Copenhagen - A Sinister Non-answer to a Non-problem

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Why don't we need the Copenhagen Treaty's sinister, unelected world government helping itself to 2% of our annual GDP and raking another 2% off every financial transaction, in reparation for imagined - and imaginary - "climate debt"?

Why should the world government not go over our elected representatives' heads, and run our economic and environmental affairs, and cancel our patents, and fine recalcitrant nations, and end democracy, freedom and prosperity forever?

Simple. "Global warming" is now known to be a non-problem.

Strip today's Earth of its atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, leaving only the lithosphere, a globe of rock like Mars that bounces just a sixth of the sunlight that hits it back into space.

The flux of solar heat at the surface of a naked Earth today would be 287 Watts per square metre - 103Wm-2 less than the 390Wm-2 trapped by our entire atmosphere.

From this, the fundamental equation of radiative transfer tells us the average temperature on the naked Earth would be -6.5°C, compared with +14.5°C on the well-clothed Earth.

So the entire existing atmosphere has trapped 103Wm-2 of solar heat that would have escaped the naked Earth. It has caused just 21C° of "global warming". Each extra 1Wm-2 of outgoing solar heat that any additional greenhouse gases trap will cause 21/103th's - around a fifth - of a degree of warming.

This century, if we make no cuts in emissions, we will double atmospheric CO2, trapping 3.5Wm-2 more outgoing solar heat. So the warming we cause, even on business as usual, will be a fifth of that, or just 0.7C° - harmless and beneficial.

Unfortunately, the UN's climate panel predicts five times as much warming - 3.5C° this century. So who is right? Monckton, or the UN?

Until now, climatologists have simply had to guess, using giant X-Box 360s - mere expensive guesswork. We now know, by measurement, that the computer models are incorrect. The "consensus" was wrong.

At last, after 25 years of painstaking observation, we have measured what has previously been guessed at: how much of the Sun's heat escapes to space as the Earth's surface warms?

Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, knows more about the atmosphere than anyone else. The Professor - a gently-spoken, bespectacled, bearded man surrounded by collapsing shelves piled high with scientific books and papers - has carefully identified 13 recent periods when global mean sea-surface temperature rose or fell by enough to eliminate any statistical "noise" that might confuse the picture.

For each period, he noted the changes in outgoing solar energy, as recorded by the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment satellite. His results show that outgoing solar heat from the Earth's surface is escaping to space much as always.

In effect, the Professor has measured the warming we can expect in response to the doubling of CO2 concentration predicted for this century. His answer: 0.5-0.8 °C, in line with our 0.7 C°.

The science, then, is settled. The only remaining question is whether the UN has exaggerated this century's warming 2.5 or 5 times over. Strictly speaking, the ERBE satellite data should be gathered in 36-day cycles only, because it has unusual orbital characteristics that may have affected the measurement.

At most, though, we are looking at less than 1.5 C° of warming this century. Even the UN admits this is safe. But our own experiment comparing the naked with the well-clothed Earth is not the only result suggesting a very low "climate sensitivity" to CO2.

David Douglass and Robert Knox, Physics professors both, have recently published a paper showing no net heat gain in the world's oceans for 68 years. Yet it is settled science that if CO2 had a very strong warming effect nearly all the heat energy trapped in the atmosphere must end up in the oceans. It is not there.

Professor Douglass has also shown that the tropical upper air, where the UN's computer models all predict a tripling of the surface warming rate, warms no faster than the surface.

Dr. Garth Paltridge has just explained why. The extra water vapour that "global warming" puts in the air subsides from the upper troposphere to lower altitudes where it causes little warming. Without the tropical upper-troposphere "hot-spot", the warming effect of all greenhouse gases is minuscule.

Dr. Roy Spencer, an expert on weather satellites, has measured the extra cloud cover that forms in response to "global warming". The UN imagines, wrongly, that more clouds mean more warming. However, the additional clouds bounce more sunlight harmlessly to space, so this century's CO2 doubling will cause just 0.6 C° of warming.

Scott Armstrong, a forecasting specialist, reports that long-term forecasts assuming extra CO2 has no warming effect are better than forecasts assuming the large effect imagined by the UN, so doubling CO2 concentration would cause 0.5 C° of warming.

However, let us pretend that the latest science is wrong and the UN is right. Will cutting emissions prevent "global warming"?

There are 388 parts per million of CO2 in the air. Worldwide emissions add just 2 ppmv each year. Using the UN's formula - 4.7 times the logarithm of 390/388 - global CO2 emissions cause less than one-fortieth of a Celsius degree of warming each year.

To forestall just 1C° of warming, we'd have to shut down the entire global economy for 40 years, flinging us back to the Stone Age but without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in our caves. Since the UN has exaggerated CO2's warming effect fivefold, make that 200 years.

There is no need to curb CO2 emissions. Even if there were, mitigation could never be cost-effective. Adaptation as and if necessary will be orders of magnitude less costly and more effective.

The correct policy response to the non-problem of "global warming" is to junk the Copenhagen draft, close the UN's climate panel, and have the courage to do nothing.

The science is in, the truth is out, and the scare is over.

Read the draft Copenhagen Treaty at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org

Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
for Money Morning Australia