Lord Monckton’s Appeal to Authority Backfires in Greenhouse Gas Debate

Written by John O'Sullivan on May 3, 2013. Posted in Current News

Having spent a few days pondering Lord Monckton’s reply to John O’Sullivan’s open letter the senior scientists of Principia Scientific International concluded that the sum of his argument is nothing other than an appeal to authority – a debating stratagem his lordship denounces when used by our mutual opponents, the climate alarmists. In addition, closer scrutiny of Monckton’s references show them to be decidedly shaky. Indeed, with Monckton doing little more than glibly deferring to Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius and Callender, in lieu of any actual scientific rebuttal, there is very little substance offered up for debate.

Despite his otherwise excellent reputation as a debater, Chris Monckton seems decidedly unaware that the aforementioned archaic figures are readily shown below to have been misrepresented, misunderstood and, in some cases, proven to be plain wrong. For it is axiomatic to any student of history to know that those who control the present also control the past because they can rewrite the past and make it say whatever they want it to say. Indeed, it is no different with those who believe in the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis; they, too, have sought to re-write history so that it supports their beliefs.

Fortunately much of what Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius, Ångström, Wood and Callender wrote is still in print and can be read by anyone who is interested in what they actually said. After several years of diligent research by determined skeptics we can now all see what separates the wheat from the chaff.  

So, let us begin by examining a key passage in Monckton’s reply:

The curious thing about the above statement is that Lord Monckton himself has a talk that he gives which calls on the carpet those who promote the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming because they use an array of logical fallacies in their arguments.Yet when challenged about his own belief in the “greenhouse effect” he falls back on the same logical fallacies of appeal to authority and tradition. He says, in effect, the “greenhouse effect” is a scientific truth because it has been known about for two centuries and some of the world’s most famous scientists have endorsed it.  

What he is counting on, of course, is that you and I have not read what these scientists and their contemporaries actually said. Perhaps he himself is not aware of what these scientists and their contemporaries actually said or he wouldn’t have appealed to their authority. At any rate, let us look at his more modern day reference, Manabe&Wetherald (1976). In fact this paper was published in 1967, not 1976, and the authors conceded:

Therefore, even some of those scientists Lord Monckton relies upon agree with PSI that any increase in CO2 actually cools the atmosphere contrary to the “some warming” assertion his lordship monotonously repeats.

So let’s review what else is said by these scientists and their contemporaries about the ability of carbon dioxide to cause atmospheric warming.

Joseph Fourier

Australian Geologist, Timothy Casey has done a superb job of explaining how Fourier (1824) and Fourier (1827) are The Most Misquoted and Most Misunderstood Science Papers in the Public Domain and it doesn’t need any further elaboration here. It would seem that Lord Monckton is carrying on the long tradition of mischaracterizing what Joseph Fourier actually said, which, if we understand him correctly, is that the “greenhouse effect” could only exist if the air stopped moving.  

This is from Fourier, as quoted on Casey’s web site: “In short, if all the strata of air of which the atmosphere is formed, preserved their density with their transparency, and lost only the mobility which is peculiar to them, this mass of air, thus become solid, on being exposed to the rays of the sun, would produce an effect the same in kind with that we have just described.” Fourier (1824; p.155) Fourier (1827; p.586).

But does the air ever stop moving? Of course not. Thus, Monckton and other greenhouse gas “theory” believers overstate Fourier’s implausible hypothetical because Fourier clearly referred to conditions devoid of any inherent cooling due to convection and conduction.

John Tyndall

This is what John Tyndall said about the ability of carbon dioxide to absorb radiant heat:

 “Through air . . . the waves of ether pass without absorption, and these gases are not sensibly changed in temperature by the most powerful calorific rays.” 

The “air” that he was testing had atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in it and at those levels there was no effect on the temperature even by “the most powerful calorific rays.” [1]

After testing carbon dioxide at a concentration of about 8{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, i.e. 80,000 ppm Tyndall specifically proclaimed:

“Carbonic acid (loosely hydrated CO2 molecules) gas is one of the feeblest of absorbers of the radiant heat emitted by solid sources. It is, for example, extremely transparent to the rays emitted by the heated copper plate already referred to.”  

Whether people will acknowledge it or not John Tyndall thus falsified in his laboratory the hypothesis that carbon dioxide (especially at atmospheric concentrations) can cause atmospheric warming. Even though he wasn’t actually able to test water vapor in his apparatus – because it kept condensing inside of the tube – he nonetheless speculated that, because of water vapor, the atmosphere acts like a “warm garment.”   

“But the aqueous vapour takes up the motion of the ethereal waves and becomes thereby heated, thus wrapping the earth like a warm garment, and protecting its surface from the deadly chill, which it would otherwise sustain,” asserted Tyndall.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that John Tyndall’s speculations about the atmospheric “hot house” effect were exclusive to water vapor and water vapor alone and they were based solely on his observation that the diurnal temperature swing is much narrower in places where it is more humid. This is clearly shown in this passage of his:

 “Whenever the air is dry we are liable to daily extremes of temperature. By day in such places, the sun’s heat reaches the earth unimpeded and renders the maximum high; by night on the other hand the earth’s heat escapes unhindered into space and renders the minimum low. Hence the difference between the maximum and minimum is greatest where the air is driest. He wrote:

“In the plains of India, on the heights of the Himalaya, in Central Asia, in Australia—wherever drought reigns, we have the heat of day forcibly contrasted with the chill of night.  In the Sahara itself, when the sun’s rays cease to impinge on the burning soil the temperature runs rapidly down to freezing, because there is no vapour overhead to check the calorific drain.” 

What Tyndall didn’t measure was the difference in the mean daily temperatures between arid and humid climates along the same latitude. If he had he would have seen what we see today. The mean daily temperature of the humid climates is less than the mean daily temperature of arid climates along the same latitude, because latent heat transfer “refrigerates” the lower atmosphere, as demonstrated by the studies of standard meteorological data and experiments carried out by Douglas Cotton and Carl Brehmer. [2,3]

Svante August Arrhenius  

Arrhenius did, indeed, predict that a doubling of CO2 would cause an increase in atmospheric temperatures, but it was predicated on the proposition that there were no active feedback mechanisms operating in the atmosphere that would counter this warming. Arrhenius wrote:

 “. . . we will suppose that the heat that is conducted to a given place on the earth’s surface or in the atmosphere in consequence of atmospheric or oceanic currents, horizontal or vertical, remains the same in the course of the time considered, and we will also suppose that the clouded part of the sky remains unchanged. It is only the variation of the temperature with the transparency of the air that we shall examine.”  [4]

A contemporary of Arrhenius, Knut Ångström, tested this hypothesis by filling a tube with the amount of carbon dioxide that would be present in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere and then running infrared radiation through it. Ångström first doubled and then halved that amount and repeated the test, which demonstrated virtually no temperature change between these differing amounts of carbon dioxide.  [5]

Taking Lord Monckton’s appeal to authority as our cue, the above rebuttal shows that his belief in the greenhouse gas “theory” is premised on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and half truths. We learn that contrary to what his lordship asserts Manabe&Wetherald conceded CO2 causes cooling; Fourier admitted a greenhouse effect only exists where there’s no convection (impossible in Earth’s turbulent atmosphere); Tyndall admitted CO2 was the feeblest absorber of radiant heat and that “greenhouse gas” humidity reduces temperature extremes; Arrhenius has been widely misrepresented as well as refuted by the experiments of Knut Ångström, while Callender made the schoolboy error of thinking that correlation proves causation – it doesn’t.

As all true skeptics know full well, it was that “correlations proves causation” fallacy that first triggered the man-global warming alarm when temperatures rose between 1975-1998 in line with a rise in CO2 levels. But as we since learned (and validated by 400,000 years of Vostok ice core data) rises in CO2 levels mostly follow rises in temperature, as now confirmed again by a new paper in  Nature Climate Change. [7]

As such they cannot be inferred as the cause of climate change because they are really an inconsequential symptom. Once his lordship and others understand these facts we will all be closer to wider climate sanity and truer to empirical science.

Finally, a supplemental detailed scientific rebuttal of Lord Monckton’s modern day greenhouse gas authority, Professor Roy Spencer, will be published in due course to accompany this reply. Some of such errors have already been pointed out to Roy.

***********

[1] All of these Tyndall quotes are from: Tyndall, John, On radiation: The “Rede” lecture, delivered in the Senate-house before the University of Cambridge, England, on Tuesday, May 16, 1865

[2] Cotton, Douglas,’Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures,‘ (February, 2013), Principia-scientific.org, (17-Appendix)

[3] Brehmer, Carl, ‘Watt’s Up with the Greenhouse Effect?‘ (April, 2013), Principia-scientific.org.

[4] Arrhenius, Svante, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science Series 5, Volume 41, April 1896, pages 237-276

[5] He published his results in:  Ångström, Knut, 1900, “Ueber die Bedeutung des Wasserdampfes und der Kohlensäure bei der Absorption der Erdatmosphäre”, Annalen der Physik, Volume 308 Issue 12, Pages 720 – 732

[6] Wood, R. W. (1909). “Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse”. The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Vol. 17, pp. 319-320.

[7] Francey, Trudinger et al., ‘Atmospheric verification of anthropogenic CO2 emission trends, ‘

Nature Climate Change 3, 520–524 (2013) doi:10.1038/nclimate1817:

‘A recent paper published in Nature Climate Change finds a disconnect between man-made CO2 and atmospheric levels of CO2, demonstrating that despite a sharp 25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} increase in man-made CO2 emissions since 2003, the growth rate in atmospheric CO2 has slowed sharply since 2002/2003. The data shows that while man-made emissions were relatively stable from 1990-2003, the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 surged up to the record El Nino of 1997-1998. Conversely, man-made emissions surged ~25{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} from 2003-2011, but growth in atmospheric CO2 has flatlined since 1999 along with global temperatures. The data demonstrates temperature drives CO2 levels due to ocean outgassing, man-made CO2 does not drive temperature, and that man is not the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels’

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