A new climate panic is gripping the far-Left profiteers of doom. Those few of Them who are climate scientists have made fame and fortune by telling us the world is toast unless the once-free West commits economic hara-kiri. The cost of placating climate Communism is already in the quadrillions. However, They are becoming aware that Their official climate narrative is rooted in a grave error of physics – an error so elementary that it can be described here.
The 24 K difference between the 8 K direct and 32 K final greenhouse-gas warming up to 1850 was temperature feedback response, a knock-on, additional warming chiefly caused by more water vapor in warmer air. Thus, They imagined, the system-gain factor – by which direct warming before feedback response is multiplied to give final warming including feedback response – was about 32 / 8, or 4. After that strikingly simple correction to allow for the fact that very nearly all feedback response in 1850 was a response not to preindustrial greenhouse gases but to the sunshine, if the feedback regime today is as it was in 1850 we can expect not 4 K warming this century but a net-beneficial 1.1 K. That ends the «climate emergency».
What global warming?
When James Hansen, the far-Left agitator at NASA, first published the error in 1984, he imagined the system-gain factor was somewhere between 2 and 4 – a tacit admission that we do not know the feedback strength to within 100%, let alone 1%. The uncertainty in feedback strength in IPCC’s leaden, prolix Assessment Reports is still greater. That means climatology has not the faintest idea how much – or, rather, how little – global warming we may cause. There is very little reason to suppose the feedback regime today is not exactly as it was in 1850.
The error arose when Hansen, copied by all climatologists since, borrowed feedback math from control theory, a mature branch of engineering physics, without understanding what he had borrowed. It destroys Their pretext to shut down the West. In the past 30 years, notwithstanding the increasingly hysterical rhetoric at the UN’s interminable annual climate gabfests, anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing – our influence on temperature – has increased in a near-perfect straight line by one-thirtieth of a unit per year. Since the West accounts for just 20% of global emissions, even if all Western countries achieved net-zero by 2050 , the warming abated would be less than 1/13 K. After correcting Their error of physics, make that just 1/50 K – far too small to be measured.
A year ago the Argonauts, my distinguished team of ten climate scientists and researchers, including a former head of the U. Global Climate Change Research Program, a tenured professor of control theory and an expert on the global electricity industry, submitted a paper explaining climatology’s error to a leading climate-science journal whose editor has said that those whom he calls «climate deniers» have no credible argument against the Party Line. That, gentle reader, is why the climate Communists are trembling with fear.
Source: Christopher Monckton of Brenchley | American Thinker
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