I've updated the list of Monckton arguments so at the bottom of the page, it lists Monckton arguments that we've yet to write a rebuttal for. If there are some "low-lying fruit", arguments that we can cobble together a quick rebuttal to, would be good to add these before Feb 1 as it will fill out the Monckton Myths more fully. Here they are:

• Al Gore overestimated sea level rise by factor of 100
• Arctic was warmer in 1940
• Better to adapt than mitigate
• Boreholes show strong Medieval Warm Period
• Briffa's hockey stick was broken
• Central England warmed more in the 18th century
• CO2 is just a trace gas
• CO2 is plant food
• CO2 levels were high during Snowball Earth
• CO2 limits will hurt the poor
• CO2 limits will make little difference
• Cold spells kill more people than heat waves
• Coral atolls grow as sea levels rise
• Diseases won't spread because of global warming
• Drought is not caused by global warming
• Earth hasn't warmed as much as expected
• Earth was warmer for most of its history
• Glaciers have been receding since the 1800's
• Heat waves won't become more intense or frequent
• Hurricane activity was low in 2010
• IPCC overpredicts CO2 rise
• IPCC ‘disappeared’ the Medieval Warm Period
• It warmed just as fast in 1860-1880 and 1910-1940
• It's a plot to set up a one world government
• It's all a plot to redistribute riches to poor countries
• It's an anti-capitalist political myth
• It's clouds
• It's not urgent
• Lake Chad has emptied before
• Maldives is not sinking
• Melting permafrost is a good thing
• Mosquito migration is unrelated to global warming
• Most of the last 10,000 years were warmer
• NASA GISS adjustments introduce warming bias
• Negative feedbacks will stabilise climate
• New Zealand data was fudged
• People are making money from global warming
• Permafrost feedback won't happen
• Scientists falsified data
• Solar cycle 24 will stop global warming
• The upper troposphere should warm 2 to 3 times faster than the surface
• Tuvalu sea levels aren't rising
• Warming in pipeline is small
• Wine grew in England in Roman times

A few to highlight:

•  "Most of the last 10,000 years were warmer" - Rob has been working on this subject. Is it possible to put together a rebuttal in the interim?
• "Earth hasn't warmed as much as expected" - Dana?
• "Heat waves won't become more intense or frequent" - I'll do this, adapt it from the 'freaking cold' rebuttal
• "It's clouds" - I could've sworn I've blogged about this, will investigate.
  

I had just suggested you make such a list on another thread, but you beat me to it! Actually, though, the list is kind of overwhelming – what to focus on?

Some thoughts on low-lying fruit:

• “CO2 is just a trace gas” – I’m sure we had a thread on this somewhere but I don’t know where it went.
• “CO2 is plant food” – Somebody (I can’t remember who) has been working on this one for ages.
• “Coral atolls grow as sea levels rise” – I think Rob Honeycutt is working on this one.
• “It warmed just as fast as 1860-1880 and 1910-1940” – Robert Way covered this in Monckton Myth #2.
• “It’s not urgent” and “Warming in pipeline is small” will be at least partly covered in a post I’m writing on the paper “Target Atmospheric CO2” by Hansen et al (2008). I won’t have it ready in time because it’s fairly complicated, but when it is finished, it would give us some extra info that could be used for rebuttals of those two arguments.

Regarding “CO2 levels were high during Snowball Earth”, I notice Monckton has repeatedly claimed that CO2 reached 300,000 ppm during Snowball Earth! As usual he provides no reference for his extraordinary claim, but the actual number was more like 12,000 ppm according to the cap carbonates.

“CO2 limits will make little difference” is a difficult one to argue. Depending on the policy Monckton may have a point for a change! However he uses some pretty twisted calculations when making these kinds of arguments and usually gets highly dubious results like “this policy would only prevent 1/1000 of a degree of warming”. I enjoyed Jonathan Holmes’ description on ABC Online:

If you can’t understand its tortured mathematics, don’t worry. You’re not intended to. You are intended to think, “Well, I don’t really follow it all, but this bloke seems to be impressively learned, and he says it’s not worth doing anything about climate change”.

Do we have a list of how many times Monckton has used each unrebutted argument?

Yeah, I've got "Earth hasn't warmed as much as expected" claimed already.  Just giving people time to check my calculations in the Lindzen Case Study blog post - as long as I got it right, I'll adapt that into the rebuttal.  Shouldn't take more than 15 minutes.

There are several others I could do, it's just a matter of having the time to do them.  The wine in England was covered nicely by RealClimate a while back.  CO2 limits will make little difference I think is based on the argument than any given country has a small percentage of global emissions.  Monckton made that argument about Australia in a recent newspaper article.  For that one, we'd have to talk about how that's the entire point of international negotiations.  If everybody says "our cuts won't make a difference", then nobody cuts them.  If everybody agrees to cut them, it adds up.  This isn't a science argument though.

I might do 'IPCC disappeared the MWP'.  I saw Monckton made this argument several times, and I've researched it a bit in the past.  Just depends on whether I have time tomorrow.  We've talked about "CO2 limits hurt the poor", but that will take some research.  Too time consuming to do by Tuesday.

are you going to update the "Oceans are cooling" rebuttal from Monckton Myth #1?

If I get time- not as high a priority as arguments that have no rebuttal at all.

Do we have a list of how many times Monckton has used each unrebutted argument?

I've just updated Monckton arguments so it now lists how often Monckton uses each argument - good idea so we can spend more time on the more popular ones. Very good idea.

“CO2 is just a trace gas” – I’m sure we had a thread on this somewhere but I don’t know where it went.

Dang, I've been meaning to program up a forum search - will try to create one this afternoon time permitting.

UPDATE: just added the forum search in the left margin. Here's the thread on CO2 trace gas.

“CO2 is plant food” – Somebody (I can’t remember who) has been working on this one for ages.

Someone emailed me a huge intermediate rebuttal in unfinished form, no chance of getting that into shape in time. Although there was a basic level blog post which would serve as a basic rebuttal. I didn't use it as a rebuttal as it didn't have any peer-reviewed references but that was back in the days before basic/intermediate/advanced. Nowadays, it would serve as a basic rebuttal. Hmm, will look into that.

“It warmed just as fast as 1860-1880 and 1910-1940” – Robert Way covered this in Monckton Myth #2.

If Rob doesn't get a chance to claim and create this rebuttal, I'll do it for him.

Note - I don't think we have to go crazy trying to do as many as possible. But if there are a few that are relatively easy to throw together a rebuttal - a particularly egregious argument or something we already have material for - then would be a good idea to build the list of myths with minimal effort.

And we can continue doing these beyond Tuesday - in fact, any we do now or in the recent future can be used as Monckton Myth blog posts. So even if you throw up a rebuttal before Tuesday, if its new content, we'll hang onto it and post it as a blog post afterwards. The continue drip drip drip of MM blog posts will serve as a reminder of the MM resource.

Thanks, John, for locating the thread. I've been meaning to do something about this for months! But I really cannot do this right now. Here is the last bit of that thread: I hope someone can do something with it in time:

If we just wanted to focus on the basic part: The thing that gets people's doubt is that the % of CO2 is so small. But the point is that the % is totally irrelevant: The size of the greenhouse effect depends on the absolute concentration (molecules/volume) in the atmosphere, not on the relative concentration. If you added 100 times as much of a non-GHG to the atmosphere, the ppm would go down by a factor of 100; but the GHE would be just the same! (In fact, for technical reasons involving pressure broadening of the absorption line, it might even strengthen the GHE.) Maybe someone can just whip this part into shape.

A useful analogy discussed in the thread: If you have 1 Million people in a region, but only 350 people vote, the election is decided by those 350 people, even though they're only 350 ppm. However many non-voters there are doesn't matter, because the voting GHG molecules don't have to "convince" the others of the validity of the vote; they only have to "convince" the photons, and that depends on the absolute number of GHG molecules, not the %.

I hope someone can take this up. I'm under some pressure right now in the "real world".

Yes, but the force of the denier argument is: "How can CO2 be important at all, when it's down at 300 - 350 ppm?" They aren't complaining that a 35% increase in CO2 isn't significant; they saying that the whole gas is insignificant.

So the counter-argument is that CO2 is significant because it's the only player at 15 microns, and the non-players don't count at all, one way or another.

Albatross:

I strongly request that you do not refer to Monckton by the name you have been using just now: It cheapens the tone and sets us up for another "Climategate" situation. Even internally, keep it civil: Even something private can become un-private.

The old saying is, "Don't write anything that you would worry about showing up in the New York Times." Let's not do any own-goals, please.

Neal,

You a re of course perfectly correct.  My apologies.  The post has been revised.

Hi all,

I have been trying in vain to help John with this.  As you can see from the "Artciles" page, I have made a real mess of linking/uploading some of the Monckton Articles-- even after John explained to me what to do.  The entire URL is hyperlinked, not just a title. The dates are also incorrect.

Apparently I am incapable of following simple instructions! :(

Instead of wasting John's time any more than I already have, could someone explain to me how to fix the problem.

I have to go run an errand, but I will try and get online again before we head out for dinner tonight.

I've edited those articles. Was quick and easy for me to fix this, just meant changing the title in the database and updating the date - which I had to do with every single submitted article as the system automatically uses the date that the link is submitted to the database. This is inevitable - we didn't want too many fields in the Firefox Add-on and article date seemed unimportant.

I was hoping to create an edit function so all authors could edit articles directly but just haven't had the time to do it yet. But as this will probably be an ongoing series with other skeptics, will definitely do that soon.

It is possible to edit articles in the database, but there is a problem: the edit form is limited to ten arguments, so if you've added more than ten arguments via the Firefox addon, the remaining arguments will just vanish from that article.

I don’t think Albatross linked to Gareth’s debunking of the 10,000 years claim, so here it is:

http://hot-topic.co.nz/easterbrooks-wrong-again/

You could ask Gareth if you could reproduce it on SkS. Then we would have a ready-made rebuttal to Monckton's top unrebutted argument.

I emailed Gareth this morning, he gave thumbs up and I just posted an amended version of the rebuttal:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/10000-years-warmer.htm

Will also start a thread just to get people looking at this for nitpicking purposes.