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| Letter to Represenatives Ed Markey & Joe Barton |
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| Written by Christopher Monckton | ||||||||
| Tuesday, 14 April 2009 | ||||||||
Page 3 of 6 The fast, exponential CO2 growth predicted by the IPCC is not occurring Observed CO2 growth between 2000 and 2100 is linear, and is also well below the now-visibly-exponential growth curves (bounding the pale blue region) predicted by the IPCC in its 2007 report. If CO2 continues on its present path throughout the 21st century, the IPCC’s projections for anthropogenic temperature increase to the year 2100 must be halved. Red flag 19: Mr. Karl, on being asked by the Committee to comment on the graph showing that CO2 concentration had increased at a rate well below the least of the IPCC’s predictions, responded to the effect that CO2 emissions had been rising at a rate well above the greatest of the IPCC’s predictions. Yet it is settled science that it is not the emissions but the concentration in the atmosphere that determine the influence of CO2 over temperature. The IPCC admits, in its 2001 report, that it cannot add up what is known as the “carbon budget” to within a factor of two of the right answer. According to the IPCC’s estimates, atmospheric CO2 concentration should be increasing by 4.1 parts per million by volume per year, but in the real world the rate of increase is less than half of that value, at just over 2 ppmv/year. This very large and admitted discrepancy between prediction and reality is of great significance. On its own, it requires that all of the IPCC’s predictions of the anthropogenic increase in temperature between 2000 and 2100 must be almost halved. The IPCC’s central estimate, on the “business-as-usual” scenario A2, is that the CO2 concentration in 2100 will be 836 ppmv, implying a warming of 6 Fº over the century, or 7 Fº to equilibrium. On the current, near-linear trend, however, CO2 concentration will be 575 ppmv, implying a warming of little more than 3 Fº/century, or 3.5 Fº to equilibrium. A warming of 3.5 Fº would be harmless and beneficial. The IPCC ought not to have had any difficulty in predicting the future path of CO2 emissions: the Chinese Statistical Office, for instance, has made no secret of the very rapid rate at which the regime plans to open new coal-fired power-plants in the coming decade. China is now the world’s largest emitter of CO2. She has sternly, absolutely, and rightly, refused to make any reduction in emissions below the per-capita emissions of the West. Paradoxically, to stabilize CO2 emissions (even if stabilization were necessary), fossil-fueled growth is essential: for it is well established among demographers that the only reliable way of stabilizing population growth is to raise the general standard of living above the poverty-line. The fastest way to raise living standards is to burn fossil fuels. While population continues to grow, as it does in the poorest nations, CO2 emissions will perforce grow with it. Stabilization of emissions cannot realistically begin until poverty has been eradicated by as much CO2 emission as may be necessary, thereby making stabilization of the world population possible. Whatever may be the opinions of Western politicians about the brutality and lack of democracy in China, it is imperative that we should do nothing to impede the economic growth of China: for without economic growth, her population will not stabilize. Even the often savage enforcement of the “one-child” policy has been insufficient to prevent a rapid and continuing growth in China’s population. It is only prosperity that will allow population stability. Therefore, it is essential that no Western nation or bloc should interfere with free trade by attempting to impose tariffs on goods made in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, or other third-world countries now hoping to enjoy something of the prosperity that we have long been fortunate enough to take for granted. Is the UN exaggerating the greenhouse effect sevenfold? Red flag 20: In my testimony, I included a graph demonstrating that the diminution over time in outgoing long-wave radiation from the Earth’s surface, as measured by the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment Satellite, was approximately one-seventh of that which the IPCC’s computer models had been instructed to predict – The UN exaggerates the greenhouse effect sevenfold Smoking gun: 14 years’ model-predicted (black) and ERBE satellite-observed (red) change in outgoing long-wave radiation. Seven times as much long-wave radiation as the models predict continues to escape to space. Data were tuned to coincide from 1985-1990 so as to show any divergence thereafter. The data closely track changes in global mean surface temperature. Source: Wielicki et al. (2002). See also Chou (1994); Covey (1995); Chen et al. (2002); Del Genio & Kovari (2002); Lin et al. (2002); Cess & Udelhofen (2003); Chou & Lindzen (2004); Hatzidimitriou et al. (2004); Clement & Soden (2005). The behavior of outgoing long-wave radiation over time is of fundamental importance. Measurement of changes over time in outgoing long-wave radiation provides a direct method of measuring climate sensitivity – i.e. the change in global mean surface temperature in response to a given proportionate increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. As the world warms, whether by natural or by anthropogenic influences, conventional theory holds that positive temperature feedbacks, such as a near-exponential increase in the carrying capacity of the space occupied by the atmosphere for water vapor, will interfere with outgoing long-wave radiation over time at a rate sufficient to retain some of the radiation in the atmosphere, causing it to warm at a predictable rate. However – and this is crucial – the satellite-measured diminution in outgoing long-wave radiation over time is one-seventh to one-tenth of the diminution predicted by the UN’s climate models. This very substantial discrepancy between prediction and observation – approximately an order of denary magnitude – implies an equally substantial overstatement of temperature response to anthropogenic CO2 enrichment, because the “blanket” of CO2, water vapor, and other heteroatomic gases is not thickening as fast as the models assume, or is not as effective in causing warming as the models predict, or both. Covey (1995), basing his conclusions on data from Chou (1994), concludes that the discrepancy between model-predicted and actually-observed outgoing long-wave radiation implies outgoing long-wave radiation “an order of magnitude [i.e. 10 times] larger than that obtained in the earlier [model-based] studies.” Covey concludes – “On its face, this implies a climate sensitivity an order of magnitude [i.e. 10 times] smaller than conventional wisdom would claim, especially in the tropics.” Covey’s result and Wielicki’s result are broadly consistent with one another, and with many other similar results reported in the literature over the past 20 years. Yet Mr. Karl, asked to comment on the Wielicki graph, merely commented that orbital degradation had caused the difference between prediction and observation in the graph. How, then, can the models relied upon by the UN have come to so very large an exaggeration of the warming effect of additional atmospheric CO2 concentration? It is very likely that the exaggeration is inadvertent. The central question in the climate debate is this. How much warming will a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration cause? This “climate sensitivity” question is central because if – as I shall show – the warming is very small, then there cannot be and will not be any “climate crisis”, none of the disasters imagined in official circles will occur, and the childishly Messianic millenarianism of the more excitable and less scientifically-literate politicians and journalists will have been proven unfounded. Red flag 21: Arrhenius (1906) estimated 1.6 C° of warming at CO2 doubling, down from 5 Cº in his paper of 1896; however, Al Gore, Sir David King and others cite only the 1896 paper. Red flag 22: Hansen (1988) estimated 4.2 C° of warming at CO2 doubling; IPCC (1995) 3.8 C°; IPCC (2001) 3.5 C°; and IPCC (2007) 3.26 ± 0.69 C°. There is plainly no “consensus” as to the magnitude of the effect of CO2 on temperature (for the IPCC does not even agree with itself), and if there is no consensus on climate sensitivity then there can be no consensus on anything else. Also, the UN’s “official” estimates of climate sensitivity – the temperature response to doubling CO2 concentration – are inexorably falling. How much further must they fall before they start to conform both to scientific theory and to satellite-observed reality? The UN calculates greenhouse-enrichment-induced temperature change over time as the product of four parameters, the:
The relation is logarithmic because each additional CO2 molecule has less effect on temperature than its predecessors, and – beyond 915 ppmv – it has practically no effect on temperature at all (Myrhe et al., 1998, hold that the logarithmic formula fails at this point). Red flag 23: It is at once apparent that even a very small exaggeration in the value of each of the four key parameters will cause a very large exaggeration when the four parameters are multiplied together to give the UN’s projection of anthropogenic temperature change over time. For instance, even if each of the four parameters is exaggerated by as little as one-third, once the four parameters are multiplied together the projected temperature change will appear to be (4/3)4 = 3.16, or more than thrice what it should be. However, as I shall demonstrate, the UN has, on average, approximately doubled the value of each of the four parameters. That is, when they are multiplied together, the UN’s projection of temperature increase to 2100 becomes approximately 24 = 16 times too great. It is this central exaggeration on which all of the UN’s excitable conclusions about the impacts of anthropogenic “global warming” absolutely depend. Yet the vast majority of the scientists who wrote and reviewed the UN’s climate reports are unaware of these exaggerations, and unaware that it is the multiplication together of four separate exaggerations that causes the very large overestimates of anthropogenic temperature change over the present century which repeated satellite measurements of changes in outgoing long-wave radiation have demonstrated, and without which the UN’s entire case for alarm about our effect on the climate falls away. Red flag 24: Most scientists are unaware of the magnitude of the UN’s exaggeration, because the UN’s treatment of the central question of climate sensitivity is obscurantist in the extreme. Consideration of the four key parameters is scattered untidily through several separate chapters of each report: yet the chapters are written and reviewed by different groups of scientists. At no point are the four parameters and the relationships between them drawn explicitly and clearly together. Some of the parameters are not explicitly quantified. The question of climate sensitivity ought to be the first question dealt with in each major, quinquennial UN climate assessment: however, the topic is neither explicitly nor completely dealt with either in the 2001 or in the 2007 report. Readers of these reports are apparently expected to take the UN’s calculations in relation to this central question purely on trust. Often, the values selected by the UN exceed those in the very small number of papers that it cites as justification. These are some of the reasons why no one has noticed the large – and perhaps accidental – exaggeration that has demonstrably resulted from the UN’s methodology. As we have already seen, the UN’s projection of the rate at which CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere leads to an unwarrantable near-doubling of its estimate of temperature increase over the present century. The three other parameters I have mentioned – radiative forcing, the Planck parameter and the feedback factor – are similarly exaggerated, as I shall now show. The radiative forcing: The UN predicts a distinctive fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming – a “hot-spot” in the tropical upper troposphere (IPCC, 2007) – Temperature fingerprints of five forcings, and of all five combined |
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