Have you read Lord Monckon's paper?

Question

Have you read Lord Monckon's paper? Here are two links to it:

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

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_072108/content/01125114.guest.html

Answer 1

Linlyons, where do I start? Your post is....odd.

"i read the first part. until i got to the first graph.

"Figure 1 - Mean global surface temperature anomalies (°C), 2001-2008"

which is clearly wrong."

No it isn't wrong, whether or not it is valid is another story. Monckton uses monthly data from the Had/CRU dataset and the UAH troposphere data (which are legitimate sources). Using monthly data is perfectly acceptable, unless the majority of your "negative trend" hinges on that incomplete year (2008).

"1998 was an extraordinarily warm year.

most deniers use that exception to imply that the world has cooled since.

it has not.

in fact, by now, 1998 is no longer the hottest year."

I really don't see how 1998 is relevant to the graph you claim is "wrong" (it isn't). In the paper, 1998 is discussed twice I believe:

"However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001."

and

"LOBALLY-AVERAGED [sic] land and sea surface absolute temperature TS has not risen since 1998 "

While strictly speaking, temperatures have not risen since 1998 (if you include monthly data from 2008), this is considered cherry-picking (starting point is an anomalously warm El Nino year). Though this is subjective and there are valid reasons for picking 1998 as a starting year, such as it being a ten year time frame.

"2005 was the hottest, with 1998 and 2007 tied in second place."

These are not robust conclusions, as their accuracy rests on the dataset you choose (NASA).

"Have you read Lord Monckon's paper?"

I have, and I found it interesting. His calculations of climate sensitivity are not all that different from the IPCC, and it is clear he has done his homework. The thing I can't figure out is why he divided by 3 in equation (17). He explains it as such:

"Since the great majority of the incoming solar radiation incident upon the Earth strikes the tropics, any reduction in tropical radiative forcing has a disproportionate effect on mean global forcings. On the basis of Lindzen (2007), the anthropogenic-ear radiative forcing as established in Eqn. (3) are divided by 3 to take account of the observed failure of the tropical mid-troposphere to warm as projected by the models –"

But it would make no real sense to divide the global radiative forcing by 3 because of the supposed discrepancy in the observed tropical tropospheric trends (the discrepancy may or may not exist). As a side note, the predicted "hot-spot" in the tropical troposphere exists for non anthropogenic forcings as well.

But overall, the article is fairly well written--not without error, but well written.

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Edit:

"Then the very next statement is also wrong, although to be fair, it was corrected only a few months ago.

"the absence of ocean warming since 2003""

I fail to see where this was "corrected" in either of your links, Dana. The first realclimate link is about the "artefact" in the SST record in the 1940s, and the second link is about the Domingues 2008 paper, which only corrects SSTs to 2003. Where has it been corrected?

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Edit2:

antarcticice wrote

"APS have now gone to the trouble of putting a disclaimer at the top of the article."

They have now retracted that disclaimer and put up a new one. The new disclaimer is now at the top of the Schwartz article as well.

Answer 2

Yeah, I read it.  It's pretty much what I would expect from a guy with a degree in journalism trying to write a scientific paper.  Lots of basic errors.

Reading the paper, his very first statement is 100% wrong.

"[G]LOBALLY-AVERAGED land and sea surface absolute temperature Ts has not risen since 1998 (Hadley Center...)

Here is what the Hadley Centre *actually* says:

"A simple mathematical calculation of the temperature change over the latest decade (1998-2007) alone shows a continued warming of 0.1 °C per decade."

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pr...

So right off the bat, he makes a blaitantly false statement. Not a good start. A couple sentences later, he makes another major blunder.

"50 years’ cooling in Antarctica (Doran et al., 2002) and the Arctic"

Whoa there! 50 years' cooling in the Arctic? The most rapidly warming area on the planet??

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resource...

Then the very next statement is also wrong, although to be fair, it was corrected only a few months ago.

"the absence of ocean warming since 2003"

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

So it's not a good sign that he's getting the basic facts wrong. A lot of the rest of his discussion is hard to follow. One point he makes later is the apparent lack of tropical troposphere warming, which like the ocean warming, has recently been resolved as instrumentation errors.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

He also brings up warming on other planets - a totally amateurish error we see frequently on this forum. I devoted Myth #4 to it:

http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/global...

On top of getting the basic facts wrong, he also got the basic math and physics wrong.  A nice summary of a few of the many errors here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/...

I could go on pointing out errors in the paper, but you get the point.

Answer 3

Well, he started out with an outright lie--claiming that "1998 is the warmest year on record."  Not surprising. Nor is it surprising that the only kind of place that will promote his garbage is the website of a drug addict.

Man-made global warming is a proven fact. There is no "debate."

Answer 4

Yes. It is something climate skeptics deny happens - a scientist openly challenging the accepted view, attempting to overthrow the accepted wisdom and receiving publication.  Science accepts all points of view and it is up to Monckton to provide enough persuasive evidence to overthrow the consensus.

The current  view of the APS does not agree with this paper - yet it publishes it. Can anyone point me to a site who holds the view that there is no global warming - yet publishes a paper directly opposing its views and arguing global warming is real and caused by man?

That would be a test of open versus closed mindsets.

Answer 5

Make no mistake, scientists paid by the government have a political ax to grind.  Everyone does.  Ask anyone who's toiled in an underpaid associate researcher position for years.  

Look Hansen, Schmidt and other NASA employees have a LOT to lose if AGW stops being the crisis it is made out to be.

The public often makes the mistake of assuming that scientists are somehow "above" normal human nature: greed, lying, etc.

They are not.

Intelligent people are capable of coming up with very good 'reasons' to support very bad theories.

Answer 6

Lord Monckton's is not a scientist is not even trained in the field he is a journalist who tried to go into politics and failed.

APS have now gone to the trouble of putting a disclaimer at the top of the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher...

Answer 7

Yes, and he makes some very amateurish and serious mistakes. Which is why I prefer relying on peer reviewed scientific literature (those kind of simple mistakes are typically caught before publication) for accurate information about science.

I have no problem with any person writing such a paper, so long as it's fairly represented. This was simply a non-scientists op-ed piece published as part of an informal debate (like many other newsletters and magazines often do), it wasn't a peer reviewed scientific journal article.  When the anti-AGW blogsphere starts ranting about how this paper "proves" AGW isn't happening and 50,000 Physicists have "changed" position on AGW, that's pure and blatant deception which should be condemned by anyone more interested in truth than ideology.

Here's some analysis of Monckon's mistakes:

http://duoquartuncia.blogspot.com/2008/0...

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/...

Here's a previous analysis of mistakes he's made in former articles:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

Answer 8

i read the first part.  until i got to the first graph.

"Figure 1 - Mean global surface temperature anomalies (°C), 2001-2008"

which is clearly wrong.

here's a far better graph.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

from NASA.

you'll notice that after 2,000, the temperature continues to go up.

unlike what Monckton claims.

1998 was an extraordinarily warm year.

most deniers use that exception to imply that the world has cooled since.

it has not.

in fact, by now, 1998 is no longer the hottest year.

2005 was the hottest, with 1998 and 2007 tied in second place.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news...