Climate sensitivity: Warmists miss by a factor of 682?

I have maintained for some time now that the effects of CO2 on the planet’s temperature are insignificant, no more than a pimple on an elephant’s butt. CO2 was chosen as a stalking horse to enable warmists to surreptitiously level an attack on humanity via elimination of fossil fuels, our lifeblood. It’s people that they want gone. 

Much of the debate surrounding CO2 is about what is referred to as “climate sensitivity”, or the amount of warming that would occur with a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Typically measurements of atmospheric CO2 start before the industrial revolution, in the late 1700s, at 280ppm (parts per million), so that a doubling would be 560ppm, which by my calculations will happen in 35-40 years at current rates. (We are currently at about 422 ppm, or stated otherwise, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 is .0422, or .000422 if stated as a decimal. It is but a trace molecule, blown up by warmists to T-Rex proportion. 

Before we dissect the above graph, I want to cite AI, which these days bleeds over anything I try to use a search engine for … this is AI describing IPCC Climate Models. 

While some models projected less warming than we’ve experienced and some projected more, all showed surface temperature increases between 1970 and 2016 that were not too far off from what actually occurred, particularly when differences in assumed future emissions are taken into account.

That last sentence fragment, beginning with “particularly”, makes no sense. It is saying if we can know what is not known, we will be right. The ultimate claim to being right by the warmists is that it will happen … down the road. 

The spaghetti lines in the graph are the various climate models in use by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The bright red line is the average of all of them.  Note that there is only one model that in the period 2000-2016 that projected less warming. Only one – AI says “some less” and “some more.” AI is not being straight with us. 

Below the spaghetti are observational data. Blue squares are satellite data, green circles are weather balloon data. Diamonds appear to be an average of satellite and balloon observations. Note the faint gray line that goes through the satellite and balloon data. That is, as far as I know, the Russian climate model, and is dead on versus observed temperatures. At least one group of scientists knows what they are doing: the Russians.

See now that AI tells us that the Climate models are “not too far off”. They appear to me to be … what’s the scientific term to use here? . I think it is wayway … they are way way off. But because climate change is a rigged game played by insiders, actual data plays no role in policy debates. Only IPCC models do. Governments around the world are basing policy on models that have no bearing on reality. Hence, we have spent trillions tilting at windmills and planting solar gardens, all for no purpose. Stick that in your EV and, using fossil fuels of course, charge it. 

Back to climate sensitivity. The temperature of the planet has increased by 1.1 degree Celsius in the last 144 years, this according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA but I would venture reliable in this regard – there has been very little warming going on. When I woke up this morning it was 50 degrees outside. Now it is 77  – that’s a 2.8 degree Celsius rise in maybe four hours. Is that frightening? Neither is 1.1 degree Celsius warming over 144 years even slightly scary. 

The planet does not actually have a measurable temperature, by the way. All they can do is average, and what they choose to average makes it all subjective. But it is all we have, and if they do not change the components of their average, then movement up or down has some meaning. 

I was handed a scientific paper by a gentleman, 14 pages long entitled “Exact Formulas for Estimating the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of Rocky Planets & Moons  to Total Solar Irradiance, Absorbed Shortwave  Radiation, Planetary Albedo and Surface Atmospheric Pressure“, by Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. and Karl Zeller, Ph.D. If you’re intimidated by that title, join my club. But over the years I have made it a point to dive into things that are over my head. The Car Talk chicken soup provider agrees. His name is Kent Hoight. 

To be clear, the math in this paper is intimidating. I cannot do that kind of ciphering. What this means is that I have to follow Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) and trust that they got the math right. In other words, I am blindly following experts. I hope that is OK if I admit it up front and leave myself open to both criticism and correction. Thus do I jump to a conclusion from the paper [with brackets containing my interjections]:

The above estimate of Earth’s ECS [Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity] to total pressure (0.161 K/kPa) can be used to calculate the response of global surface temperature to a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ compared to a preindustrial level of 280 ppm. According to the Nikolov-Zeller discovery about the adiabatic [a process without transfer of heat to or from a system] nature of the atmospheric thermal effect, a change in the amount of any gas in the atmosphere (including CO₂) impacts global temperature only through the contribution of such a change to total surface air pressure. In other words, what matters for the global thermal environment at the surface is the partial pressure of gases, not their infrared radiative properties [all of “greenhouse effect” science is about infrared radiative properties]. Thus, a 280 ppm increase of atmospheric CO₂ implies a 0.0276 kPa increase of surface air pressure (i.e. 98.55*280/10⁶ = 0.0276 kPa). [kPa is a unit of measurement for pressure and stress, specifically in the International System of Units (SI). It is defined as one thousand pascals.] Multiplying this perturbation by the ECS to pressure yields the true response of our planet’s global surface temperature to a CO₂ doubling: 0.0276*0.161 = 0.0044 K [Kelvin]. This amount of global warming is practically undetectable. Hence, current climate models overestimate the Earth’s global temperature sensitivity to atmospheric CO₂ about 682 times or by 68,100% on average (i.e. 3.0/0.0044 = 681.8). (Emphasis added.)

(3.0 degrees centigrade, seen on that last line (3.0/0.0044) is typically the effect cited by climate alarmists as the sensitivity of our temperature to a doubling of CO2.)

That is, in the opinions of NZ, the state of Climate Science today not just wrong, but stupendously wrong. How do they pull off such ineptitude? They use propaganda techniques. They claim there is a scientific “consensus” when there is none. They say their theories are “proven” when they are anything but. They fill the airwaves with wild predictions that never come true, keeping everyone off balance. They punish anyone who disagrees with them and demonize skeptics as “deniers”. Thus has propaganda always worked, from the days of Edward Bernays and through Jacques Ellul forward. 

What to do? Like the proles of Stalin’s Soviet Union, we can merely look at our shoes while “experts” carry on. We can speak up and then be drowned out or shouted down. We can wait for it to blow over, but frankly, this movement is so powerful and well-funded that is self-perpetuating. Children in school are indoctrinated in Climate Change, and students in high school and college study it, go into it, as if it were all real, when it is all fake. (I wonder if somewhere, perhaps Hillsdale College, where real science is preserved for future generations?)

We can only do so much, which is so little, to keep the truth alive, to call them on their errors, to call out sheeple who go along telling them to get better information. They get really angry when called out, as hypocrites would. They have no science to stand on, so they refuse to debate any who disagree with them. They stroke one another, meet with one another, review one another’s work, and pass on each other’s mistakes and miscalculated projections. 

Steve McIntyre is a skeptic’s skeptic, a very smart man well-versed in statistics. He’s a former mining engineer. I bring him up because I got a great kick out of how he closed a recent critique on his blog, A group of climate scientists, Esper et al, had published a paper that basically reworked MBH98, the original Hockey Stick. McIntyre was having none of it. Here’s his conclusion:

And, at the end of the day, Esper et al (2024) is best described as climate pornography.  In the premier modern journal for climate pornography: Nature. And while climate partisans (and scientists) pretend to read the articles and the fine print, in reality, they, like Penthouse readers in the 1980s, are only interested in the centerfold. In the present case, an air brushed hockey stick diagram. A diagram that raises the same question that Penthouse readers asked back in the day: real or fake?