The Temperature Of The UK Over The Last 100 Years (part 8)
A butcher's at daily maxima and minima over the last 100 years. Are things getting worse, and what does ‘worse’ mean?
In part 7 we took a look at my home-baked UK34 tmin and tmax annual anomalies over the period 1853–2021 and found both series to be remarkably identical; that is to say, day time and night time temperatures have been steadily rising at the same rate, exhibiting the same warmer-cooler short phase oscillations as they do so.
I touched on the subject of atmospheric water vapour being the muscle behind the greenhouse gas effect and we discovered just how complex things can get when we start looking at the real world rather than an idealised world. The ‘official’ position is that narrow band IR capture by CO2 is forcing warming, and that this warming increases atmospheric water vapour which then acts like a rather large hot water bottle, this being an example of positive feedback.
This sounds very plausible indeed until you realise the physical details for this were sketched out by the IPCC mob using artificial dry atmospheres in a laboratory rather than real world measurements of a water-laden atmosphere. Then there’s the wrinkle of the saturation curves for greenhouse gases, this being something we’ve known about for decades that tends not to get discussed. It tends not to get discussed because once you realise CO2 has done pretty much all the work it can do by 200ppm then any climate scare based on 400ppm and beyond sails right out the window, the same being true for methane, freons and all the other greenhouse gases. There’s a fabulous 41min lecture on this by Dr Thomas Sheahen that I highly recommend that can be found here.
Anyone grasping the gist of Dr Sheahen’s lecture will realise the Earth is rather stable when it comes to the greenhouse effect. Without it the planet would be inhabitable, so we are fortunate little seedlings indeed! Saturation also explains why the Earth didn’t bake to death when CO2 was up at +4,000ppm. The head scratcher here is how come the Earth is warming and cooling if the greenhouse gas effect is stable and incoming solar radiation is pretty much constant. This brings us on to some fabulous theories that suggest Earth’s energy balance is modulated by other factors.
Earth systems modellers pedalling under CMIP ignore all this and rely on idealised climate simulations to tease out confounding factors. The problem with this approach is that such simulations embody the very hypotheses we need to put to the test; that is, they are getting their carefully programmed hypotheses to effectively ‘prove themselves’ by producing outputs that agree with a bunch of theory that is politically motivated. Yes, it really is that daft/corrupt (delete as appropriate), and we may rightfully exclaim doh! and reach for a doughnut. The situation is not unlike a dog trying to sniff its own arse.
The circular nature of the simulations that lie at the heart of IPCC-flavoured climate science provides for a cosy relationship with grant bodies, journals, social media and governments that is not going to be rocked by anybody anytime soon. In essence they have locked themselves into their own simworld instead of looking out of the window. So let’s quickly take a look out the round window at a corker of a result I discovered back in Feb 2019.