By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Some days ago, a prolix, inspissate whigmaleerie was posted here – a gaseous halation, an unwholesome effluvium, an interminable and obscurantist expatiation purporting to cast doubt upon my team’s conclusion that official climatology has misdefined and misapplied feedback and has thus made a mountain out of a molehill, approximately tripling the true midrange rate of global warming we can expect our sins of emission to engender.

We define emission temperature R₀ as the 255 K global mean surface temperature that would obtain on Earth at today’s solar irradiance and albedo but before any greenhouse gases have entered the atmosphere and before any feedback begins to operate; B₀ as the feedback response in Kelvin to R₀; E₀, the sum of R₀ and B₀, as the equilibrium temperature that would prevail after feedback has responded to emission temperature; ΔR₀ as the 10 K reference sensitivity to the naturally-occurring, noncondensing, preindustrial greenhouse gases; ΔB₀ as the feedback response to B₀; ΔE₀, the sum of ΔR₀ and ΔB₀, as the equilibrium sensitivity to the preindustrial noncondensing greenhouse gases present in 1850; R₁, the 265 K sum of R₀ and ΔR₀, as the reference temperature (not including feedback responses) in 1850; B₁, the sum of B₀ and ΔB₀, as the total feedback response to 1850; and E₁, the sum of R₁ and B₁, as the observed equilibrium temperature (including feedback responses) in 1850. The graph above, a detail from Fig. 1 of the whigmaleerie, shows B₀ as 5 K and ΔE₀ as 28 K, implying that ΔB₀ is 18 K or thereby.

Relationships between this gallimaufry of variables constituting the equilibrium global mean surface temperature in 1850 are shown below, where a₀, the ratio of ΔE₀ to ΔR₀, is the system-gain factor or closed-loop gain that transforms reference sensitivity ΔR₀ before feedback to equilibrium sensitivity ΔR₀ after feedback.

We define the unit feedback response as the ratio of the feedback response to the reference temperature or sensitivity that triggered it: or, in plain English, the amount of feedback-driven temperature or warming per degree of the pre-feedback temperature or warming.

The implication of the whigmaleerie’s Fig. 1 is that the unit feedback response ΔB₀ / ΔR₀ to the greenhouse warming to 1850 is 28 / 10, or 2.8, while the unit feedback response B₀ / R₀ to emission temperature is 5 / 255, or 0.02. The implication is that, in the widdershins world of the whigmaleerie, feedbacks are imagined – per impossibile – to respond 140 times more energetically to each degree of greenhouse-gas warming than to each degree of emission temperature. Nothing more need be said of the whigmaleerie, whose author had known of this central defect in his argument in advance, for I had explicitly drawn his attention to it before.

I shall leave the reader to work out the relationship between the feedback impact ratio X, defined in the above equation, and various real or imagined values of the system-gain factor a₀. In that revealing relationship between the X factor and a₀, the reader will discern why it is that the high equilibrium sensitivities profitably imagined by official climatology, which had erroneously defined feedback and had consequently not understood that feedback responds to equilibrium temperature, are untenable. Or watch the video of my lunchtime keynote at the forthcoming Heartland Climate Conference in Washington DC. It will blow your socks off.