Christopher Monckton writes at the American Thinker about the latest scare among climate alarmists.
A new climate panic is gripping the far-Left profiteers of doom. Those few of Them who are climate scientists have made fame and fortune by telling us the world is toast unless the once-free West (though responsible for only a fifth of the world’s sins of emission) commits economic hara-kiri. The cost of placating climate Communism is already in the quadrillions.
However, They are becoming aware that Their official climate narrative is rooted in a grave error of physics – an error so elementary that it can be described here. At a vital point in Their calculation of how much warming we may cause, They forgot the Sun was shining. …
… That was Their mistake. They had forgotten that the water-vapor feedback (all others broadly self-cancel) must respond not only to direct warming, such as greenhouse-gas warming, but also to the surely observable fact that the Sun is shining.
After correction to take account of the feedback response to the 255 K sunshine temperature that would subsist on Earth if there were no greenhouse gases in the air at all, the system-gain factor in 1850 was not 32 / 8, or 4, as They had imagined, but (255 + 32) / (255 + 8), or 1.09.
After that strikingly simple correction to allow for the fact that very nearly all feedback response in 1850 was a response not to preindustrial greenhouse gases but to the sunshine, if the feedback regime today is as it was in 1850 we can expect not 4 K warming this century but a net-beneficial 1.1 K. That ends the “climate emergency”.
Sure enough, the rate of global warming since the end of the Second World War has been equivalent to about 1.1 K per century, or about a third of the 3.3 K/century-equivalent medium-term warming confidently predicted by IPCC in 1990.
