Monckton watch

Heartland Institute is pumping out newsreleases about their group of "dissident scientists" who have been banned from presenting in Bali. Guess who their spokesperson is?

And wonder where they got the dough to attend?

Gotta keep saying it. Monckton: never not funny.

HMS indefatigable.
"Why does Monckton think he deserves a piece of the Noble?"
Well, aren't Viscounts nobles? :-)

This reminds me, readers here recall the Monkcton/Schulte v oreskes thing, of which Tim did much good detective work. I had occasion to generate a coherent presentation of that whole thing in one place, and the kind folks at zerocarbonnow actually posted
it.

Impressive. The continuing efforts of conservatives worldwide to eradicate the last remaining traces of conservative rationality continue unabated..

That said, does anyone know the basis of this claim of southern hemispheric cooling?

"...DDT, the only effective agent against malaria."

Makes you wonder why malaria deaths have falling in all those countries wasting their money spraying "ineffctive" agents like Malathion.

Actually reading that interview one gets the impression of an elderly, ill, lonely man, quite possibly mentally disturbed or suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

Mocking him really isn't nice - but encouraging his delusions and acting as though he was a reliable source of scientific information on a vitally important subject is even less nice.

Mocking him really isn't nice

Oh so true, but it must be done, for the betterment of the species if nothing else. So on with it!

But then it must also be noted that simply noting what he says, in his own words, and pointing out that they do not accord with reality, is not "mocking" but "Spockoing".

Right prediction, wrong person.

Markg:

On the southern hemisphere "cooling" claim, Tamino has a good post on the subject:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/hemispheres/

A quick graph of the data can be found here:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/demos/temrec/graph.htm

The gist of it is that the southern hemisphere is warming, and Monckton is, again, worng.

I haven't yet made it to one of the Viscount's daily "science" briefings - but the 2 I've noted fliers for were:
*"IPCC exaggerates increase in radiative forcing of CO2" and
* "Sea level rise (IPCC or Gore - one of them is wrong)"

I can't fault his ambition, though, as each of his briefings sets aside only 15 minutes to attack the science and/or maths of part of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. Most of the other side-events run for an hour and a half on serious topics.

If I have the time, I'll have to make it along to one, just for a laugh.

ChrisC; Thanks, but I'm pretty well read on the topic. I was more wondering why Monckton thinks that the Southern Hemisphere is cooling. I started to look into figuring what on earth he thinks he's talking about, but I got bored with the search. I can only take reading so much stupid before I get sleepy and remind myself to finish my PhD. So I was hoping someone might have already done the legwork in this regard.

does anyone know the basis of this claim of southern hemispheric cooling?

It might be based on the fact that there is very little warming and a little cooling at some latitudes south of 50S in the past 30 years. I'd guess that Monckton could come up with some dishonest way to show that this means the "Southern Hemisphere is cooling".

I appreciate that most of your comments focus on specific scientific corrections of Monckton---I find this style of argument much more appropriate than politics and ad hominem. (Ben Thurley's assertion that residence in Australia qualifies him to measure his hemisphere's average temperature is as asinine as anything coming from the other side of the debate.)

It strikes me, however, that the analysis given here with regard to radiative forcing is just plain wrong. The IPCC make an assertion about the change in CO2 radiative forcing, *not* the change in change of radiative forcing. You compute here the difference between two changes based on an arbitrarily (but I suppose sensible) fixed point; the percentage increase between the first percentage change and the second percentage change is unequivocably *not* an increase in "the CO2 radiative forcing". If the IPCC arrived at their numbers as you did, the result is being described incorrectly in their text and this is an error in need of correction.

"The WHO did not ban DDT and has always recommended its use."

Yup, and my house wasn't sprayed in Tanzania in 1997, in fact there was a blanket DDT ban in place. The only recommended malaria prevention recommended to me was DEET impregnated mosquito nets and profylaxis tablets.

Don't you think it's UNEP who's responsible for this?

Rob said:

(Ben Thurley's assertion that residence in Australia qualifies him to measure his hemisphere's average temperature is as asinine as anything coming from the other side of the debate.)

Rob, if you paid attention to the links I provided which pointed straight to the CSIRO data on Australia's temperature (1950-2007) and the graph of IPCC data I also posted, you would know that I didn't assert my own ability to measure hemispheric temperature, but rather pointed to the relevant evidence (which Monckton had been unable to do in conversation with me when I challenged him.)

"Don't you think it's UNEP who's responsible for this?"

Personally I think it's Santa and his elves.

There's just as much evidence for one proposition as for the other.

Even if your claim were true of course UNEP and are not the same organsiation (although i'm sure I'm about to hear about how they're both part of the Marxist/Green/left-wing journalist/New World Order/ Weather Channel/ grant-money-guzzling climate "scientists" / pro-flouridation/humanist/inteternatonal banking /kidney-poisoning/anabaptist/ geocentric theory/prov-vaccination axi of evil.(

Rob, you and Monckton are wrong and the IPCC is right -- it seems you don't know what radiative forcing means.

Ben, if you don't mind, where are Monckton et al holding the briefings? I thought they were banned from the official sites.

(I think you should definitely go, and post about your impressions)

Hey bcl, I'll have to check out if they're still holding them as I haven't seen any new flyers out, but the 2 I noted were 15-minute briefings in the NGO coordination area (which is at the hotel where official side events are being held). So it is an official venue, but his briefings aren't listed as official side events, so I'm not sure on what basis they were organised.

I'm pretty time-poor during the conference, and have really been focusing my efforts on adaptation discussions and lobbying, but will try to get along if possible.

Hey bcl, I'll have to check out if they're still holding them as I haven't seen any new flyers out, but the 2 I noted were 15-minute briefings in the NGO coordination area (which is at the hotel where official side events are being held). So it is an official venue, but his briefings aren't listed as official side events, so I'm not sure on what basis they were organised.

I'm pretty time-poor during the conference, and have really been focusing my efforts on adaptation discussions and lobbying, but will try to get along if possible.

Right, and I should have said banned from "official events" not the sites themselves. Thx.

I'd really like to hear what definition of radiative forcing makes these numbers right, because log2(C1)/log2(C0) is the formula for *change* in forcing according to everything I can find.

Again, I find this outright hostility to critical appraisal extremely counter-productive; such an attitude is playing right into the hands of those who want to make the debate a political and not a scientific one.

Rob, it seems that you didn't find the IPCC's own definition:

>Radiative forcing is the change in the net,
downward minus upward, irradiance (expressed in W m-2) at the
tropopause due to a change in an external driver of climate change,
such as, for example, a change in the concentration of carbon
dioxide or the output of the Sun. Radiative forcing is computed with
all tropospheric properties held fixed at their unperturbed values,
and after allowing for stratospheric temperatures, if perturbed, to
readjust to radiative-dynamical equilibrium. Radiative forcing is
called instantaneous if no change in stratospheric temperature is
accounted for. For the purposes of this report, radiative forcing is
further defined as the change relative to the year 1750 and, unless
otherwise noted, refers to a global and annual average value.

Thanks for that---you're quite right and the IPCC definition is available at .

So if radiative forcing only measures change, then the correct units for a value of radiative forcing is percentage, right? I still find it quite odd to take the derivative of a derivative to produce a percentage of a percentage---calling a change from 5% o 6% a 20% change instead of a 1% change is incredibly confusing at best (and certainly does give ammunition to the charge that the data is being "spun" in presentation)---but I was wrong to claim that this was an outright error by the IPCC. I consider it to be poor presentation, but that is a very different matter.

Thanks for the clarification.

Rob,

To reduce your confusion, see:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/

This uses the empirical formula for ÎF = 5.35ln(C/Co) expressed in Wm^-2, which is a physical value that might make more sense than the general principle relative value of âF = log2(C/Co) for a fraction of doubling of CO2.

Note in Table 2; column 2 that for 1995 forcing is 1.380 Wm^-2, and 2005 is 1.655 Wm^-2. An increase of 19.93% using slightly different and more accurate initial values. Using Tim's values above gives Tim's 19.4%.

The IPCC is just wrong. They would have us believe that increasing CO2 will warm the atmosphere but they never tell us where this extra energy will come from. Google CO2 Infrared absorption and you will find that the current level of CO2 is about ten times more than is required to absorb all the Blackbody radiation available to CO2.

If there was more energy in the windows that CO2 absorbs energy it would be visible from space but it is not. All the energy is absorbed.

Why is it that most people don't even know that THE major %greenhouse gas is not CO2 it is H2O? 90% of our warming is from water vapour. CO2 contributes less than 10%. If not for greenhouse gas warming our planet's average temperature would be minus 18C.

Congratulations, Kent. You've just overturned 150 years of physics and the modern work of literally thousands of climate scientists.

You can pick up your Nobel at the door ...

Thanks luminous, but I still consider this presentation deceptive (whether intentionally or not). Since the amount of forcing measures a change in the absolute irradiance it really only makes sense when compared with the initial, absolute measure, i.e. as a percentage. Computing a percentage change between two forcings just compounds the problem.

It's pretty obvious that a statistic is misleading if you'd throw the numbers away in most situations. The percentage change between annual forcings in 1751 was infinity (because the forcing was zero in 1750); while the actual forcing was absurdly tiny (which I assume was the case in the nineteenth century) you probably had periods with astronomical percent changes between forcings. Worse, it seems clear that in the future the percentage change between forcings will level off (and then almost certainly decrease) even if the problem is getting much much worse.

Reporting on double-derivatives may give appealingly eye-popping numbers for now, but given credence to double-derivatives will probably support the PR efforts of a do-nothing approach. "We've lowered the acceleration of fossil fuel emissions to eighteenth-century levels!" is precisely the kind of rhetoric I expect from the coal industry in the future as a way to spin "We're emitting more and more every year!" as a positive.

Rob,

"The percentage change between annual forcings in 1751 was infinity (because the forcing was zero in 1750)"

Actually, no. 1750-1751 is the first year in which one can calculate annual forcing change defined as beginning in 1750. You cannot measure a differential by comparing 1750 to 1750.

That's absurd.

It is some small measurable difference that makes all the difference in measuring a differential.

calling a change from 5% o 6% a 20% change instead of a 1% change is incredibly confusing at best ...

Yet accountants and financial people the world over do the same.

It should be clear from context that it's a rate of change that's being talked about.

Kent darling, the greenhouse gases emit radiation as well as absorb it, which is why the optical depth of the atmosphere at any particular wavelength by itself is not very informative, Its not where the extra energy comes from because of the greenhouse gases, but rather that the energy from the sun does not go away as fast. It is not radiated directly to space as would be the case without greenhouse gases, but rather rattles around in the atmosphere being continually absorbed and re-emitted. In order to maintain the balance between energy in from the sun and energy out in the IR, the atmosphere and the surface warm up.

Why is it that most people don't even know that THE major %greenhouse gas is not CO2 it is H2O? 90% of our warming is from water vapour. CO2 contributes less than 10%.

Those are interesting questions. I was able to find quite easily the information about water vapour being the major greenhouse gas. I have no idea why people don't know about it, but I also don't know why people like you often jump into threads and bemoan the fact that few people know it.

A little more research shows it to be less relevant than you imply, as well as what looks like an error on your part. You say that 90% of the warming if from water vapour, but that's not true. 90% of the volume of greenhouse gases is water vapour, but anyone who fears minute amounts of cyanide can tell you that percentage of volume is not equal to percentage of effect. The effect is more like 40-70%, even though it's by far the most prevalent. CO2, while being far less than even 10% is 10-30% of the effect, which makes it more of a concern. Add to that the fact that we're not increasing or decreasing water vapour, but we have increased CO2 by 35% over the last hundred years or so (most in the last 30-40) and it's pretty plain to see why CO2 gets all the action.

Do you think that scientists should perhaps hold a press conference to talk about how water vapour isn't much of an issue? Would that be a good solution, do you think? Then more people would know about water vapour, as well as know about it accurately. It seems that the few people who know enough to get worked up about it don't seem to know enough not to get worked up about it.

Kent:

Still proving that The Google needs a 'wisdom' button.

Best,

D

Kent "most people" may not know water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas but most people aren't actively engaged in debating the science of climate change.

Amongst this subgroups most people know the following:

1. the total greenhouse temperature on Earth currently is equivalent to around 30 degrees Celsius.

2. Approximately 90% of this effect is due to water vapor.

3. Water vapor is a relatively inefficient greenhouse gas and its large contribution is attributable to its relative abundance. (Water vapor concentrations can be in the tens of thousands of parts per million, carbon dioxide is in the hundreds of PPM. (Think about that for a second - there's several hundred times more water than CO2 and CO2 still produces almost 10% of the total warming.)

4. Because there is so much water vapor in the atmosphere, it takes an equal large shift in water vapor to produce a significant change in total warming.

5. Because of 4, the RATE OF CHANGE in the greenhouse effect rather than the total effect is largely determined by changes in carbon dioxide and other so-called minor greenhouse gases such as methane and fluorocarbons.

6. As Eli said, GHG molecules re-emit photons in the infrared. While the IR photons emitted from the Earth are all heading more or less straight up, there is no preferred orientation for the re-emitted photons which can as easily go down or sideways. Taking this effect into account, the effect of doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide is a 70% increase in the associated forcing.

7. 10% of the 30 degree current greenhouse effect is 3 degrees Celsius. So a doubling of carbon dioxide levels will produce a direct increase in heating of 3 degrees multiplied by .7 or 2.1 degrees. This is a vast oversimplification of the calculations undertaken by climate modelers but produces much the same result.

8. Warming caused by increasing carbon dioxide levels will result in a higher vapor pressure of water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor is, as you point out, the most important greenhouse gas and this is just one of the positive feedbacks which magnify the direct warming effect.

Ian, you might want to add

9. CO2 is also distinctly different from water vapor in that is it a 'well mixed gas'. Well mixed gases have long residence lifetimes in the atmosphere, and are well distributed in the vertical. Water vapor has a short residence lifetime in the atmosphere and is not well mixed (it's all near the surface). This has important implications for the impact of these gases on the radiation budget. (Figuring those out is left as an exercise for the reader, haha).

I don't think Kent is listening anymore :( Still perhaps this will help someone else. I should add that if you're skeptical about all this there's, like, whole books on this subject out there. And if that's not enough for you there's MODTRAN, LBLRTM, COART and other models out there you can play with. Go crazy!

It's curious that one of the denial arguments is that since water vapour is the GHG with the strongest effect then we don't need to worry much about the "lesser" GHGs such as CO2. At the same time, another denial argument goes that since CO2 is only directly responsible for a fraction of climate sensitivity, most of climate sensitivity is hypothetical because it is based on feedbacks (such as from water vapour).

So one denial argument likes to make use of the importance of water vapout while the other tries to ignore it. Of course as we all know, denialism does not need to be consistent.

Ian, you seem to have corrected me. I was wondering if what I stated was going to be corrected by someone who knows better. I got most of my information from Wikipedia, as well as (perhaps poorly-remembered) readings from RealClimate. I was under the impression that the 90% number was volume rather than effect and that water vapour's effect was less - more in the 40-70% range.

From Wikipedia:

The major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect on Earth (not including clouds); carbon dioxide, which causes 9-26%; methane, which causes 4-9%, and ozone, which causes 3-7%. It is not possible to state that a certain gas causes a certain percentage of the greenhouse effect, because the influences of the various gases are not additive. (The higher ends of the ranges quoted are for the gas alone; the lower ends, for the gas counting overlaps.)

Pough, I was writing off the cuff and your figure is probably more accurate.

But whether the component of the greenhosue effect is 36% or 90%, it is the largest single contributor and the rest of my points re. the contributions of water vapor and carbon dioxide to the rate of change reamin broadly valid (I hope).

I'll have to follow up that source becasue I'd never seen a figure as highas 26% before for the CO2 contribution.

Kent,

The reason climatologists focus on CO2 as the driver of global warming, even though water vapor accounts for more of Earth's greenhouse effect, is that, to a first approximation, we're not affecting water vapor.

The average residence time of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the air is 200 years. The average residence time of a molecule of water vapor in the atmosphere is 9 days. We could double water vapor tomorrow, and in a month almost all the excess would be gone, rained out.

Water vapor does act to amplify the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, since warmer air holds more water vapor. But it's CO2 that is the main (though not the only) problem here. CO2 averaged 280 parts per million by volume in the preindustrial atmosphere. By burning fossil fuels (and other, smaller methods, such as cement manufacturing and deforestation), we have significantly added to that amount. CO2 was 315 ppmv in 1958 and is now 384 ppmv. In other words, 27% of the CO2 now in the air was put there by human technology.

As a result, the Earth is warming -- and it will continue to warm as we pour more and more CO2 into the air.

Actually Tim old bean, i'm from the southern hemisphere aswell, and you're wrong about the warming... or rather you would be, had you remembered, in your denier-indignation fest, to take into account la nina's soothing effect on Australia's cyclic drought (that wasn't even all that bad, compared to other's its been through), or Antarctica's increased levels of ice.

From my understanding Co2 warms the atmosphere by absorbing earth's blackbody radiation, ( it does this in three main frequency windows, which account for 8% of earth's blackbody radition.) It does not convert this to thermal energy directly. This radiation causes it to vibrate. Through impacts with other atmospheric gasses it changes this vibration into kinetic energy which we call heat.

The problem with the idea that increasing the amount of CO2 will increase the temperature is that for this to happen there has to be blackbody radiation in the windows that it absorbs energy. The fact that the NIMBUS satellites found zero energy in these windows indicates that the CO2 levels we have are absorbing all the energy available. Increasing the level of CO2 will have little effect.

The is also a problem with the ice core data relating to CO2 levels in the past.They had to shift the ice core data something like 70 years to make it fit with the data from mona loa.

The current data for temperature had to be down graded due to NASA's incorrect adjustment in January 2000. (Y2K) kWe are also seeing a major problem with the 2000+ weather station in the USA. It seems that the majority have errors of2 degrees or more, which is greater than the supposed increase in global temperature. It seems they have some of the instruments close by air conditioners, asphalt,and other heat sources.

But wait there is more. Here are a few sites that go into much greater depth. go to the left had side crunching the numbers is a good place to start. http://www.nov55.com/ntyg.html

This one explains why doubling co2 will have little effect
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
This site is massive but well worth the days needed to go through it.
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/

Kent posts:

[[The problem with the idea that increasing the amount of CO2 will increase the temperature is that for this to happen there has to be blackbody radiation in the windows that it absorbs energy. The fact that the NIMBUS satellites found zero energy in these windows indicates that the CO2 levels we have are absorbing all the energy available. Increasing the level of CO2 will have little effect.]]

Kent, for decades (about 1900-1940) scientists doubted the theory of global warming (Arrhenius 1896) because of the saturation argument. The CO2, they said, was already absorbing all the IR it could, so increasing it would have no effect.

As Gilbert Plass pointed out conclusively in 1956 (after high-altitude observations in the '40s showed what was happening), it isn't just radiation near the ground that counts. The lines are not saturated at lower pressure levels, so, since CO2 is a well-mixed gas, increasing it will increase absorption in those levels. Which will warm them up. Which will make them radiate IR. Some of the IR will get down to the lowest level, where it will be absorbed. And the layer absorbing it will heat up. And it will radiate more IR. Some of that will go back to the ground. So the ground will get warmer.

Adding CO2 to an atmosphere continues to increase the temperature of the ground even when the bands saturate low down. (In fact, they aren't even completely saturated low down, because there are lines and wave spread all over the electromagnetic spectrum, and they become more important the higher the temperature goes -- thus Venus.)

The IPCC says: "The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005)."

Let's do the calculation, shall we? The pre-industrial concentration was 280 ppm, so in 1995 the forcing was log2(360/280)=36% of that from doubling CO2, while in 2005 the forcing was log2(378/280)=43% of that from doubling CO2. That is a 20% increase, just as the IPCC said.
--------------------------------------

I think the 20% increase is wrong.
You did not compare total values as that are talked about by the IPCC and Monckton (what would be a value relative to 0 ppm) but incremental change relative to the value at 280 ppm. That results in a huge exaggeration.