We’ve been hearing a great deal from our liberal friends about “settled science.” Reading this paper, I feel compelled to agree. The science is settled: an atmospheric greenhouse effect is incompatible with the established facts of theoretical physics and thermodynamic engineering.
ABSTRACT
The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
The Earth is not a greenhouse. As the authors observe:
It is not the “trapped” infrared radiation, which explains the warming phenomenon in a real greenhouse, but it is the suppression of air cooling.
CONCLUSIONS:
A statistical analysis, no matter how sophisticated it is, heavily relies on underlying models and if the latter are plainly wrong then the analysis leads to nothing. One cannot detect and attribute something that does not exist for reason of principle like the CO2 greenhouse effect. There are so many unsolved and unsolvable problems in non-linearity and the climatologists believe to beat them all by working with crude approximations leading to unphysical results that have been corrected afterwards by mystic methods, flux control in the past, obscure ensemble averages over different climate institutes today, by excluding accidental global cooling results by hand, continuing the greenhouse inspired global climatologic tradition of physically meaningless averages and physically meaningless applications of mathematical statistics.
In conclusion, the derivation of statements on the CO2 induced anthropogenic global warming out of the computer simulations lies outside any science. …
The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.
Hat tip to QandO via Bird Dog.
pete best
Has this paper been peer reviewed for starters?
JDZ
Cornell’s arXiv.org describes itself:
“arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is also partially funded by the National Science Foundation.”
There is a submission procedure, and it seems clear that that procedure includes some kind of review of the text and the author(s)’s credentials and academic background.
I’m not sure if that procedure is fully as rigorous as the peer-review procedure for the most prestigious journals in the physical sciences.
Nonetheless, one clearly does find very serious papers by first-rate scientists published via arXiv.
ria tambie
it is short
bjchip
As a matter of politeness it would be good form to acknowledge the seriously fatal errors that Gerlich and Tscheuschner engage in. I will not repeat them here, the scathing refutations of their errors are everywhere. Here is one of the better treatments:
http://arthur.shumwaysmith.com/life/content/the_arrogance_of_physicists
The part that remains arguable is the degree of the effect. THERE one may still argue and have some actual scientific support. I commend you on your interest but G & T are serious competitors for the prize of “worst scientific paper ever published”, and repeating their nonsense seriously undermines any credible argument you might have against AGW theory.
BJ
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