Reply To: Questions regarding DPF.

[Brian H]

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>”Today I’m in a good mood, so I’ll give you a twofer: Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner. Neither of these physicists has produced a single peer-reviewed paper bearing on any aspect of climate science, or even on the radiative physics underpinning climate science.”
Indeed, this is a great advantage for the whole discussion, both scientifically and politically. It is a presupposition for to have a fresh look at the topic. We (Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner) are unbiased totally independent theoretical physicists, familiar with stochastic description of nature and quantum field theory, respectively, and last but not least familiar with the physics lab and software engineering. Of course, we have published our papers in peer-reviewed journals, and on topics that belong to science, not to science fiction as the computer games of global climatology do. We are physicists, not climatologists.

The main results of our paper are:
– the CO2 greenhouse effect is not an effect in the sense of a physical effect and, hence, simply does not exist;
– computer aided global climatology will not be science, if science is defined as a method to verify or falsify
conjectures, according to the usual definition of science.
(We do not get into the ideas of e.g. Feyerabend “anything goes” here in that they do not apply to physics, in particular to applied physics, e.g. aeroplanes).
Due to research grants, huge amount of financial support, virtual global climatologists suffer from a kind of
omnipotence delusion comparable to the state of highness of the early super string community. However, physics is different. “Physics is where the action is”, i.e., finally, reproducible results in the lab. We cannot
overemphasize that science is a method to prove conjectures, and not to go on-stage like the pop star Al Gore
performing what-if-when-scenarios beyond any reality and scaring kids.

>”The two links you provide in fact point to the same paper. What you seem to be unaware of is that this paper has not been published in any journal. It appears only in the unreviewed ArXIV repository of manuscripts. This repository has no screening whatsoever as to the the content of the papers posted. Indeed, a look at the paper by anybody who has even a nodding acquaintance with radiation physics shows why they wouldn’t dare subject it to peer review. About 40 pages of this 90 page opus is in fact devoted to discussing the well-known flaws in the glass-greenhouse analogy sometimes used in simplified explanations of the phenomenon. These flaws have no bearing whatever on the manner in which the greenhouse effect is actually computed in climate models.”

We are not sure, whether you, Dr. Pierrehumbert, really know what you are talking about. The full theory of the atmospheric system must be a fusion of magnetohydrodynamics and radiation theory including Earth’s gravity and rotation. The full theory should be a multi component theory and should include phase separation , plasma physics, and highly involved boundary conditions which, in general, even cannot be written
down. You, Dr. Pierrehumbert, first solve the turbulence problem, and then we can discuss the existence of a local thermodynamic equilibrium for the photon bath in which the atmosphere is embedded. Point us to only one source in the literature, where the CO2 term enters the fundamental equations (not the useless phenomenological toy model equations).
Mathematically, even within the most simplified models you cannot predict anything, because all these ones
crudely approximate non-linear partial differential equations with unknown boundary conditions. There is
simply no physical foundation of the computer models with and without CO2.

>”The rest of the paper is simply bad physics; in fact, if they were right, not only would there be no anthropogenic
greenhouse effect, there would be no greenhouse effect at all!”
Boy, you got it.

>”They’ve proved too much!”
We did not prove anything.
We did not show anything.
We only demonstrated that you and your virtual global climatology buddies and Al Gore and the peace Nobel
prize committee do not know anything about fundamental university physics. We conclusively showed that
you, guy, and your buddies never will prove or disprove anything in the context of your unproven computer
models.
Moreover, we are sure that you are fully aware of this fact.

>”The Earth would be a solid ball of ice, and Venus would be 400 degrees colder than it is.”
In our paper, we clearly show that the standard calculation giving the 33 Celsius degrees for the greenhouse effect is wrong. Moreover, the Venus problem has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect, since in this case even the core presupposition is not fulfilled, namely that the sunlight reaches the ground.

>”And, as an aside, infrared weather satellites wouldn’t work either.”
Apparently, you do not know the subtle difference between absorption and warming. Read Chandrasekhar, read
Unsoeld, read Schack.

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