Jennifer Marohasy

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Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered

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Physics and Society, in its July 2008 quarterly edition, has published a paper by Christopher Monckton entitled Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, which exposes the IPCC’s strange method of calculating the effect of CO2 on temperature and suggests that in response to a CO2 doubling global temperature may rise by as little as 0.6 C.

Abstract:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the “global warming” of the past 50 years and would cause further rapid warming. However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC’s models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity:

1. Radiative forcing ΔF;
2. The no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter κ; and
3. The feedback multiplier ƒ.

Some reasons why the IPCC’s estimates may be excessive and unsafe are explained. More importantly, the conclusion is that, perhaps, there is no “climate crisis”, and that currently-fashionable efforts by governments to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions are pointless, may be ill-conceived, and could even be harmful.

Physics & Society: July 2008, Volume 37, Number 3

Full Paper at http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

Physics and Society is the quarterly of the Forum on Physics and Society, a division of the American Physical Society. It presents letters, commentary, book reviews and reviewed articles on the relations of physics and the physics community to government and society. It also carries news of the Forum and provides a medium for Forum members to exchange ideas. Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. SJT says

    Lord, I say Lord, Munchkin, rears his self important head again. I’m going to start a scientific journal, and I’m going to give it an impressive name too. I hope you all read it and believe it.

  2. SJT says

    “The models heavily relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had not projected this multidecadal stasis in “global warming”;”

    What a jerk, the record over the last century shows much bigger deviations. It still gets warmer.

  3. peterg says

    Interesting paper. Dont like the way it dismisses bodes law, as all systems are linear when a small enough microscope is used. Its a provable mathematical theory. Comes from Taylors expansion. Only breaks down when you divide by zero.

    The “amplification” effect it criticises is garbage. Has convection saturated or something? If the Earths temperature is much cooler than it would be if only CO2 was acting, then drawing a straight line through the operating point would tell you that.

  4. Paul Biggs says

    I worry about you SJT – the journal isn’t Monckton’s. Climate sensistivity to CO2 remains an open question and the IPCC has not provided an exposition/derivation of how 2xCO2=3C.

  5. Gary Gulrud says

    Moncton is safe. The motivation behind use of Beer-Lambert for calculation of GHG transfer functions is the pratfall opening to a comedy of errors.
    The law was developed for estimating signal attenuation and reached its final form in 1852, before Maxwell, Planck, and modern physics. It is ‘electromagnetically’ naive.
    Transmission and absorptance bear no physical relation to emissivity and absorptivity of the medium. Using the optical depth of the atmosphere rather than finding the instananeous cross-section of the molecules is another opening face-plant:
    Low temperature and pressure GHGs absorb weakly and share any energy not emitted instantaneously–as they do in signal’s transmission. So as before the average kinetic energy of the gas, the temperature, is the same and spontaneous emission does not occur.
    So Beers fails to distinguish electromagnetically between absorption and emission.

  6. duffer says

    “the IPCC has not provided an exposition/derivation of how 2xCO2=3C.”

    Maybe they just cited Arrhenius, who managed to suss this out over a century ago?

  7. Steve Short says

    Gary

    I agree, Monckton is safe. Beer-Lambert is a crude 19th century ‘law’ often utterly irrelevant to emissivity and absorptivity and this fact has been known to a host of scientists working in numerous fields for a long, long time. Australia’s invention of atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), an absolute boon to the mining industry represents just one classic example.

    I cackled at the Bodes Law corker from peterg – “all systems are linear when a small enough microscope is used.” “Comes from Taylors expansion.” Presumably typed on a PC using integrated circuits (Josephson etc) subject to quantum tunneling by a life form comprised of non-linearly acting genes, enzymes etc etc too! Ha ha ha ha….. Obviously never tried to use a Taylor series expansion to describe the error of the quotient of two variables.

    Like i’ve said – we’re drowning in post-modernist wallies.

  9. Ivan (862 days & Counting) says

    Poor Rudderless – one can’t help but feel sorry for him.

    You’d think that when he was over rubbing shoulders with all his G8 friends, that someone would have tipped him off.

    At least George Bush should have had a quiet word in his ear – “Listen Kev. We’re all dropping out of this AGW nonsense and we’re going to blame the Chinese and the Indians, so you should get on board as well.”

    Or Angela and Nick should have taken him aside and said – “Listen Kev. We’ve pissed 40 Billion Euros down the drain on our cap-and-trade and our CO2 emissions have gone up.”

    But no – the bunch of meanies have just let him wander off into the traffic on his own.

    Interesting that there is a small bit of sanity returning to the ‘debate’. Pity some people are just too stupid to sit up and take notice before it’s all too late…

  10. Ian Mott says

    Interesting. If the IPCC has accepted that up to half the recorded warming of the past century was not from AGW then why have they not included at least one projection that incorporates a natural correction to this past non-AGW warming?

    And if the IPCC has accepted that a natural correction of half the warming could take place then, surely, the “Guano Report” is grossly negligent for not including such a significant probability in its projections.

    And is this acceptance by the IPCC of half the recorded rise being non-AGW an implicit recognition of the scale of Hansen et al’s fudging by way of UHI and all the other scams?

  11. Jan Pompe says

    Steve: “Australia’s invention of atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), an absolute boon to the mining industry represents just one classic example.”

    Thanks for the memory AA spectrometry was my first introduction to spectrometry in a working lab. Used it to analyse for cyanide being released into the streams – all the way to the pub in Fig Tree.:)

  12. sunsettommy says

    “Lord, I say Lord, Munchkin, rears his self important head again. I’m going to start a scientific journal, and I’m going to give it an impressive name too. I hope you all read it and believe it.”

    “What a jerk, the record over the last century shows much bigger deviations. It still gets warmer.”

    “Maybe they just cited Arrhenius, who managed to suss this out over a century ago?”

    How about this crazy idea of more credible counterpoints and leave out the name calling?

  13. Eyrie says

    Thanks for the link, Louis. I once sat next to Bill Kellogg on a DC10 going to LA in 1985. He was on his way back to NCAR after visiting Antarctica. Interesting that in 1985 he certainly wasn’t trying to convert a former meteorologist to his apocalyptic world view. He did admit to me that NCAR did stuff that was too “way out” for normal research institutions.

  15. Ianl says

    Jan

    “Thanks for the memory AA spectrometry was my first introduction to spectrometry in a working lab”

    Here’s another geo that remembers

  16. Ianl says

    Here’s a couple of quotes off CA today.

    Note that the actual quotes on cherry-picking dendrochronology data come from the The Team (IPCC stalwarts), not McIntyre:

    “PR Challenge coauthor D’Arrigo told an astonished NAS panel that you have to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie. PR Challenge coauthor, Esper (in Esper et al 2003):

    this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology by reducing the number of series used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology.”

    [The PR Challenge is of mild interest – given pseudodata, how close can computerised climate models come to the pseudoclimate ?]

  18. SJT says

    “I worry about you SJT – the journal isn’t Monckton’s. Climate sensistivity to CO2 remains an open question and the IPCC has not provided an exposition/derivation of how 2xCO2=3C.”

    My bad, I assumed from the title he had published a paper in serious journal, naturally, an impossibility. If you look at what the journal is, he is just putting an article in the forum section. Just an *article*, not a *paper*, which implies he has had them publish a peer reviewed paper.

    If you are interested, there is also an article explaining basic AGW science for those who are interested. I found it informative, as a non-scientist. Every time I read something like this, I learn a little more.

    http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/hafemeister.cfm

  19. cohenite says

    sjt; started to read your link; gave up; here’s why;

    “one can attribute 21C to water vapour, 7C to CO2 and 5C to other gases. If we add more CO2 we would expect it to increase the surface temp.” No we wouldn’t; even IPCC recognise the logarithmic decline in ‘heating’ from extra CO2; and no % of warming attributed to the oceans!

    “but IPCC has observed that feedbacks are more positive”; do you live on Venus? That statement is absurd; AR4 admit they have no idea about vapour and clouds (p 131-132); what about declining RH, reactive halogen, cyanobacteria; Miskolczi, Spencer, clouds, the 3 stooges.

    “the data over the past decade is now solidifying in general agreement with theory”; tell that to Koutsoyiannis, McIntyre and Watts; or lucia or Tilo; actually that claim is bizarre, psychotic.

    “The pre-industrial CO2 level was 280 ppm in 1800.” No it wasn’t; Beck, Jaworowski.

    But the coup de grace to this ‘paper’ is its absurdities about Venus;

    “Venus’s higher CO2 concentration traps IR, giving it a surface temp of 750K, 3 times Earth’s surface temp of 287K.”

    Venus has an atmosphere 90 times more massive than on Earth. The tropopause is about 65 km, just above the clouds, where the temp gradient from top-down solar absorption equals the lapse rate and the temp and pressure is approx Earth-like; however, the dry adiabatic lapse rate in hot CO2 is about 8K/km (compared to 10K/km on Earth, which is reduced to about 6K/km on average by water vapour, of which there aint any on Venus), giving something like 500K temp difference purely as a result of pressure. Not much SW penetrates the clouds, so the troposphere is not being warmed from the bottom up as on Earth; but you may get a ‘greenhouse’ in the layer just above the clouds, where SW passes through to warm the cloud tops and some LW is absorbed coming out again (but that would be tiny given the albedo effect). There is little to directly heat the surface and there has been and there is no runaway on Venus. So, what kicked things off on Venus? Episodic tectonic overturn about 750 million years ago according to Craig O’Neill; the whole planet was one big volcano; the sun did the rest.

  21. Steve Short says

    Does it now?

    On the other hand:

    “In this paper we show that the central problem can be modelled as a boundary value problem for a pair of coupled non-linear wave equations, the more complex part being the aerodynamics with aeroelastic interaction on the boundary viz. the wing. The composite problem can be modelled as a non-linear convolution equation in Hilbert space.”

    can we also presume that you’d never, ever, ever travel by air?

  24. Gary Gulrud says

    Steve:

    Thanks for the feedback. Although physicists have summarily dismissed climate science’s motivation on this account and treated it with benign neglect I believe they have begun to recognize the importance of public education on this and other fantasies at the base of the AGW stack of cards.

  26. SJT says

    So are the people who run this site going to fix up the erroneous topic information. Monckton did not get a paper published, he has had an article placed on the public forum of the APS. Big difference……

  27. SJT says

    And now a comment appears at the top of the article.

    “The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”

    Take that Moncky.

  28. non fidarsi e meglio says

    It is APS policy to not submit ANY of its articles for peer reviewing. Does that make every article false? the logic is flawed.