But we’re all thinking adults here aren’t we… And we know better… Don’t we…

Quite true, and this goes for BOTH sides of the argument. Never forget this.

1. something known to be true: something that can be shown to be true, to exist, or to have happened

2. truth or reality of something: the truth or actual existence of something, as opposed to the supposition of something or a belief about something
based on fact

3. piece of information: a piece of information, e.g. a statistic or a statement of the truth

Them’s the facts

http://www.realclimate.org/ index.php/ archives/ 2008/ 07/ once-more-unto-the-bray/

I am so impressed.

from the Free Online Dictionary:

1. Knowledge or information based on real occurrences: an account based on fact; a blur of fact and fancy.
2.
a. Something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed: Genetic engineering is now a fact. That Chaucer was a real person is an undisputed fact.
b. A real occurrence; an event: had to prove the facts of the case.

from Encarta

1. something known to be true: something that can be shown to be true, to exist, or to have happened

2. truth or reality of something: the truth or actual existence of something, as opposed to the supposition of something or a belief about something
based on fact

3. piece of information: a piece of information, e.g. a statistic or a statement of the truth

Them’s the facts.

http://www.turnuptheheat.org/?page_id=27

Here’s how Monckton made more of it:

“Throughout the past 600 million years, almost one-seventh of the age of the Earth, the mode of global surface temperatures was ~22 °C, even when carbon dioxide concentration peaked at 7000 ppmv, almost 20 times today’s near-record-low concentration. If so, then the instability inherent in the IPCC’s high-end values for the principal temperature feedbacks has not occurred in reality, implying that the high-end estimates, and by implication the central estimates, for the magnitude of individual temperature feedbacks may be substantial exaggerations. Source: Temperature reconstruction by C.R. Scotese; CO2 reconstruction after R.A. Berner; see also IPCC (2007).

“Since absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation, Figure 7 confirms what the recent temperature record implies: the causative link between changes in CO2 concentration and changes in temperature cannot be as strong as the IPCC has suggested. The implications for climate sensitivity are self-evident. Figure 7 indicates that in the Cambrian era, when CO2 concentration was ~25 times that which prevailed in the IPCC’s reference year of 1750, the temperature was some 8.5 °C higher than it was in 1750. Yet the IPCC’s current central estimate is that a mere doubling of CO2 concentration compared with 1750 would increase temperature by almost 40% of the increase that is thought to have arisen in geological times from a 20-fold increase in CO2 concentration (IPCC, 2007).”

But is any of that right?

First of all, there’s the small issue of Figure 7 itself. It’s from a denialist source and is not peer-reviewed or even produced by a scientist, although it’s supposedly constructed from two sources that are. So who knows if it’s right, but let’s take it a face value. Of those sources, the one showing CO2 levels (GEOCARB III) was still considered current in the AR4, but the Scotese temperature data was not. So even if the construction of Figure 7 is correct, Monckton is attacking a superseded straw man. Worse than that, he’s doing something quite dishonest by referencing the AR4 analysis and not being clear that he’s comparing it with substantially different data. (See the IPCC’s parallel discussion in AR4 WG1 Ch. 6 pp. 440-1, which includes a similar although much more detailed graphic that Monckton could have used instead.)

Had Monckton (or Saperstein) looked at the peer-reviewed literature on this subject, it would have been impossible to miss this recent paper (”Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years”) that tied up the last loose ends on deep-time climate sensitivity.

Neither analysis goes back far enough to cover Monckton’s example of the Cambrian, though, so let’s look at that separately to see if he did it right within his own terms.

First of all he has a graph-reading problem: His 8.5C temp difference is really 10.5C, although he did get the 7000 ppm CO2 number right. So taking the pre-industrial CO2 level (280 ppm) and the IPCC central sensitivity of 3C per CO2 doubling, we need about 4-1/2 doublings to get to 7000 ppm, but the 10.5C is more like 3-1/2. So Monckton is right! Ah, but there has been some legerdemain. He’e taking the IPCC “central” sensitivity rather than considering the entire range. A number around 2.2C (more than the 2.0C bottom of the range) works very nicely, so we can’t say the IPCC is at all wrong. But actually Monckton did something much worse — his 7000 ppm figure has error bars on the order of +/- 4000 ppm! Now we see why the the IPCC and the paper I linked didn’t try to do anything with most of the Paleozoic: The errors are just too large to draw meaningful conclusions.

So basically Monckton’s whole deep-time analysis was a fraud from top to bottom. He had to have known that, but I suppose it’s not clear that Saperstein did.

Hopefully Raven and any other denialists reading this will take the appropriate lesson from it.

No it means something much worse!