The Continuing Enchantment of the Big Black Marble

The "lukewarmer" wuwt site has a post by fellow lukewarmer Christopher Monckton, purporting to derive the CO2 "climate sensitivity" by no-doubt-settled science (theory, that is). My response:

Lukewarmers like Monckton and Anthony Watts believe in the radiation transfer theory. I don't. As I wrote just a few weeks ago (June 30th), in the post "It Beggars the Imagination", "There are other obvious weaknesses in the radiation transfer theory ...but the main one is this error of making everything a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody, mitigated only by a fudge factor called the 'emissivity factor'."

I won't quote further, or at length, from what I wrote before. I will merely point out that Monckton's exposition of consensus theory assumes not only that the Earth's surface emits as a blackbody surrounded by vacuum, but that the so-called "emission level" in the atmosphere does also.

He says that 97% of the Earth's albedo, or reflected fraction of solar radiation, is due to clouds, not the Earth's surface. That is the same as saying the surface reflects relatively little, and is of course consistent with calling the Earth's surface a blackbody--as the radiation transfer theory assumes--but it is belied by looking at the Earth from space. The Earth does not look like a dark object (a black body) partially covered by bright clouds; it looks like "a big blue marble"--remember? One can see the landmasses, and their colors, clearly from low-earth orbit. It is simply NOT a blackbody, and cannot emit as one. (One might, and perhaps should, also question what fraction of Earth's clouds do not reach as high as the "emission level"--about 5km altitude--since Monckton subtracts the full value of the albedo from the incident solar intensity, and thus assumes all clouds rise higher than that "emission level"; but I don't know the precise answer, and it is of lesser importance than the "blackbody earth" error I want to emphasize.

When Monckton also says the emissivity of the "emission level" in the atmosphere is 1, that defines it as a blackbody also. This only underlines what I wrote in that "It Beggars the Imagination" post, that the theory assumes(!) every level, including the surface, is a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody. Monckton says there are two blackbody levels (and conveniently, just those he is interested in).

The obvious reason for such a ridiculous assumption, as I have written for years now, is that the scientists "measure" what they think are the radiation levels in the atmosphere, at the various levels, when what they must REALLY be doing is measuring the TEMPERATURE, misinterpreted as the equivalent blackbody radiation intensity.

I knew this must be the case years ago, when I realized the "radiation" "measured" coming off the Earth's surface was just that which would be emitted by a blackbody at the same temperature as that surface; but seeing it claimed by Monckton that the "emission level" is also essentially a blackbody drives home the point that the radiation transfer theory is fundamentally unsound, with local temperature responsible for the "radiation" being measured, not vice-versa. (And again, radiation transfer theorists are comparing the Earth's surface to a blackbody SURROUNDED BY VACUUM, which can only give off heat by radiation; while of course, the Earth's surface is surrounded by atmosphere, and heat is lost there by conduction and convection, as well as by radiation--so the whole idea is stillborn, unworkable according to basic physics, i.e., essentially by definition).

Again, it beggars the imagination, that even the "lukewarmers" (the heroes, to so many lay "climate skeptics") should be so enamored of the false radiation transfer theory (which is also disproved by the "global warming pause" of the last nearly 20 years, but an unwary layperson would hardly know it from the continued devotion to the dogma (or propaganda) of the "settled science", which is not science but only mass delusion).

Six Categories: A Lukewarmer's Biased Take on the Climate Debate

The masterresource site has a post on "six categories" of positions in the climate debate, according to Richard Mueller of UC Berkeley, who, the article says, should be an "important voice" in the debate. My response:

Bottom line: Mueller's categories are not valid, and he should not be "an important voice" for anyone looking for the truth. To say as he does that "warmists" stick to the science is a lie by omission, for they stick only to their "consensus" dogma, which has been shown, time and time again, to be utterly worthless. And his take on "deniers"--that as a group they "pay little attention to the details of the science"--is another lie; they are simply "skeptics" who have indeed studied the details presented by the "climate scientists", and over time have assured themselves that the warmists--both "alarmists" and "lukewarmers"--refuse to let go of their dogma long enough to realize that the consensus "climate science" is no such thing, is in fact completely counter to the observable facts. Mueller is worthless to anyone other than lukewarmers, who are trying to stake out their "reasonable middle" position as the only valid alternative to the alarmists. Politically, of course, that may seem reasonable, but it only kicks the chance for the scientific truth to be faced and accepted in this (or even the next) generation further into the future. The truth will out, but only those who know there is no valid climate science and no competent climate scientists today, are actually on the side of true science.

The article concludes with "reasonable" advice on governmental climate policy, but it too is worthless, for in the current rampant incompetence in science, there can be no rational "climate action". The "science"--much less the politics--simply cannot be trusted at this time.

Nobody Is Learning Anything, Even the Skeptics

Doubters of the "global warming" alarmism (driven as it is by incompetent and criminal "leaders" in both science and politics today--as they are, figuratively speaking, shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre, when they know not only that they are deliberately trying to panic the world, but that there is no "fire", at all) need to begin to stand firm, not just against the alarmists, but also against the "lukewarmers" who make up the large majority of the critics of the alarmism. They misdirect their energies, and those of their followers (such as habitual readers of their blogs), by refusing to listen to those, like me, who have given them overwhelming evidence against even their lukewarm defense of the so-called "settled science" (basically, of the "greenhouse effect" as something capable of causing global warming). They are at pains not to rock the "settled science" boat, essentially, and in this they are just as incompetent as the alarmists (for there is no valid climate science, no global-warming greenhouse effect, and no competent climate scientists, as I have been informing those who would listen for 5 and 1/2 years now, using the definitive evidence I uncovered easily, as I insist any competent physicist can, and should already have done by now--most simply by listening to me, and taking the time to recognize the strength of my evidence).

In pursuing their agenda of defending the "settled science" even as they criticize its "exaggerations", "uncertainties" and political abuse (all skeptics agree about the political abuse), the lukewarmers continue to fill their blogs with essentially irrelevant chaff and worse. Judith Curry, a tenured professor, keeps putting forth posts on the "psychology" and "sociology" of the climate debate, and especially on governmental "climate policy", when she should know there can be no rational climate policy at all, in the current tattered intellectual and scientific climate of ignorance, incompetence, and raw, unthinking activism.

And Anthony Watts keeps putting up "straw men" for his readers to knock down as they like, as well as admiring posts of other "settled science", like Milankovitch theory and paleoclimatology, none of which is any more settled--any more correct, or even competent, in actual fact--than is "climate science" itself. Just today, Watts has a post titled "Study Claims Ancient Tectonic Activity Was Trigger For Ice Ages". His readers, predictably, lambast the assumption in the study that CO2 drives the "ice ages", so that the study is little more than empty speculation that the ancient tectonic activity drove down the CO2, causing catastrophic global cooling.

But, as I have informed him and any with ears to hear and eyes to see, for years, not only is there no CO2 "greenhouse effect", but there were no naturally-occurring "ice ages", nor was there any naturally-occurring "tectonic activity" responsible for moving the landmasses over the Earth to their present arrangement and shapes.

Instead, the Earth's surface was deliberately re-formed, to a precise pattern, as I proved in my 2009 post, "A Challenge to Earth Scientists", and several more in the "Challenge to Science" series here. It is a simple demonstration, that completely disproves any theory of chance "continental drift" responsible for the precise positions of the continents today, in a precise (and anciently referenced, as a dodecahedron) pattern. (As I noted in that post, the probability of chance placement of the world's landmasses is on the order of one in a million million--that is, one in 1,000,000,000,000. In other words, and to anyone who can look at the pattern and see how closely the landmasses conform to it--it is a certainty that the landmasses were deliberately moved to their present locations and orientations).

So "skeptics", you are missing out on the greater truth, in your own willingness to hew to the consensus speculations piled upon false assumptions that constitute all of today's earth and life sciences, not just climate science. And in the lukewarmers, you are heeding the wrong voices, if you want to know the overriding truth that now faces mankind, with its many divisive and false dogmas so long nurtured and so stubbornly promulgated, by those who are perhaps best known as jihadists, or religious warriors, of every stripe.

Climate Alarmists and Lukewarmers Are All Incompetent

The Climate Etc site of the tenured (snugly employed) academic Judith Curry has a post on "lukewarmers", those who are proud to call themselves reasonable (as opposed to the alarmists on one side, and the "skeptics" who are "deniers" on the other). Their "reasonableness" has been a drag on any effective criticism of current climate science for years, and it is unfortunately the position of choice for many in the global warming debate. My response:

There is no haven in the lukewarmer position(s); climate science is totally wrong, because it is based upon the science of mere weather--alias local and transient processes--with no regard for the global constraint of the hydrostatic atmosphere, or for the direct heating of the atmosphere by the Sun rather than by the planetary surface. Their (your, Judith Curry) scientific incompetence is just as large as the alarmists'. But here at the nadir of the "debate" (or fruitless war of words) to co-opt the public to a science they are not equipped to judge, no one will question their own tragically flawed estimation of their own "expertness"; no one is learning anything. None of you is worthy of the name "scientist".

"In Search of the Lost Chord" of Reason In Our Time

The Jo Nova site reports on the cancellation of a Bjorn Lomborg "consensus center" which, as I understand it, was to be devoted--at least partially--to reporting the truth about the ridiculously high cost of alarmist climate policies. Readers here should read that Jo Nova post, then my following response:

On April 25, 2011 (six months after my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison, which disproves the global-warming greenhouse effect and separates the competent from the incompetent in so-called "climate science"), I submitted the following comment to this site (it may seem to start out off-topic on this thread, but read on):

"You cannot shame Barack Obama. I wrote to him, on paper, about the unrecognized crisis of incompetence in science the day after he was elected, and received only a 3X5 card with 'thank you for writing', after 4 months. He was brainwashed from his youth, epitomizes the current widespread inability to focus on the critical evidence in any field, and personally exults in what I, to put all the political hysteria in the proper perspective, call the 'War of the Insane Left'. They are out for revenge (against the Bush presidency, against past slavery and racism, against the excesses of capitalism, and yes, probably against every personal injustice each of them has experienced in life), and for them the ends justify any means that comes to hand. I just saw a portion of a TV program on 'The Third Reich: The Rise', within the last hour. It was familiar to me, and was depressing (knowing how it would play out), so I didn't continue watching it. The Left is trying to emulate the rise of the Third Reich; that is, they want all the power and no opposition. Anyone of any maturity knows that government, academia, and all large institutions utilize the same absolute power, absolutely corrupted and corrupting, to maintain themselves and those at the top. And ALL of our scientific and political institutions, and the media, have already been suborned by the supposedly righteous image they have been projecting for decades. The global warming hysteria is just the current tip of their spear, to be pushed regardless of the truth. And just as most Germans were not Nazis, most of those defending the obscene climate 'consensus' are not evil. They are, however, thoroughly incompetent, and brainwashed to be accepting of evil. All the signs are that it will only get worse, until there are no 'lukewarmers' left, in climate science, all of science, or in politics. Shortly after, it will be World War III in earnest. And it will be our own fault if we refuse to see it coming."

The Hydrostatic Condition of the Real Atmosphere

I have submitted the following comment, affirming the stable Standard Atmosphere model for our troposphere, to the wattsupwiththat site of Anthony Watts, in reply to another comment by one DirkH:

DirkH @9:14a.m.: "The principal and terminal fault with climate science and climate models seems to be that they assume the atmosphere to be hydrostatic. It is known that it isn’t ..."

You should be aware of the definitive evidence by now, my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison. That comparison is between the temperature-versus-pressure (T-P) curve of the Standard Atmosphere model, for Earth, and the T-P curve of Venus as measured on October 5, 1991 (over 21 years ago now). The clear result can be stated thus: If you imagine moving Venus to the same distance from the Sun as the Earth, or Earth to the same distance from the Sun as Venus, then their T-P curves are essentially, and precisely, the same (for pressures above and below the cloud layer of Venus, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures) . Not only does this disprove the "greenhouse effect", of increasing temperature with increasing CO2 (as the temperatures in Venus's 96.5% CO2 atmosphere are no different from Earth's, when corrected for solar distance), but it confirms the Standard Atmosphere, with its defining hydrostatic condition, as the real, stable equilibrium state of our troposphere. If current academics believe the hydrostatic condition does not apply to the real atmosphere, that is just one more wrong belief they harbor, while stubbornly ignoring my definitive Venus/Earth evidence against their theories. Alarmists and lukewarmers alike will get nowhere, no matter how protracted or how honest the debate, unless and until they understand and accept the clear corrections to climate science indicated by that definitive evidence.

Children In Charge in the Climate Debates

I have submitted the following comment on the Real-Science site, where Steven Goddard concluded:  "Temperatures continue to plummet below Hansen’s Scenario C – which represents humans having disappeared off the planet twelve years ago. The only possible interpretation being that human generated CO2 has little or nothing to do with global temperatures.  Our alarmist friends, being the crooks that they are, will continue to pretend that they don’t notice this disaster.":

And the "lukewarmers" will also continue to pretend, that there is a greenhouse effect, of increasing temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide--just not a "catastrophic" one. Well, as a real scientist, I say anyone who thinks there is ANY such global-temperature-raising greenhouse effect, is incompetent and should be thrown out of science. Once again, my comparison of temperatures in the tropospheres of Venus and Earth, here--which should have been done by any competent, interested scientist 20 years ago--is the definitive evidence, that makes the "no greenhouse effect at all" obvious. If there were a greenhouse effect, it would ADD to the temperature in Venus's atmosphere (which has over 2400 times, or over 11 doublings of, Earth's carbon dioxide concentration), but in fact the Venus/Earth temperature ratio is a CONSTANT, and even more amazing, that constant is PRECISELY, physically explained by the two planets' relative distances from the Sun, and nothing else. Until that is faced, there is no viable climate science at all.


I am also still waiting for someone to find independently what I suggested many months ago, that the global temperature record is really not that at all, but only an unrecognized proxy for the multidecadal ocean oscillations, and that is really why the former and the latter are so well correlated since the 17th century. I am sadly amused that the surface temperature in the Standard Atmosphere--which I confirmed in my Venus/Earth analysis--is 288.15K, and has been for a century, and that is higher than the supposed mean global surface temperature, even after a century of "global warming".

Unfortunately, the climate "debate" is just so many barking dogs, unwilling to learn anything but only wanting to defend their respective territories. (The consensus is thus a "Lord of the Flies" phenomenon: Out of control children, really, without any responsible parental authority.)