Timothy Birdnow

Here is an interesting paper arguing that the concept of the Greenhouse Effect in the atmosphere is wrong. While I tend to disagree, I do think we are overblowing the idea. Bear in mind that space can't really conduct heat, so there is no convection of heat out of the atmosphere. That's not to say we don't lose heat to space; we do all the time. It is to say that heat is lost through radiative processes and not through convection - what we normally think of as heat. Heat and cold are generally functions of convection, not energy gain and loss. But it is enough; without it we would have the big temperature swings we see on Mars. But is it the primary driver of planetary temperature? I tend to think it's that big energy wasting light bulb in the sky that is the culprit...


Here is the abstract:

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
By Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner

Full paper, 114 pages, 1.54MB at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
This approved non-technical summary by Hans Schreuder, 24 June 2008

"The authors express their hope that in schools around the world the fundamentals of physics will
be taught correctly, not by using shock-tactic 'Al Gore' movies and not misinforming physics
students by confusing absorption/emission with reflection, by confusing the tropopause with the
ionosphere and by confusing microwaves with shortwaves.”
Abstract

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea the authors trace back to the traditional works of
Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896, but which is still supported in global climatology,
essentially describes a fictitious mechanism by 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 widespread secondary literature it is
taken for granted that such a mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this
paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles 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 °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.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:15 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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