Yet more Monckton

Posted by William M. Connolley on December 5, 2006
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I’ve listed a few of Moncktons mistakes in previous posts; and RC has a nice article about his misunderstanding climate sensitivity.

Adam points out in a comment that Monbiot is now saying (in the comments) …what happened to the debate with Christopher Monckton. A good question. So far my attempts to challenge him have been met with threats to sue for libel. While the Guardian can cope with this, I’m in a more exposed position when posting material on my own sites. This is why I have not yet posted my original article about his paper on monbiot.com, let alone any rejoinders. Which is interesting.

Because… over at the wiki page about Moncktons errors, someone claiming to be James Rowlatt, Clerk to Lord Monckton is complaining about the page and threatening libel too. Note, BTW, that the wiki page is in the user space of [[User:Dbuckner]] and so has a slightly curious status; it may get deleted soon so read while you can. Since its shifting, it may help that this is by “James Rowlatt” (actually anon IP 62.136.27.125, which appears to locate to London… errm although another one says Energis UK ooop North. Can anyone do better? Note BTW that Lord M does indeed appear to have a clerk by that name) and this is the other sides. They seem to have done a fairly good job of reading M’s references and discovering that many of them don’t quite say what M wants them too; they aren’t so good at lambda – they should just read RC for that.

The anon/clerk has been trying to make the wiki page more favourable to Lord M; even (rather oddly) asserting that Lord M correctly allows for feedbacks as well as forcings in his S-B stuff when what he does is hand-wave about why the positive and negative feedbacks might balance (oddly enough no refs for that bit).

Ive just noticed (trying to make some kind of sense of his lambda and failing) in his extended gunk; p26 that M things that forcing-proportional-to-ln-CO2 is “a heuristic derived from the climate models”: it isn’t, of course: it comes from more basic radiative physics and is an input to the GCMs. M compounds this error by assuming it applies to all the GHGs (with a delightful “To generalize the equation to cover forcings from all greenhouse gases, multiply both sides by g, the ratio of forcings from all greenhouse gases including CO2 to the forcing from CO2 alone,”) thereby forgetting (or never knowing) that not all GHGs are in the log regime.

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Comments

  1. #1 pough
    2006/12/05

    Yay, more Monckton! Now he’s getting all suey, Ball-style! Monckton: never not funny.

  2. #2 Steve Bloom
    2006/12/05

    William, WP is, I guess, hosted in the UK (and so vulnerable to those absurd British libel standards)? Are you implying that the page is going to be removed because of this?

    BTW, does it seem obvious that the alleged clerk posts are probably from Monckton himself?

    [WP is probably hosted in the US by law. I don't see why the clerk shouldn't be a real person - who knows? -W]

  3. #3 Ian Forrester
    2006/12/05

    Monckton has posted 77 pages of e-mails he claims to have recieved in response to his articles. They are full of complete non-sense such as this one:

    “Dear Monckton of Brenchley, – I have skimmed your mighty tome. It is a profound work which I hope will stop this runaway political bandwagon. Unfortunately the general public in common with politicians are not sufficiently educated to digest it. I suggest the following
    statement: “It is an incontrovertible scientific fact that if carbon dioxide is 500 ppm of the atmosphere the quantity of heat it can account for is 0.05%. This is based on simple proportion of mass (with Specific Heat and Temperature constant). This means that any temperature
    variation due to the presence of Carbon Dioxide is insignificant when compared to the multitude of other factors which influence the Earth’s climate.” I challenge any one to disagree with this. RB, C.Eng. FIET.”

    The whole 77 pages can be found at:

    http://tinyurl.com/ykyj3c

    I doubt if anyone will get past page 2 before heading for the Gravol bottle.

  4. #4 Hank Roberts
    2006/12/05

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming/Apocalypse_cancelled

    (moved from dbuckner’s page)

  5. #5 Hank Roberts
    2006/12/05

    hmmm.
    http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=916 has a posting signed:
    bikerbikerbiker@hotmail.com. – James Rowlatt, Clerk to Lord Monckton.

    Google that:

    http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=bikerbikerbiker

    “Christopher Monckton Limited, business consultants”
    “Europe’s leading business consultancy, specialising in solving problems caused by over-mighty State bureaucracy….”
    ” Positive Feedback: 98.4%…..”

  6. #6 Eli Rabett
    2006/12/06

    I just drove a tractor through one of Monckton’s haystacks. Basically he assumes an average albedo for Earth with an atmosphere, for Earth without. That is a no no, the grass don’t grow there, but to be honest a lot of other people make the same mistake.

  7. #7 Carl Christensen
    2006/12/06

    Pretty funny the septics screech libel. Has anyone noticed on “climateaudit” how they are defaming Martin Juckes & raking him over the coals for perceived “academic misconduct” (they’re usual screed) etc? Well they’ve done that previously with John Hunter, Judith Curry, Simon Tett, Myles Allen, the list goes on?

  8. #8 guthrie
    2006/12/06

    Its a bit off that some individual lacking in interpersonal skills and scientific knowledge (Yes, so sue me!) can blunder into a Wiki page and issue legal threads, and end up with big boxes at the top of a page saying roughly “This may well all be lies and my lawyers are trying to find someone to sue”.
    Monkton looks stupider by the day here.

  9. #9 guthrie
    2006/12/06

    Ian, that link is horrible. It is proof that stupidity is no respecter of political or environmental outlook. Next time someone says lefty environmentalists are all gaga, I shall produce it as evidence that so is everyone else.

    One commenter even said that as far as they could see, all the gases in the atmosphere were greenhouse gases!!!!

  10. #10 Abe G.
    2006/12/06

    What is it with these people try to sue away criticism of their arguments? Tim Ball fluffs up his CV and then sues someone for pointing it out. And now Monckton wants to sue–for what exactly?

    They have taken a cue from the Scientology playbook, and that tells you all you need to know about their ethics.

  11. #11 Dano
    2006/12/06

    Pretty funny the septics screech libel. Has anyone noticed on “climateaudit” how they are defaming Martin Juckes & raking him over the coals for perceived “academic misconduct” (their usual screed) etc?

    Use this condition as another indicator that they have nothing.

    Best,

    D

  12. #12 Eli Rabett
    2006/12/06

    Basically threatening to sue works, especially if you are richer than the other guy (see Robert Maxwell in the Wikipedia and Justin Lancaster.

  13. #13 Bruce
    2006/12/07

    Hi William,

    Just wondering where you got (or how you deduced) the name “James Rowlatt”. I can’t find him as a wikipedia author…

    Please enlighten me (and forgive me if I have missed the obvious.)

    Cheers

    Bruce

    [He wrote out his name on one of the wiki pages -W]

  14. #14 Eli Rabett
    2006/12/07

    Hank, William, the moved Monckton page appears to have disappeared. Why? Where?

    [Its been moved, but all the links should still redirect. Which don't work for you? -W]

  15. #15 Steve Bloom
    2006/12/07

    It’s been moved here.

  16. #16 Bruce
    2006/12/13

    Cheers W.

  17. #17 Hank Roberts
    2007/12/10

    It’s gone again.

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    < User:KimDabelsteinPetersen

    Since it seems that external pages are referencing this article – and may wonder what happened – i’ve created this stub.

    The article was deleted per wikipedia deletion vote – which you can find at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:KimDabelsteinPetersen/Apocalyse Cancelled.

  18. #18 Martin Lewitt
    2007/12/13

    RC’s “nice article about misunderstanding climate sensitivity” appears to be chock full of assumptions and hyperbole.

    Consider:

    “Because all of the above tricks work for solar forcings as well as greenhouse gas forcings. Either there are important feedbacks or there aren’t. You can’t have them for solar and not for greenhouse gases.”

    GHGs and solar are coupled to the climate system quite differently. In a nonlinear system, you can’t assume the feedback responses are the same. GHGs are coupled mainly to the atmosphere, while UV is coupled to the stratosphere, IR is coupled to the troposphere and visible radiation to the surface and oceans.

    Consider:

    “We also know that the best definition of the forcing is the change in flux at the tropopause, and that the most predictable diagnostic is the global mean surface temperature anomaly. Thus it is natural to look at the real world and see whether there is evidence that it behaves in the same way (and it appears to, since model hindcasts of past changes match observations very well).”

    Of course models are tuned to match the global mean surface temperature anamoly and likely would not be used until they did. But the model hindcasts do not match the observations “very well”. Authors of recent papers have noted that the models are 30 years behind the arctic melting, more than 100 years behind on the expansion of the tropical stratosphere, fail to reproduce the signature of the solar cycle and all the AR4 models have a positive surface albedo bias in the temperate snow cover and melt. As I have discussed previously, this globally and annually averaged magnitude of this albedo bias is an order of magnitude larger than needed to attribute the approximate 0.8W/m^2 energy imbalance.

    Consider:

    “The next thing to conviently forget is that climate sensitivity is an equilibrium concept. It tells you the temperature that you get to eventually. In a transient situation (such as we have at present), there is a lag related to the slow warm up of the oceans, which implies that the temperature takes a number of decades to catch up with the forcings.”

    There is no evidence that the climate system has ever been at equilibrium, so the “transient situation” is not exceptional, so to mention it is to give a misimpression.

    Consider:

    “And of course, when you look at the last 50 years, there are no trends in solar forcing at all. Maybe it’s best not to mention that.”

    This text also plays upon ignorance, which Gavin can’t claim having mentioned the lag due to heat storage into the ocean earlier. There was an increasing CO2 trend over the whole 20th century. Yet there was a mid-century cooling. Maybe it’s best not to mention that. Correlation does not equal causation.