The Elephants in The Room

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The “climate hell” mentioned in the run-up to the latest COPout conference by the excitable Mr Guterres, Sekjen of the United Nations, is not a happening thing. As the New Pause in global warming lengthens inexorably, month by month, real-world global warming departs more and more visibly from what was and is predicted.

Yet the Thermageddonites, flogging the dead horse like a bull in a china shop even though the emperor has no clothes, are ignoring the elephants in the room.

Their latest wheeze is to point out that the real-world global-warming trend in the third of a century since IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990is greater than the trend from that year to June 2014, the month when the New Pause began. From 1990 to June 2014 the trend was 0.09 C/decade. However, despite the New Pause, the trend from 1990 to April 2023 was 50% greater, at 0.136 C/decade.

If the New Pause continues, of course, eventually the overall trend will match the trend to the beginning of the New Pause. If it continues long enough, it will fall below that prior trend, just as with the previous Long Pause.

Either way, these long Pauses are visible indicators of the elephant in the room: namely, the fact that the entire interval of predictions of global warming made by IPCC (1990), and still adhered to by IPCC (2021), has proven to be flagrantly in excess of observed reality:

Nor is gross over-prediction the only elephant in the room. Let us quickly summarize some other members of the growing herd. For instance, the approximately logarithmic forcing response to increased CO2 concentration means that each additional molecule of CO2 we add to the atmosphere causes less forcing, and hence less warming, than any of its predecessors:

Most official methods of predicting global warming rely on feedback analysis. Feedback strength implicit in the 3 [2, 5] C ECS predicted by IPCC (2021) is 0.24 [0.23, 0.26] Watts per square meter per degree of the reference temperature. The breadth of the interval is just 0.03 W m^–2 K^–1. Thus, adding only 0.01 W m^–2 K^–1 to feedback strength would increase ECS by 1 K. But feedback strength is not knowable to so tiny a precision as a hundredth of a Watt per square meter. Thus, all IPCC’s predictions are no better than mere guesswork, and provide no basis for the costly policies being pursued by imprudent Western governments.

The absence of the predicted tropical mid-troposphere “hot spot” confirms that the water-vapor feedback (the only one potentially big enough to matter: the rest self-cancel) is small:

Nor is misrepresentation of feedback the models’ only error. When Dr Pat Frank of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory first presented his finding that the general-circulation models had not accounted for propagation of error across the time-steps from here to 2100 and beyond, his audience – the World Federation of Scientists – were flabbergasted. His result, published in 2019, stands unrefuted in the learned journals to this day. His result renders all of the models’ predictions valueless. They are no better than mere guesswork:

Fortunately, there are observationally-based methods of temperature prediction that do not depend on diagnosing feedback strength from the outputs of general-circulation models, or on any other form of feedback analysis, and do not depend on the models’ failure to account for propagation of uncertainty. The energy-budget method, for instance, does not depend on knowing feedback strength. Monte Carlo distribution based on the mainstream, published uncertainties in the five listed initial conditions gives ECS as a harmless 0.13 [0.09, 0.20] K:

One may also use Monte Carlo distribution to derive the 0.1 C global warming that might be prevented in the unlikely event that the whole world attained net zero emissions by 2050:

The above graph generously assumes that global net zero emissions are possible. In reality, China, Russia, India and Pakistan are greatly increasing their coal-fired capacity so as to keep their electricity prices an order of magnitude below those of Western nations. On that assumption, each $1 billion spent on abatement would prevent less than 1/10,000,000 C:

The favored method of reaching net zero – installing wind and solar power – cannot further reduce CO2 emissions without costly static-battery or hydrogen-production backup once hourly mean demand on a national grid exceeds the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power – their output in ideal weather. Many Western countries are now above that limit. So the above estimates of warming prevented, of cost and of value for money are optimistic:

Finally, the lurid predictions of death by famine made by the profiteers of doom were false. Indeed, in the global warming era from the 1970s onward, deaths by famine have fallen to record lows:

Experience has shown that simple and irrefutable points such as those which are summarized in this set of diagrams exert a powerful influence on those whose minds are still open to the objective truth.

One of my projects for this summer will be to make the elephants in the room visible to all by drawing them together in a book of images such as these, with a necessary minimum of text. The graphs can then be updated for each annual edition. Not everyone will understand every point, but most people of goodwill can understand most of them. On any view, the organized hysteria reflected in Mr Guterres’ utterances is wholly misplaced.