SPPI MONTHLY CO2 REPORT : : JULY 2009

Editorial : : The science is in. the scare is out.

Recent papers and data give a complete picture of why the UN is wrong.

NO LONGER can it be credibly argued that “global warming” is worse than previously thought. No longer can it be argued that “global warming” was, is, or will be any sort of global crisis. Recent papers in the peer-reviewed literature, combined with streams of data from satellites and thermometers, now provide a complete picture of why it is that the UN’s climate panel, the worldwide political class, and other “global warming” profiteers are wrong in their assumption that the enterprises of humankind will disastrously warm the Earth.

The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend.

More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale.

Not only in the oceans but also in the tropical upper atmosphere, realworld measurements are showing up the scaremongers’ computer models as useless. All of the models predict that at altitude in the tropics “global warming” should have happened at thrice the surface rate. But half a century of measurement has shown that that warming has not happened either. That, too, is fatal to the “official” notion.

A recent study by Paltridge et al. tells us why the tropical upper troposphere is not warming at thrice the surface rate. The modelers had told their X-Box 360s to predict that “hot-spot” because the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – one of the very few proven results in climatology – mandates that the space occupied by the warming atmosphere will carry near-exponentially more water vapor, which, by its sheer quantity in the atmosphere, is many times more significant than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

However, Dr. Paltridge’s paper demonstrates that subsidence drying carries the additional moisture down to lower altitudes where the water vapor has less effect because its absorption bands are already saturated there. Subsidence drying allows far more outgoing longwave radiation to escape unimpeded to space than the models predict: obsessed with radiative transports in the atmosphere, they tend to undervalue non-radiative transports such as subsidence drying.

We not only know why the outgoing radiation is not being trapped as predicted – we now know that it is not being trapped. Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has just published a paper – arguably the most important ever to be published on “global warming” – that plots real-world changes in outgoing long-wave radiation, as measured by the ERBE satellite system, against real-world changes in global mean surface temperature. See the startling graph on page 4.

Observed reality is entirely different from what 11 of the UN’s models predict. Instead of 6 F warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, only 1 F can be expected, because nearly all the radiation that should be trapped in the atmosphere is escaping to space. The scare is truly over.

Monckton of Brenchley

See full report at: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monthly_report/sppi_monthly_co2_report_july.html