"Lord"Monckton and a band of the usual suspects have a new paper out in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal, Science Bulletin. The paper—covered by WUWT and the Daily Mail—concerns an "irreducibly simple climate-sensitivity model" that purports to show that IPCC models run too hot. You can read the press release at phys.org or download the paper yourself courtesy of the Heartland Institute, which paid $3,000 for it to be open access.
The Boston Globe points out that co-author Willie Soon failed to disclose the $1million+ in fossil fuel funding he has received, in seeming violation of the journal's conflict of interest policy. The end of the paper notes that none of the authors have any conflict of interest, but over $1million in fossil fuel funding certainly seems like a conflict!
Vice has a great piece that uses the Monckton paper as a starting point to discuss how bad science can still get published, with quotes from NASA's Gavin Schmidt calling the paper "complete trash."
As for actual content, Carbon Briefhas a lengthy debunking: from the basic physics of water vapor, to equating ice-age climate with the current one, to ignoring the warming oceans, the paper features many shortcomings. Meanwhile, the Imperial College of London has a short blog post saying the reason Monckton et al's model shows less warming than other models is because it uses an "inappropriate" feedback value and with strategically chosen parameters. And Then There's Physics gets a little more technical, noting that Monckton's model uses a closed-loop gain feedback factor, which works on the grounds that "we can't warm much over the coming century because the designers wouldn't have designed a system that would allow for this."
To make matters worse, Thought Fragments points out the model isn't even new, but is based on already existing models, some of which are cited later in the paper. Finally, Richard Telford looks at the paleoclimate data upon which the authors rely, concluding that, "Monckton et al do not provide evidence of a huge model failure, but a failure of their own scepticism. They accepted without checking a result they thought favourable to their argument."
If you'd like to see Monckton's attempt to rebut many of these criticisms, he's issued a point-by-point response at Climate Depot.
All debunkings aside, our favorite part is how co-author Briggs brags about the model being so simple that a high school student could run it on their pocket scientific calculator. Because when it comes to something as important as maintaining a livable climate for ourselves and future generations, who trusts the power of super computers when you have a TI-83?
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