By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
It is now almost two years since we submitted our paper on the central error perpetrated by climatologists in their attempts to derive climate sensitivity to anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcings – namely, their failure to appreciate that such feedback processes as subsist in the climate system at any given moment must, at that moment, necessarily respond equally to each Kelvin of the entire reference temperature. Feedbacks do not, repeat not, respond solely to perturbation signals, the reference sensitivities. They also respond to the base signal, the emission temperature that would prevail even if there were no greenhouse gases in the air, because the Sun is shining. Yet one of the world’s most eminent climatologists reflected the error that is near-universal throughout his trade when after several days’ fencing, he answered a direct question from me by admitting he did not consider there was any feedback response to emission temperature.
The diagram below shows the two competing methods, as they apply to 1850. Method (a), in red, is the incomplete method that led climatologists into error. Method (b), in green, is the complete and correct method, which takes due account of the fact that the Sun is shining.
It is necessary to follow the latter method because the base signal, the 260 K emission temperature R0 (shown in sunshine yellow in the corrected diagram but omitted from the defective diagram), is about 30 times the 8 K reference sensitivity ΔR0 to (or direct warming by) the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases that were present in the preindustrial atmosphere of 1850. Then R1, the sum of R0 and ΔR0, is the entire input or reference signal as it stood in 1850. That year is of interest because there was then a temperature equilibrium: there would be no temperature trend for 80 years thereafter.
The feedback response to emission temperature R0 is B0. Likewise, the feedback response to ΔR0 is ΔB0. The feedback response to the entire input signal R1 in 1850 is thus B1. The differential feedback fraction or closed-loop gain factor h is the fraction of the uncorrected output signal, equilibrium sensitivity ΔE0, represented by the feedback response ΔB0. Likewise, the absolute closed-loop gain H is the fraction of the corrected output signal, equilibrium temperature E1, represented by the total feedback response B1.
Let us ask the computer to do a more sophisticated energy-budget calculation than the much-simplified version I showed earlier this month, and let it show its working:
We begin in 1850 by calculating the forcings by the principal naturally-occurring greenhouse-gas species in 1850. The data are from Meinshausen et al. (2017); the formulae are from IPCC (2007, table 6.2). The advantage of these particular formulae is that they were designed to permit calculation of forcings from zero rather than from some arbitrary concentration greater than zero. The forcings to 1850, therefore, work out at 25.3 Watts per square meter.
Next, midrange initial conditions are specified. All are standard, but for two. First, the aerosol adjustment of 0.6 Watts per square meter corrects IPCC’s excessively negative aerosol forcing to take account of a substantial body of literature on the subject. Professor Lindzen is on public record as having stated that the strongly negative aerosol forcing adopted in the models is a fudge factor calculated artificially to exaggerate climate sensitivities.
Secondly, the anthropogenic fraction M of total greenhouse-gas forcing is taken as 0.9. In reality, one might deduce by weighting the entries in table 2 in Wu et al. (2019) by reference to the relevant period lengths that, of the total period forcing of 0.96 W m–2, 0.71 W m–2 was anthropogenic and 0.25 W m–2 was natural. On that basis, some 73.5% of the forcing over the period was anthropogenic. However, we have cautiously assumed that as much as 90% of the forcing was anthropogenic.
The emission temperature is then derived via the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Note, however, that, as is regrettably customary in climatology, no account is taken of the fact that if there were no greenhouse gases in the air there would be no clouds, so that the albedo would be half the standard value used here, and the emission temperature – even after allowing for Hoelder’s inequalities, which climatologists generally ignore – would be well above 260 K. Indeed, Professor Lindzen has estimated 271 K, in which event ECS would be a great deal less than is shown here.
It is then shown that the system-gain factor in 1850, the ratio A1 of equilibrium temperature E1 to reference temperature R1 in that year, was 1.0764, implying that – if the feedback regime has not changed since 1850 (which the le Chatellier principle and the minuscule warming since then would lead us to expect, and which climatologists implicitly assume) – equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity is only 1.1 K. By the incorrect method, the system-gain factor erroneously expressed as the ratio a1 of equilibrium to reference sensitivities would be 3.712, leading us to expect 3.9 K ECS.
How do we know that this is the mistake that climatologists have made? The reason is simple. Some 15 years ago I wrote to Sir John Houghton, then chairman of IPCC’s climate “science” panel, and asked him why, given that direct warming by doubled CO2 in the air was little more than 1 K, it was imagined that final warming was 3 or 4 K. Sir John replied that the total natural greenhouse effect in 1850 was 32 K, and reference sensitivity to naturally-occurring greenhouse gases was about 8 K. Therefore, he said, the system-gain factor was about 4 and, therefore, ECS would be of order 4 K. Similar sentiments are expressed in numerous IPCC documents and peer-reviewed papers on climate sensitivity.
Next, it is necessary to conduct an energy-budget experiment for the period 1850-2022. Here, the objective is to see whether, using midrange, mainstream data throughout, the system-gain factor A2 in 2022 differs significantly from the system-gain factor A1 = 1.0764 obtained from the data for 1850. In fact, on the basis of the mainstream, midrange data shown, the two turn out to be identical. The feedback regime, then, has not changed with the increase of a mere 0.35% in global mean surface temperature since 1850. Not much of a surprise there.
A note of caution. Precisely because – whether climatologists like it or not or admit it or not – the feedbacks present at any given moment respond to the entire input signal, including the enormous 260 K sunshine temperature, even a very small change in the feedback regime would potentially lead to a very large change in global mean surface temperature, since the elevated feedback strength must act on the entire reference temperature including the dominant sunshine temperature, and not merely on the paltry reference sensitivities.
A further note of caution: the data and hence the climate sensitivities can be readily tweaked in any desired direction. For instance, IPCC has changed the midrange values and bounds of the underlying data time and again (for instance, it has raised the midrange estimate of the doubled-CO2 forcing from the mean 3.52 W m–2 in the CMIP6 models to 3.93 K, an increase
breaching the long-established ±10% bounds).
Precisely because small changes in the underlying data affect the feedback strength and hence the system-gain factor, and because the system-gain factor applies not only to anthropogenic reference sensitivity but to the entire input signal, including the emission temperature, it is simply not possible to constrain ECS by diagnosis of feedback strengths from the models’ outputs. Therefore, the notion that the high ECS predicted on the basis of such diagnoses represents “settled science” signifieth even less than the twattling of crickets outside my window here in stone-age Gozo.
Even the simple energy-balance method used by our computer is prone to this defect. Why, then, can we rule out the notion of a large change in the feedback regime since 1850? The reason is a practical one. If there had indeed been a major departure from the feedback regime as it stood in 1850 the warming since 1990 would not be – as it is – two and a half times less than what IPCC had confidently but misguidedly predicted in that year.
That is why the long Pauses in global temperature at a time when anthropogenic forcings are continuing to increase in a straight line are so significant. They provide a visual indication that global warming is not, after all, happening at anything like the originally-predicted rate, and that, therefore, there has been no change to speak of in the feedback regime.
Now, critics have commented that if one were to apply the actual changes in forcing since 1850 to IPCC’s diagrams showing predicted forcings for individual greenhouse gases from 1990, IPCC’s predictions would have been proven correct. One obvious problem with that: if the outturn in forcings since 1990 has proven to be so very much less than IPCC’s business-as-usual predictions in that year, why does IPCC continue to predict two and a half times as much warming as the outturn in forcings would lead us to expect?
Another favorite objection among critics, is that we have been guilty of illegitimate “extrapolation”. However, it should be apparent from the above calculation that there is no “extrapolation” in it at all.
It is climatologists, not we, who insisted that ECS was about 3-4 K on the basis of the data for 1850 and that it is still 3-4 K today on the basis of the data since 1850. The energy-budget method we have used does not rely upon extrapolation at all. One would not expect much, if any, change in the feedback regime given a mere 0.35% increase in absolute global mean surface temperature; and the above calculation shows that, using mainstream, midrange values, there may well have been no change at all in the system-gain factor from 1850-2022, so that ECS is of order 1.1 K.
A recent postercited four climatologists as disagreeing with us. But none of the climatologists in question has read our paper. None has any particular knowledge of control theory (any more than the poster does). Two could not even be brought to admit that there is any feedback response to emission temperature at all (Hint: there is: get used to it). The other two are not on record as having commented on our result at all. If our paper were as easy to refute as the poster suggests, it would not still be sitting before the editor of a leading climate journal, marked as “With Editor” on the editorial-management site, almost two full years after it was submitted. If it were defective, it would simply have been thrown back at us, and it has not been. Go figure.
Why does any of this matter? It matters because, if we are right, two important scientific conclusions follow. First, by the energy-budget method it is possible to demonstrate that, using mainstream, midrange data, ECS is likely to be as little as 1.1 K, and is necessarily as little as that if one adopts climatology’s own not unreasonable assumption (critics would call it an “extrapolation”) that the feedback regime has not changed since 1850.
Secondly, once the extreme sensitivity of ECS to very small changes in the feedback regime is properly understood – as it is not at present understood in climatology – it becomes immediately self-evident that models’ outputs provide no basis whatsoever for deriving ECS values any better than guesswork, because the data uncertainties exceed the very narrow interval of system-gain factors that would allow reasonable constraint of ECS.
Those conclusions matter because, as paper after paper has demonstrated, the energy-budget method suggests that ECS is a lot smaller than IPCC et hoc genus omne find it expedient to admit. Previously, climatologists have dealt with the low sensitivities found by the energy-budget method by declaring that the models’ outputs are more sophisticated and that, therefore, diagnoses of feedback strength and consequently of ECS therefrom are to be preferred. Our paper puts paid to that illusion. Just as Pat Frank has already demonstrated, the models’ predictions of future global warming are no better than rolling dice. Our results confirm his in spades, but by the distinct method of demonstrating the extreme sensitivity of all such predictions to very small perturbations in the feedback regime.
Let us end, then, by updating the estimate of just how little global warming would be abated even if the whole world went to net-zero emissions – which it won’t, since 70% of all new emissions are from so-called “developing” nations such as China and India, that are exempt from any legal obligation under the various climate treaties to reduce their emissions. Indeed, China has recently and sensibly proposed to build hundreds of new coal-fired power stations.
But let us pretend the world will actually reach net zero emissions by 2050. A first-order assessment of the “benefits” and costs of this questionable achievement is on the back of the envelope below –
In the past three decades, there has been 1 W m–2 anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing, arising in a near-straight line at 1/30 W m–2 per year –
Despite all the waffle at successive conferences of the parties to the framework convention on climate change, and despite the trillions already squandered by Western nations on emissions reduction, that straight line shows no flicker of a downturn. Thus, only half a Watt per square meter would be abated by 2050 even if the whole world moved in a straight line from here to net zero by that year – which it won’t, since 70% of the world is moving in a straight line in the opposite direction, and the remaining 30% are finding it a lot more difficult and expensive to attain net zero than they had originally pretended.
Now, let us imagine that IPCC is correct in its midrange estimate that there would be 3 K ECS in response to 4 K effective doubled-CO2 forcing and that, therefore, there should have been at least twice as much warming since 1990 as there has been in the mere real world of which the modelers have proven so contemptuous. If so, abating half a unit of forcing, which is all that would be abated by 2050 even if all the world got serious about net-zero emissions, would abate a whoppingly pathetic 3/8 K global warming by 2050. And that is little more than 0.1% of the prevailing absolute global mean surface temperature.
However, according to McKinsey Consulting, the capital cost alone of attaining global net zero would be £275,000 billion. And that estimate was made before the recent price hikes in energy, whose root cause was the West’s foolish insistence on shuttering coal-fired power stations generating power at $30 per MWh and replacing them with unreliables at many times that unit cost, to say nothing of the tenfold hike in Siberian gas prices that allows the Kremlin to profiteer handsomely for as long as it can keep its special military operation going in Ukraine, sanctions or no sanctions.
Our intelligence assessment is that if Moscow can keep the war running it will have made so much money from the order-of-magnitude price hikes in gas, oil, grain, nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium and other raw materials that have long been the chief earner of its resource-based economy that Mr Putin, who has a pathological (and legitimate) fear of national debt, will be able to pay down the entire Russian national debt in just two years. He has already reduced it to about 25% of annual GDP, one of the lowest rates in the world. He is aiming not for net-zero emissions (his academy of sciences has told him he need not worry about that) but for net-zero national debt. Despite the recent setback for his forces in Ukraine, it is not at all clear that he will fail in that legitimate ambition.
Let us ride with IPCC’s “mainstream” midrange estimate that each unit of forcing abated will reduce global temperature by 3/4 K. Divide the 3/8 K that would be abated up to 2050 by the half-unit abatement of forcing if the world actually went to net zero by the $275,000 billion cost of attaining net zero, and the amount of global warming abated by each $1 billion squandered on net-zero emissions would be – wait for it – less than 1/700,000 K.
Less than one seven-hundred-thousandth of a degree per $1 billion slung down the gurgler. Not exactly good value for money – indeed, it would be the worst value for money in the history of global taxation.
But now factor in the following facts. In consequence of the Ukraine war, compounded by the idiocy of governments in grossly and inefficiently interfering in the free market in energy supply by forcibly shuttering coal-fired plants and replacing them with costly unreliables, the capital cost of attaining net zero will now be many times greater than McKinseys had imagined. What is more, the current-account costs of attaining net zero, which were not included in McKinseys’ estimate, will be no less than the capital cost. Indeed, in the UK the grid authority has estimated that to achieve net zero by 2050 would cost $3,000 billion just to re-engineer the electricity grid.
One must also factor in the cost of installing enough charging-points for electric buggies, which would increase electricity demand by 70% in the UK alone. And where are the nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium for the batteries going to come from? Oh, yes, from Russia and China, whose propagandists have been undermining the West’s capacity for rational thought on this issue for decades. Putin is already laughing all the way to the Moscow Narodny Bank. Now imagine how much more he and his Communist soulmate Xi Tsin-Ping will have to laugh about when the following fact is borne in mind. If Britain alone were to replace all its real cars with electric buggies, the batteries would consume twice the world’s annual output of cobalt and almost all its output of lithium. As other Western nations idiotically follow similar lunatic policies, the price of the rare metals that make up the batteries in the buggies is bound to increase by another order of magnitude. We are looking to store some lithium carbonate in our shed and then wait five years before cashing in as billionaires.
After taking these facts into account, and after bearing in mind that ECS is not 3 K but 1.1 K at midrange, the true warming abated by each $1 billion spent on chasing the chimera of net zero emissions could be as little as one five-millionth to one ten-millionth of a degree.
Now, even if we were indeed facing the near-certainty of ECS at 3 or 4 K that the climatologists profitably imagine (and which Professor Lindzen says would be net-harmless even if it were to occur), it could not be reasonably argued that such large expenditures for such infinitesimal returns are in any degree justifiable.
Yet our result shows that official climatology’s conclusions, based as they are on the outputs of general-circulation models, are mere guesswork. They do not in any degree warrant or justify any action whatsoever to abate global warming.
On the basis of climatology’s own implicit assumption that the total feedback strength, denominated in Watts for each Kelvin of reference temperature, that obtained in 1850 also obtains today, it is proven that ECS will be only of order 1.1 K. The critics who accuse us of wrongful “extrapolation” should, therefore, address their concerns not to us but to official climatology.
Put the scientific case and the economic case together and the correct policy option is to ignore the far-Left critics, stop subsidizing unreliables, shutter the IPCC, abolish the UNFCCC, silence the costly conferences of the parties, unshutter coal-fired power stations and bring to an end the long-planned and now imminent economic hara-kiri of the West that the climate activists and those behind them have so long, and so dishonestly fostered.
NOTE FROM ANTHONY: Over the past months, there has been a running duel of back and forth postings from Joe Born vs. Christopher Monckton over this topic. Everything that could be said, has been said. Some of it has been said multiple times. I don’t agree with all the opinions expressed, but I have given both sides a fair airing of points and greivances.
This is not the Festivus channel.
Because both authors have submitted manuscripts with highly charged language, it has become a burden to edit them for publication. Therefore, this will be the very last posting on this topic from either author. Since Mr. Monckton is a long-time friend and supporter of WUWT, I’m giving him the last word on this contentious topic.
-Anthony
The CO2 level before 1958 and the global average temperature before 1979 (UAH satellite) are questionable numbers not likely to be accurate enough for any scientific conclusions. This is especially true for1800s numbers.
Nut Zero is not feasible, or even close to being feasible. There are no detailed assumptions to make a reasonably accurate guess on the cost. The need for minerals, from mines that don’t yet exist, are just one feasibility problem. Any estimate of Nut Zero cost might require a +/- 50%, or more, margin of error.
For Nut Zero, it appears that only the UK, EU, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are interested (although none of them are likely to meet their Nut Zero goals). That leaves about seven billion people who could not care less about Nut Zero. Some of them may hold their hands out for “free money” to build windmills and solar panels. If they get that money, the Nut Zero nations I listed above will have less money to spend on their own Nut Zero projects. There is no free lunch.
It’s easy to claim the “official” ECS range, based on CMIP6 models, is too high. But it’s impossible to know what the actual ECS of CO2 is. This article makes a reasonable claim for ECS, but the correct answer is “No one knows”.
The actual ECS is one of many climate science questions where the right answer is “We don’t know”. To know the actual ECS, a scientist would have to know the exact effect of perhaps 10 different climate change variables. That knowledge does not exist.
So the best conclusion now is that the IPCC is overstating ECS, using a large range of guesses, where even their current low range ECS guess (+2.5 degrees C.) is likely to be above the actual ECS.
There are many times that “we don’t know” is the right answer.
But that answer is extremely rare from scientists.
We can prove that the IPCC ECS is too high
without knowing the actual ECS of CO2.
The world already has too many ECS guesses.
Why add another guess to the pile?
Mr Greene has not quite gotten the point of the head posting. We say that if one were to use the method by which climatologists originally thought that ECS was of order 4 K, but if one were to correct that method by correctly attributing the feedback response between the 255 K emission temperature and the 8 K reference sensitivity to greenhouse gases in 1850, then ECS would be 1.1 K. However, the article also points out that even a minuscule change in the feedback regime from 1850 to the present would have a very large impact on ECS, which is, therefore, not constrainable by the current method of diagnosing feedbacks from the outputs of the general-circulation models.
The damage that our result does to the official Party Line is to demonstrate that, although one can plausibly argue for a low ECS, it is not in reality possible to predict ECS, which, however, is very likely to be a lot lower than predicted because warming itself has been a lot less than predicted. Since, therefore, there is no solid scientific foundation for high ECS, which is merely among a spectrum of possibilities and not a particularly likely part of the spectrum, there is no legitimate basis for trashing the economies of the West.
How many decades of wrong climate model predictions do we need to make it obvious that every climate model, except the Russian INM model, is using a too high ECS for CO2? The GCM models have been around for about 40 years. That’s more than enough decades of wrong predictions.
The Nut Zero project is a panic response to the belief in a coming climate crisis. That belief is not based on actual experience with rising CO2 levels in the past 47 years, since 1975. In those years, CO2 did rise along with the global average temperature. CO2 likely to have been one cause of warming, although its effect is just a guess. Our planet can warm from causes other than CO2.
What did we learn from 47 years of experience with global warming?
Apparently not much. The actual warming was mainly in the Northern half of the Northern Hemisphere, mainly during the six coldest months of the year, and mainly at night (TMIN).
Think of warmer winter nights in Siberia.
The actual timing and pattern of warming in the past 47 years was good news for the few people who lived in the high latitudes. Not a climate emergency.
What else do we know about actual climate change since 1975?
Most important:
How does the current climate compare with what we know about past climates?
In my opinion, based on climate proxies, the current climate is the best climate for humans, animals, and especially plants, in the past 5,000 years, since the Holocene Climate Optimum ended.
That Optimum was slightly warmer than today, with about one third less CO2 in the atmosphere, which is not a CO2 level that green plants prefer. The C3 plants prefer about 750 to 1,250 ppm of CO2.
People with common sense would be celebrating the current climate, not fearing future climate change predicted by “scientists”, who have a 50-year track record of wrong climate predictions.
Predictions of CAGW, that have been wrong for the past 50+ years, should be ignored.
If the global warming trend of the past 47 years continues for another 47 years, what’s wrong with that? Will it be a climate emergency if Alaska is a slightly warmer on winter nights 47 years from now?
UAH6 has a 0.13 ℃/decade over its entire period of 43 years. That period encompassed the rising portion of the cyclical variation in temperatures (60-70 year cycle) during a period of rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 levels. That implies that over an entire cycle warming will be less than 0.13 ℃/decade. Color me unimpressed.
I am probably representative of the majority of the readers. I am “technical,” but these arguments are not in my field. I really appreciate Lord Monckton’s persistence and patience in all this! But there seems to be disagreement. Either Lord Monckton is smarter than the “rest of us,” which MAY be true, or there are countervailing arguments. -OR some variation in the middle!- But I can only conclude that climate science is another one of those disciplines that in the end is beyond the realm of current [maybe future?] understanding, much less explanation by our -barely- knowledgeable sciences. We know almost nothing. Cosmology is currently in “crisis” – their own words. Every time I watch a youtube by Dr Berg on the body I am flabbergasted at the complexity. Maybe in 10,000 years we will have a clue. In the meantime, “NOBODY OWNs the SCIENCE”! I would say. And I would say the lesson to take from all this is that you cannot declare things to be true -EVEN IN SCIENCE- -you doing so invalidates your being. We have to negotiate the different interpretations to move forward. The tragedy of today is that there seems to be NO compromise acceptable, esp to those -currently- espousing “mainstream” -i.e. gov supported- views. Will we ever get to this point? NOT while I am alive I fear. The wheel will turn someday. Nuff said!
In the meantime, “NOBODY OWNs the SCIENCE”! “
Many people think the UN / IPCC owns the science, even though the IPCC is really a political organization whose Summary report is written by politicians and climate activists.
CO2 naturally increased from 180 ppm at the end of the last glacial period to 280 ppm at the start of the industrial revolution. The 50% increase should have caused a warming of 2+ degrees if you believe the ECS is 4+ degrees. The data shows temperatures have fallen by 2 degrees or so since the Holocene Climate Optimum. If you hold the alarmist view, don’t you also have to believe that natural variation swamped the feedback effects of the CO2 increase? I don’t see how one can argue that the 50% increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution will cause major positive temperature feedback but the 50% increase from the last glaciation didn’t cause any feedback. What a strange world climate science is.
There are estimates that the average temperature 20,000 years ago was at least +5 degrees c. colder than today. If the Holocene Climate Optimum was 2 degrees warmer than today, that means there was a +7 degrees C. warming from 20,000 years ago to the Holocene Climate Optimum 5000 to 9000 years ago).
That +7 degrees warming would have released a lot of CO2 from the warming oceans into the atmosphere. In addition, the warmer atmosphere would hold more water vapor. Those two variables — CO2 and a water vapor positive feedback — probably explain much of the +7 degree warming.
I don’t see how one can argue that the 50% increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution will cause major positive temperature feedback but the 50% increase from the last glaciation didn’t cause any feedback.
Since we don’t know the exact effect of the +48% CO2 increase since 1850, we certainly don’t know what the water vapor positive feedback was.
There is no reason to assume any feedback was “major”.
The +56% increase of CO2 from 180ppm (20,000 years ago) to 280ppm (1850 estimate) probably had some global warming effect, along with some amount of a water vapor positive feedback.
But that was only a +1 degree global warming, not +7 degrees.
Many climate change variables could have caused a +1 degree C. warming, not just CO2. Considering the measurements in 1850, maybe we are just guessing at +1 degree warming?
If we don’t know exactly what CO2 does, then we certainly don’t know exactly what the water vapor positive feedback does.
“…“settled science” signifieth even less than the twattling of crickets outside my window…” — hah! Worth the price of admission right here, thanks Christopher!
A pleasure! It was a wonderful holiday first in Gozo and then in Malta, though my health makes such travel difficult these days.
Over the past months, there has been a running duel of back and forth postings from Joe Born vs. Christopher Monckton over this topic. Everything that could be said, has been said. Some of it has been said multiple times. I don’t agree with all the opinions expressed, but I have given both sides a fair airing of points and greivances.
Born doesn’t understand the circuit he put out to justify his extrapolation strawman.
The carbon attribution inference and net-zero thermal effect. And the sun shines on, and the system distributes the heat in chaotic pools.
“Yet one of the world’s most eminent climatologists reflected the error that is near-universal throughout his trade when after several days’ fencing, he answered a direct question from me by admitting he did not consider there was any feedback response to emission temperature.”
not only is this hearsay, its anonymous hearsay that appeals to authority
only a lord could violate laws of logic and rules of evidence and convince himself
Hahaha….he has returned from contact tracing with his own logic
Ah, the lamentable Mosher has resurfaced from the goo. No argumentum ad verecundiam arises when no one is named as the possessor of the verecundia. If Mosher were to get his kindergarten mistress to read to him the scientific papers on climate sensitivity, he would find the error perpetratred over and over again. I have not named the scientist in question because I am not in the business of reputational assassination. That is the specialism of the Communists, who learned it from the files of the Reichspropagandaamt in 1945 and have been perpetrating it ever since. See e.g. Desinformatsiya, by the late Lt.-Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa. In the free world we don’t do reputational assassination.
hint number 1.
anytime you see a circuit drawing in a climate article consign it to the flames
bad metaphor. bad bad metaphor
He is using their maths
Mosher is, as usual, woefully out of his depth. He is not even capable of comprehending the simplest circuit diagram.
‘Climate Science’ is based far more in the arts than in science and, as such, there is no place in it for engineering or physics. Which is a tragedy really as, before the climate enthusiasts got their grubby little mitts around it, we had learned so much about the physical world around us from those disciplines. Now we would appear to be progressing backwards.
However, the correct calculation for 1850 allows for the fact that, in that year, the feedback processes then extant must perforce be responding equally to each 1 K of reference temperature, regardless of whether that 1 K came from the Sun shining or from the direct influence of greenhouse gases.
So simple. Feedback doesn’t magically differentiate between heat from the sun and heat from GHG emissions.
Got it!
Monckton of Brenchley, here at WUWT I have read (I think) every one of your posts and replies on this topic. Good for you to have been so tenacious. I do agree with the central point – that it can be understood logically and theoretically that one of the core errors of consensus climate science is to have exaggerated the feedback effects of increases in non-condensing GHG concentrations. But Anthony Watts has made it clear that this will be the last such post here.
It is no contradiction that on the one hand, I cannot see how any estimate of ECS differing from zero can be reliably determined by methods presently available; and on the other hand, to express support that you have taken the assumptions and data of the climate consensus on their own terms and have produced a more reasonable estimate of ~1.1K.
I will look forward to reading the paper you and your team have submitted for publication, should it be published. And even if not, I hope it will be made available.
I am sorry that the debate will not continue here. But one of the participants had made himself so wilfully and nastily objectionable that Anthony decided that – though these columns on climatology’s error have proven very popular – he cannot continue to host them. However, it has been very useful to have been able to discuss these ideas here, for there have been several constructive and helpful contributions.
“This is not the Festivus channel.”
ANTHONY WATTS
That’s funny !
And so is this:
The Story of Festivus – YouTube
Climate scientist Rot Spencer, Ph.D., has read this article and does not agree with it.
No, Climatologists Did Not “Forget the Sun Was Shining” « Roy Spencer, PhD (drroyspencer.com)
Here we go again with the argumentum ad verecundiam from Mr Greene. Dr Spencer has kindly agreed to publish a reply from me to his piece, which is based on several misunderstandings. Control theory is readily prone to such misunderstandings, which is why there are several expert control theorists on our team.
Dr Spencer is a highly regarded climate scientist, and his article is worth reading. It is not a character attack on you — it is a serious article by a respected scientist who disagrees with you.
Mr Greene is, as usual, being silly. Instead of trying to produce his own argument against our result, an argument that he is incapable of formulating, he resorts to the argumentum ad verecundiam by citing Dr Spencer, who had, however, not seen our paper and has received much of his information about our result not from us but from a third party determined (and, no doubt, handsomely paid) to try to divert attention from our result.
Dr Spencer, who is a good friend, has kindly allowed me to reply to his latest piece, setting straight the record about what we do and do not assert.
Climatology is gradually realizing that we are right. Therefore, the powerful political forces that do not wish us to be right are using every trick in the book to try to derail us. They will not succeed, for the truth will prevail.
Roy Spencer has posted a rebuttal.
– – – – – – – – –
No, Climatologists Did Not “Forget the Sun Was Shining”
Lord Christopher Monckton is a talented mathematician, and there are many things on which we agree. But it is unhelpful to the skeptical response to claims of a supposed climate emergency to be chasing rabbits down holes when others have already gone on that chase. So, what follows is my latest attempt to explain why Monckton’s feedback arguments supporting a very low climate sensitivity cannot be supported. This doesn’t mean his conclusion is wrong, only the line of reasoning that led him to that conclusion.
Read the rest, here:
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/10/no-climatologists-did-not-forget-the-sun-was-shining/
And don’t forget to read my reply to Dr Spencer’s post, which will appear shortly at his website, drroyspencer.com.
“…a whoppingly pathetic 3/8 K global warming by 2050. And that is little more than 0.1% of the prevailing absolute global mean surface temperature.”
Please don’t do that, comparing any temperature change as a percentage of the temperature on the absolute Kelvin scale. It is not a physically meaningful statistic.
Any scientifically educated critics who might be potentially persuaded by an otherwise good article will simply stop reading and walk away laughing.
Another point is that not one person lives in the global average temperature.
Global warming from greenhouse gases should most affect cold, dry climates at night (TMIN), not hot, humid tropical climates in the afternoon (TMAX).
That has been the warming pattern in the Northern hemisphere since1975.
So even if you use C. or F. degrees for a prediction of future global warming, the single global average temperature does not tell you much about how that warming is likely to affect you, where you live and work/
Mr Hart appears to be ignorant of the fact that in climatology it is essential to conduct calculations in Kelvin and not in Celsius degrees. For one thing, the Stefan-Boltzmann equation does not work in Celsius. It is entirely appropriate to show that the change in absolute temperature is minuscule, because the feedback processes that are the subject of the head posting respond to absolute temperatures in Kelvin. Any scientifically educated critic who might otherwise have been persuaded by a silly comment such as Mr Harts will simply stop reading and walk away weeping.
If the comments above are any indication, Lord Monckton’s twenty posts here have led much of this site’s readership woefully astray.
Still, it’s gratifying to see that the refutation I was finally able to get posted has successfully ended this site’s promotion of Lord Monckton’s error. I’ll take the W.
Have you figured out why your circuit doesn’t work yet?
“I’ll take the W.”
You mean, the “W” as in, “Whinging”?
“Because both authors have submitted manuscripts with highly charged language, it has become a burden to edit them for publication.”
Mr. Watts’ stated reason for ending the site’s “promotion of Lord’s Monckton’s error” hardly fits your claim.
Astually, my article had a single line of well-justified epithets, directed at a contributor whom I did not even name. That article was at first rejected, though the contributor in question had been given too much liberty to call me names in his article. However, I have broad shoulders, and the truth will prevail despite that contributor’s successful campaign to get this discussion stopped here. It will be continued at two more liberally-minded sites elsewhere, and also in due course in the scientific journals.
That’s the stated reason. But notice that Mr. Watts had no problem with Lord Monckton’s “charged language” before I dismantled the forgotten-sunshine theory.
Also, I disagree that my language compared at all to the intemperate verbiage Lord Monckton routinely uses in referring to me. To suggest that it did is highly misleading.
“That’s the stated reason.”
Unfortunately I don’t know him personally, but somehow I nevertheless find it awfully difficult to imagine Mr. Watts as a liar.
Perhaps you know better . . .
Liar was your word. And of course I can’t see into Mr. Watts’ mind. But here’s what I do know:
When Lord Monckton’s theory debuted on WUWT Mr. Watts rejected with ill grace my attempt to give him notice that promoting so mathematically incoherent a theory was unlikely to burnish the site’s reputation among the more-serious skeptics. He thereupon proceeded to run nineteen more head posts directed to that theory, with no evident restraint on Lord Monckton’s language, at least until my post last year showed his “end of the global warming scam in a single slide” boiled down to bad extrapolation.
And an example of the allegedly “highly charged language” edited out of my draft? My sharing with readers that “I have it on good authority that serious skeptics of the above-mentioned scientists’ caliber have therefore quietly attempted to dissuade Lord Monckton from taking so nonsensical a position.” Yes, I called his position “nonsensical.” I also called his score of posts a “farrago,” and his verbiage “word salad” and “inscrutable.” But these were considered judgments of his work, not personal attacks, which in light of his track record you may rest assured were featured in Lord Monckton’s draft.
Your mileage may differ, but in my opinion it’s misleading to imply any equivalence. In my view it’s also misleading to trivialize as a mere airing of grievances my attempt to spare WUWT’s readers the error that WUWT’s promoting Lord Monckton’s theory has inflicted upon the more gullible.
Particularly since that’s not the only issue. Lord Monckton has stated his intention to file another climate-lawsuit amicus brief based on his theory. Giving a court the impression that the forgotten-sunshine theory represents the caliber of skeptical thought could have serious consequences. We may not be able to dissuade Lord Monckton from taking so irresponsible an action. But I hope this time he won’t be able to dupe as many others into joining him.
At least we now have it on the record that a skeptic site also ran a refutation.
Stop whining.
Mr Born is like a stuck gramophone record: out of date, out of tune and out of kilter. He is out of his depth here, though I have seldom come across anyone quite so malicious and mendacious. He continues to blame us for “bad extrapolation” when it is climatology, not we, that extrapolates. He persists in maintain we insist the climate system must act linearly, but it is climatology, not we, that takes ECS today as the same as in 1850.
“Liar was your word. And of course I can’t see into Mr. Watts’ mind.”
Yes I see the clear denial here…
“But here’s what I do know:”
A great blatterooning of meaningless snollygoster only to confirm I was right all along?
Next time, just say, “Yes sir, you are correct, sir” and save us all some time, won’t you?
Spiteful to the last, Mr Born again shows his true colours. Stifling debate is not praiseworthy.
You seem to take great delight in having shouted the loudest and silenced someone you personally disagreed with yet with very little information of your own. How very modern party political of you; you must be so proud of having accomplished nothing at all.
Isn’t there an experiment that can be run that proves which equation works and which one does not? I am thinking yes, so why not do the experiment and force the issue of forcing?
The experiment has been done, both by one of my co-authors (who had not at first believed that we were correct) and also by a national laboratory of physical engineering, which built its own test rig and demonstrated definitively what is in any event well established in the equations underlying control theory: namely, that at any given moment the feedback processes then subsisting must perforce respond equally to each unit of the reference signal, specifically including the base signal, which in climate is the 260 K emission temperature. There is no doubt whatsoever either in the equations or in the experiments. It is simply a question of building a simple test rig.
I’ve been valiantly trying to come to grips with Christopher’s accounts of this for a long time now, years in fact! The above seems to be the clearest and simplest account so far.
What he is saying seems to be the following:
We know what the temperature in 1850 would have been, absent feedbacks. It would have been 255 K + 8 K = 263 K, where the 8 K is the greenhouse effect from naturally occurring GHGs, and 255 K is what the temperature would have been with no GHGs. This 263 would also have been absent any feedback effect.
But, the recorded temperature was 24 K higher than the 263 K, at 287 K. This addition is due to feedback. So the question is, how much feedback was there in 1850, and in response to what input?
According to Christopher, the conventional view is that we have a total of 32 K over and above the base temperature, which is due to the combination of GHGs and feedback to the warming the GHGs caused.
The total amount of warming was 32 K, the sum of the direct warming from the GHGs of 8 K and the 24 K of feedback amplification. The conventional view is claimed to be that all of that 24 K was an amplification of the 8 K direct warming from GHGs.
If I have got this right, he’s arguing that the conventional view then predicts what happens if the GHGs rise by an amount which will, in itself, raise temperature by 1 K. The conventional answer is said to be that the total effect would be 4 K. You get this because there would be 1 K direct and 3 K feedback. Its the same proportion as in 1850, where there was a 1:3 ratio between direct and feedback amplification. There it was 8:24. Add just 1K and the same ratio will happen, and it will produce a further increase of 3K.
But, says Christopher, this assumes that the feedback mechanism, whatever it is, only operates on the GHG direct increase to the 255 K ’emission temperature’. And, he asks, what is the justification for this assumption? Surely the mechanism should operate on any increase at all from zero, and in the same proportion to all increases?
If (just for instance) the temperature was 200 K at some point, and something took it to 255 K, then that 55 K should lead to an amplification of three times it, so the final temperature should be 255 + 55 + 165 = 475 K. Which is absurd, we know that did not happen.
If I have got this right, Christopher extends this argument to cover the whole of the increase from zero. So the total amount of warming which gets amplified is 263 K. Since the total amplification is only 8 + 24 = 32 K we can expect a direct warming of 1 K to have the same proportional effect in the ratio 263:32. If 263 K of warming leads to an amplification of 32 K, what will another 1 K lead to?
A very very small number. 0.122.
Have I finally got this argument right? I am not judging whether its right or wrong, at least not yet, I am just trying to understand its logic.
I’m now not sure, thinking about about the last para, whether it should be 263:32 or 255:32. Or maybe 263:24? Have to think about this a bit more. In any event, its a very small ratio and the result is going to be similar. The argument is basically that if you only got a 24 or 32 K amplification due to feedback from raising the temperature by 255 or 263 K, then raising it by another 1 K is going to lead only to a tiny additional rise due to the same level of feedback amplification.
The equation for the system-gain factor in 1850 is 32 / 8 in official climatology, but is (255 + 32) / (255 + 8) in reality, for one must not neglect the fact that the Sun is shining and that, therefore, there is at any given moment, such as 1850, a substantial feedback response to emission tempeature itself. In effect, climatology’s method assumes that the Sun is not shining and that, therefore, there is no feedback response to 29/30ths of the reference signal.
You’ve basically gotten it right. He says that, since in 1850 there was 24 K of feedback to 263 K of direct warming, then there should be only 24/263 x 1 K further feedback to an additional 1 K of direct warming. You can see that in the right half of his slide I copied into “Refutation of the Forgotten-Feedback Theory.”
Don’t waste your time reading Mr Born’s purported “refutations”. They are not only inspissate but artfully inaccurate.
Isn’t that a typo? Don’t you mean 24/263 + 1 K? Not times 1 K?
No. ECS would be (RCS = 1K) + (m = 24/263) x 1K = 1.091 K. (For some reason his slide says 1.095, but I think he meant 1.091.)
I guess what I don’t understand is all the stuff about feedback theory, why its at all relevant. The argument looks like its a very simple one about a matter of fact: how does the planet respond to the application of heat?
And it seems quite reasonable to try to answer this question by looking at how it has in fact responded in the past. In fact, I don’t see how else you would answer it.
Maybe I am not understanding it all, but all the material about feedback seems like a distraction from this very simple argument. Never mind what feedback theory says can or cannot happen in various circumstances which may or may not be relevant, who cares?
Just look at what has in fact happened in the past in this particular system.
What am I missing?
Well, very tentatively, his logic appears to be sound. He is trying to figure out how the system responds to the application of heat.
So he looks at the past, sees a given temp which results from the previous application of heat, looks at what the temp would be from that much heat without any amplification, and concludes the excess must be feedback amplification.
I don’t see anything wrong with the argument. I guess you could question whether the whole 263 or 255 is correct, that is, whether zero is the right starting point.
But I can’t see why you would attribute the whole of the 24 K gap to feedback on only the last 8 K, which is due to the natural GHGs.
That would be like arguing that the temperature of 255 is somehow not the result of any heating, wouldn’t it?
I can see that if we have a pan of water, and we apply enough heat to raise its temp by 10 degrees, but the temperature in fact goes up by 40 degrees, then we are entitled to conclude that some form of amplification is accounting for the extra 30.
But in our climate experiment, it seems like the planet starts out at zero, gets heated by the sun to 255 and then gets heated another 8 degrees because there are GHGs. If there is any feedback amplification in the system surely it would happen in response to that heat application? In which case he is surely correct, there was only 24K of feedback to 263 K of direct warming?
I don’t understand all the feedback theory material, but this seems like a simple empirical question: how does the planet respond to the application of heat? And looking at how it has responded in the past seems a reasonable way of answering that question.
Maybe I am missing something.
You’ve just described Lord Monckton’s reasoning, which Fig. 5’s blue dashed line in “Refutation of the Hidden-Sunshine Theory” illustrates. Specifically, that line illustrates the proposition that the equilibrium global-average surface temperature E must be linearly proportional to the value R it would have had if there had been no feedback. Despite Lord Monckton’s denial, this is the proposition on which his entire theory is based.
The problem is that, to the contrary, nothing in feedback theory requires that E be linearly proportional R. As Fig. 5’s black curve illustrates, feedback theory permits E to be a nonlinear function of R. This means that the rate at which E increases in the interval between points B and C can be greater than the rate at which it increases in the interval between points A’ and B. Therefore, as the green dashed line illustrates, the estimate is better if it’s based on the smaller interval from A to B–as Lord Monckton contends “climatology” does–than it is if it’s based on the entire interval from A’ to B, as he erroneously contends that feedback theory requires.
Note that a nonlinear function wouldn’t mean there’s no feedback at lower temperatures, or no feedback in response to sunshine, or that feedback is not responding to the entire “reference signal”; it would merely mean that the incremental feedback response can be lower at lower temperatures than at higher temperatures.
An electronic analog illustrating such a nonlinear relationship can be found in “The Power of Obscure Language.” (That post’s diagrams are drawn to scale, whereas for the sake of simplicity the just-mentioned Fig. 5 is not.)
To be clear, I personally think that, to the extent that ECS exists, its value is low. But Lord Monckton is wrong to contend that feedback theory requires it to be low.
OK, thanks for this. I am still finding his very simple argument quite persuasive, regardless of the merits of his account of feedback theory and his application of it.
It seems like a very simple and verifiable point: the claim is that the climate does not in fact respond to forcing with the feedback levels that the conventional account proposes.
And as far as I can see, the simple arithmetic he cites from the situation in 1850 bears him out.
If that’s all there is, its a great pity that it got obscured in lots of irrelevant material and endless disputes on Bode and feedback. Who cares? The important thing is how the climate responds to a given recent and future level of forcing, and the best clue to that would seem to be how it has responded in the past.
Its a pretty simple question of fact to find out what it has done in the past, and it strikes me as pretty reasonable to assume it will carry on behaving the same way. Absent some very good reasons why not.
Our argument has indeed become obscured, by the deliberate action of several shills and trolls who are determined to try to keep the Party Line on climate alive long after the science underlying it has collapsed. Our argument is, at root, simple: however, for those unfamiliar with control theory it is very difficult to explain.
The correct procedure for determining the water vapor feedback would be as follows. For the current operating point at 285K, the dependence of the water vapor content of the atmosphere on the temperature would have to be determined. Then the dependency of the greenhouse effect on the amount of water vapor at this working point would have to be known. This data could then be used to determine the feedback factor for small temperature changes. If all of this were known, you wouldn’t need climate models and computers for climate predictions.
Besides, clapeyron clausius relations tell us nothing of the liquid and solid phases of water in the atmosphere (or their distribution), emitting full spectrum IR. This is far more important than the vapor phase, in my view. When air cools the water does not magically disappear, it simply turns into water droplets and ice crystals.
Doubling my whammy, clapeyron clausius only describes the maximum capacity of water vapor in air, but not the actual humidity air will have for a certain temperature.
So, when we never refer to 100% relative humidity (which means that the air actually reached its maximum capacity of water), there is no use then to mention this relation, and to mention that air can hypothetically hold more water now. Particularly when relative humidity is decreasing in the observational data at most heights.
It really does not matter what method one tries to deploy in order to try to constrain the water-vapor feedback. The uncertainties are enormous. Yet the interval of system-gain factors corresponding to IPCC’s 3 [2, 5] K equilibrium-sensitivity interval is 1.10 [1.09, 1.13]. On any view, the uncertainties in the value of the water-vapor feedback alone, to say nothing of the other feedbacks, is a great deal larger than 1 or 2 per cent. Proper feedback analysis shows this problem up: the official and incorrect method used by climatology conceals it.
Recognizing the nature of Clausius’ work, the apparent role of the Clausius-Clapeyron equation is to convert temperature differences to radiative fluxes (to and back), and by doing so to assure that no temperature-radiation feedback exists.
A first order water vapor feedback must resemble zero in the Earth system, where the 3 phases of water coexist in the atmosphere. This is confirmed by the IR emission spectrum of the Earth as observed from space, with a dominant spectrum at 273.15K. More phase changes, more emission.
JCM is more than somewhat off topic. Our simple point is that the uncertainties in feedback strength are very large, and yet they must be very small to generate the narrow range of system-gain factors implicit in the current ECS interval. It simply does not matter to our argument how the feedback strengths are composed.
Physically the feedback strength is net LW absorption after direct forcing. There is no harm to kick around some mechanistic interpretations resulting from the findings presented.
Additionally, I would caution that when using Monckton’s method of argument i.e. not disputing most assumptions in consensus, one has not necessary described any sort of reality. One has only helped to identify what is not happening in a fashionable way. After years of arguing using Monckton’s technique, while it’s an effective tactic and may help get science out of a rut, there is the risk of confusing this argument for a realistic description of climate. Such that the disputant has biased himself, and begins to see new physical arguments as a threat. This, despite his point, and new paradigms, not being mutually exclusive.
Sigh! It is very difficult to explain the scientific method to those with no training therein. Particularly where a topic – such as the climate – has been made politically contentious, the usual way to have a discussion is to accept ad argumentum (i.e., for the sake of argument) everything that the opponent asserts except what one is able to disprove. And the most powerful form of disproof is a disproof that is, as far as possible, rooted in the data, methods and assumptions of the interlocutor. That does not in any degree mean that we have fooled ourselves into accepting the absolute truth of what we accept purely for the sake of argument. We are trained minds, and not prone to make schoolboy mistakes of that kind.
I don’t see why you need to go into this detail. All you have to know is how the planetary climate responded to previous forcings. Never mind what caused the response, or how it did it. That may be very interesting but its irrelevant to the argument.
Then you ask whether there is any reason why this pattern should have changed for the current and future warmings. Absent any good reason to think its different this time, you assume it will be the same.
Christopher’s key point seems to be that the analysis of the situation in 1850 shows that feedback to forcing is very low indeed. We might not know why its so low, we might not even know what is causing there to be any.
But the important thing for policy is how low it is.
You are engaging them on their own terms.
.
Feedback is when an amplifier, such as a speaker, is heard by the detector, such as a microphone, and amplifies itself, you get a Screech.
There is no analogy here.
Do not lend credence to their BS.
And, obviously, if increased temperature increased water vapor which also increased temperature, this would run away, the Earth would have boiled. Known in the engineering world as Positive Feedback, look up Galloping Gerty, the bridge over the Tacoma Narrows, a famous engineering disaster.
Do not accept their ridiculous contentions. There is no feedback.
It is a convenient premise for the quest to destroy mining, from which our prosperity stems.
These people would like to pretend that the Sun, through the wind and the incident radiation, can support a prosperous economy, without changing the Earth, which they hate to see drilled and mined.
Well, it cannot, until we have better batteries. Did you know that the lead-acid battery was invented in 1859 and is still the best, used in all ICE cars? Sure, we will soon get batteries that can provide power to the grid for weeks-long windless and sunless days.
Or not.
That is all that is going on here.
Ludicrous.
Moon
As a simpleton, I tend to agree with you as it seems to me positive feedback must lead to instability and runaway response until the power supply limit is reached.
Similarly, it seems negative feedback necessarily leads to stability and maintenance of equilibrium. My half century or so of lived experience is the latter rather than the former.
I do, however, acknowledge that I’m no control theory expert, and I wonder how time and feedback response are related: in the old days, bringing a mic up to a speaker gave a rapid and undeniable response.
Does that no longer happen?
Those who, like “slow to follow”, are not familiar either with control theory or with the still older discipline of summing infinite series and obtaining closed-form solutions thereto, will find it difficult to understand any feedback-related discussion.
Provided that the fraction of the output signal represented by feedback response is appreciably below unity, stability is perfectly possible in a feedback-moderated dynamical system.
Moon is, alas, ignorant of feedback formulism in control theory. As the head posting shows, there is indeed feedback response in the climate system, but, due to climatologists’ silly error of physics, they had grossly overstated its magnitude.
“Feedback is when an amplifier, such as a speaker, is heard by the detector, such as a microphone, and amplifies itself, you get a Screech.”
That’s unstable feedback, move the microphone further away and the screeching stops but you still have feedback, it’s just stable.
CMoB’s response to Roy Spencer:
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/10/lord-monckton-responds-to-spencers-critique/
Immediately the Stokes groupies began noise generation:
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/10/lord-monckton-responds-to-spencers-critique/#comments
Don’t be shy, Monte:
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/10/lord-monckton-responds-to-spencers-critique/#comment-1375318
Show me what you got.
Request DENIED, groupie.
Brave Sir Monte ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
So original…
FTR—no running away, I don’t open kook-links as a matter of policy.
When danger reared it’s ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
What a clown you are.
Not interested in playing your klown kook klimate cirkus.
Thank you for the compliment, Monte.
Please donate:
https://clownswithoutborders.org/
If adding CO2 to the atmosphere caused surface warming then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused at least a measurable increase in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere. The lapse rate is really a measure ot the insulating properties of the atmosphere. Hence the climate sensitivity of CO2 must be zero. According to the AGW hypothesis, H2O is the primary greenhouse gas responsible for the majority of the radiant greenhouse effect. H2O is also supposed to provide the primary feedback to CO2 based warming. The idea is that CO2 based warming causes more H2O to enter the atmosphere which causes more warming because H2O is the primary greenhouse gas which causes even more H2O to enter the atmosphere and so forth. If this were really true then one would expect that if adding H2O caused surface warming then the wet lapse rate must be greater than the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but in reality the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate which is evidence that H2O is a net coolant in the troposphere, Hence the feedback that H2O would provide would be negative. Hence AGW must be a false hypothesis. We should also note the derived from first principals the lapse rate is equal to -g/cp where g is the acceleration of gravity and cp is the heat capacity of the atmosphere at constant pressure. Hence the LWIR absorption properties of certain trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere have no effect on the lapse rate and hence have no effect on the insulating properties of the atmosphere.. .
The lapse rate, for various powerful reasons, tends to remain broadly constant. The principal effect of a radiative forcing is not to alter the lapse rate but to increase the altitude of the characteristic emission level at which incoming and outgoing radiation are in approximate equilibrium, and consequently, with a near-constant lapse rate, to increase the surface temperature.
Thank you for your reply. Then please tell me exactly how much does adding CO2 to the atmosphere increase the characteristic emission level. That should tell us what the climate sensitivity of CO2 is not including feedbacks..
30 years and hundreds of billions of dollars and ZERO progress on determining ECS.
And climate science doesnt stop to consider their underlying assumptions.
ECS has not converged on the true value because the true value is not the expected value.
Let me repeat: ECS has not converged on the true value because the true value is not the expected value.
For 2000 years science was held back because it was believed the law of nature could be derived by logic.
Planetary orbits must be circular because a circle is more perfect than any other alternative.
Hubris. Climate science dogma has a fundamental error. Otherwise ECS should have converged on the true value.
The change in feedbacks is a function of the change in forcings.
Delta(feed) = f(delta(force))
Total(feed) = sum(f(delta(force)))
The problem is that climate science is not precise when they talk about feedback. Is that total feedback or change in feedback.
MofB and climate science are talking past each other as a result because they have different names for the same thing and the same names for different things.
The problem is climate science is not rigorous in its treatment of existing science. Like a bunch of art students got together and created new names for existing dimensions and properties because they didn’t know any better..
When was the last time you saw a trig function in a climate science paper. It is like there are no cycles in anything and no interactions between various cycles. Even daily temps use a plain arithmetic average of temps rather than trying to compute anything using enthalpy or integrals.
Kinda like they are math challenged.
Water feedback began at the point where water vapor entered the atmosphere.
Total water feedback is the net sum of all the changes in water feedback since that point.
At no time did water feedback return to zero while water vapor was still in the atmosphere.
Thus you cannot calculate how much water vapor changes will change the climate untul you first calculate how much feedback there is currently.
Climate science tries to avoid this by arbitrarily setting current total feedback to zero. In effect using feedback anomalies and labelling them feedback.
Thanks, Christopher:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/how-to-lord-comment-sections/
With my infinite gratitude to Monte et Xim.