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New Peer Reviewed Study: ‘Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics’ by Gerlich & Tscheuschner
A new peer reviewed paper has been published in the International Journal of Modern Physics. Purchase the paper at the WSPC website for $ 25.00
G. Gerlich, R. D. Tscheuschner:
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics.
International Journal of Modern Physics B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (30 January 2009), 275-364
World Scientific Publishing Co.
There is a freely available post-print version 4.0 from the preprint server of the Cornell University :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161
Physicist Dr. Gerhard Gerlich, of the Institute of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig in Germany, and Dr. Ralf D. Tscheuschner co-authored a July 7, 2007 paper titled “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics.”
The Abstract of the paper reads, in part: “(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 C 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.” Gerlich and Tscheuschner’s study concluded, “The horror visions of a risen sea level, melting pole caps and developing deserts in North America and in Europe are fictitious consequences of fictitious physical mechanisms, as they cannot be seen even in the climate model computations. The emergence of hurricanes and tornados cannot be predicted by climate models, because all of these deviations are ruled out. The main strategy of modern CO2-greenhouse gas defenders seems to hide themselves behind more and more pseudo explanations, which are not part of the academic education or even of the physics training.”
From the Conclusions: “The derivation of statements on the CO2 induced anthropogenic global warming out of the computer simulations lies outside any science.”
March 19th, 2009 at 5:34 am
A good site – both in look and content.
I’m a regular
March 20th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
I´m curious to know if you agree with what reads in this paper?
March 20th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
I have an open mind as the whether or not the paper is fully or partly correct about the greenhouse effect.
March 21st, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Real measurements at any single station in the US weather station network fluctuate by as much as 4 degrees C over a year or two. Volatility is very high. The database is available from a link on CO2 Science web site. That fluctuation is consistent with rapid cooling to space and absence of a green house.
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:46 am
To paraphrase the IPCC description of the atmospheric greenhouse effect:
1. A warm body (the earth) radiates heat to a cool body (the atmosphere)
2. The cool body “back-radiates” (IPCC term) heat to the warm body.
3. This process continues perpetually, with heat flowing round and round in a continuous cycle.
4. The result of this perpetual process is that the warm body becomes warmer.
What is most amazing is that both alarmists and skeptic scientists have taken the above blatant 2nd Law of Thermodynamics violation at face value for so long. Many will shout that all bodies radiate … yes they do but NETT heat flow is always from hot bodies to cool bodies (without the input of work), not the reverse. Note also that the 2nd Law does not care about the wavelength of radiant heat.
Atmospheric gases do absorb radiation from the sun and the earth. NETT radiation from the cool daytime atmosphere is to space. The Sahara desert in daytime has a very low “greenhouse gas” concentration above it, yet contrary to greenhouse theory, it is a hot place rather than a cool place.
Night time, rotation of the earth, convection, conduction, latent heat all add greatly to the complexity of climate. However the basic daytime atmospheric greenhouse model as presented by the IPCC and most school textbooks, is nonsense.
Gerlich at last provides a rational view of this topic.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:36 am
adb: Actually, it is the G&T paper that is nonsense. You are right that the 2nd Law states that the net heat flow (in the absence of work) has to be from the hotter body to the cooler body. Where you (and G&T, as near as I can figure from wading through their dense writing) go wrong is in believing that this is violated by the atmospheric greenhouse effect. It is not.
Now, you are probably saying, “That makes no sense…How can the greenhouse effect cause warming of the earth if the net heat flow is from the earth to the atmosphere?” Well, the answer to that question is simply to ask, “Warming relative to what?” What the earth is warmer relative to is the case of an IR-transparent atmosphere in which case all of the heat that the earth radiates (according to the Stefan Boltzmann Eq.) goes out into space with NONE of it being returned to the earth. So, even if only a small portion of what the earth radiates that is absorbed by an IR-absorbing atmosphere is then radiated back to it, the result is a warming relative to the IR-transparent case…and this is what we call the atmospheric greenhouse effect.
If this all still confuses you, one can get a better handle on it by considering a simpler problem involving an emitting blackbody sphere at constant temperature surrounded by one or two concentric spherical blackbody shells, all immersed in empty space. With a few assumptions, this problem (described in more detail here http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/03/second-law-and-its-criminal-misuse-as.html ) can be solved exactly by any decent student in a 1st-year physics course using the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation and the results then clearly illustrate where G&T have gone astray.
Another way of looking at it is given by a retired meteorologist named Alistair Fraser at this website: http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadGreenhouse.html Personally, I think he is a little too militant in what he considers acceptable pedagogy but I agree with him that that his statement, “The surface of the Earth is warmer than it would be in the absence of an atmosphere because it receives energy from two sources: the Sun and the atmosphere” is a very succinct way of putting it (and avoids words like “re-radiate” or “reflect” that are shorthands which can lead to misunderstandings).
March 28th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
OK, there are two “interfaces” (earth-lower atmosphere and higher atmosphere-space) where radiation is important factor, and this is what G&T are not covering enough. But does this render all their work to complete nonsense, is at least questionable. Let imagine an atmosphere without “greenhouse gases,” consisting only of N2,O2, Ar etc, shortly gases without IR absorbtion/emission lines. Because of the heat capacity and conductivity of non-greenhouse gases, there will still be higher night temperatures on the ground, if compared to celestial bodies without atmosphere, like the Moon, isn’t that correct? If yes, then maybe it’s reasonable to think, as G&T obviously do, that the only effect of so called GHG-s is slightly higher heat capacity which has almost nothing to do with spectral lines of the GHG-s.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:07 am
Heat in the form of radiation flows in all directions from any warm object to any other object that intercepts that frequency of radiation, without regard to the temperature of the other object (or to space, which doesn’t intercept). NET natural heat flow by ALL means is always from warmer to cooler, but there can be heat flows in all directions, particularly if you consider one narrow form of heat flow in isolation – for example, radiative heat flows in the frequencies that our atmosphere will absorb.
So the proferred case that greenhouse theory violates the laws of thermodynamics, is not true.
The atmosphere essentially operates as a blanket, both by its thermal mass and by its radiation characteristics.
The theory is that an increased CO2 level makes that blanket slightly *thicker*. The lower atmosphere already captures ALL the planet surface’s radiation at the frequencies where CO2 is relevant (the overwhelming majority of it is captured by water vapor, not CO2), and some of it is re-emitted back toward the surface while some goes more or less up to be captured a second time at a somewhat higher altitude. More CO2 can’t increase the absorption there. But go far enough up in the atmosphere, and that ceases to be the case; more CO2 *there* means more absorption which in turn means more re-emission downward… like throwing another sheet over the six heavy quilts on your bed.
I have my doubts about whether this theory is *significantly* true. It is true, as far as it goes. (It may overlook some things. For that matter my analogy, in addition to being rather short on numbers, probably overlooks some things that the actual theory takes into account.) But I suspect the effect over the range of plausible increases in CO2 may be trivial.
A big factor in my doubts is that CO2 really isn’t that big a deal in the earth’s greenhouse-gas profile, constituting something like 1/4 of 1% of the whole atmosphere’s absorption. (The balance consists of water vapor and rounding-error gases.) Also atmospheric CO2 apparently used to be vastly (several hundred to several thousand percent) more dense than it is now, pretty much any time prior to 50 million years ago – and life on earth seems to have done pretty well.
May 1st, 2009 at 8:35 pm
As 70% of the surface of the earth is water and as liquids don’t emit Plancks radiation it is not allowable to use Boltzmann’s equation to calculate the surface temperature of the globe. Water will transfere heat by evaporation not by radiation.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:42 am
G&T write out equations in great detail which apply in very specific circumstances only to state that these circumstances are not found in the messy conditions of earth’s atmosphere. But if you can’t give an exact average temperature of the earth surface does that mean there is no radiation into space (aren’t clear, still nights colder than cloudy, windy ones?). If gases don’t behave like idealized black body solids, do they not radiate more when they are warmer? What people who want to reduce co2 emissions are saying is that it is possible and likely that increased levels of co2 cause dangerous warming of the earth. What G&T seem to say is that we must not do anything to avoid it until we are absolutely sure it has happened.
August 13th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
“What G&T seem to say is that we must not do anything to avoid it until we are absolutely sure it has happened.” No Tober, that is an unfair representation of what G&T write. They are concerned with science proper and the misuse of it in public debate and want to rectify that. Whatever one should believe without scientific support or whatever one should do in practical politics is without the realm of their arguments in this paper. I am sure they have personal opinions on politics, too, but that is beside the point just here.
September 1st, 2009 at 8:50 am
I don’t understand the notion of “the surface of the Earth would not be as warm without the greenhouse effect”. If this is true, why is the daylight side of the moon 253F|123C ? And this despite the fact that it also gets down to -387F|-233C at night. So, the temperature rise is a whopping 640F|356C change between night and day. I understand how our atmosphere “holds” the heat at night, but without other effects that cool the atmosphere and surface (ie: precipitation, clouds, water vapor negative feedback), I suspect that our temperature would also be similar to that of the moon. It is in fact, water (Ocean’s) and water vapor that regulates (buffers) our temperature to a much more modest level. I still don’t see how you can come to the conclusion that, if it were not for the “greenhouse” effect, that our temperature would be much lower. This just doesn’t make sense.
December 17th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I’ve been searching the internet for hours in vain trying to find somebody rebutting this publication (I’m in a quantitative field, but not physics, so I cannot evaluate it properly myself).
I’ve seen many of these discussions on blogs, and apparently every single one results in the critics of this paper shutting up and disappearing.
This is an interesting link (don’t mind the title of the pdf, it summarizes some of the replies by the authors in question…):
http://ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/DEFINITIVE_DEATHKNELL_to_CLIMATE_ALARMISM.pdf
This is big… VERY BIG…
I can’t wait for the physics community
December 17th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
[hit enter by accident]
…I can’t wait for the physics community to get a hold of this.
They may let the media slam the skeptics for the sake of a ‘better’ environment. However, I doubt that they will let the media slam the second law of thermodynamics.
December 17th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
I’ve been searching the internet for hours in vain trying to find somebody rebutting this publication (I’m in a quantitative field, but not physics, so I cannot evaluate it properly myself).
I’ve seen many of these discussions on blogs, and apparently every single one results in the critics of this paper shutting up and disappearing.
This is an interesting link (don’t mind the title/URL of the pdf, it summarizes some of the replies by the authors in question…):
http://ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/DEFINITIVE_DEATHKNELL_to_CLIMATE_ALARMISM.pdf
This is big… VERY BIG…
I can’t wait for the physics community to get a hold of this.
They may let the media slam AGW skeptics for the sake of a ‘better’ environment. I however highly doubt that they will let them slam the second law of thermodynamics.
December 28th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Squidly: If this is true, why is the daylight side of the moon 253F|123C ? And this despite the fact that it also gets down to -387F|-233C at night. So, the temperature rise is a whopping 640F|356C change between night and day.
One can compute the average moon temperature as (123-233)/2 = -55C, quite a bit colder than Earth (although, comparisons between an orb without and one with atmosphere may not be valid). Also, the moons day/night cycle is about one earth month making the extremes much larger. If the moon revolved in 24 hours, the difference would be much smaller. Just guess how hot the day would be here on earth if it lasted 360 hours.
December 30th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
What really counts is what the empirical data shows. Please explain that away.
December 30th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
The empirical evidence is pretty unexciting – CO2 changes following temperature changes in the past (for only half of the geological record) and a warming world after the end of the Little Ice Age, which started before any significant man-made CO2 emissions.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:34 am
I’m not a climate scientist, but I am an astrophysicist, so I’ve studied radiative transfer and thermodynamics. I teach thermo at the university level, so I’m qualified to judge the G&T paper. It is nonsense, and I am flabbergasted that they got it past peer review. They assert, among other things, that the atmosphere can’t “warm” the earth, because it would require that heat flow from a cool object (the atmosphere), to a warm object, (the earth), in violation of the second law of thermo. But that’s not the point! The atmosphere simply makes it harder for heat to escape, leading to a higher equilibrium temperature at low levels in the atmosphere given the more-or-less constant input of heat from the sun. If their argument were correct, there would be no point in wearing a jacket on a cold day — how can a jacket, which is cooler than you are, keep you warm? The point is that the heat is _of course_ flowing outward from your body; the jacket simply makes it harder for you to lose heat, so your equilibrium temperature is higher than it would be without the jacket. So, adb:
“What is most amazing is that both alarmists and skeptic scientists have taken the above blatant 2nd Law of Thermodynamics violation at face value for so long.”
Yes, that would be amazing if true. It simply isn’t. The second law is alive and well, and it is completely consistent with conventional radiative transfer theory, which explains the greenhouse effect.
The G&T paper is really garbage, on fundamental physical grounds. They may have doctorates, but their analysis is deeply incompetent.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:56 am
Thanks palindrom. If Michael Mann can get his papers through peer review, then anything is possible!
January 6th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
I can’t believe someone who teaches thermo can state “Yes, that would be amazing if true. It simply isn’t. The second law is alive and well, and it is completely consistent with conventional radiative transfer theory, which explains the greenhouse effect.”, as this demonstrates no understanding of the second law or of the behavior of an ideal gas. Most of the atmosphere is an ideal gas, and is compressed by Earth’s gravity. If unperturbed, the dry (ideal gas) portion will have a higher temperature at Earth’s surface than at higher elevations. Radiative theory and the greenhouse effect are bunk!
January 13th, 2010 at 7:49 am
BigWaveDave: Well, I’m glad you’re not teaching thermodynamics at the university level, because your reply makes no sense at all. The temperature profile of an atmosphere depends on a lot of things — is it in convective equilibrium? In that case one can compute a lapse rate based on adiabatic expansion. Is it isothermal? In that case, it has an exponential density profile. Both of these are perfectly compatible with the ideal gas law.
Look, AGW may be right, or it may be wrong. I wish I knew! But the G&T paper is incompetent, and if you’re a serious AGW skeptic looking to discredit AGW, I suggest you look elsewhere.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:21 am
palindrom: Another take on the greenhouse effect for you to cast your eye over, with presentation, here:
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7715-Portland-Civil-Rights-Examiner~y2010m1d12-Hungarian-Physicist-Dr-Ferenc-Miskolczi-proves-CO2-emissions-irrelevant-in-Earths-Climate
January 15th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
admin, I glanced at that, and aside from the tendentious tone it doesn’t look half as crazy as G&T, which is just laughably, wildly, weirdly wrong. The Miskolczi theory is not obviously wrong to the non-specialiast scientist reader. However, it seems very pat — declaring that you have a “law” and a “Constant” are the marks of a polemicist who’s chasing a foregone conclusion. Who knows, maybe he’s right! But the Hungarian journal of meteorology isn’t exactly the top of the scientific food chain. I know, I know, all dissenting voices have been cruelly suppressed, it’s a all a conspiracy, the scientists formed a cabal, they’re all commies trying to take away our cars, they’re guilty libs who want to bring us down to the level of the third world, and so on and on — but I do know some of these people as colleagues, and I frankly don’t believe it. They could certainly all be wrong, but they know a whole lot more than I do about the problem, and they’re deeply worried, and — whatever you think — it’s not because of a political agenda, and not because they hunger for grants. They honestly think there is likely to be a real problem.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
I left the G&T paper alone for a couple of years, until it was peer reviewed. The ‘climategate’ emails give an unambiguous insight into what goes on in the peer review and IPCC process.
In the end, it all comes down to the true rather than theoretical climate sensitivity to CO2 in a naturally variable, chaotic, non-linear climate system. Taking into account the Tsonis et al natural ‘climate shifts’ and the poorly understood but tangible solar-climate link, there doesn’t seem to be much room left for the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’which seems to be close to nil.
January 21st, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Like palindrom I have read G&Ts paper but have come to quite different conclusions.
He said that he agrees with G&T that heat cannot flow from the colder atmosphere to the warmer Earth.
However this is exactly the claim that is made by the IPCC consensus.
G&T are very careful to distinguish between energy, work,heat and entropy.
Others either do not know or do not care about such distinctions.
Quite often the G&T critics use an energy balance approach to show the greenhouse effect is valid.
While this approach may satisfy the Ist Law of THD in does not satisfy the 2nd Law of THD.
This topic is bedevilled by people who are free and easy with their speculations.
The speculations are made without the need to tie these to observations.
The huge size of the “back radiation” from the clouds should be easy to measure.
Where is there an experiment to support this magnitude of an effect?
Instead computer models are trundled out to produce predictions.
When the predictions fail other factors are then added so no falsification of the “theory” is possible!
A good summation on this aspect of the debate is
http://greenhouse.geologist-1011.net
February 6th, 2010 at 4:04 am
People get excitedly the Himalayan Glaciers and Amazon forest boobs, by the IPCC.
A much bigger clanger is shown in the diagram ipcc_fig1-2.
In the diagram EM radiation is shown in and about the surface of the Earth.
In an effort to balance the energy from the Suns Radiative Balance with the Earth.
What they dont seem to comprehend is that EM radiation has no fixed direction ,it can be refleced and refracted.
Going by their diagram the Sun provides 342 w/m2 to earths surface.
the same square metre provides 168+324 down and 350+40 up.
Remember that the photons do not worry about direction this means that the available energy just above the surface is 900w/m2 .
The energy moving around at the surface of the Earth is almost three times the input energy from the Sun.