Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah

Ok, all the wacky news about Lord Monckton is quickly becoming too much to remember!  But alas, I don’t feel inclined to let this kind of juicy stuff slip into the oblivion of forgetfulness, so I’ve created a new permanent page called “Lord Monckton’s Rap Sheet“.  I’ve kicked it off with quite a few examples, but feel free to fill in any blanks I’ve left by posting comments.  I’ll update the page as more information comes out.

In my last post, I took apart a single paragraph in Lord Christopher Monckton’s recent testimony to a committee of the U.S. Congress.  This paragraph had to do with natural variations in solar radiation, and I showed that 1)  Monckton had problems citing the appropriate literature to back his factual claims, and 2) the data he alluded to actually support a conclusion directly opposed to the one he wanted his readers to draw.  That is, variation in incoming solar radiation simply cannot explain the last 40-60 years of global warming.  This time I decided to hit the entire rest of the section where that first paragraph appeared.  The intent of this section of Monckton’s testimony was to convince his audience that “neither global mean surface temperature nor its rates of change in recent decades have been exceptional, unusual, inexplicable, or unprecedented.”  Here is the entire text.

Global mean surface temperature: Throughout most of the past 550 million years, global temperatures were ~7 K (13 F°) warmer than the present. In each of the past four interglacial warm periods over the past 650,000 years, temperatures were warmer than the present by several degrees (A.A. Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006).

In the current or Holocene warm period, which began 11,400 years ago at the abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas cooling event, some 7500 years were warmer than the present (Cuffey & Clow, 1997), and, in particular, the medieval, Roman, Minoan, and Holocene Climate Optima were warmer than the present (Cuffey & Clow, 1997).

The “global warming” that ceased late in 2001 (since when there has been a global cooling trend for eight full years) had begun in 1695, towards the end of the Maunder Minimum, a period of 70 years from 1645-1715 when the Sun was less active than at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004). Solar activity increased with a rapidity unprecedented in the Holocene, reaching a Grand Solar Maximum during a period of 70 years from 1925-1995 when the Sun was very nearly as active as it had been at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Usoskin, 2003; Solanki, 2005).

The first instrumental record of global temperatures was kept in Central England from 1659. From 1695-1735, a period of 40 years preceding the onset of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, temperatures in central England, which are a respectable proxy for global temperatures, rose by 2.2 K (4 F°). Yet global temperatures have risen by only 0.65 K (1.2 F°) since 1950, and 0.7 K (1.3 F°) in the whole of the 20th century.  Throughout the 21st century, global temperatures have followed a declining trend.  Accordingly, neither global mean surface temperature nor its rates of change in recent decades have been exceptional, unusual, inexplicable, or unprecedented.

Let’s dissect Monckton’s argument and see what there is to it.  As usual, I’ll make sure to give His Lordship credit whenever I find that he has gotten something right, or even in the ballpark.

1. Lord Monckton claims, “Throughout most of the past 550 million years, global temperatures were ~7 K (13 F°) warmer than the present.”  He gives no source for this claim, so it’s difficult to tell whether he is accurately representing anyone’s work.  But from what I could find out, the 7 K figure is probably an exaggeration.  Still, in a qualitative sense Monckton’s point is correct–the Earth was considerably warmer during much of the distant past.  The evidence from paleoclimate studies shows, however, that CO2 is an important driver of climate change, and the issue with human-induced climate change is how rapidly we are likely to be driving climatic conditions toward states the Earth likely hasn’t seen in millions and millions of years.

I found the following article when I looked for estimates of global temperature over the last 550 million years (i.e., the Phanerozoic Eon, in terms of the geologic time scale.)

Royer et al. (2004) CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate, GSA Today, v. 14, no. 3, pp. 4-10.

Royer et al. (2004) reconstructed shallow ocean temperatures over the Phanerozoic, and the graph in Figure 1 shows their results.  (The black and orange lines are the ones to look at.)  In this graph, each data point is averaged over 10 million years.  Since I don’t know what the present global average temperature is relative to the past 10 million years, I don’t really know whether the temperature change values in the graph should be adjusted up or down a little.  However, even if we adjusted the curves up a couple degrees, it would still be a stretch to claim that it was 7 degrees warmer than the present over most of the last 550 million years.  Qualitatively, however, it has to be admitted that the Earth has been a few degrees warmer during much of the distant past.

Figure 1. Reconstruction of shallow marine temperatures over the Phanerozoic Eon, taken from Fig. 4 of Royer et al. (2004). The black and orange lines represent their final estimates, corrected for pH effects on the proxy temperature indicator they used.

Although I looked up Royer et al. (2004) because I was trying to find temperature estimates for the last several hundred million years, I should point out that the major thrust of the article was to show that CO2 has been a primary climate driver over that period, contrary to Monckton’s implication that variation in solar radiation is doing nearly all the work.  In fact, Royer and colleagues published another paper in 2007 (see Royer et al., Climate Sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years, Nature, v. 446, pp. 530-532,) in which they used long-term reconstructions of temperature and atmospheric CO2 to show that “a climate sensitivity greater than 1.5 °C has probably been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate system over the past 420 million years, regardless of temporal scaling.”  In other words, the global mean temperature rises by at least 1.5 °C if you double CO2 concentration–any less is highly unlikely, according to their analysis.  Later in his testimony, Monckton argues that climate sensitivity must be much less than this.

There are two more problems with Monckton’s argument.  First, the climate scientists are not arguing that a few degrees difference in temperature one way or another is inherently “bad.”  Rather, as I mentioned in my last post, humans now appear to be affecting climate in such a way that we are experiencing sustained warming, even when the natural forcings (like variations in solar radiation) are pushing it in the opposite direction.  When the natural forcings inevitably start pushing toward more warming, the climate will heat up even more rapidly.  Our knowledge of climate history shows that sustained climate change can bring us to “tipping points” where the changes become even more rapid.  Even if “change” isn’t necessarily bad, exceptionally rapid change can cause all sorts of problems.  E.g., humans and other organisms might have to move to survive if climate conditions change, sea level rapidly rises, and so on.  This will be expensive and disruptive for humans–I expect wars will be fought over it.  It could be much more traumatic for many other organisms, however.  What happens when animals have to migrate to new areas, but the plants they depend on can’t move fast enough to keep up with shifting climate zones?  The animals’ habitat shrinks, that’s what.

Second, do we really want to push the climate into Paleozoic conditions over one or two hundred years, for Pete’s sake?  Present-day ecosystems are not adapted to those conditions, but for the sake of illustration, check out the graph of sea level over the last 550 million years in Figure 2, which I swiped from here.

Figure 2. Sea level during the Phanerozoic Eon (i.e., the last 550 million years), taken from here.

In the past 550 million years, especially during those warm periods Lord Monckton is so fond of, sea level has sometimes been more than 200 m higher than it is now!  Now, I’m not saying that the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are necessarily going to collapse, so that sea level suddenly rises 10′s or 100′s of meters in the next one or two hundred years.  I am simply pointing out that there is a lot of unpredictable baggage that comes along with bumping the global average temperature up a few degrees, especially if the change occurs relatively quickly.

So in this single sentence, Monckton has again given us a statistic that is possibly in the ballpark of accuracy, but he expects his audience to draw a conclusion from it (i.e., it’s ok to cause global warming) that is overly simplistic, to put it mildly.

Unfortunately, that’s the best thing I have to say about this section of Monckton’s testimony.  The rest is incompetent nonsense.

2. Monckton cites more temperature statistics to show that current temperatures and rates of global temperature change aren’t out of the ordinary in the more recent past.  In no case are these statistics “global” in nature, however, and the “local” data he points to does not support his point.

Lord Monckton next cites Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, to support his claim that, “In each of the past four interglacial warm periods over the past 650,000 years, temperatures were warmer than the present by several degrees.”  Al Gore did show a temperature graph for the past 650,000 years, but that originated with ice core isotopic data from Antarctica, as found in this paper:  Siegenthaler et al., Stable carbon cycle–climate relationship during the late Pleistocene, Science, v. 310, pp. 1313–1317.  In Figure 3, I have plotted reconstructed temperature over the last 650,000 years from the EPICA Dome C ice core, which is one of the ice cores used for Gore’s graph.  Notice that during the last four warm episodes, the temperature got 3-5 °C hotter than it is now.  Was Monckton right?

Figure 3. Temperature reconstruction from the EPICA Dome C ice core (Antarctica). The data were taken from here.

The problem is that this temperature reconstruction is only good for Antarctica, and the global average temperature difference between the present and the last four interglacials is probably quite a bit less.  For example, the IPCC says that “The largest temperature changes of the past million years are the glacial cycles, during which the global mean temperature changed by 4°C to 7°C between ice ages and warm interglacial periods (local changes were much larger, for example near the continental ice sheets).”  Meanwhile, Figure 3 shows that Antarctic temperatures swings during the glacial-interglacial cycles were about 8-15 °C, which is double the estimated global average.  It seems very unlikely, then, that the difference between present global average temperature and those of the last 4 interglacial peaks was more than a couple °C, or so–hardly the “several degrees” Monckton wants us to buy into.

Monckton moves on to the past 11,400 years (the current interglacial period) and tells us that there have been several times when the Earth was warmer than the present during that period.  The only literature he cites is a 1997 paper by Cuffey and Clow.  Here’s the full citation, which Monckton failed to provide–Cuffey and Clow (1997) Temperature, accumulation, and ice sheet elevation in central Greenland through the last deglacial transition, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 102, pp. 26,383-26,396.  Notice the title?  Once again, Monckton has mistaken local climate variation (this time in central Greenland) for global variation.  The IPCC warns,

[L]ocal changes must not be confused with global changes. Local climate changes are often much larger than global ones, since local factors (e.g., changes in oceanic or atmospheric circulation) can shift the delivery of heat or moisture from one place to another and local feedbacks operate (e.g., sea ice feedback). Large changes in global mean temperature, in contrast, require some global forcing (such as a change in greenhouse gas concentration or solar activity).

This is even more true of a place like Greenland than others, because global temperature changes are amplified in the Arctic relative to other places on the globe, including Antarctica.  The huge Southern Ocean acts as a heat sink and dampens temperature changes around Antarctica.

But what about the essence of Monckton’s point, i.e., that global temperatures were often warmer than the present over the past 11,400 years?  Was he right, even if he cited the wrong paper?  Again, the IPCC summarized the state of the evidence:

Temperature is a more difficult variable to reconstruct than CO₂ (a globally well-mixed gas), as it does not have the same value all over the globe, so that a single record (e.g., an ice core) is only of limited value. Local temperature fluctuations, even those over just a few decades, can be several degrees celsius, which is larger than the global warming signal of the past century of about 0.7°C.

More meaningful for global changes is an analysis of large-scale (global or hemispheric) averages, where much of the local variation averages out and variability is smaller. Sufficient coverage of instrumental records goes back only about 150 years. Further back in time, compilations of proxy data from tree rings, ice cores, etc., go back more than a thousand years with decreasing spatial coverage for earlier periods (see Section 6.5). While there are differences among those reconstructions and significant uncertainties remain, all published reconstructions find that temperatures were warm during medieval times, cooled to low values in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and warmed rapidly after that. The medieval level of warmth is uncertain, but may have been reached again in the mid-20th century, only to have likely been exceeded since then. These conclusions are supported by climate modelling as well. Before 2,000 years ago, temperature variations have not been systematically compiled into large-scale averages, but they do not provide evidence for warmer-than-present global annual mean temperatures going back through the Holocene (the last 11,600 years; see Section 6.4). There are strong indications that a warmer climate, with greatly reduced global ice cover and higher sea level, prevailed until around 3 million years ago. Hence, current warmth appears unusual in the context of the past millennia, but not unusual on longer time scales for which changes in tectonic activity (which can drive natural, slow variations in greenhouse gas concentration) become relevant (see Box 6.1).

Did you get that?  We just don’t have data that is complete enough to back up the assertion that there have been warmer global average temperatures in the last 11,600 years.  Sure, scientists can make some rough estimates, as we’ve seen above with estimates of global average shallow ocean temperatures over the past 550 million years and of the swings in global average temperatures during the glacial and interglacial periods.  But when we’re talking about temperature swings of only about 1 °C, we don’t yet have enough data to make such fine distinctions on a global scale further back than the past 1-2 thousand years.

Lord Monckton might counter that we shouldn’t trust the IPCC, because it is controlled by the Commies.  (I’m not joking.)  But Monckton isn’t a scientist himself, so he hasn’t done his own paleoclimate studies to challenge the IPCC.  Instead, he claimed the 1997 paper by Cuffey and Clow supports his assertion about the temperature history of the last 11,400 years.  So what about Cuffey and Clow?  Do they think their data on the temperature history of central Greenland  is sufficient to justify sweeping claims like Monckton’s?

It turns out that Kurt Cuffey, a geography professor at UC Berkeley, has gone on record about just this kind of issue.  Cuffey was a member of the National Academy of Science panel that evaluated the science behind Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” reconstruction of temperatures over the past two thousand years.  They found that the science behind the “hockey stick” was basically sound, but noted that uncertainties become larger and larger as we go back in time.  Commenting on the NAS report in this news article, Cuffey noted that the problem is lack of geographic coverage as you go further back in time.

“The picture is much murkier before 1600 and considerably murkier when you go further back in time,” said committee member Kurt Cuffey, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “We start losing sources of information … and start relying more and more on data from fewer and fewer geographic locations.”

That’s right.  Kurt Cuffey said exactly what the IPCC did about the danger of using local climate data to draw conclusions about global averages.   (And if you want to delve even deeper into Kurt Cuffey’s opinions about climate change, read this article, in which he states, “There is now no reasonable doubt that atmospheric pollution is causing global warming, and this warming is strong enough to have serious consequences in the next century.”)

But lack of relevant data has never stopped Lord Monckton from pontificating about climate change!  If he doesn’t have the right data, all he has to do is find some that he can pretend is relevant.  Which brings me to his use of the Central England temperature record (CET).

Although we can only reconstruct decent global average temperatures back to about 1850, a few localities have much longer records of temperature measurements.  Of these, the CET the longest, going back to 1659.  Once again, is Central England the entire globe?  Of course not, but at least this time Monckton acknowledges the problem of using a local temperature record by claiming that the CET is “a respectable proxy for global temperatures.”  What does he mean by that?  Normally, if I were to say that data X is “a respectable proxy” for data Y, it would mean that given data X, I could perform some simple mathematical operation on it to obtain a reasonable estimate of data Y.  Can we do that?

In Figure 4, I have plotted both the HadCRUT3 annual global mean surface temperature, as well as the CET record.  Note that over the period covered by both records (1880-present), they show similar overall trends over multiple decades.  So it might be reasonable to say that if the CET was going up over a fairly long time period, the global average temperature was probably going up, too.  However, the figure also clearly shows that the local CET temperature varies a lot more than the global average.  A LOT more.  (Imagine that–the IPCC was right!)

Figure 4. HadCRUT3 annual global mean temperature anomaly and the CET temperature anomaly plotted together. Note that both sets show similar long-term trends, but the CET (being a local record) oscillates over a much wider range.

But can we make a simple mathematical model to predict the global temperature anomaly from the CET?  Figure 5 shows the HadCRUT3 anomaly plotted vs. the CET anomaly for 1880-2002.  If the CET anomaly were really such a good “proxy” for the global mean temperature, the data on the graph would cluster about a line, rather than looking like a shotgun blast.  Just to be a little more quantitative, I also fit a linear regression model to the data and calculated 95% confidence limits, which turn out to be +/- 0.4 °C.  That means that, at least over the period where we have both sets of data, we can use the CET anomaly to predict the global mean temperature anomaly, and be 95% confident that the true global mean value is within a 0.8 °C range around the answer the regression equation predicts.  Since the global mean only varied over a range of about 1.1 °C during that period, I’d say that the CET is pretty darn useless for predicting the global mean temperature.

In fact, Jones and Mann (2004, Climate over past millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, v. 42, RG2002) also compared the CET and similar records from localities in Europe with the 1850-present Northern Hemisphere (NH) average, and found that, “The principal conclusion that can be drawn… is that NH averages clearly cannot be inferred from a single region.”

Figure 5. The annual global mean temperature anomaly from the HadCRUT3 data set is plotted vs. the CET temperature anomaly for 1880-2002. The HadCRUT3 data was obtained here, and the CET data was obtained here.

If the CET has varied so much more than the global average, what can we do with Monckton’s comparison between the two?  He said, “From 1695-1735… [the CET] rose by 2.2 K (4 F°). Yet global temperatures have risen by only 0.65 K (1.2 F°) since 1950, and 0.7 K (1.3 F°) in the whole of the 20th century.”  Well… nothing.  Temperatures in central England (or pretty much any specific locality) vary a lot more than the global average… period.  So what?

3. Lord Monckton claims that global temperatures have been declining “throughout the 21st century.”  But even if he’s right, 10 years is not enough to statistically establish climatic trends.

This brings me to Monckton’s final statement that, “Throughout the 21st century, global temperatures have followed a declining trend.”  Really?  I actually calculate a positive slope in the GISTEMP and HadCRUT3 temperature anomaly series over 2000-2009.  And even if the slope were negative over such a short time period (like it was from 2002-2009,) who cares?  Even if you don’t know enough statistics to realize that it usually takes at least 15 years of data to get a statistically significant trend in global average temperature data, you can still eyeball Figure 6.  Look at the period from 1979-2009, where there is clearly a strong upward trend in the temperature.  The fact is that, even during that 30 years, there have been several multi-year periods where the trend was downward.  (See Fig. 2 of my last post for a more quantitative treatment of this.)  Can you really look at the data and say that we’re on a different overall trend than we have been for the last 30 years?

Figure 6. Annual global average temperature anomaly from the GISTEMP and HadCRUT3 data sets.

The Bottom Line

I have examined the section on “global mean surface temperature” in Lord Christopher Monckton’s recent testimony before Congress.  Monckton attempted to convince his audience that past global average temperatures have been warmer than the present and global warming trends have been steeper in the recent past.  I find, however, that he has used various local temperature records to make sweeping, unjustified claims about global averages.  In fact, both the IPCC and one of the authors of a study Monckton cites have warned that this is notoriously bad practice.

Recently, Prof. John Abraham criticized Lord Christopher Monckton for citing scads of scientific papers to back up his opinions about climate change, but when Abraham actually looked into those papers, it often turned out they didn’t support Monckton’s conclusions, or they even contradicted those conclusions.  Prof. Abraham also criticized Monckton for improper citation of others’ work and data, often making it difficult to figure out where he was getting his information.

Given his rap sheet (including numerous infractions mentioned on this blog), I thought it would be fun to start examining Lord Monckton’s recent testimony before a committee of the U.S. Congress.  What if I were to scan through the document, randomly pick one of Monckton’s claims that I don’t know much about, and start investigating the literature he cites?  Would I find that he makes reasonable points, or that he has continued his nearly unblemished record of propagating scientific-sounding nonsense?  Tim Lambert has already shown that Monckton’s testimony was flamboyantly incompetent about three issues (solar brightening, ocean acidification, and Snowball Earth), so I picked another topic that has to do with variations in the radiation output of the Sun.  Here’s what Monckton said about it.

The “global warming” that ceased late in 2001 (since when there has been a global cooling trend for eight full years) had begun in 1695, towards the end of the Maunder Minimum, a period of 70 years from 1645-1715 when the Sun was less active than at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004). Solar activity increased with a rapidity unprecedented in the Holocene, reaching a Grand Solar Maximum during a period of 70 years from 1925-1995 when the Sun was very nearly as active as it had been at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Usoskin, 2003; Solanki, 2005).

The point of rattling off these statistics is obvious, and it has to do with something called Total Solar Irradiance (TSI), which is essentially the amount of radiation from the Sun reaching the Earth’s upper atmosphere..  If we have moved from a period with exceptionally low TSI into a period of exceptionally high TSI, then maybe humans pumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere aren’t really to blame for the recent warming trend.  If it’s all Nature’s fault, why bother trying to fix it?  Monckton urged members of the U.S. Congress to have “the courage to do nothing” about climate change.

In the remainder of this post, I’ll take apart Monckton’s argument and point out a few things he got right, and others he got wrong.  [SPOILER ALERT:  The final result is classic Monckton.]  ;-)

1. Monckton cites three scientific papers to back up his claims, but makes it unreasonably difficult to find those papers.

At the beginning of every talk I’ve seen Lord Monckton give, he tells his audience, “You must not believe a word I say.”  Instead, they should meticulously check for themselves on all his claims!  Well, to do that we have to be able to find the literature he cites.  Even if we admit that standards for literature citations in oral presentations are generally a little loose, even among scientists, shouldn’t we expect Monckton to include at least the journal name, volume, and first page number when he submits a written testimony to the Congressional Record?  Unfortunately, all he gives us is:  ”(Hathaway, 2004; Usoskin, 2003; Solanki, 2005)”.  He doesn’t provide the traditional reference list at the end of the paper, or even footnotes.

Well, I’m a trained scientist, used to tracking down scientific literature, so I took the time to hunt them down.  Here are the papers that seem to be the most likely candidates.  (Lord Monckton is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong).

Hathaway, D.H. and Wilson, R.M. (2004) What the sunspot record tells us about space climate, Solar Physics, v. 224, pp. 5-19.

Usoskin, I.G., Solanki, S.K., Schüssler, M., Mursula, K., and Alanko, K. (2003) Millennium-scale sunspot number reconstruction:  Evidence for an unusually active sun since the 1940s, Physical Review Letters, v. 91, article # 211101.

Solanki, S.K., Usoskin, I.G., Kromer, B., Schüssler, M., and Beer, J. (2005) Reply to R. Muscheler et al., Nature, v. 436, pp. E4-E5.

There was another 2005 paper with Solanki as the first author (Solanki et al., Irradiance models, Advances in Space Research, v. 35, pp. 376-383.)  However, it doesn’t seem to provide direct support for any of Monckton’s points.

2. Monckton says that recent “global warming” began over 300 years ago, but that the globe has been cooling for “eight full years”. There’s no way around it–this is just a stupid comment, even if it is factually correct-ish.

Let’s look at factual correctness, first.  Thermometers haven’t been around for more than a few hundred years, and people have been taking regular temperature readings all around the globe for even less time.  Therefore, we can only reliably reconstruct an “instrumental” (thermometer-based) global average temperature since about 1850.  To estimate temperatures back farther than that, we have to use temperature “proxies,” i.e., other types of time-calibrated data that we can use to estimate what temperatures must have been like in the more distant past.  There are a number of different temperature proxies, including tree ring densities and borehole temperature profiles.

And what do we get from these temperature proxies?  Figure 1 shows a graph that is part of Fig. 6.10 from the latest IPCC report (AR4 WG1).  The top graph in the figure shows the instrumental temperature record for the Northern Hemisphere, and the bottom graph shows a number of different proxy temperature reconstructions (using different types of data, different statistical techniques, and so on) for the last 1300 years.

Figure 1. Part of Fig. 6.10 from the 2007 IPCC report (Working Group 1). a) Instrumental temperature records. b) Proxy temperature records of various types with the instrumental temperature record overlain as the dark black line.

Obviously, the proxy temperature reconstructions back before the instrumental record don’t give exactly the same answers, but they all show roughly the same picture of how temperatures evolved over that time period.  Furthermore, several of the proxy records show that the temperature was pulling out of a dip around the end of the 17th century, just like Monckton said.  Fixing the start of the recent warming trend to the year 1695 is ridiculous, however, because the data just aren’t that precise!  And furthermore, the instrumental record shows that there were multi-decade dips in the temperature during the last half of the 19th century and the mid-20th century.

So I guess one could say that we’ve generally been warming since 1695 (or thereabouts,) but if there have been multi-decade cooling trends since then, it makes absolutely no sense to contrast “eight full years” of cooling with a 300+ year warming trend.  In fact, even over the past 30 years, during which climate scientists agree there has been a pretty consistent warming trend, there have been other 8-year periods of cooling.  Figure 2 shows a graph of the slope of the global average temperature (from NASA’s GISTEMP and the UK’s HadCRUT3 data sets) over 8-year periods starting with the year plotted.  That is, the point plotted above the year 2002 is the slope over the 8-year period 2002-2009, and so on.  All the points that lie below zero on the y-axis represent 8-year periods in which there was an overall cooling trend.  Note that several points (not just the last couple) have negative slopes, and each of those represents an 8-year period during which there was net global cooling, even though most of the time the overall trend from 1979-2009 was warming.

Figure 2. 8-year slopes in the global average temperature over the past 30 years, for the GISTEMP and HadCRUT3 data sets. Each data point represents the slope in the data during an 8-year period starting with the year plotted. E.g., the point for the year 2002 represents the slope of the temperature data during 2002-2009.

Monckton’s comparison may be a bit weird, and he definitely gives undue precision to the dates he recites, but what about his main reason for bringing it up?  If the recent warming trend began before the Industrial Revolution, then it can’t be due to humans burning fossil fuels, right?

Well of course that’s right–at least partially–and certainly no self-respecting climate scientist would deny it.  Consider Figure 3, which shows a graph taken from Fig. 1 of FAQ 9.2 in the 2007 IPCC Report (Working Group 1).  The black line in the figure shows the actual evolution of the global mean temperature over the 20th century. The blue band shows the range of predictions for the temperature evolution given by the IPCC’s climate models if you only drive the model system with natural factors like changes in solar output, volcanic activity, and so on. The pink band shows what the models predict if you add in human factors like increased greenhouse gas concentrations from fossil fuel burning.

Figure 3. Taken from Fig. 1 of FAQ 9.2 in IPCC AR4 (Working Group 1). The black line shows the actual evolution of the global mean temperature over the 20th century. The blue band shows the range of predictions for the temperature evolution given by the IPCC's climate models if you only drive the system with natural factors like changes in solar output, volcanic activity, and so on. The pink band shows what the models predict if you add in human factors like increased greenhouse gas concentrations from fossil fuel burning.

You should notice a couple things about the graph in Figure 3.  First, given all the known climate drivers (the pink band), the IPCC climate models do a decent job of mimicking the temperature evolution over the 20th century.  But they don’t do such a good job over the last half of the 20th century when you don’t include human causes (the blue band).  Second, the blue and pink bands stop overlapping one another after about 1975, so the predictions for all natural vs. natural + human causes have really diverged by then.  I think it’s fair to say, therefore, that the climate scientists who put this graph in the IPCC report would have no problem attributing climate change before about 1950-1975 mainly to natural factors like variations in TSI.

So really, Monckton’s point is worthless unless he can show that the IPCC climate models can’t adequately reproduce the global temperature evolution over the past 300 years.  Since he didn’t show that, I can only assume that Lord Monckton was playing to the large segment of the public that erroneously believes the IPCC says humans are the ONLY thing driving climate change.

3. Lord Monckton next says that during 1645-1715 the sun was less active than at any other time in the last 11,400 years, and cites “Hathaway, 2004″ to support this claim.  This paper (see above for the full reference) actually talks about what the sunspot record tells us about TSI over the last 400 years, not 11,400.

The number of sunspots (averaged over a number of years) has been shown to correlate pretty well with TSI.  Since we haven’t had satellites to measure TSI for very long, we can extend our record of TSI back further by looking at records of sunspot observations, which have been carried out for about the last 400 years.  The article by Hathaway and Wilson does, in fact, show that TSI was very low during the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), but since their paper is all about sunspot numbers they only discuss the past 400 years, not the past 11,400 years.  Here are a couple quotations from the abstract of the paper to illustrate my point.

The records concerning the number, sizes, and positions of sunspots provide a direct means of characterizing solar activity over nearly 400 years….

The sunspot record shows… there has been a significant secular increase in the amplitudes of the sunspot cycles since the end of the Maunder Minimum (1715).

Let’s not be too hard on His Lordship, though.  It turns out that Lord Monckton was possibly right about the Maunder Minumum being a low point in the last 11,400 years (see below.)  He just didn’t cite the right paper to back up his claim.

4. Monckton claims that during 1925-1995 solar activity was almost as high as it has ever been in the last 11,4oo years, citing three different papers as evidence (Hathaway, 2004; Usoskin, 2003; Solanki, 2005).  If you dig hard enough in that list, you can actually find evidence for Monckton’s claims!

Once again, it’s a little strange to cite Hathaway’s paper when making a point about the last 11,400 years of solar activity, when the paper only covers the last 400.  It also turns out that the paper by Usoskin et al. only covers the last 1150 years!  But at least the the paper by Solanki et al. does, indeed, refer to solar activity during the last 11,400 years.  And to be fair, I should acknowledge that all of these papers do at least support the point that solar activity has gotten abnormally high over the last hundred years, or so.

The wackiness of Monckton’s citations continues, though, because it turns out that Solanki et al. (2005) is simply a short response to a comment some other scientists made on a paper Solanki’s group published the year before!  You can’t find anything remotely like the statistics Monckton cites in Solanki et al. (2005)  So… if you want to finally track down the evidence that, compared to the last 11,400 years TSI is abnormally high now, and was abnormally low in the Maunder Minimum, you will need to find the following paper:

Solanki, S.K., Usoskin, I.G., Kromer, B., Schüssler, M., and Beer, J. (2004) Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years, Nature, v. 431, pp. 1084-1087.

Here’s what Solanki’s paper is about.  We have only had satellites to directly measure TSI for a few decades, and people have only been counting sunspots for about the last 400 years.  To get estimates of TSI before 400 years ago, scientists turn to cosmogenic isotopes, which are isotopes generated in the atmosphere due to interactions with incoming cosmic rays.  Since TSI affects the amount of incoming cosmic rays, and the amount of cosmic rays affects the amount of cosmogenic isotopes generated, we can estimate variations in TSI by looking at the amounts of various cosmogenic isotopes in features of known age, like tree rings or annual ice layers in glaciers.  Solanki’s group used the amount of C-14 (a cosmogenic isotope) in tree rings of known age to estimate the sunspot number (and hence the TSI) over the last 11,400 years.  The graph in Figure 4 (taken from Fig. 3 of Solanki et al., 2004) summarizes their results.  Here the red line represents the observed sunspot number over the last 400 years, and the blue line represents the reconstructed sunspot number from their tree ring data over the last 11,400 years.

Figure 4. This graph was taken from Fig. 3 of Solanki et al. (2004), shows. The red line represents the observed sunspot number over the last 400 years, and the blue line represents the estimated sunspot number from their C-14 tree ring data over the last 11,400 years.

5. The graph above shows that even if Monckton’s citation style is completely wacky, it turns out that the statistics he quoted were essentially correct!  We are in a period of exceptionally high solar activity, right after a period of exceptionally low activity.

Point conceded, even if I had to go to extraordinary lengths to find out the origin of Monckton’s statistics.

6. However, Monckton has often used the standard climate skeptic’s argument that the “hockey stick” temperature graph used by the IPCC (see the first figure above) was fraudulently transmogrified so that the Medieval Warm Period (about AD 950-1250) is no longer shown to have been warmer than today.  (Click here to read more about the “Hockey Stick Controversy.”)  Solanki’s data stomps that argument into the ground.

Just look at the graph in Figure 5, which is taken from Fig. 2 of Solanki et al. (2004).  It shows measured and estimated sunspot numbers for a little over the last 1000 years, which is about the same time period found in the temperature plots in Figure 1.  And guess what?  Both the temperature plots and the sunspot plots are shaped like… hockey sticks.  This was discussed further by:

Usoskin et al. (2004) Solar activity over the last 1150 years:  Does it correlate with climate? Proceedings of the 13th Cool Stars Workshop, pp. 19-22.

Figure 5. Graph of real and estimated sunspot numbers for the last 1000+ years, taken from Fig. 2 of Solanki et al. (2004).

I find it interesting that someone like Monckton would argue BOTH that the hockey stick temperature graph is a fraud, AND that variations in TSI over the last few hundred years (which look like a hockey stick when graphed) have been the main driver of temperature change.

7.  And yet, even if we grant that all of Monckton’s statistics are factually correct, natural variations in TSI cannot explain the last few decades of global warming, because over that time TSI has been steady while temperature has gone up.  This has been specifically discussed by the very scientists from whom Monckton collected his factoids.

Remember how Monckton cited the 2005 paper by Solanki’s group, but the information Monckton referred to was really in their 2004 paper?  I see two possibilities–either it was a simple typo, or Lord Monckton didn’t actually read Solanki et al. (2004).  If he had even read the abstract of the paper, he would have noticed the following statement.

Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades.  (Solanki et al., 2004)

If Monckton had read on in the paper, he would have found out that Solanki’s group had published a paper in 2003 in which they had analyzed the question of the extent to which variation in TSI can explain the last few decades of climate change.

In ref. 3, [Solanki, S. K., and Krivova, N. (2003) Can solar variability explain global warming since 1970? Journal of Geophysical Research, 108, doi: 10.1029/2002JA009753.] reconstructions of solar total and spectral irradiance as well as of cosmic ray flux were compared with surface temperature records covering approximately 150 years. It was shown that even under the extreme assumption that the Sun was responsible for all the global warming prior to 1970, at the most 30% of the strong warming since then can be of solar origin.

Supposing Monckton didn’t bother to actually read the literature he cites, he could have appealed to Google to find out what Sami Solanki thinks about how his work relates to the climate change debate.  That’s what I did, and I found the following passage in this article from the BBC.

Even though misguided journalists have sometimes mistaken his work as implying a solar cause to modern-day warming, Sami Solanki agrees with the IPCC verdict.

“Since 1970, the cosmic ray flux has not changed markedly while the global temperature has shown a rapid rise,” he says. “And that lack of correlation is proof that the Sun doesn’t cause the warming we are seeing now.”

8. Although Monckton’s statistics were supposed to show us why the IPCC is wrong about humans being responsible for recent global warming, the data from which he got those statistics actually agree quite well with the picture painted by the IPCC.

As Dr. Solanki said, variations in TSI cannot explain much of the warming trend since 1970.  And remember my discussion of Figure 3, which was taken from the IPCC report?  I said that the graph shows the IPCC is only claiming humans have been the main drivers of climate change since sometime around 1950-1975.

So what was the point of Monckton’s recitation of statistics about TSI?  It seems to me that he chose statistics that would sound problematic for the IPCC to laypersons who don’t clearly understand what the IPCC actually claims.  In fact, his statistics are essentially meaningless in that context.

The Bottom Line

I have examined a single paragraph in Lord Monckton’s recent testimony to a committee of the U.S. Congress, in which Monckton cited some statistics about natural variations in incoming solar radiation (TSI) to show that recent global warming can be explained by natural causes.  I show that Monckton’s statistics are correct, but the scientists who originated the data he cites say that the data actually agrees with the IPCC.  Furthermore, I show that Monckton made it exceptionally difficult to check his claims by citing the wrong papers and failing to provide full citations.  These are exactly same kinds of problems John Abraham found in his recent examination of one of Lord Monckton’s presentations.

[UPDATE (June 26, 2010):  I didn't realize it when I posted this, but it turns out that John Abraham has already beat me to the punch on some of my points, because Monckton brought up something similar in his Minnesota presentation that Prof. Abraham critiqued.  Prof. Abraham did a much more thorough literature review than I did--I mainly stuck to the papers Monckton cited in his testimony before Congress--and he went to the trouble of contacting David Hathaway of "Hathaway, 2004" fame.  Here's what Hathaway told him:  “I did not then, nor did I ever, suggest that solar variability plays a dominant role in climate change.”  In any case, in his response to Abraham's critique, Lord Monckton castigated people who wrote with approval about the critique without personally checking all of Abraham's claims.  "As usual though, none of these silly bloggers make any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality." Well, I'd say that I spent considerable time checking this particular point, and even before I realized the overlap, I had verified Abraham's assessment in spades.  I get the impression that Lord Monckton adjures his audiences to check his claims for themselves simply for the dramatic effect.  He doesn't actually expect anyone to do it.]

Some readers may think I have already posted too much about Lord Christopher Monckton.  (See here and here.)  But the fact is that bloggers are expected to be snarky, and for that purpose Monckton is the gift that keeps on giving.  Practically every time he opens his mouth, out pops another lie, half-truth, or blatant distortion.  He lies about his credentials, and he lies about climate science.  The net result is a pile of plausible-sounding nonsense so enormous that it would take an immense effort to document and rebut even half.  Well, people who desire a rational public debate about climate change are getting sick enough of Monckton’s snake oil that, over the past few months, several have taken it upon themselves to start methodically ripping apart his arguments.  If it would amuse you to see His Lordship get a good pistol-whipping, check out the following videos.

1. Tim Lambert, a computer scientist who maintains the popular Deltoid blog, recently debated Lord Monckton in Australia.  The video embedded below is the first of 15 parts of the debate on YouTube.  When you watch it, pay special attention to the end of Part 3 and beginning of Part 4, where Lambert exposes Monckton for misrepresenting the work of one Dr. Pinker.  It’s hilarious.

2. Peter Sinclair, who maintains the excellent Climate Denial Crock of the Week site, has produced a two-part series called “Debunking Lord Monckton”.  It’s beautifully argued, but perhaps most importantly, Sinclair makes fun of Lord Monckton for lavishly dropping Latin phrases to impress the rubes who listen to him.

3. Finally, John Abraham, an Engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas, has taken an enormous amount of time to comb through this presentation that Monckton gave in Minnesota last year.  Prof. Abraham actually checked the references Monckton cited, and contacted the authors to see whether Monckton was fairly representing their work.  Hint:  He wasn’t.  Big surprise.  The following embedded YouTube video is the first of ten parts–the rest of the parts are linked at the end, or you can find the entire presentation on Prof. Abraham’s website.

I mentioned here how the Climate Change Denial Champion for the Republicans in the Utah Legislature was none other than Lord Christopher Monckton.  Well, it turns out that he is also the CCDC for some of the Republicans in Congress.  This morning he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming as the sole “expert” for the minority.  I was encouraged to see one congressman try to slap Monckton down by bringing up that in his last testimony to a Congressional committee, he began by saying, “I BRING fraternal greetings from the Mother of Parliaments to the Congress of your ‘athletic democracy’”.  This congressman (I didn’t hear who it was) asked Monckton when he had ever been a member of the House of Lords (a house of Parliament).  [UPDATE:  It was Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA).]

Monckton correctly pointed out that he is a “Lord.”  (The congressman apparently didn’t understand that point.)  But then, predictably, he tried to wiggle out of his lie by saying,

But, by virtue of the 1999 House of Lords Act, I no longer have the right to sit or vote, that was taken away from my father, so I have never sat or voted in the House of Lords, nor have I ever pretended otherwise.  And I think that really should deal with that matter.

No, Your Lordship, it doesn’t deal with the matter.  The fact is that Monckton has clearly and publicly claimed to be a member of the House of Lords.  In a 2006 letter to Senators John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, he said,

Finally, you may wonder why it is that a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature, wholly unconnected with and unpaid by the corporation that is the victim of your lamentable letter, should take the unusual step of calling upon you as members of the Upper House of the United States legislature either to withdraw what you have written or resign your sinecures.

So, wait a second.  Is he, or isn’t he, a member of the House of Lords (“the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature”)?  The key to detecting Monckton’s evasion is to realize that he claims to be a member of the House of Lords who doesn’t have a seat or vote.  Like a mascot, or something.  In a recent article he explained,

Google me and you’ll find hundreds of enviro-loony websites, such as Wikipedia, now an international music-hall joke for inaccuracy, that call me a fraud (for writing about climate science when I’m not a climate scientist), a plagiarist (for citing learned papers rather than making up scare stories), and a liar (for saying I’m a member of the House of Lords when – er – I’m a member of the House of Lords, though, being merely hereditary, I don’t have a seat there).

However, when I e-mailed the House of Lords Information Office about whether Monckton was some sort of “honorary,” or “non-voting” member, they replied,

Christopher Monckton is not and has never been a Member of the House of Lords. There is no such thing as a “non-voting” or “honorary” member.

(Check out this page for more details and the full text of the reply from the House of Lords Information Office.  Also check out this article in the Salt Lake Tribune, and this one from The Guardian, for details about my experiences with Monckton.)

The good congressman who brought the subject up didn’t really close the deal with Monckton, but he should be applauded for giving it the old college try.  The important thing is that we have fun making the Monckey dance.

Here’s another short tutorial on how to make His Lordship dance and squirm.  In a recent nasty e-mail exchange that involved both Lord Monckton and me, I brought up that he has publicly admitted lying about his personal circumstances to sell more units of a puzzle he invented.  A reporter from The Scotsman newspaper documented the whole thing.

Lord Monckton invented the Eternity Puzzle, and offered a $1 million prize for the first person to solve it.  Given the chance that someone would solve it before enough puzzles were sold to cover the prize, Monckton took out an insurance policy against such an eventuality.  Two mathematicians did solve the puzzle after only 18 months, and of course, the insurance covered it.  But as a publicity stunt Lord Monckton had gone around claiming that he had to sell his ancestral home to cover the prize.  In fact, he did sell his home, but he didn’t need the proceeds to cover the prize.  Monckton admitted the deception to The Scotsman, which reported:

Mr Monckton told The Scotsman that the story about him being forced to sell Crimonmogate, his 67-room pile near Peterhead, had been invented to boost sales. In fact, he said he had made a healthy profit from the first version of the puzzle, despite it being solved so quickly.

“[The house sale] was the story which the PR people dreamed up after we had three months of the best sales that any puzzle had ever had,” he said. “They wanted to keep the momentum going to take us through to Christmas.

“I was selling the house anyway and they asked me if I would be willing to tell people I was selling the house because I was afraid somebody might solve the puzzle too fast. I said ‘yes’. They said, ‘Don’t you mind being made to look an absolute prat’, and I said, ‘No – I’m quite used to that’. History is full of stories that aren’t actually true.

“We sold shed-loads of extra puzzles and I made an handsome profit – and I sold the house as well.”

But when I brought this incident up in our e-mail exchange as an example of Monckton’s tendency to make up facts whenever convenient, consider how he tried to evade the issue.

I did not admit to lying about selling my house because I feared someone would shortly win the £1 million prize for the ETERNITY puzzle: it is a matter of record that I sold my house, having admittedly taken full advantage of the publicity opportunity that the circumstances of the sale presented, and paid the prize in full.

Careful readers will note that his denial didn’t really deny anything he had been accused of.  Not wanting to miss the chance to watch Monckton squirm, I replied:

Here was Monckton’s response to me:

I do not propose to answer any further ad-hominem points, and, as I have explained, I shall not answer any points from anyone who continues to assert ad-hominem arguments against me. No further communications from this email address will be answered, therefore. – Monckton of Brenchley

So remember, Monckton’s method is to evade owning up to his lies by answering questions that nobody asked.  The key to extracting the maximum fun from making him dance is to keep the pressure on.  Don’t be daunted by the fact that he’s such an accomplished liar–just relax and enjoy the challenge.