Abstract
In this paper, we scrutinize two completely different explanations of the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect: First, the explanation of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the World Meteorological Organization (W?MO) quan- tifying this effect by two characteristic temperatures, secondly, the explanation of Ramanathan et al. [1] that is mainly based on an energy-flux budget for the Earth-atmosphere system. Both explanations are related to the global scale. In addition, we debate the meaning of climate, climate change, climate variability and climate variation to outline in which way the atmospheric greenhouse effect might be responsible for climate change and climate variability, respectively. In doing so, we distinguish between two different branches of climatology, namely 1) physical climatology in which the boundary conditions of the Earth-atmosphere system play the dominant role and 2) statistical climatology that is dealing with the statistical description of fortuitous weather events which had been happening in climate periods; each of them usually comprises 30 years. Based on our findings, we argue that 1) the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect cannot be proved by the statistical description of fortuitous weather events that took place in a climate period, 2) the description by AMS and W?MO has to be discarded because of physical reasons, 3) energy-flux budgets for the Earth-atmosphere system do not provide tangible evidence that the atmospheric greenhouse effect does exist. Because of this lack of tangible evidence it is time to acknowledge that the atmospheric greenhouse effect and especially its climatic impact are based on meritless conjectures.
Highlights
Gerlich and Tscheuschner [2] listed a wide variety of attempts to explain the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect
The Scope of the Physical Climatology On the basis of the Subsections 2.1.1 to 2.1.3 we may state that studying 1) the input of solar energy into the system Earth-atmosphere, 2) the temporal and spatial distribution of this energy in the atmosphere and the oceans by radiative transfer processes, circulation systems and cycles, governed by fundamentalgeophysical fluid dynamic processes, 3) the absorption of solar irradiance in the underlying soil, 4) the exchange of energy between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere by the fluxes of sensible and latent heat and the infrared net radiation and 5) the long-term coinage of the boundary conditions of the respective climate system under study is the scope of the physical climatology
The scope of the statistical climatology is the statistical description of weather states over long-term periods of, at least, thirty years to characterize the climate of locations, regions or even climate zones by mean values and higher statistical moments like variance, skewness and kurtosis
Summary
Gerlich and Tscheuschner [2] listed a wide variety of attempts to explain the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect. Halpern et al stated that these authors’ lack quantitative familiarity with the field they are criticizing, second their claims of complexity or invalidity, impossibility and occasionally fraud regarding well-established quantitatively verified analyses of atmospheric processes and third their extensive diversions on topics that do nothing to further their own argument or a reader’s understanding In their reply to this comment, Gerlich and Tscheuschner [4] argued that their falsification paper discusses the violation of fundamental physical and mathematical principles in 14 examples of common pseudo-derivations of fictitious greenhouse effects that are all based on simplistic pictures of radiative transfer and their obscure relation to thermodynamics, including but not limited to those descriptions that 1) define a perpetualmotion machine of the 2nd kind, 2) rely on incorrectly calculated averages of global temperatures and 3) refer to incorrectly normalized spectra of electromagnetic radiation.
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