Book review: The Dynamic Greenhouse Effect and the Climate Averaging Paradox

Dr Roy Clark explains earth's energy fluxes and climate from first principles. He concludes that the fundamental climate consensus model/equations of Manabe & Wetherall, 1968, which are behind the global warming and climate change scares, are both wrong and too simplistic. Clark entirely rejects the idea of a climate in equilibrium, and/or an earth energy balance. This book concentrates on atmospheric effects (warming and cooling) and the greenhouse gas effect. It is not a complete climate book. For example: it doesn't touch on Paleoclimatology, Milankovitch cycles, Little Ice Age, Solar cycles, etc. Clark goes into detail for the climate science he touches on. He uses maths extensively to reach his conclusions but does not give a mathematical approach in the book. Rather a description of what the climate physics implies. So one gets a very readable, comprehensive book; with an outline of a sophisticated alternative to "climate consensus" models. He includes 52 references and 89 diagrams.

In addition to the book, there are two more long articles freely available by Roy Clark

• The Climate Greenhouse Effect
• A Null Hypothesis For CO₂
• Dynamic Greenhouse Effect and the Climate Averaging Paradox (short book)

'Climate Change' is an obsession or 'ideology'

Living in Harmony.

We often seek deep patterns in thought to explain ideas. For example eco-modernists see modern environmentalism as a prescription and ideal for humanity to live in harmony with nature. This harmonic notion is behind the organic farming fad. It animates enviro oppossition to scientific agriculture, finely-tuned genetic techniques to improve crops, and even fish-farming. It explains enviro worship of primitive lifestyles and beliefs of Wiccan, hunter-gatherers, and off-grid drop-outs. Harmonic obsessions help explain their fervour for renewable energy and land-intensive energy systems such as solar, wind and bio-energy systems. Eco-modernists believe that by leaving harmonic obsessions behind they've liberated environmentalism from its worst excesses.

Stasis and Equilibrium

It's a shame self-styled eco-modernists stopped their analysis at harmonic fixation. There is an even more pervasive 'idée fixe' ruling the thoughts of the modern enviro and climate intelligentsia: an obsession with equilibria. The common idea uniting many so-called Left and Environmental ideas is a notion that equilibria are desirable states to aim for. That anything which isn't aiming for equilibrium is pathological. These imaginary pathologies, falling short of the ideals, include: Capitalism, climate change, fossil fuel use, ...

We see it in both climate policy prescriptions and analyses. Analyses increasingly blame nearly all "climate change" on more atmospheric carbon dioxide! Not just recent change, but past change hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago. We know for sure that a lot of past climate change is due to Milankovitch cycles combined with continental drift. For example: the changes resulting in the current Ice Age which now dominates our climate. Once they started down the path of blaming carbon dioxide, climate scientists forgot the science and, instead became anti-carbon evangelists. I think Mann, Hayhoe, ... and their acolytes show these symptoms. They can't talk about climate without demonizing carbon dioxide.

Climate policy seems to actually believe that climate change can be stopped. That we can, and should, 'go back to' a mythic, perfect climate associated with 280ppm (or is that 350ppm?) CO₂. Surprisingly this is never really stated. It is assumed that we all desire this imaginary, perfect, past climate state - whether, or not, it ever existed! Seeking utopias is not a first for humanity. But harking back to an assumed utopia is a bit crazy?

Why do we dream up impossible ideals to aspire to?

Fear of resource depletion and losing balance became tied to a dreams of renewable energy, sustainable and 'circular economies. Our fears need alternative ideas to aspire to and counter negativity. That's part of our nature. Fear alone cripples us. Environmentalists created counter-narratives such as 'climate optimism' to rally around and diffuse their fears of resource depletion, over-population, Capitalism and environmental pollution. These optimistic narratives are invariably templated from equilibria. For example: 'climate optimism' promoted renewables where and when-ever. Not, at first, as a non-CO₂ energy technology, but purely for its own sake. Germany's Energiewende was a perfect example of that. Done at vast expense, Energiewende had nothing much to do with reducing CO₂ emissions in electricity generation. None of the major politicians promoting it gave emissions reductions more than a passing footnote. So don't be surprised it did nothing much to reduce Germany's carbon footprint.

Equilibrium-obsession syndrome

The main “intellectual fallacy” dominating climate alarmist’s ideas is the notion of a natural equilibria. It assumes our current climate is in equilibrium. That any climate change must be bad and man-made (upsets the equilibrium). That energy systems should be some variation of imaginary perpetual motion machines (they call it “renewable”, and say it makes “free” energy). The climate scare rename from "global warming" to: “climate change” was because it's the “change” that really scares. These people are afraid to stray from an imaginary stasis of equilibria. It’s an ideal or template they think all things should be in thrall to. They are not so much environmentalists, more “equilibrilists”. We see it in their neo-Malthusian economic suggestions too. It perfectly explains their hostility to none-CO2 emitting nuclear power as well. Many such people are called environmentalists, and may use that term for themselves. But anyone who prefers wind-turbines and solar farms to nature has travelled very far away from loving their environment.

I medicalized it by post-pending "syndrome" because it's become a pervasive pathological condition. These ideas are genuinely harmful to our fellows.

Notes

1. Unfortunately, for me, the term “equilibrist” is already in use and it means a circus performer who keeps things in balance during performance.
   equilibrilist seems to be some kind of TMed product.
2. “intellectual fallacy” = a wrong system of thought which dominates thinking. Examples: Marxism, Freudism, neo-Malthusianism. It’s basic precepts are taken for granted. It cannot be seen, by its believers, as a fallacy. It’s understood as “how the world works”. In this case as “how the world should work”
3. When I talk of neo-Malthusianism I refer to a general limits obsession in economics. To sustainable economics, scarcity thinking, and other systems which relegate human welfare behind equilibria concerns.

Scientific Consensus.

171 ya: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis makes hand-washing mandatory for obstetricians at Vienna General Hospital. The incidence of puerperal fever, a mass murderer of mothers, drops by 90% overnight, vindicating Semmelweis’ hunch that iatrogenic contagion is to blame. His students soon replicate this miracle in maternity wards throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and publish their results in the scientific press.

153 ya: Almost two decades have passed since the empirical confirmation of Semmelweis’ ideas, but mainstream pathology perseverates in ignoring them, sticking to the ancient and evidence-free consensus on miasmas, ’humoral imbalance’ and leeching. Semmelweis himself has been vilified and hounded from his job by the medical establishment, to whom the very suggestion that their hands might be vectors of disease was an affront, coming as it did from a Jew with a low h-index. Unemployed, angry and deeply depressed by the needless deaths of thousands of women a year, Semmelweis is committed to an insane asylum. The guards welcome him with a savage beating. His injuries fail to heal and within a fortnight, at the age of 47, he has died of blood poisoning.

by Brad Keyes (part reblog from)

Hal Lewis. Resignation from The American Physical Society

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence – it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it…

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.

"reads like someone outside their area of expertise wrote it"

Reblog of Twitter thread by: Ryan Maue | weathermodels.com | @RyanMaue

Tropical storm expert Ryan Maue said the new IPCC report section on tropical storms "reads like someone outside their area of expertise wrote it"

---

The Tropical Cyclones section in Chapter 3 of the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report is poorly written & referenced -- reads like someone outside their area of expertise wrote it ... including out of date 15-year old studies? This isn't 2005.

Don't waste printer paper or ink on the @IPCC_CH 1.5°C report for tropical cyclones. Reference this page ---> https://t.co/I908S7hCgb which is continually updated by experts.

1) Numerous studies have not reported a decrease in the number of global tropical cyclones or accumulated cyclone energy.

I'd know because I wrote the last papers cited in IPCC SREX that say otherwise.

The statement is just false -- makes no sense w/cited references. Bizarre.

2) This paragraph is awful -- fails to provide the consensus reached already in the previous IPCC AR5 and SREX and instead goes back to papers from 10-15 years ago -- long outdated and deprecated.

3) Tropical Cyclones in next 10-40 years? Same number globally -- probably a few more intense by percentage of total. A bit wetter near the eye ... and when making landfall.

That's it.

Will the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) destroy earth?

No.

Many of the particles which strike the Earth are orders of magnitude more energetic than anything we are ever likely to produce. Some particles like the infamous “Oh-my-god” particle which struck Earth in 1991 with an energy of 3×10⁸ TeV, hitting us at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light defy explanation – we shall likely never find a way to produce particle energies of that magnitude (for comparison the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, produces particles at around the 4TeV range).

-- Eric Worrall