based on the gravitational force involved, and the wind/rolling resistance that force would be up against in establishing a new equilibrium (constant speed). Of course they can’t rightly, unless they take into account ALL the wind/rolling resistance the engine is already overcoming.
Climate “equilibrium” temperature, involves a heat “engine” called the Sun, that is constantly running (and overcoming the dissipation of heat from the Earth into space). And, much as the example already moving car, would not be sped up by anywhere near an amount equal to what the same car simply placed on a given slope would eventually move at, once the gravitational force was balanced by the wind/rolling resistance forces that given amount of slope would by itself involve/produce; Adding a bit of CO2 to the atmosphere would not cause anywhere near the amount of “warming” that this (or any other GH gas) would otherwise involve/generate by itself.
No doubt you can come up with a better, more appropriate, analogy, but it seems to me you need one or more to get people to grasp what happened to the Sunshine forgetters ; )
Mr Larson’s analogy is a very nice one. It shows that he has very nicely grasped the main point, which is that one must not ignore the big yellow elephant in the sky – after all, it accounts for at least 99.999% of the mass of the solar system. At this stage, we are concentrating most of our effort on trying to get the paper published, after the delay caused by the Chinese virus. Of course, the journals are being maximally difficult: they don’t want to tip the gravy-train into the gulch. But we shall persist, and we shall prevail. Once we have done so, we shall produce a plain man’s guide to our result. But not yet.
Dear Lord Monckton!
Please let me point out that not just sunshine is indeed the biggest “forcing”, but we could also imagine it to change. It is not just true for 11year solar cycles, but more cycles we know too little of, and the very long term. Total TSI is expected to have increased over time and is going to increase in the future.
This brings up the so called “Faint young Sun paradox”, as Earth was not frozen like 4 bio years ago. Rather climate stayed relatively stable, which again is explained by a weakening GHE..
Anyway, we can test the feedback hypothesis with the different plantes in our solar system. For instance Mars at 1.527 AU receives 147W/m2 in solar radiation and 122W/m2 post albedo. Theorically this would suffice for a surface temperature of 215K (=(122/5.67e-8)^0.25). This is almost exactly the observed average surface temperature.
Now if you would place Earth into the orbit of Mars, what temperature would it yield? Post albedo it would receive only 103W/m2, enough for ~206K. Even if we compare this to the 255K figure, that is a forced 49K less. If feedback enhanced this forcing by a factor of 4, the result was 255 – 4*49 = 59K. Because feedbacks Earth would turn a lot colder than Mars.
We can try the same with Mercury. In its orbit Earth would receive 1960W/m2 of radiation (post albedo), providing a forcing of 176K over 255K (to a total of 431K). Again if feedbacks multiply this forcing by a factor of 4, Earth should heat to 255 + 176*4 = 959K. However, Mercury only has an average 440K.
The feedback narrative contradicts the observations. While the planets in our solar system largely stick to the temperatures they should have given TSI, Earth would be the big exception. It would heat extremely if moved closer to the sun, and cool extremely if moved further away.
Herr Schaffer makes an interesting observation. However, climatologists argue that the degree of feedback response on Earth is by a large margin the most substantial in the entire Solar System. They would not accept the application of their erroneous terrestrial system-gain factor 4 to any other planet.
We think it is simplest to confine the calculation to the Earth for now. The equilibrium in global temperature in 1850 is a good basis for showing the difference between climatology’s system-gain factor and ours.
Climatology says the natural greenhouse effect in 1850 was 32 K, and that the direct warming by greenhouse gases was 8 K, so that the system-gain factor was 32 / 8 = 4 K.
However, climatology had forgotten the Sun is shining, and that it would induce a temperature of 255 K, the emission temperature, if there were no greenhouse gases in the air. The system-gain factor in 1850 was actually (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) <1.1.
Based on 1850, then, we know that climatology’s estimate of ECS was excessive by a factor 4. Of course, it would be tempting to assume that its estimate of ECS today is similarly exaggerated. However, one consequence of our result is that after correction of the error the climate is far more sensitive to very small changes in the system-gain factor than before that correction.
Before correction, a 1% increase in the system-gain factor would engender a 1% increase in ECS, compared with 1850. However, after correction that 1% increase in the system-gain factor would engender a 250% increase in ECS.
Since we know that temperature has not risen by the hundreds of degrees that climatology would predict if its estimated system-gain factor 4 were correct, we know that the system-gain factor has barely changed, if at all, since 1850. And we also know that the system-gain factor cannot possibly be anything like 4, and that, since that value was derived from the outputs of the general-circulation models, those models are incapable of providing outputs from which feedback strengths and consequently ECS can be correctly derived.
Hmm the same article again, so I will be asking the same question again.
Does the earthly CO2 change the sun?
(If it doesn´t you must not multiply a temperature effect from solar radiation by an earthly feedback factor)
No, it’s not the same article again: it’s the same subject again, with answers to questions from those interested in what is objectively true.
The impact of variations in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Earth has a negligible influence on the Sun.
However, one must perform the calculation in the right direction. The climate on Earth has a very small influence on the Sun, but the Sun has a very large influence on the climate on Earth.
Consider the water vapor feedback (at midrange, all others broadly self-cancel). If the Sun were not shining, even if by some magic there was an atmosphere, with greenhouse gases in it, the Earth would remain frozen. Even increasing the concentration by an order of magnitude would not make any difference to that.
Now, fiat lux! Let there be light! Suddenly, assuming today’s insolation, there would be a mean temperature of 255 K before accounting for greenhouse gases, and another 8 K from the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases.
So now, with the Sun shining, the reference temperature is 255 + 8 = 263 K. And that’s quite enough to melt all the ice in the tropics and a good bit more besides. And once that ice melts, feedbacks, notably the water-vapor feedback, start to happen. And they happen quickly.
Now, imagine that you are the water-vapor feedback. Recall that you did not even exist – indeed, could not exist – in the absence of the Sun’s warmth. But now you exist. And you are confronted with 263 units of temperature, of which 255 come from the Sun and 8 come from the noncondensing greenhouse gases.
By what magical process do you decide that you will altogether ignore the fact that the Sun is shining, even though it is supplying you with 30 times as many units of temperature as the greenhosue gases, and that you will respond solely to the 8 units of temperature from the greenhouse gases?
But the water-vapor feedback is inanimate, you will rightly reply. So it can’t decide anything.
Bingo! You’ve got it! By George, you’ve got it! Feedback processes are inanimate. They do not possess a soul, or an intelligence, or a will. Therefore, presented with any given temperature, here 263 K, they cannot but respond to that temperature, at any given moment, by treating each unit of that temperature in the same way. Because they are inanimate, they cannot pick and choose. Therefore, very nearly all of the feedback response in the Earth’s climate is, in reality, feedback response to emission temperature – the temperature that comes from the fact that the Sun is shining.
>> No, it’s not the same article again
To the uninitiated it looks so similar..
>> Consider the water vapor feedback
Producing with about 24k Warming on top of that about 255K from Solar radiation for an “earthlike body without atmosphere”
Now you write that the sun is unaffected from anything happening here, yet in your feedback formula you multiple a factor to the 255K part as if the sun would change.
That´s not the correct way to do it.
>> So now, with the Sun shining, the reference temperature is 255 + 8 = 263 K
For a world without water maybe, but that also does not at all describe our planet.
Your Fantasy worlds seem as bad as those climate models!
Laws of Nature, if it wishes to complain about the 255 K value for emission temperature, or the 8 K value for reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases, should not complain to us. We take these values, as we take all the data-founded premises in our argument, from official climatology itself. Go quarrel with them, not with us.
LoN is of course right. It is quite wrong in any case to include fixed terms in a perturbation equation. It gets treated as a perturbation, with ridiculous results. But feedback, as LoN understands, is a response to perturbation, and a fixed quantity just can’t provide it.
Mr Stokes is not at ease with control theory. Feedbacks respond not only to perturbations but also to the base signal. Since we knew that those who, like Mr Stokes, are paid to try to prevent the truth from emerging would seek to maintain that feedback processes do not respond to the base signal, we commissioned experiments at a national laboratory that confirmed that they respond both to the base signal and to the perturbation signal.
Our professor of control theory, who is amused by Mr Stokes’ attempts to say that feedback processes respond only to perturbation signals and not to the base signal, points out – and it is in our paper, if we can ever get it past the gatekeepers – that the distinction between a base signal and a perturbation signal is an arbitrary choice made by the observer. The climate system frankly does not care how we apportion the reference signal between a base signal and a perturbation signal. For the feedback processes in the climate system respond to the entire reference signal.
That does not mean one cannot perform calculations that concern themselves with the perturbation signal, in an attempt to isolate its effect on the system. However, those calculations must not misallocate the large feedback response to emission temperature, and must not add it to, and miscount it as part of, the actually minuscule feedback response to the perturbation signal. That is what Hansen, Schlesinger, Lacis and countless others have done. And, like it or not, they were and are wrong. Their argument was, of course, influential: after all, the natural greenhouse effect is 32 K and the natural reference sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases is 8 K, and everyone knows 32 / 8 = 4.
Perhaps Mr Stokes would care to explain how inanimate feedback processes can distinguish between one degree of reference temperature and another, and can decide to respond not at all to 29/30ths of that signal, and then decide to respond with absurdly exaggerated vigor to the other 1/30th.
Mr Stokes is out of his league here. And, now that the destruction of the coal-fired power stations that was the target of Russian climate communism has succeeded, and now that the profits from Siberian oil and gas that have paid for Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine have killed tens of thousands, including women and babes in arms, perhaps even Mr Stokes will have the integrity to cease to take the climate-Communist shilling and, just for once, try to discern the objective truth.
Recall that the Western intelligence services realized come years ago that the climate scam was directed selectively and unreasonably at the West alone, and that Putin and Xi (the former via Siberian gas and the latter by lithium carbonate for electric buggies’ batteries) were profiteering mightily therefrom. Likewise, Interpol now has an active and growing climate fraud division, and I give nothing away when I explain that that division is not investigating skeptics.
The time will come – and it is not long away now – when those who, effectively as agents of totalitarian regimes, peddled the climate nonsense with the degree of artful dishonesty so regularly demonstrated here by Mr Stokes will be held to account for their role in what the late Professor Moerner called the greatest fraud in human history. Those who were merely useful idiots advancing Communism via the global warming storyline will perhaps be able to plead for lighter sentences. However, those who, like Mr Stokes, know perfectly well what they are doing and are doing it deliberately will in due course face the full rigor of the law. The dying women and children of Ukraine have seen to that. Enough is enough.
>> Feedbacks respond not only to perturbations but also to the base signal.
That does mean here that Earth is changing the Sun!
Codswallop.
More than that I think!
Have you never heard of gravitation?
>> Perhaps Mr Stokes would care to explain how inanimate feedback processes can distinguish between one degree of reference temperature and another
While I do not want to put words in Stokes mouth this seems a very trivial question.
The sun does not change due to additional CO2, the atmosphere might.
Oh your math is wrong.
Poppycock.
Here is a question for you. It isn’t hard. The basic assumption is that the sun provides all the energy in the system. If you disagree with that please feel free to say so.
So the question is “where does the feedback energy come from that raises the temperature?
Think carefully about energy conservation and Planck’s discussion of radiated heat.
>> Carlo, Monte: Have you never heard of gravitation?
I have, why is my hearingrelevant here?
>> The basic assumption is that the sun provides all the energy in the system
That is one assumption and means that an “earthlike planet without atmosphere” has a mean temperature of about 255K.
As I already stated that seems a good starting point for what the atmosphere (including feedback) will do.
Starting at 0K for an atmospheric feedback process seems as wrong as assuming an unphysical -5000K starting point.
>> Jim Gorman: So the question is “where does the feedback energy come from that raises the temperature?
That surely is not my question and has little to do this MoB´s article, you seem to lack understanding about the so called greenhouse effect.
The easiest most general, but incomplete answer might be that energy flows in from the sun and “insulation” raises the temperature of Earth´s surface. Changing the atmosphere might result in a different surface temperture.
>> Monckton of Brenchley: Codswallop.
>> Monckton of Brenchley: Poppycock.
I see you withdrew yourself from any meaningful discussion. I suggest that you withdraw your numerous flawed articles as well then.
Insulation CAN NOT raise the temperature of the earth. The best it can do is slow the cooling of the earth. The only way to raise the temperature of the earth is for the atmosphere to go past thermal equilibrium and turn into the hot body thereby providing net heat to the earth.
Can the insulation have a temperature increase, certainly. Thermodynamically speaking, at the earth/atmosphere boundary that could occur. Yet as the earth is the hot body providing energy, equilibrium is the best that could occur at the boundary.
You distract from the discussion! I have no idea why you would pick me to discuss fundamentals of the so called Greenhouse effect.
Well then,
>> Insulation CAN NOT raise the temperature of the earth.
>> Can the insulation have a temperature increase, certainly.
Okay . .
>> at the earth/atmosphere boundary that could occur
That would be called the Earth surface and is probably not what you meant. Regardless, if one part of the system changes the temperature because of the CO2, so does the rest of it in time.
If you really want to test the Greenhouse effect you would need for example a double walled transparent container filled with water and a strong IR radiator shining on it.
You can then easily test yourself experimentally that the temperature of the water indeed very much depends what you fill in the double wall.
Doubting the so called Greenhouse effect is a futile exercise and only reveals a lot about you..
However, this is also wildly of topic.
This is determining how the sun warms the water, not how the water warms itself when the sun goes down.
>> not how the water warms itself
Is this some kind of joke? Your meaning is completely lost on me.
If you were serious, please note that typically the temperature drops as the sun goes down. What you describe seems unreal.
I keep wondering, how I ended up with such obscure answers, was it something I said? May I suggest we stay on topic, these aww contributions seem to lead nowhere fast.
Absolutely correct.
Good thing you aren’t responsible for designing any analog amplifiers.
The ventriloquist dummy pictured at the top of this article is “Mortimer Snerd”, Edgar Bergen’s second dummy.
A perfect foil to represent the climate dimwitted glitterati.
Or it might be Dunham’s hilarious dummy, Bubba J. Who can say?
I thought it was Bubba J, but what do I know?
Direct warming by doubled CO2 is 0.24 K without any amplification mechanism. There is no proven mechanism of amplification.
There are several proven mechanisms of amplification. The head posting provides evidence for one of these methods: apportionment of the greenhouse effect in 1850. There was one. There’s your proof. The question is not whether there is a greenhouse effect. There is: get over it. The question is how much warming it may cause. Climatology’s answer is that there will near-certainly be enough global warming to be catastrophic unless the West continues to shut its own energy sector down and import emissions from the profiteers from the global-warming scam in Russia (gas to replace torn-down coal-fired power stations) and China (lithium carbonate to replace petrol in vehicles). Our answer is that once climatology’s error of control theory is corrected there is no longer any near-certainty of high climate sensitivity. That becomes one of a spectrum of possibilities. And, if the feedback regime in the industrial era is as near-constant as climatology implicitly assumes it is, ECS will not much exceed 1.2 K.
Expect more Pauses, therefore.
Thank you Christopher for an excellent article. The most interesting point which I would like to add is that thermodynamics operates with absolute temperatures in all cases (K) but climate modelers have always tried to use centigrade degrees, thus the 255K offset you show above! All of the thermodynamic constructs (including Boltzmans constant etc.) including emission are Kelvin numbers, which is the reason why your description works!
Mr Stone is of course correct that the key climatological equations, such as the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, must be performed in Kelvin or they will give wildly incorrect answers. However, the offset between Kelvin and Celsius is not 255 K but 273 K or thereby. The Earth’s emission temperature of 255 K is, therefore, about minus 18 degrees Celsius.
Since climatology estimates that the direct warming by doubled CO2 is 1 degree before accounting for feedback response, its estimate of final warming (ECS) by doubled CO2 after accounting for feedback response is 32 / 8 = 4 K based on the data for 1850.
However, using the corrected calculation, and in particular expressing the neglected 255 K emission temperature in Kelvin, the true ECS based on the data for 1850 is not 32 / 8 = 4 K: it is (255 +32) / (255 + 8) < 1.1 K. That result is a lot closer to observation than climatology’s long-standing but erroneously-based prediction.
I’ve tried several times to get clear about this, and here is yet another attempt. If I have understood it correctly its more a matter of logic than feedback theory.
We start with Planet Earth with oceans and an atmosphere, and apply heat to it. We then measure what the temperature is in 1850.
We discover that if there was no atmosphere, the temperature, given the heat applied and nothing else, would be 255 K. However, it is not. It is 287 K, so the difference is 32 K. It is 32 K warmer than it should be, from the known heating alone.
The question is, what has caused that difference? The answer is two things, and they are both insulation.
The first is that there is an insulating effect from GHGs which raises the temperature by 8 K.
The second is that as the planet warmed from the heat applied, this produced increases in insulation, in particular water vapor content of the atmosphere, and this raised the temperature by 24 K.
We therefore have a total of 32 K increase over what we would expect from just the heat applied, of which 8 K is due to the existence of GHGs, and 24 K is the cumulative effect of the climate reacting to the heat increases from the applied heat, and raising the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere.
Now we ask the following question: what would happen if we increased the insulation some more, by injecting CO2 into the atmosphere? We would expect it to produce an increase in temperature. But that increase in temperature, like all increases in temperature, would also produce reactions, the water vapor concentration would increase, and this would raise the temperature some more, by further increasing the insulation effect of the atmosphere.
The question is, how large this secondary effect would be.
Christopher seems to be arguing that conventional climate theory says the total effect of an increase plus the direct effect would be the amount of the raw increase times 4. Inject enough CO2 to raise the temperature by itself by 1 K, and you will, on the conventional wisdom, get an actual increase of 4 K. Inject enough GHG to raise it by 2 K in itself, and you would get an 8 K total increase.
He argues that this cannot be correct, and his argument is based on the above account of the situation in 1850. If we look at the temperature of 1850 we see that heating which should produce a temperature of 255 K actually produced an increase in temperature due to water vapor increase of 24 K. He estimates the actual effect of an increase in temperature as follows:
That is, add enough GHG to itself raise the temperature by 1 K and you will produce an end result of +1.09 K.
The explanation of the quoted formula seems to be this. Christopher is saying that we know that in the actual temperature of 287 K there is a direct heat component of 255 and another component from water vapor and GHGs of 32 K, broken down 8 K GHGs and 24 K water vapor. The question is, how much lower this would be if there were no water vapor component.
It would be 263 K. The effect of the water vapor increase, which is a consequence of the heating of 255 K, is therefore 24 K. If we want to know what the effect of raising the GHG insulation effect by 1 K would be, the answer is that it would behave just like the response to the 255 K. We can just do the sums with the assumption.
Native GHGs will now have a 9 K forcing effect. The direct heating effect remains the same at 255 K. The 24 K vapor effect will rise, and it will rise by the same percentage per degree as it did to the 255 K forcing.
And this is where am less sure. It looks like the water vapor effect of the 255 K was 24 K. If this is right, the effect is 24/255=0.094.
Therefore the effect of increasing the temperature by 1 K (from increasing the GHGs or any other cause) will be to raise total temperatures by a factor of 1.094.
Is this the basic core of the argument?
Michel has made a valiant and commendable attempt to understand the essence of our argument, which begins in 1850 with 255 K emission temperature (the sunshine temperature ignored by climatology), and another 32 K that is the natural greenhouse effect, comprising about 8 K direct warming by preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases and 24 K feedback response. All these values are mainstream, and are quite well constrained,
Climatology, forgetting that the Sun is shining and that the resulting 255 K emission temperature will accordingly be responsible for nearly all the feedback response in the system, assumes that the 255 K produces no feedback response at all, and yet that by some magic the 30-times-smaller 8 K direct warming by the preindustrial noncondensing greenhosue gases is responsible for the entire 24 K feedback response.
In effect, climatology has misallocated the emission-temperature feedback response, adding it to and miscounting it as part of the actually minuscule feedback response to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases. So it thinks the system-gain factor – the quantity by which one must multiply a direct warming before feedback to obtain the final warming after feedback – is 32 / 8, or 4.
In reality, however, the system-gain factor (which is in effect also the equilibrium sensitivity or final warming after feedback, since the direct warming in response to doubled CO2 is about 1 K) is not 32 / 8 = 4. After taking proper account of the 255 K emission temperature and of the fact that it must necessarily engender the same feedback response per degree as the direct warming by greenhouse gases, the corrected calculation is (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) < 1.1 K.
Using somewhat better-resolved values than the above, based on the data for 1850 the corrected system-gain factor is 287 / 263 = 1.095. Michel is quite right that, therefore, the unit feedback response is 1 less than the system-gain factor: i.e., 0.095.
michel said:
“We discover that if there was no atmosphere, the temperature, given the heat applied and nothing else, would be 255 K. However, it is not. It is 287 K, so the difference is 32 K. It is 32 K warmer than it should be, from the known heating alone.”
It would still be 255K for a STATIC non radiative atmosphere because the atmosphere would be the same temperature from surface to space and all radiation to space would be from the surface and out, undisturbed on the way. The lapse rate would not exist.
As soon as one introduces convection then surface KE gets converted to PE higher up and the lapse rate forms.
The top gets colder because of more PE and the base gets warmer due to more KE.
That is how the surface comes to be warmer than 255K. In the case of Earth 287K.
Radiative gases have nothing to do with it but for the purposes of the head post Christopher is working with the climate establishment in assuming that radiative feedback is the cause.
He shows that even on the basis of their own radiative theory they got the sums wrong and there is no climate emergency regardless of how the surface temperature enhancement is actually caused.
Actually, we accept that the greenhouse effect exists. Its mechanism of action is known down to the quantum level, and it can be demonstrated in the laboratory, where putative altitudinal distinctions between potential and kinetic energy do not exist. The only legitimate question is its magnitude. Here, climatology’s error has led it to expect a large warming, where our result shows that the imagined near-certainty of large warming is imaginary.
to sum up, climatology has assumed for decades that the feedback response of the climate to CO2-driven temperature increases can be calculated ignoring the base “no GHG” temperature, attributing 100% of feedback to the CO2-driven increase rather than to the entire new “with GHG” temperature including the base
when one considers the feedback as a function of the entire temperature, which is self-evidently a far more physical approach, the feedback is much smaller
and this explains why observational UAH data generally supports an ECS around 1.2, and why Lewis and Curry and others calculate a similar value, in contrast to the much higher ECS promoted by IPCC, NASA, ESA, etc
it’s an interesting argument but seems a bit obvious… would be curious what Roy, Judith, Javier and others think of this notion
accepting the premise ad arguendo, this seems like an excellent opportunity to publish a simple model of predicted temperatures… since the great majority of the work in our very complex and expensive GCMs revolves around a variable that turns out to have negligible impact, a competing, more accurate gloabl temperature projection should be fairly easy to calculate
as it is very difficult to replace something with nothing, such models are invaluable to policymakers going forward
I look forward to spending the next few decades comparing the Monckton model to the IPCC’s ilk 🙂
It is not all that easy to prepare a definitive model, because our result shows that global temperature is an order of magnitude more sensitive to changes in the system-gain factor than even climatology imagines. That makes all prediction of global warming impossible, and shows that just about every previously-published analysis of climate sensitivity, including the first one by me, is nonsense.
What one can do, though, is run the model on the basis that climatology’s implicit assumption of linearity in the system response to feedback processes, and hence in ECS, is correct. In that event, one notes that the observed radiative forcing rate, extrapolated over about a century on the reasonable assumption of business as usual, would give the same forcing as doubled CO2. In that event, one would expect warming at a rate of about 0.12 K/decade, far closer to the observed 0.13 K/decade since 1979 than IPCC’s 0.4 K/decade.
Since the CGM’s are, in essence, nothing more than a linear equation after a few years I can easily give you a new model.
Y = mx + b
You pick the initial value b and the growth value m and you’ll have a model just as good as any “fancy” one.
Mr Gorman makes an excellent point. Increasingly, IPCC et hoc genus omne have been insisting that, notwithstanding the logarithmicity of the forcing response to increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations, the ECS response is approximately linear. Yet look how vigorously the trolls here have whined to the effect that it is we who have assumed linearity, when we have not, while remaining tellingly silent about climatology’s assumption of linearity. Is there some sort of a far-Left double standard at work, do you think?
Gedankenexperiment time. If from this point onwards the sun as a radiative heat source was to start to cool, at what surface average temperature of earth would all water vapour and CO2 have finally condensed from the atmosphere. We know that the atmosphere itself would condense before 0K is achieved so it can’t be 0K. Shouldn’t that surface temperature be the temperature baseline we start from in your control theory calculation? Just a thought.
Son of Mulder asks an intelligent and constructive question. The answer is that the feedbacks that subsist at any given moment, such as the useful temperature equilibrium in 1850 (before we had much influence on climate), do not concern themselves with what the temperature might have been at any temperature other than that which is currently obtaining at that particular moment.
It follows that those feedback processes must, at that moment, respond equally to each degree of the reference temperature then obtaining, and must thus respond proportionately, at that moment, to each component therein.
Note that the proportions might change over time, to the extent that system response is nonlinear with respect to feedback strength. However, it is certain that climatology’s system-gain factor 32 / 8 = 4, derived from the data for 1850, is incorrect because it takes no account of the feedback response to the 255 K emission temperature. And it is also clear, following through the literature, that it was the notion of a system-gain factor 4 based on the well-constrained data for 1850 that misled climatologists into believing that a system-gain factor of order 4 would also obtain today. After correction, the 1850 system-gain factor, and hence equilibrium sensitivity given 1 K reference sensitivity to doubled CO2, was not 32 / 8 = 4 K but (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) < 1.1 K.
If, as climatology assumes, the system-gain factor is invariant in the industrial era, then it is the same today as in 1850, and global warming will be far too small to matter. If, on the other hand, the system-gain today is twice the true value <1.1 in 1850, as IPCC imagines, then ECS after correction of climatology’s error is hundreds of degrees – which, of course, is nonsense.
We went to a national laboratory of some eminence, which constructed a test rig for us to make absolutely sure that this is indeed the case. But it does follow directly from the equations governing the feedback loop. The fact that after all these decades climatology has not realized facts such as this is a scandal. And the fact that journal editors have been doing their best to prevent publication by means other than fair and honest review is not merely a scandal but arguably a serious crime of fraud by false representation. Professor Moerner used to call it the greatest fraud in human history.
But say the atmosphere was drained of greenhouse gasses at say 100K then instead of 255 you should use 155 instead because nothing happened before that in terms of greenhouse effect. All the action would happen above 100K.
I repeat that when we are looking at the position at a particular moment in the industrial era – say, 1850, right at the beginning of it – we do not need to know anything about the feedback response that might have obtained with no greenhouse gases in the air. All we need to know is that the feedback response in 1850 was 24 K, and that the feedback processes then subsisting were responding not only to the 8 K direct warming by greenhouse gases but also to the 255 K emission temperature.
Therefore, climatology was wrong to ignore the feedback response to emission temperature, wrong to misallocate it, wrong to add it to the actually tiny feedback response to greenhouse gases, wrong to miscount it as part of that feedback response, and wrong to draw from this concatenation of elementary errors the absurd conclusion that the system-gain factor, based on data for 1850, was (24 + 8) / 8 = 4, giving ECS of about 4 K in response to 1 K direct warming by doubled CO2 in the air.
Correcting the equation to allow for the feedback response to emission temperature is straightforward, provided that, as in 1850, the climate is at temperature equilibrium at the time (there was to be no trend in global warming for 80 years after 1850). The system-gain factor thus became (255 +24 + 8) / (255 + 8) < 1.1, and CO2 was likewise of that order.
Notice that in that calculation we have absolutely no need to wonder what life might have been if there had been no greenhouse gases in the air in 1850. All we need to know is that the reference temperature for that moment was 255 K + 8 K = 263 K, and that the equilibrium temperature was 255 + 24 + 8 = 287 K, and that the ratio of the latter to the former was the system-gain factor 287 / 263 < 1.1.
The reason why we have no need to go back any further in time is that at any moment, such as the useful temperature equilibrium in 1850, before we perturbed things significantly enough to make any appreciable distance, the feedback processes then subsisting must perforce respond equally to each degree of reference temperature and thus proportionately to each of the components therein. Whatever might have been the case in the year dot does not have any influence on the calculation, therefore.
It took us quite a long time to work out that actually quite simple point, so lamentably deficient is the consideration of control theory in climatology.
You say “Notice that in that calculation we have absolutely no need to wonder what life might have been if there had been no greenhouse gases in the air in 1850.”
Then you have no need to know when absolute zero was. One should always only consider change when within the frame when the change occurred.
We do not need to know when the temperature on Earth was zero Kelvin, for it was never zero.
Consider a gas that with a boiling point of 200 K. If you keep that gas at say 300 K and heat it up by 1 extra degree to 301 K, the volume of the gas will increase by a factor very close to 1/300 . It does not matter that there is an abrupt phase change at 200 K. The gas can’t “remember” that and it is of no consequence for how the system behaves at 300 K. The same is true for anything in gaseous phase and many other physical properties. The starting point for calculation is 0 K.
Herr Amholt is correct. Though one may arbitrarily divide the total reference signal into a base signal and any number of perturbation signals, at any given moment the feedback processes then present must perforce respond equally to each degree of the entire reference temperature, and thus proportionately to each arbitrarily-selected component therein.
One may not exclude any fraction of the reference signal. In particular, one may not exclude the base signal, particularly where it constitutes 97% of the entire reference signal. Yet that is what climatology has done.
We are not dealing with ideal gas laws here. But if you want to calculate the average rate of increase of say water vapour or CO2 in the atmosphere per deg K you don’t just divide quantity by absolute temperature you divide quantity by temperature above boiling point for the gas. That is similar to where greenhouse warming starts ie once there is water vapour or CO2 in the atmosphere.
I repeat that the temperature in 1850 is all that the feedback processes have to go on. They have no memory of conditions that might once have obtained, for they are inanimate. They are faced with an entire reference temperature. To that entire temperature they must respond.
On the planet Gedanken the temperature rose in a linear way between 0K and 100K. There was then some natural process that increased the rate of increase of temperature but still linear. Then in 1850 they had an industrial revolution and the linear rate of increase in temperature increased again. This change was blamed on the increase of Gedanken Dioxide. In 2022 Control system theorists applied Control Theory methods to assess temperature amplification based on what’s happening now and since 1850. They got 3 answers depending on which gradient jump point they measured from. Only one was right for now, it’s the one measured from 1850 and certainly not the one at 0K
Son of Mulder persists in misunderstanding the position. Like it or not, feedback processes are inanimate. They do not follow the climate-Communist or any other Party Line. Temperature feedback is a response to a temperature – the reference temperature. The reference temperature in 1850 was the sum of the 255 K emission temperature and the 8 K direct warming by greenhouse gases.
At any particular moment, such as 1850, the feedback processes then obtaining, whatever they may be (and their nature and magnitudes will change over time) must perforce respond equally to each degree of the entire reference temperature and thus proportionately to each component in reference temperature. There are no exceptions. That is how it is, as the governing equations of control theory make quite clear.
However, there is nothing in that statement that in any way requires that the magnitude of the unit feedback response (i.e., the feedback response per degree of reference temperature) will remain constant over time.
Nevertheless, in 1950 we know what the unit feedback response was. For we know what the total feedback response was, and we know what the reference temperature was. Whatever may have happened in the past, and whatever may happen in the future, for 1850 the values are known, now that we have supplied the necessary correction to take account of the fact that the Sun is shining and that the emission temperature is of order 255 K, and that each degree of that emission temperature, and each degree of the 8 K direct warming by greenhouse gases, will produce the same unit feedback response.
I continue to disagree. There would be some max temperatureTm lower than 255 where there was no CO2 contribution or Water vapour feedback or contribution. The 8 and the 24 are the result of the temperature increase above Tm. I rest my debate there as it was my original position and you do not recognise my point as relevant or maybe don’t understand it. In summary the true forcing factor is somewhere between your answer and the similarly wrong Climatology assertion of 4. I have no idea what Tm happens to be but it isn’t 0K.
The feedback processes in 1850 were entirely unconcerned with what might have happened at some earlier stage in the evolution of the climate. Temperature feedback responds to the temperature prevailing at a given moment. It has no memory of what the temperature might have been at some earlier moment. Sorry, but Son of Mulder is running entirely counter to long-established and well-proven control theory.
Why do people have such a problem with understanding that a single moment in time can be used to find the values at that single point in time? Not one second earlier nor one second in the future. It is the value of the derivative (slope) at that single point.
Can the slope at that given point be used to find out what happens in the future? That is up to the user to find out. At best, the same data is available today, and if someone thinks it is different, it should be provable. So do it!
First, Christopher, my thanks for an interesting article.
My problem with your analysis is with your claim that the average temperature of the earth in the absence of greenhouse gases would be 255K. It’s true that if you take the incoming sunlight (~ 340 W/m2) and subtract the amount lost to clouds (~ 100 W/m2), and then convert that to Kelvin using the Stefan-Bolzmann equation you get ~ 255 K (-18°C, or ~ 0°F).
But there are various problems which complicate that immensely, including but not limited to the following:
First, it ignores the fact that if the earth’s temperature were that cold, well below freezing, there would be ice lots of places, and that would increase reflection … and thereby reduce the temperature.
Second, it neglects the warming effects of the circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean.
Third, it neglects the uneven cooling due to the rotation of the earth.
For an example, consider the moon. Both get the same solar radiation. Due to its lower albedo (moon ~ 0.12, earth ~ 0.3) the lunar surface receives about 60 W/m2 more solar energy than does the earth … but due to the factors above plus other considerations, the average lunar surface temperature as measured by the Diviner mission is 245K.
So the moon is getting ~ 60 W/m2 more energy at the surface than your theoretical earth, but the actual lunar surface temperature is ~ 10°C lower than that of your theoretical earth.
I encourage everyone to read Dr. Robert Brown’s outstanding post, Earth’s baseline black-body model – “a damn hard problem”. It points out that you can’t calculate the blackbody temperature it with a couple of simple assumptions as you have done here.
And since your entire analysis rests on the accuracy of your 255K theoretical blackbody earth temperature …
My very best to you as always, thanks again for being such an excellent host when we saw you in the UK, and keep up the good work,
w.
It doesn’t matter what the actual baseline temperature is for the purposes of Christopher’s head post.
Whatever it might be the error he points to remains present.
Pretty sure from reading the article it was Hansen in 1984 that came up with that number, not Monckton. Taking him to task for others published work is wonky.
“Second, it neglects the warming effects of the circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean.”
The worst part is missing out the ocean by far, but that is not really a criticism on the author more so on climate science in general.
Why is the belief that only C02 and greehouse gases with feedbacks can warm the atmosphere above a blackbody?
The planet Earth disagrees because if this was the case the laspe rate would show the same behaviour all over the globe. It doesn’t because the ocean warms the atmosphere in regions more than others.
The poles often have colder temperatures at the surface than higher up in altitude above them. This is against the laws that would be expected on CO2 and greehouse gases with feedbacks only responsible for the 288k global temperature above the base 255k. These state with the laspe rate that the altitude increases in temperature the closer to the surface. The reason this occurs especially in these regions is because there is either little or no source of ocean warming especially in Winter. In Summer latent heat keeps the Arctic ocean very cool at the surface and is warmer higher up in altitude.
It is always good to hear from my good friend Willis Eschenbach. However, once one corrects climatology’s strikingly elementary and regrettably influential error of physics, emission temperature may vary by as much as 35 K either side of climatology’s 255 K value, which we have adopted ad argumentum so as to minimize conflict with our interlocutors on matters inessential to our argument, without making much change to the system-gain factor. Actually, if the learned literature is anything to go by, the interval is only about 15 K either side of the midrange, which we derive in the paper from midrange data for net incoming top-of-atmosphere solar radiative flux density, for albedo and for emissivity.
I say “inessential to our argument” because there is so much leeway available to us once we correct climatology’s error. A quantitative demonstration, showing the interval of the system-gain factor in 1850 on the assumption of an absurdly generous interval 255 +/- 35 K:
System gain factor in 1850:
Upper bound (220 + 32) / (220 + 8) = 1.105
Midrange (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) = 1.095
Lower bound (290 + 32) / (290 + 8) = 1.080
Hope this helps.
Thanks, Christopher. I’ll re-read it with that in mind.
My best to you and yours,
w.
Great thought experiment with the extreme interval for the emission temp (255 +/- 35). But wouldn’t the “total greenhouse effect” at 1850 then also have to vary enormously in the opposite direction (32 +/- 35) in order to maintain the observed temperature at 1850 (287 K). The math would be:
Upper bound (220 + 67) / (220 + 8) = 1.259
Midrange (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) = 1.095
Lower bound (290 + (-3)) / (290 + 8) = 0.963
Still no catastrophic warming, but a little more room for uncertainty.
My bad! Working too late at night. I should have looked up the paper, which has the right figures in it.
Assume that emission temperature is 255 +/- 15 K and that natural reference sensitivity varies by +/- 10% either side of the midrange 7.6 K, and that the midrange natural feedback response is 24.9 K, that the natural greenhouse effect was 32.5 K at midrange, and that the equilibrium temperature in 1850 was 287.5 K.
Then neglecting emission temperature would give an ECS interval based on 1850 data of 4.5 [2.4 to 6.0] K, against the CMIP6 3.9 [2.0, 5.7] K or IPCC’s 3 [2, 5] K.
But including emission temperature would give a corrected ECS of 1.16 [1.12, 1.20] K.
Hi Willis. Let me introduce myself as an amateur who is a regular reader of Watts Up With That. I’ve enjoyed your contributions greatly. On this issue, though, I think it is not right to say that CM’s entire analysis is dependent on the correctness of the 255K assumed emission temperature or any of the other inputs in his calculation. His main point is that many climatologists have made an error in assuming feedbacks only to a pertubation and not to the emission temperature itself. That argument is independent of the correctness of the variables in the calculation by which Lord Monckton seeks to demonstrate the calculation error. His primary criticism is of climatologists’ calculation methodology, not their views about the correctness of the variables in that calculation. The question whether climatologist make the error Lord Monckton alleges is really a factual question, which, as I noted in a post above, can be answered only by evidence that bears on it, such at the published studies of those climatologists. Can we see from the mouths of climate scientists evidence that they have made the error alleged? I know Lord Monckton has touched on this and given some examples in his articles that appear to show they have, but I think it would be very helpful if he might comment further on that evidentiary issue, perhaps in a subsequent article that is directed to demonstrating from the mouths of the climatologists that they have in fact made the very error he alleges. Just my two cents.
The error appears universally: e.g., in Hansen et al. (1984), Schlesinger (1988), AMS (2000), Soden & Held (2006), Bony et al. (2006), IPCC (2007, ch. 6.1, p. 354), Monckton of Brenchley (2008), Roe (2009), Lacis et al. (2010, 2013), Schmidt et al. (2010), Lindzen & Choi (2011), IPCC (2013, p. 1450; 2021, p. AVII-12), Knutti & Rugenstein (2015), Dufresne & St-Lu (2015), Prentice et al. (2015), Heinze et al. (2019), and Sherwood et al. (2020).
Thanks CM.
A pleasure!
You give ECS units of K in your text.
Shouldn’t it be dimensionless, as indicated in your graphic??
Apologies if this nit-picking.
A good question! ECS and the system-gain factor have the same number, because RCS is 1 K and ECS is the product of RCS and the system-gain factor. But the system-gain factor, as is correctly shown in the diagram, is unitless, while ECS is of course denominated in Kelvin.
The failure in the logic can easily be shown in a simple thought experiment:
Imagine that a brand new type of matter is discovered on the other side of the universe. This matter has the unique property that its temperature can go below absolute zero. Let’s say approximately twice absolute zero = -550degC. Since the definition of 0K is the lowest temperature possible, 0K is redefined as -550degC. Plug this into the equations and the absolute temperatures are doubled but the delta temperature due to GHGs remains the same. Therefore the calculated “ECS” of the earth is halved. The author must explain how merely the DISCOVERY of a new type of matter on the other side of the universe can change a physical property of earth by physical processes.
The existence of the other type of matter has no relevance because the Earth would still have a minimum possible temperature of 0K and not -550C.
To discuss these matters intelligently it is necessary to know a little science. Zero Kelvin is known to be the coldest possible temperature, because that is the temperature at which there is no molecular activity, without which no heat can exist. Therefore, there is no “failure in the logic”. Feedbacks respond to reference temperature in Kelvin at any given moment. Thanks to that fact, climatology’s estimate of ECS based on the data for the temperature equilibrium in 1850 is erroneous, and is excessive by a factor 4. Since climatology implicitly assumes that the system-gain factor is still of order 4 today, its ECS projections on the basis of today’s data are likewise excessive, from which follows the inconvenient truth that there is no “anthropocene”.
Here’s a layman’s analogy that I think explains control theory bit.
Imagine you’re sitting in black void. Luckily there are a couple of light sources. There’s an old incandescent lamp that gives off 255 lumens (a unit of light) and there’s a fancy LED lamp that gives off 8 lumens. There’s also a mirror next to you that reflects some of the light back on to you so that it doesn’t all just escape into the dark void. You’re a scientist so you have a luminometer (a light measuring device). You measure that there is actually 287 lumens where you’re sitting, that’s an extra 24 lumens for free. You realise that the mirror must be providing some kind of feedback. You’re really an LED lamp researcher and you’re desperate to know how many extra lumens you would get in the room if you light an extra LED lamp with a nominal output of 1 lumen. But that experiment will take another 30-40 years to perform and you must know the answer now in order to guide global energy politics, so you try to estimate the possible outcome of the 30-year experiment from the current conditions. You’re definitely not an incandescent lamp researcher, so you immediate subtract 255 from 287 (= 32 lumens) so you can focus on the numbers for the LED lamp. It turns out that 8 lumens from the LED lamp get multiplied by the mirror giving you an extra 24 lumens for a total of 32 lumens. Then it is simple math to get the final outcome. Your extra LED lamp with the 1 lumen output will add a total of 4 lumens at your seat in the dark void. Now you can start writing that Science paper and your next grant application for more research funding. In reality, of course, the big old incandescent lamp was also reflected by the mirror. And the light added by the mirror to the whole setting was only 9% of the input (100% x 24 / (255+8)). The mirror did not magically add 300% exclusively from the fancy LED lamp (100% x 24/8).
No copyright on this little fable !!
Very good example.
That is a very nice example, one of several in this thread. It shows that, despite the formidable length of the Your Questions Answered format, our kind host’s loyal readers have taken the trouble to understand the math. I am most grateful.
An interesting post, accompanied by lively discussion.
There have been a number of conjectures about the “correct” reference state, so if I may add another.
The non-condensing greenhouse gases (mostly H2O) can only play a part when they exist in the atmosphere at the prevailing temperature and pressure. Short of oxygen and nitrogen condensing out, the pressure will be approximately constant*, so the limiting factor for water existing in the gaseous phase will be temperature. That minimum temperature for water in the gaseous phase may well be the appropriate reference temperature for the feedback calculations.
That will be higher than the author’s 0K, but lower than the 1850 global average temperature.
[*] this is grossly oversimplified because air pressure decreases with height above sea level, but there is already more than enough complexity introduced by latitudinal differences in insolation.
In control theory, the correct starting-point is the entire reference signal, which is the sum of the base signal and all subsequent perturbation signals. At any given moment, the feedbacks then subsisting respond to the entire reference signal, and not – as climatology and Old Cocky would like – to some arbitrarily-selected fraction of that reference signal. In 1850, for instance, the feedback processes then extant neither knew nor cared at what temperature they had theselves originally come into existence, nor at what point had first entered its gaseous state. For they are inanimate. They respond to the reference signal in existence at that moment, and to no lesser or greater signal.
I need to go back to the beginning and try to understand this posting. But it begins with such non-nonsensical statements that it I doubt it will ever be clear.
Consider this,”Direct warming by the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases up to 1850 was about 8 K”
Are these gases burning? Where is this energy coming from? How are they directly warming anything and just where is that thermometer? I believe I know what this refers to, but it reads as though the fiberglass insulation in the walls of my house is heating my house. Is the fiberglass insulation directly heating anything? No. it is not.
(Possible translation: The insulating effect of carbon dioxide, methane, and similar gases other than condensable water vapor, reflect enough energy to keep the surface temperature of the earth as measured at the face height of human beings in Stevenson screen, 8°C warmer.”) Another suggestion. Yes, absolute temperature is important, but changes in temperature are exactly the same in °C or °K. No one knows what 373°K feels like until they covert that to100°C where water boils. (at sea level). Please add a temperature in °C in parentheses to any absolute temperature. Torture a few more electrons on my monitor, its not a printed journal where every line of print costs money.
I doubt whether “Gary P” has any real intention of understanding the head posting. The needless discourtesy is part of a pattern that tends to suggest climate Communism rather than a genuine interest in discerning the objective truth. However, I shall do my best to explain to one who, perhaps, neither needs nor wants an explanation.
Gary P quibbles about the meaning of “direct warming by greenhouse gases”. As the head posting makes clear, this direct warming by greenhouse gases is known as “reference sensitivity” to changes in the atmospheric concentration of those gases. It is also clearly explained that reference sensitivity is warming before accounting for feedback response, and that equilibrium sensitivity is final warming after accounting for feedback response. I use the word “quibble” about Gary P because his comment indicates that he knows perfectly well what this distinction means, but would have preferred me to describe reference sensitivity as a first level of indirection and equilibrium sensitivity as a second level of indirection.
I assumed, rightly as it turns out, that most people are familiar with how greenhouse gases cause warming and do not need yet another explanation from me.
As to Kelvin and Celsius, feedback processes act upon absolute temperature, in Kelvin. Therefore, Kelvin is the measure that is used in science. No doubt Gary P would have preferred me to add parentheses not only pointing out that 8 K is 8 C, but also putting the values in Fahrenheit and Reaumur.
I have done my best to make the head posting as clear as can be, given that control theory, at the best of times, is not easy for the non-specialist to comprehend. Here, however, as in general, some little effort is demanded on the part of the reader. On both the issues Gary P has raised, it is abundantly clear that he is entirely familiar with what the head posting is saying and with what it means. But it is also abundantly clear that he has no real intention of understanding the head posting.
If I have understood the argument between Monckton of Brenchley and Nic Stokes etc. correctly, it should be a relatively simple task to design a circuit with analogues of the agreed 255K emission temperature and pre-1850 ‘non- anthropogenic’ feedback giving an amplitude equivalent to the agreed 287K 1850 temperature. The additional ‘anthropogenic’ gain could then be added to the feedback loop and the resultant output amplitude measured to determine which view of the process is correct?
As I see it, one of the fundamental problems is where does the additional energy in the feedback path come from? The sun only provides a certain amount. Additional feedback energy must come from the “temperature” output thereby lowering the original output. All the gain will do is bring the temperature back to what you had before the additional feedback is subtracted.
Perhaps the water flow idea someone mentioned above provides a better set of analogues. Flow rate in and out as energy in and out, depth in a cylindrical tank as temperature. No feedback gives a depth of 255mm in the tank, adding ‘natural’ feedback increases depth to 287mm. By what proportion is depth increased by increasing feedback proportionally to include ‘anthropogenic’ contribution?
Bugger! I now need to decide on the diameter of the tank (as an analogue of the relationship between energy content and temperature?)…
But where does the water for the feedback come from? It has to come from the water of the controlled output flow rate. When you divert water from the outflow you lower the outflow. That means the reference temperature must go down also. What you end up with is basically a lower reference temperature + a larger feedback temperature = what you started with! In either case, CM’s equations hold since both the reference + feedback are still worked on together. What climate science did is create energy from nowhere and operated on it as if it was real!
In response to Gavin, the chief feedback is the water-vapor feedback. As the atmosphere warms thanks to direct temperature, the space it occupies becomes capable of holding more water vapor, a greenhouse gas, which slows outgoing radiation and makes the atmosphere warmer than it would otherwise be.
I appreciate that the argument is largely about the point in the circuit at which the feedback should be applied but, given a factor of four difference in the output, the relationship between the natural and anthropogenic gain values should give a good indication of which point is correct?
Gavin suggests that we should build a simple feedback amplifier circuit to see whether or not feedbacks, as represented by the feedback block, must modify not only any perturbation signal but also the base signal – which, in the climate, is the 255 K emission temperature.
A control engineer with a lifetime’s experience and his own laboratory was so surprised when one of my distinguished co-authors told him that there would be a feedback response to the base signal that he went away and built a circuit to prove us wrong. It proved us right, and he became an enthusiastic co-author.
Another co-author, also a control engineer with a lifetime’s experience, suggested that we should approach a national laboratory to have a circuit built and tested, to confirm this result. So we approached a national laboratory and, after a few months to-ing and fro-ing because the signal representing feedback response to anthropogenic forcingts was so minuscule that even the presence of the operator in the same room as the apparatus would mask the signal, the laboratory was able to confirm the position.
What is more, Stokes knows this, because he had previously scoffed that no such apparatus was necessary, because the equations of control theory were enough in themselves to establish the position. Therefore, he not only knows a national laboratory had built a circuit which has definitively demonstrated that the feedback block must perforce respond to the base signal as well as to any perturbation thereof, but he also knows this conclusion perfectly well, given that it is transparently inherent in the governing equations of feedback amplifiers.
I am afraid that his conduct in this matter can no longer be indulged as mere incompetence. Steps are in hand.
A circuit for the 8K and 255K addition is shown below. It includes the 1.091 gain.
The output is 287K. Not surprising since this is what is was designed to do.
If you set the 255K value to zero the output drops to 8.7279361mV(K) or 9K which is 8K multiplied by the gain of 1.091.
Again, no surprises.
Would it be sensible to leave out the 255 input completely?
Well, it depends on what you want to achieve. To map real world conditions it feels appropriate to input real world value. If you want a contrived value then leave out the 255. It works either way, but what is the realistic value?
Most maths in climate science is correct. It is just that they are doing the wrong maths, you know, averaging values that give a meaningless answer. Yes, the maths are correct, just wrongly applied maths. Applying the law of large numbers when your large number of numbers are of the wrong type!
For the technical:
U1 is an opamp connected as a 2 input inverting amplifier. R1, R2 and R5 add the two input values and multiply the result by 1.091.
U2 is an opamp connected as an inverting amplifier with a gain of 1. It just changes the sign of the voltage from U1 back to positive.
V3 and V3 are the power supplies to allow the opamps to work.
If you want to play with the simulation, the ile is at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xSM_lpLSL9-NoAWyDA4KXxQMVObtmV3R/view?usp=sharing
To use it it is easiest to download the circuit simulator I use which is free from:
https://www.analog.com/en/design-center/design-tools-and-calculators/ltspice-simulator.html
The circuit is interesting, but the system-gain factor 1.09 is what we are seeking to find. The inputs are 255 K emission temperature and 8 K reference sensitivity to greenhouse gases up to 1850. The output is 287 K. What, then, is the system-gain factor?
Sorry, I can not design a circuit to find a required result. The circuit replicates your diagram in the head post. The system gain is of course 1.091 which comes from R5/R1 or R5/R2.
We can of course sweep various values between min and max to see how a circuit reacts but I feel that is not wanted here.
There is actually no need for a circuit at all, since the equations are entirely clear, and, in any event, a national laboratory has already built us one, which has amply confirmed what poor Stokes is now trying so futilely to deny.
Moving on, I do not understand why people argue over irrelevances.
Lord Monckton clearly states he is arguing over ONE point in the climatologists argument. This is how the ECS or system gain is calculated.
EVERYTHING else within the climatologists argument is accepted as being correct FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS ONE DIFFERENCE.
But, my god, people pile in going on about this that and the other, apparently having read and understood the constrains of the discussion!
If the Monckton proposition wins, as I am sure it will, then, with a reduced gain or sensitivity or ECS, call it what you will, there will be much more room scientifically to allow the coexistence of other theories.
Currently, CO2 is said to warm the planet so much that no other idea can be allowed to exist.
But with CO2 sensitivity et al., down to extremely modest levels, then the:
Willis argument(s)
Rickwill argument(s)
Wild argument(s)
(Apologies if I have left any off the above list)
Will have some room to breathe and can be fully evaluated.
I think that most would agree that the climate of this planet is sufficiently complex that a multiplex of ideas will probably get us closer to explaining how it works.
Mr Richards is quite right: people like to use these threads to advance their own pet theories, some of which have merit and some have not. I don’t mind this, except where people like Rick Will divebomb the thread with repetitious and angry denunciations of all who will not accept their theories, and who have no regard for the true topic.
Agreed. I think focus on Lord Monckton’s main point is very important. In his propagation of error paper, Pat Frank suggests there is no basis for modelers’ temperature projections because the impact of clouds cannot be modeled with sufficient precision. But the modelers make those projections anyway and Dr. Frank says they do so in a way that implies a common error of physics (which is a pretty generous way of describing unjustified model tuning). Lord Monckton is here claiming to have identified the modelers’ common error. If I understand him, he is essentially saying that climatologists appear to be using an ECS of around 4 as an input, not a model result. He says they do so because they assume feedbacks only to greenhouse gas pertubations and not the underlying emission temperature on which such pertubations act. Lord Monckton seems to be saying that it is that mistaken ECS conclusion that drives the model results, rather than the models driving the ECS conclusion. The claims of both Dr. Frank and Lord Monckton that there is a common, unscientific, mistake behind the IPCC’s temperature projections are very important claims, because the entire world is acting in reliance on those projections. Kip Hansen says he doesn’t have a dog in the fight, but I would sure be interested in hearing his thoughts on Lord Monckton’s claim.
I am several days late to the discussion, but perhaps MOB still reads the comments and will be kind enough to reply.
This is an excellent and thought-provoking article.
There does seem to be something terribly wrong with the calculations of a temperature feedback response, leading to an ECS of 4K, and climate models that “run hot”.
Like MOB I find Hanson’s original “32/8=4” reasoning faulty, but for a different reason.
It seems to me that there are two main mechanisms at play: direct warming by CO2 (I will use CO2 as a shorthand for noncondensing GHGs) and warming by H2O within the temperature range of interest (255-300K).
Warming by CO2 is relatively easy to estimate, due to the known relationship between its absorption frequencies and the black-body emission spectrum.
Warming by H2O is horribly complicated to analyse. Ice cools by reflection, water vapour warms by absorption, clouds cool or warm depending on day or night, vary by latitude, and vary by season due to the Earth’s tilted axis relative to the orbital plane.
The H2O effects will net out to some average, but the horrid complexity makes that extremely hard to estimate. The averaging has to range over ice at the poles, heat at the topics, and seasonal changes over a year.
Plus, of course, there is interaction between the CO2 warming and the H2O effects. However, I question the validity of assuming that the H2O effects provide a feedback response reacting to the CO2 effect. When building models, should we not start by looking at them separately and then correct for their interactions? H2O is capable of providing greenhouse warming all by itself, as water vapour in the atmosphere is a more powerful GHG than CO2.
The climate models start with the fact that the direct warming effect of CO2 is only about 8K at 280ppm, and so they estimate a feedback amplification factor from H2O, in order to account for the fact that the combined effect of CO2 and H2O was about 33K above the “black-body, no atmosphere” situation back in 1850.
But why is there a need to assume a feedback mechanism? H2O in the form of water vapour is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. The mechanisms of H2O may operate independently of CO2. The two together result in the 33K. Of course, CO2 at 420ppm will give more direct warming than at 280ppm and we can safely assume a warmer ocean will result in more water vapour. But there is tremendous complexity here. More water vapour could produce more clouds and the result of more clouds could, under some circumstances, be cooling due to reflection. In other words, without deep understanding of cloud formation and behaviour at different temperatures, we would not know whether more water vapour warms or cools. The climate models apparently assume that the CO2 is the driver, and that the complexity resolves into a result of about 4K warming for each doubling of CO2.
Fortunately, we can get an overview without descending into complexity. We have observational data. Over the last 150 years or so, the CO2 has increased by about 50%, and the temperature has increased by about 1C.
If we simply look at the combined effect of CO2 and H2O what result do we get?
The combined effect is about 33K warming over an Earth with no atmosphere. It has risen by about 1K while CO2 rose by 50%. Assuming, as the climate models do, that the rise is logarithmic in CO2 concentration, then the combined effect is a rise of about 1.4K for each doubling of CO2. It would imply that a temperature increase of 1.5C over pre-industrial would not be reached until about 50 years from now, at the current rate of CO2 increase. This is far less alarming than predictions of the complicated climate models and their 4K per doubling.
This makes the current UAH pause much more understandable, and climate concern a much longer-term issue instead of a climate emergency.
So, are the climate models helping our understanding of climate changes, or hindering, based on an implicit incorrect assumption that the H2O effects are a feedback amplification of the CO2 effects instead of H2O being a mechanism in its own right?
Anyway, I applaud MOB’s efforts to look carefully at the feedback assumption, and highlight its failings.
Regarding his calculation, I like his amusing characterisation that the conventional ECS calculation amounts to omitting the sun’s input. However, in order to address the feedback calculation, MOB adopts, ad argumentum, the implicit incorrect assumption that H2O is a feedback on CO2. As I point out above, if we instead regard the two mechanisms jointly, we get a prediction based on reliable observations instead of dubious models, and this prediction is that “business as usual” takes another 50 years to reach the 1.5C-over-pre-industrial that is used as a touchstone of acceptability.
I prefer to focus my skepticism on the underlying “H2O is a feedback amplifier on CO2” assumption, which is at best an over statement, and may even be essentially false.
Nevertheless, MOB’s calculation is one of the few attempts to bring original objective thought to a minefield of contentious reasoning, and I liked this article.
I wonder if MOB might agree with some of my basic points here.
Mr Beal’s response is most thoughtful. He seems to be suggesting that we are not only directly adding CO2 to the atmosphere, but also directly adding water vapor to the atmosphere.
Therefore, he says, the increase in water vapor in the atmosphere is not attributable to a feedback response to the direct warming by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
A little science may help. As the atmosphere warms (e.g., in consequence of a direct warming by increased greenhouse-gas concentration), by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, one of the few proven results in the slippery indiscipline of climatology, the space occupied by the atmosphere may hold near-exponentially more water vapor.
And the water vapor is a greenhouse gas. But its increase in the atmosphere is a function of the increase in atmospheric temperature. Therefore, the increase in water vapor is indirectly, not directly, occasioned by reference temperature. Therefore, it is a classic feedback response.
Many thanks for your reply. It tells me that I was not sufficiently clear! Unfortunately you misinterpreted my paragraph in which I mention a likely increase in water vapour. Of course that is a feedback response, and I was intending to merely acknowledge its existence.
But the total effect of H2O on temperature is not simply the water vapour level. That’s why I stressed the complex role of clouds. I was talking about the total effect of H2O on temperature, not merely the amount of water vapour. (And I certainly did not intend to imply “the water vapour is not attributable to a feedback response to direct warming by CO2”. I don’t understand how that interpretation comes about! )
I was questioning the implicit assumption that the +24K in 1850 is due _solely_ to feedback amplification by H2O of the +8K by CO2. Whether one uses the Hanson calculation or the MOB version, this starting assumption implicitly determines a current CO2 temperature sensitivity to be used in a climate model, and this is a very important issue.
Neither the Hanson calculation nor the MOB calculation deliver the “black-box” result that I described.
Of course I understand that your purpose was limited to showing that the Hanson calculation is incorrect.
I’ll have to improve my description if I try again elsewhere.
Again, thanks for the reply.
Mr Beal’s earlier comment had said at two or three different occasions that he did not think water vapor should be treated as a feedback. But that is how it is treated in climatology, and with good reason. As to other forms of feedback arising from the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere – such as cloud albedo – we take the straightforward approach adopted by IPCC: i.e., that at midrange all feedbacks other than the water-vapor feedback broadly self-cancel.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley,
Sir,
In your analysis you state the following:
When presented by statements like this in which there are fundamental a priori assumptions my first instinct is to validate these assumptions. For climate science the critical assumption is the Earth’s planetary thermal emission temperature of 255 Kelvin and how this is calculated.
This value comes from the application to climatology of an equation derived from astronomy. The Vacuum Planet equation that is used to calculate the average surface temperature of a rapidly rotating airless world. There are two fundamental problems with applying this model to a study of the Earth’s climate. First that the Earth is not a vacuum planet and more critically our world, while clearly rapidly rotating, does not possess an axial tilt of 90 degrees.
Because planetary daily rotation is a zonal process and because the planetary surface of a vacuum world is solid, it follows that the only way that solar energy can be evenly distributed from the equator to the poles using this model is for the annual track of the sun to be at some point at zenith over the pole. The only way this can be achieved is for the planet to be like Uranus with an axial tilt of circa 90 degrees.
It is this logical failure of geometry of the Vacuum Planet equation that inspired us to adopt a new fundamental planetary model to study the Earth’s climate. Our model is the tidally locked planet we call Noonworld in which the only mechanism by which intercepted solar flux can be evenly distributed across the surface is by the meteorological processes of fluid mass motion which can inherently be the required meridional process needed to transport energy from the solar zenith to the poles of rotation.
Given the recent discovery by NASA of super-hot tidally locked exoplanets in which the atmospheric condensing volatile is liquid sand it is clear that our Noonworld modelling concept has applicability, and more so than the Vacuum Planet equation because indisputably the study of climate is the study of a fluid mass motion and energy transport process.
Why is the foundation climate model important? Because with a tidally locked Noonworld model the illuminated surface of Earth has an average flux that is sufficient to melt surface ice across the whole extent of the lit hemisphere. Therefore, the need for carbon dioxide gas to provide the required atmospheric thermal radiant opacity as a bootstrapping role in climate initiation is completely negated.
The difficulty with all such alternative theories is that, whether or not they are sound, they do not command universal acceptance and are not at all easy to prove.
It is perfectly possible to calculate the mean value of the emission temperature (subject to an uncertainty of +-1 15 K each way) by doing calculations based on the annuli surrounding the subsolar point, and taking advantage of the useful fact that the surfaces of equialtitudinal spherical frusta are equiareal. On that basis, which duly allows for Hoelder’s inequalities between integrals, the emission temperature (which would be 271-274 K by a global use of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation once one realizes that there would be no clouds at emission temperature and before the operation of any feedback) becomes 255 K, which, by coincidence, is the value assigned to it by climatology using a single global value of the SB equation on the incorrect basis of today’s albedo.
We simply take as Gospel (if only for the sake of argument) all the input data offered by official climatology except those we can prove to be erroneous. Therefore, we are happy enough with 255 K +/- 15 K, which gives an ECS that is quite well constrained at about 1.1-1.2 K.
Sir,
I think that it is extraordinarily easy to prove that the Sun does not shine on to the surface of the Earth at night.
The history of science is bedeviled by consensus built on built on false models, the Ptolemaic system had universal acceptance and is in my view the best analogy here.
The vacuum planet equation, with its siren like appeal of the divide by 4 sophistry being falsely applied to the surface of a planetary atmosphere, seems to seduce even the finest minds.
Don’t be silly. Our method does not require an accurate estimate of emission temperature (which is not a “vacuum” temperature, but the temperature in the absence of greenhouse gases): merely an approximation. Son of Mulder is entitled to his own theories, but he is not entitled to insist that we should defer to them, still less than we should consider them here, when they are off topic.
I wear my red thumbs as a badge of honour.
Please donate generously.
Planet With The Strangest Water Cycle and Atmosphere Ever Seen
Further and further and further off topic. If this is the best the climate Communists can do, the climate scam will soon be at an end.
Very much on topic. Climate science is based on modelling. Starting with the wrong model is like asking for directions from Galway to Dublin using the wrong map. As the lost tourist seeking directions was told “If I were you I wouldn’t start my journey from here.”
Don’t be silly. Our method does not require an accurate estimate of emission temperature. Climatology has erred, whatever the value. That is the point of the head posting. If Mr Mulholland disagrees with climatology’s value, let him take the matter up with IPCC, not with me.