Correct Calculation of Climate Sensitivity by Magna est veritas
Pitch
The world is warming at half the predicted rate. A serious physics error in the models now needs urgent correction. My team has the answer.
Description
Summary
IPCC (1990) predicted 1 K global warming in the 36 years to 2025, implying 0.75 K in the 27 years to 2016. However, only 0.45 K warming has occurred, and only then after ex-post-facto upward revisionj of the data for four of the five longest-standing global-temperature datasets. IPCC (2013) found that 2.3 Watts per square meter of net anthropogenic forcing had occurred in the industrial era, which, using the feedback factor 0.65 derived from the 3.3 K Charney sensitivity predicted by the CMIP5 ensemble, suggested that 2.0 K global warming should have occurred in the industrial era to date, but only 0.75 K has occurred. Models, therefore, are running hot, raising the question why.
The Magna Est Veritas international team of leading professors, doctors of science, engineers and other specialists is unique in conducting scientific research without grant or other reward. The team has been investigating the models' over-predictions and has discovered that a series of long-standing errors of feedback method is the chief cause of the problem. Initial results indicate that the correct interval of Charney sensitivities (assuming that official climatology has made no errors other than those the team have identified) is 1.3-1.5 K, and not the 1.5-4.5 K posited by Charney (1979) and IPCC (1990, 1995, 2013), still less the 2-4.7 K predicted by the CMIP5 models. Our research is vital to all adaptation strategies: if we are right (and we have found an irrefutable demonstration), global warming at doubled CO2 will be 33-50% of the previously-predicted central estimates. Far less adaptation will be needed than had been thought. Stern (2006) had imagined 3 K global warming to 2100, in which event, using an artificially low inter-temporal discount rate of 1.4%, he had predicted a 3%-of-global-GDP cost of unmitigated global warming (or just 0.3% of GDP using the US Treasury's 7% discount rate). However, it now becomes possible to regard CO2 as a welfare benefit, not as a loss.
Is this proposal for a practice or a project?
Project
What actions do you propose?
Our proposal is to recruit additional team members with the expertise to rectify within the general-circulation models the general defect that we have been able to diagnose in the mainstream fashion by the use of the zero-dimensional climate-sensitivity model. Using the model equation in the defective form that is currently universal in climatology, we are able to input official values from the general-circulation models and obtain as outputs the official interval of equilibrium Charney sensitivities, demonstrating thereby that the models are themselves incorporating the error of feedback methodology that we have discovered.
Our team is already strong, and we continue actively to recruit academics with relevant expertise. Once we have sufficient expertise in climate modeling available to us, we shall be able to advise the modelers on the steps they need to take to correct the orrors of feedback method that have led to a considerable overstatement of Charney sensitivity - and indeed of all equilibrium sensitivities - in the general-circulation models.
An initial short paper outlining our discovery is currently out for peer review. Assuming that it passes peer review and is published, with no major error found in our actually simple analysis, the project will need to be developed rapidly so that the error can be eradicated from the next generation of general-circulation models.
We are expecting that, at first, there will be considerable resistance to the good news we have found. For, if our result is found to be in substance correct, official climatology has been in formal physical error for 120 years. However, it is self-evident on examination of the textbooks of control theory and feedback analysis that the method currently practised in climatology, and described in numerous textbooks and papers, as well as in IPCC's reports, is not the mainstream method used in feedback analysis in dynamical systems other than climate.
The mathematics of feedback in dynamical systems - i.e., systems whose state changes measurably over time - is applicable to all such systems. It was Harold S. Black, at Bell Labs in the 1920s and 1930s, who first developed the mathematics of feedbacks in electronic amplifiers, which were important to the stabilization of telephone transmissions. His colleague Hendrik Wade Bode, in 1945, published the textbook in which feedback theory was first codified in detail. And it is that work that is repeatedly referred to in climate papers and textbooks, which, however, uniformly misapply the Bode feedback analysis by making a number of serious errors, whose combined effect is to overstate the contribution of feedbacks, and hence of climate sensitivity generally.
It will be necessary to adjust all climate models to correct the errors and bring the feedback methodology in the models injto conformity with the mainstream method of feedback analysis.
Owing to the errors, of order 100% of papers attempting to determine equilibrium sensitivity over the past 120 years have been incorrect, including several papers written by members of the team. The errors have hitherto escaped detection for several reasons. First, feedback mathematics is counter-intuitive, even where the zero-dimensional model represents the simplest feedback loop. Secondly, climatology had imported feedback theory from control theory but without having understood it sufficiently, so that errors made by early authors were perpetuated. Thirdly, the increasing segregation between disciplines prevented anyone from the control-theory community from realizing that climatology was not implementing feedback theory correctly, and that significant errors were arising in consequence. Fourthly, within climatology itself the question of climate sensitivity became politicized, so that questioning the official estimates was very vigorously discouraged.
The team's task, therefore, once the principal results have been found correct by peer reviewers at a leading climate journal, will be to ensure that the result is disseminated to the climatological community worldwide as quickly as possible, and then to begin the work of correcting the climate models to reflect the new and considerably less alarming reality.
The team are already working on the preparation of briefing materials, including sets of lecture slides, pedagogical papers, papers for the control-theory community so that it can verify that the team's results properly and fairly reflect mainstream feedback analysis, and briefing papers for newspapers, governments and the general public.
But the principal task will be the reprogramming of the general-circulation models so that they correctly reflect mainstream feedback methodology. At present, the team is able to use the zero-dimensional model as a black-box diagnostic. It is, for instance, easy to demonstrate that the general-circulation models are in error, since there is considerable agreement as to the magnitude of the direct CO2 forcing, but feedbacks add up to 3.34 K to the 1.16 K direct forcing in IPCC's Charney-sensitivity interval, whereas the team's results show that the maximum contribution of feedbacks to Charney sensitivity is 0.34 K., since Charney sensitivity cannot exceed 1.5 K.
The general-circulation models, therefore, will all need to be re-programmed to reflect the mainstream feedback methodology. There are no exceptions, not least because the growth of intercomparison has had the unfortunate effect of ensuring that an error in one model is readily propagated to all the others. By the same token, however, it should be possible to use the same formal mechanism of intercomparison to ensure that the new best practice is rapidly and universally adopted.
The team are also making plans to evaluate the economic consenquences of the new and lower climate sensitivity of 1.3-1.5 K per CO2 doubling that their result suggests. Members of the team had already authored papers in the reviewed journals commenting adversely on the decision by Stern (2006) to adopt - on stated grounds of intergenerational equity - an artificially low discount rate of just 1.4%, in which the utility element was a ridiculous 0.1%. Perversely, the consequences of adopting a sub-market discount rate actually inflict a heavy welfare loss on future generations by much reducing the value of our legacy to them; and that would be the case even if, as Stern had imagined, there would be as much as 3 K global warming this century (it will be less than half that), and even if, as he had also fancifully and implausibly imagined, there was a 10% chance of the world coming to an end by 2100 owing to global warming.
The U.S. Treasury's discount rate for deciding whether to undertake long-term investments of taxpayers' money is 7%. If it be suipposed that Stern's 3 K of 21st-century warming was a reasonable prediction, and that, therefore, the cost of not mitigating that warming was 3% of global GDP throughout the century on the basis of his 1.4% discount rate, the adoption of the Treasury's 7% rate would at once have reduced the 21st-century GDP cost to just 0.3% of global GDP, again throughout the century. The team has developed a readily programmable econometric equation that allows such conversions between GDP costs (or benefits) at various discount rates to be made with ease.
However, if, as the team predicts, the warming in the 21st century will be of order 1 K, rather than 3 K, then there will be no disbenefit from global warming at all. The team is also developing methods of properly accounting for the benefits of increased CO2 concentration. The short-term benefits include the CO2 fertilization of trees and plants, accompanied by a reduction in the number of stomata on the undersides of the leaves, reducing plant transpiration and thereby greatly increasing drought resistance (though, as the most recent and comprehensive survey of global land area under drought has shown, the drought-bound fraction of the land surface has declined somewhat throughout the past 30 years). The increase in crop yields since 1950 is to some extent directly attributable to CO2 fertilization, though chemical fertilization, genetic manipulation and improved agricultural techniques generally have also been of great assistance. Hitherto, insufficient efforts have been made to include the welfare benefits of more CO2 and of generally warmer weather alongside the welfare losses. The discovery that climate sensitivity not only to CO2 but to all greenhouse gases is considerably less than had been feared provides a welcome opportunity to revisit the economic argument in a more thorough, mature and balanced way than was evident, for instance, in Stern (2006).
It is very likely that any such economic analysis, competently and fairly performed, will demonstrate that there is no net welfare benefit in regulating or reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, though there might still be some welfare benefits in reduced pollution. Here, too, though, the economic analysis has been bedeviled by proselytization on the part of enthusiastic but not necessarily economically literate campaigners and government entities. For instance, it is necessary to account not only for the particulate pollution from old-style coal-fired power stations (though hyper-supercritical combustion of pulverized or fluidized coal, with flue-gas scrubbing and fly-ash trapping and recycling, more or less entirely removes particulate pollution as an issue in new coal-fired power stations), but also for the environmental welfare losses occasioned by so-called "renewable" energies, all of which suffer from four costly and mutually-reinforcing defects: first, low energy density per square km or per $1 million of investment capital; secondly, intermittency of power delivery, requiring expensive and also heavily polluting battery storage, or backup coal-fired power running at ultra-low-efficiency spinning reserve, altogether removing any CO2-reduction benefit that might otherwise have arisen; thirdly, exceptionally high current-account cost per MWh delivered, currently approximately 5 times that of modern coal-fired power; and fourthly, exceptionally high welfare losses from environmental damage per MWh generated. Though all forms of power generation contribute some environmental welfare losses, the correct metric is welfare loss per MWh delivered; and it is here, above all, that current accounting methods have proven inadequate in that almost everyone involved in "renewables" has a very strong financial as well as ideological vested interest in not asking the hard environmental-economics questions. The team plans to change all that, using its extensive network of contacts in the field of environmental economics worldwide.
The team's hypothesis is that its result, combined with the introduction of proper accounting and discounting methods, will be likely to demonstrate not only that "renewable" energies are hopelessly uneconomic but also that they are, in environmental-economics terms, now the cause of what is unquestionably a very strong welfare loss, not least because of the very high environmental damages caused by "renewables" per MWh delivered.
In short, the team is working towards a complete set of both climate-physical and climate-economic results that will be of universal utility at local, regional, national and supranational government level, together with policy recommendations that will, on present evidence, be startlingly different from those that are now being carried out worldwide.
Why is it important that the world should now get the science and the economics right? Because otherwise money that could and should be spent on the real environmental problems of the world, of which there are many, is being expensively and damagingly diverted into policies that can now be proven to be doing far more environmental harm than good. Those who truly care for the environment will no logner wish to subsidize CO2 mitigation.
Who will take these actions?
The leader of our team is The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who has drawn more opprobrium from believers in the current climate paradigm than almost anyone else, but who is nevertheless internationally recognized and consulted at government as well as corporate level on matters concerning climate sensitivity and adaptation or mitigation strategies.
Dr Willie Soon, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also came under savage and unprincipled attack from totalitarian-controlled news media worldwide for his distinguished contribution to an earlier paper, published by the team in the Science Bulletinj of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in which the ideas that have now come to fruition were first cautiously adumbrated. It was the strength of the attack on Dr Soon that led the team to discover what it was that his attackers were hoping they could hide.
Professor David Legates (climatology, U. Delaware); Dr Matt Briggs (statistician, NY); Dipl.Ing. Michael Limburg (electronic engineering, Iena, Germany); Mr Alex Henney (electricity industry expert, London, UK); Mr John Whitfield (electronic engineer, UK, who built the team's test rig to simulate the climate system); and Mr James Morrison (undergraduate in meteorology & oceanography, University of East Anglia, UK) are also members of our team.
Lord Monckton, with his vast experience at national and international level and his formidable knowledge of climate sensitivity and mitigation economics, will lead the team and set its strategic focus, as well as leading the economic investment appraisal project.
His Lordship's deputy will be Dr Soon, whose knowledge of the Sun, the ultimate source of the radiant energy in question, is unrivaled, and who has extensive contacts in all relevant scientific communities.
Professor Legates will supervise the climatological aspects of the research and will ensure that the results are robust and consistent with theory and with observation.
Dr Briggs will provide all necessary statistical input, using his encyclopedic knowledge of all aspects of statistics.
Dr Limburg and Mr Whitfield will provide all necessary expertise in the field of control theory and feedback analysis, in which they both have a lifetime of experience.
Mr Henney will ensure that those aspects of the team's research that bear upon the electricity generation industry lead to commercially practicable as well as environmentally sustainable policy initiatives.
Mr Morrison will contribute his understanding not only of the underlying scientific and mathematical considerations but also of how today's young people, who have perhaps been brought up to believe too readily, unquestioningly and completely in the current paradigm, will be likely to react to the news that their elders have, after all, led them considerably astray.
The team is now recruiting a first-class mathematician and, after discussions with members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a climate computer modeler.
Where will these actions be taken?
The actions we have proposed are at present actively in train. We are naturally holding back to some extent until we disover whether reviewers at the leading climate journal to which we have submitted a short paper outlining our principal result have found any significant error. We think it unlikely, since they are already ten days overdue to reply and, if there had been an obvious error, they would have informed us by now. Should the climate journal reject our paper without providing what we should recognize as a legitimate scientific reason, we have already drafted a much longer and more detailed paper, which will be taken out of the politically toxic climate arena and transferred to a journal of systems and control theory, where the principal result will at once be understood. Then, when that aspect of our result has been confirmed, as it has already been confirmed by a government laboratory which we commissioned to assist us, and which has worked with us for several months, we shall return to the climate journals with our result in feedback theory already published and confirmed.
At any rate, if our result is not found to be flawed, we expect it to be published by not later than spring of 2017, whereupon the other actions in the team's plan will be executed forthwith, to the immediate benefit of all humanity.
In addition, specify the country or countries where these actions will be taken.
United States
Country 2
United Kingdom
Country 3
Germany
Country 4
France
Country 5
Canada
Impact/Benefits
What impact will these actions have on greenhouse gas emissions and/or adapting to climate change?
Our result, on the assumption that the peer reviewers do not find it erroneous, will, when combined with the economic research that is already underway, demonstrate not only that attempts to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases are unnecessary but also that such attempts, if successful, would be actively harmful not only to the global economy but also to regional and local environments and, if the team's results on the frictional effects of >500 ft windmills on the transit rate of storms are also found correct, to the global climate.
Our results will also help to focus adaptation efforts towards where they are most needed. One of the early tasks for our computer modeler will be to study the possibilities of using high explosive to disrupt and collapse tropical storm systems in the eastern Atlantic Ocean so that they never become hurricanes. It will be necessary to ensure that the rate of explosive energy release is optimized so as not to intensify and feed the storm but instead to cause the early rotation to collapse before the eye can form. It will also be necessary to look at the long-term harms that could arise along the Atlantic seaboard if the heavy and sometimes useful rainfall from hurricanes were cut off, and also to ensure that the global climate system would not come to harm by the suggested interventions. Naturally, success in preventing the formation of hurricanes and typhoons, and in reducing the number and ferocity of tropical storms, could much reduce the need for and cost of adaptation in hurricane alley.
Mr Morrison is also designing a global network of millions of nano-temperature sensors reporting real time via satellite, to provide the clearest possible indication of temperatures at all altitudes in the troposphere from the surface to the tropopause. It is hoped that these sensors will provide an affordable, highly-resolved, reliable, real-time temperature record, so as to minimize the quite wide discrepancies between the existing datasets, and even between different versions of the same dataset. Since it has been suggested that some of the datasets have been altered ex post facto, an authoritative and tamper-proof independent network now seems desirable.
The principal advantage of our result is precisely in liberating the world from what now proves to have been an unnecessary and harmful obsession with the supposed welfare losses (which are in reality welfare benefits) from returning to the atmosphere some fraction of the CO2 burden that was originally present there. This liberation will allow the retargeting of adaptation strategies, and of international cooperations, towards assisting with regional adaptations to extreme-weather events, such as the droughts that are currently frequent in the Horn of Africa, or the Indian monsoon, or the ozone pollution of major cities worldwide, or the floods that occur intermittently in various places, or the effects of dangerous storms such as hurricanes, typhoons and tornado cells.
What are other key benefits?
Our principal result, showing that 1.5 K global warming is not the minimum but the maximum to be expected in response to doubled CO2 concentration, will allow the entire costly panoply of CO2 accounting and regulation, mitigation goals, targets and reporting, overpricing of coal-fired and gas-fired generation and other unwarrantable governmental interferences in the free market to be swept away.
The sole remaining apparent net harm from CO2, in the shape of what is misleadingly described as ocean "acidification" (for the oceans must, under anything like modern conditions, remain pronouncedly alkaline), will be the focus of a further project of the team, which will recruit both marine geologists and marine biochemists and biologists to assist it in identifying an affordable method of monitoring pH worldwide at a cost below the current disproportionate cost, which has prevented any systematic worldwide monitoring of ocean pH.
In the longer term, the team proposes to examine the extent to which political motivations both from within academe and from outside it have hindered the balanced, dispassionate and rigorously scientific examination of the climate question and related topics until now.
The advantage that the Renaissance possessed over the Dark Ages was that the former was libertarian and the latter authoritatian. Now, increasingly, and particularly in the climate debate, authoritarianism has degenerated into outright, hate-filled, intolerant totalitarianism, by which only the agreed Party Line may be spoken or researched or published, and dissenters will be viciously punished and will endure the repeated, public trashing of their personal reputations. The team will be studying what legislative steps governments now need to take to deMarxize and liberate the universities so that, once again, all points of view may be fearlessly (though politely) expressed.
On speaking of our result to members of the general public, we have found that the first reaction, once it is understood that our result may well be real and correct, is one of relief that the Apocalypse so luridly predicted by the profiteers of doom may not, after all, come to pass.
The value of removing from the minds of the public the sword of Damocles that the environmentalists had menacingly dangled over them is not to be lightly dismissed, even by the academic and governing classes who have most lavishly profited by the soon-to-be-discredited official climate story-line.
In the past 30 years, the raw-material cost of coal, oil and gas have halved in real terms, yet in many countries the price of the electricity and gasoline from these sources has tripled in real terms, almost exclusively owing to the many cumulatively pernicious market interferences that governments have inflicted on their populations on the now-hollow pretext of saving the people from themselves - at the people's expense, of course. Allowing fuel and power to fall to market prices will greatly benefit the global economy.
Costs/Challenges
What are the proposal’s projected costs?
If the team's proposals are implemented, there will be no net cost to the global economy. Instead there will be a substantial welfare benefit in that the current diversion of substantial resources, time and effort towards attempts to mitigate the imagined (and, as it turns out, imaginary) problem of global warming will be brought to an end, so that the resources can either be returned to the pockets of taxpayers or redeployed to address the world's real environmental problems.
The cost of correcting the climate models that have hitherto been incorrectly programmed in their handling of temperature feedbacks will vary depending upon the extent to which the implementation of the feedback loop is explicit or implicit in the models. If it is implicit, then some further research may be necessary to determine why the models are assuming a far higher contribution of feedbacks to global warming than is physically possible.
The cost of implementing specific proposals currently being studied by the team, such as the use of high explosives to disrupt tropical storms so as to prevent them from intensifying to hurricane force, or the deployment of millions of micro-sensors to obtain a more comprehensive and reliable surface temperature record, is not at this stage at all easy to quantify. Our hurricane study will in the first instance depend upon three-dimensional tropical-storm modeling, to determine the minimum explosive charge and the optimum placement and timing to cause the maximum disruption of the storm with minimum collateral damage. The cost of this modeling will be reasonably clear once the definitional stage of the reseach, currently in progress, has been concluded.
There is also a small development cost for the individual temperature sensor modules, whereupon, once working models have been rigorously tested both for their ability to measure ambient temperatures and for their ability to report the results reliably via satellite in real time, the cost of large-volume production-line manufacture can be readily ascertained.
Additional proposals, such as the formation of a permanent international rapid-response force to be rapidly deployed in theatre whenever a natural disaster strikes to assist the victims in recovery operations, are also on the drawing board at present. But it is too early to say whether the deadweight cost of maintaining a permanent force on standby will be sufficiently outweighed by the intermittent welfare benefit of the assistance the force would render to the victims of natural disasters.
The team itself is unrewarded for its work, and it regards this refusal to accept any emolument for these projects as essential to the maintenance of objectivity in the team's scientific work. None of us has any financial vested interest in any of these projects.
Timeline
The impact of our central proposal to correct the defects in the general-circulation models that have led them to make falsely exaggerated predictions of anthropogenic global warming will be more or less immediate. There will, no doubt, be some disfiguring resistance from the plethora of profiteering campaign groups and vested interests infesting the climate field, but in due course it will become apparent to all that the exaggerations of the past are exactly that, and that basing policy on such exaggerations is not only economically but morally wrong.
The timelines of individual projects such as the global standardized temperature-sensor network, the development of a global ocean pH monitoring network, the hurricane-disruption program and the permanent rapid-response force are less easy to foresee. These and other such projects are inevitably in their early stages of development, since there was little point in initiating them until it had become clear that the distraction of policymakers by the supposed climate threat would at last be removed, whereupon they would become free to pay attention to the weather-related problems that our team was formed to address.
About the author(s)
See "Who will take these actions?" above.
Related Proposals
This is a standalone suite of proposals. Since most other proposals here have been predicated on the assumption that there will be far more global warming than will in fact prove to be the case, there is little overlap or synergy between our proposals and the other proposals, though some of our individual proposals - such as the explosive disruption of tropical storms before they intensify to hurricane force, or the networks of micro-sensors for real-time monitoring of global surface temperature and of ocean pH - will perhaps be found valuable whether or not the international scientific community recognizes that we are correct in reducing the maximum Charney sensitivity to 1.5 K.
By:
Magna est veritas
