COMMENT ON "FALSIFICATION OF THE ATMOSPHERIC CO2 GREENHOUSE EFFECTS WITHIN THE FRAME OF PHYSICS"

briefly:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1003/1003.1508v2.pdf
Gerlich and Tscheuschner, On The Barometric Formulas
â⦠another popular but incorrect idea communicated by some proponents of the global warming hypothesis â¦. since the venusian atmosphere is opaque to visible light, the central assumption of the greenhouse hypotheses is not obeyedâ¦..â
I refute it thus:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

longer form here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/05/solar/comment-pag…

Eli is right, there's low-hanging fruit at arxiv.
Watch your step, the overripe stuff is lying all 'round:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1003/1003.1508v2.pdf
Gerlich and Tscheuschner, On The Barometric Formulas
Version 2.0 (March 9, 2010
http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.1508v2

"... another popular but incorrect idea communicated by some proponents of the global warming hypothesis .... since the venusian atmosphere is opaque to visible light, the central assumption of the greenhouse hypotheses is not obeyed...."

http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
http://www.mentallandscape.com/CS_Venera09.jpg

So we're no longer wondering what planet they're from; the question now is what solar system they're describing.
Clearly not the one we live in. We have pictures.

Marco says:

If this would have been a journal with any credibility, I would have written a comment to the Editor and the Publisher, kindly asking them to get some science back in their articles. Publishing nonsense is bad enough, publishing a diatribe is injury to insult.

This journal does have credibility. It has a low impact factor, but I believe it is particularly good as English language accounts of work in China and Asia, especially in condensed matter physics. The greenhouse effect is not their normal bailiwick, but it is intended to cover quite a lot of ground. You can get a feel for their main focus with the headings on their Editorial board.

I do not think we want the journal to suddenly be overwhelmed by emails from irate bloggers. However, it would not be at all out of place, IMO, for someone who is professionally involved in physics, and who publishes themselves, to send a courteous email.

Here, for example, is what I sent to the three main editors back in March 2009, a couple of months after the first paper came out.

Dear editors,

In recent weeks, a paper that was published in IJMP(B) vol 23 #3 (Jan 30, 2009) has been popping up on several internet forums. The paper is "Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics" by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner.

On reading the paper for myself, I was amazed to find it riddled with errors that a first year level thermodynamics student should be able to correct.

It is at present being picked up and disseminated by people who have some kind of objection to the notion of anthropogenic global warming, and who willingly seize upon any argument, however fallacious, that could help raise any doubts on the conclusions of conventional climatology in this regard. But the defects of this paper are not about how climate might be impacted by *changes* to the composition of the atmosphere. The paper seeks to overthrow the very notion that greenhouse gases can warm a planet's surface at all!

There is widespread confusion amongst the general public on the science relating to climate, and the community is very poorly served by such basic errors being published in a conventional scientific journal. Many people who are interested in the topic but not particularly expert in thermodynamics are being confused on really fundamental points of physics as a result.

It appears that the article was published as a "review paper" rather than a "research paper", which I suspect means that it appeared by invitation and did not go through as careful a review process as research papers submitted to your journal. I would request that you arrange to have this paper examined properly by physicists with some background in basic thermodynamics, and if they confirm that the paper makes many elementary errors, that you confirm this publicly in your journal. Ideally, and for the standing of your journal, I think the paper should be formally retracted or repudiated.

In the meantime, I am writing some more thorough accounts of the errors in the paper at a major internet physics forum, which is widely used by students and where one of the posters there had asked about the paper. The thread of discussion is at http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=300667 and my contributions are given under my forum pen-name "sylas". There are a number of other physicists who have also noted various of the errors in this paper. The articles in the forum are, however, my own work.

With best wishes -- Chris Ho-Stuart (aka "sylas")

I note for the record that the link above to physicsforums is no longer useful. Physicsforums has decided to close down discussions related to climate change, which is why I recently started a new board for such discussions.

The reply I had from one of the editors, the one who handled the original paper, said simply:

Dear Dr. Ho-Stuart,

the best way is to summarize the mistakes in this paper (that a "first year level thermodynamics student" should be able to correct) in a brief publication. The journal will be glad to consider your contribution.

Also, we are currently having problems at Climate Physics Forums; I do not know why. William, it might be worth fixing your link in the updates to your blog to point simply to http://climatephysicsforums.com

This address will continue to work even if we have to change how it is handled.

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Although something of a statement of the obvious (i.e., G & T proved TOO MUCH, and their conclusions are heartily disproved by reality), it's a paper that should be shoved down the throats, or other orifices, of anyone who cites G&T as if it meant something. And yet, G&T respond as if they were still in the game.
Pity it's not freely accessible, but a .pdf should be available by email (jhalpern at howard.edu).

You're one of the earliest bloggers on this http://duoquartuncia.blogspot.com/2010/05/early-in-2009-unusual-paper-a…">Published rebuttal to Gerlich and Tscheuschner 2009. I am one of the co-authors, btw. (Chris Ho-Stuart).

I've also opened up a thread to talk about it at a new bulletin board, "Climate Physics Forums", which is intended to support substantive but courteous discussions on climate science. Published comment, and reply, on Gerlich and Tscheuschner 2009. People are welcome to take a look, but please check the board guidelines if you would like to join in discussion.

Actual science. Are the authors of the original peer reviewed{?} article expected to attempt a refutation of the criticism in Halpern et al?

This might illustrate how science journals work. As a layman I wonder how a paper so egregiously wrong get's published in the first place. In normal journal practice, is one critical comment sufficient to negate an article?

[In scientific terms, I think the article was self-negating. No-one would pay it the slightest (scientific) attention. It was published in a non-climate journal to avoid attention from competent reviewers and referees; but also that means that people who might be interested won't see it. In politics terms, the original has been used a bit in the blogosphere, but is clearly too wacky (and too technical) to make much impact -W]

There is a reply to the rebuttal appearing in the same issue. The reply is.... unusual. This is a very strange exchange appearing in what ought to be serious journal.

Personally, I'm opposed to all the global warming alarmism and hysteria, à la Al Gore, but anyone who disputes the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or that Earth experiences a greenhouse effect is just drowning in stupid.

Are there drafts of the G&T reply anywhere? Damned if I'm paying $25 to read more of their stuff. I suppose I can wait until I'm next in Cambridge.

I've been waiting for a refutation of G&T to make it into print - I was worried that one would never appear.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but by G&T's 'physics' if I shine a blue light at a red light (higher and lower energy respectively) then the red light will 'switch off' so as to not permit the transfer of heat (energy) from a lower temperature to a higher one?

Ouch. I _know_ I pointed out that typo, dammit.

Ah, the publicly available PDF is a draft, not the final published text. I trust that last typo got fixed behind the paywall.

"While our comment is behind a paywall, feel free to look at an earlier version (it went through 15 drafts)...."

What typo do you mean, Hank? I'm not seeing what you refer to. I'm one of the co-authors of the rebuttal BTW so I can answer if we missed something. And thanks for signing up at the forum william mentions, BTW!

That earlier draft contains an egregious error. The citation of footnote 16 comes before footnote 15.

Not only that ... no, I guess that's about it.

In the final version as it appears in print we acknowledge a certain Barton Paul Leverson. The error was pointed out ages ago by Hank over at Rabbet Run, and we still failed to fix it. It should, of course, be Barton Paul Levenson.

Mea culpa,mea maxima culpa

Bunnygate!

Bloom,

u win the internetz (for today, at least)

Halpern et al. eh? Well, that at least proves once and for all who Eli Rabbet is. ;-)

Thanks, Roger. Victory at any price, I say.

It's never really been a secret, Alex.

Sorry, Alex, I missed the smiley. I'm entirely too acclimated to septics frothing about pseudonyms that take all of five minutes of googling to see through.

Alex has it backwards

I sent a brief and friendly courtesy email to Gerlich and Tsheuschner to let them know of the discussions on the rebuttal and reply now underway at Climate Physics Forums.

We had a rather interesting reply; amongst other things Dr Tscheuschner apparently feels a particularly significant positive impact of his publication is that at last the peer reviewed literature has exposed the bunny's alter ego.

I think he underestimates the importance of this. In fact, I would go to say that this stands out by far as the most important contribution of their work on this subject.

He also prefers to remain working in the peer reviewed literature rather than at an amateur discussion forum. I understood that perfectly, and have no problem with this choice. After all, he is making real progress. With the publication of our rebuttal, their original paper now, at last, has its first citation from the peer reviewed literature. Glory!

"Yes, I've been shown to be an utter prat with no proper insight into basic thermodynamics, but at least now we know who Eli Rabett is!".

Something like that, Chris? ;-)

I'd like to send a heartfelt thanks to the authors for allowing me the opportunity to fire their timely torpedo at the ship captained by GKramm in the Guardian. Much obliged.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/06/climate-science-open-…

Glad to be of service, J Bowers, and congratulations. You win the last response to appear before comments were closed altogether!

Poor old user "gkramm" did seem to have a bit of a problem getting his contributions past the moderator. 6 out of 8 of his comments were removed.

@Sylas, the bit I forgot to add at the end before comments closed:

"Reports are coming in that the SS Sceptic is low on ammunition and has resorted to using spitballs, gossip and harsh opinion."

I just browsed the reply by Gerlich & Tscheuschner, and found this amazing example of False Appeal to Authority:
"One should keep in mind that we are theoretical physicists with experimental experience and, additionally, a lot of experience in numerical computing. Joshua Halpern and Jörg Zimmermann, for example, are chemists. We are not willing to
discuss whether they can be considered as laymen in physics, in particular laymen in thermodynamics."

And then the footnote to this sentence:
"However, we must think so."

It contains quite a few more of such appeals to authority ("We know! Do they?"-kind of argumentation)

What kind of referees is this journal using?

Marco - not only that, Halpern's PhD is in physics, not chemistry - and Joel Shore and I also both have physics PhD's, and 4 of the 6 authors have longer lists of refereed publications than either Gerlich or Tscheuschner... So the appeals to authority are fatuous, not just false.

Joshua B Halpern, from what I can see, is a physicist with a publication list that could be used to individually gift wrap the publications of Gerlich and Tscheuschner with a something over for decorative bows. Well, almost. He helps out the chemists, 'tis true; but it is very much physical chemistry, and he's come into that as a physicist. His publication record indicates a much closer association with atmospheric physics than either Gerlich or Tscheuschner.

The rest of us are not as impressive... and in that I include Gerlich and Tscheuschner as well! Put the whole lot us together and pick out the next most qualified, and it would probably be either Arthur Smith or Ralf Tscheuschner, I guess. But G&T certainly don't have anything to make them likely authors of a "review" paper on atmospheric radiation physics or the greenhouse effect.

The fuss about credentials is all beside the point. What counts is the scientific merits of the case, of course. And this explains why Gerlich and Tscheuschner need to focus on this irrelevancy.

Scientifically, none of this is going to make a scrap of difference. The original paper, the rebuttal, the reply, the various fulminations we can expect in coming days; none of it is going to have any effect on the work of science.

But there is real cause to wonder what has happened with the journal and their editorial processes.

I was surprised that the original paper got published. I assumed it slipped through, the paper's editorial board must be embarrassed, and this refutation should have been a nice chance for IJMP-B to get "closure" and hope that everybody quietly forgets about the whole G&T fiasco.

But this reply by G&T ... WTF?! Is the journal trying to euthanize its own reputation?

IJMP-B fell overboard when they printed the original G&T paper. Note to IJMP-B: when you're drowning, you want to grab the life-ring (Halpern et al's Comment) and say no thanks to the anvil (G&T's bizarre Reply).

I didn't see Arthur's response above. I honestly don't know the publication records of my co-authors other than Josh, which is online. I've not been much concerned. My own is not flash and it is in maths or computer science anyway. I know Arthur has a good record, and that Gerlich has very little (like me). I've not done a careful comparison, however.

G&T are some odd little bunnies, I must say...Apparently Bakan and Raschke (B&R) made the grievous mistake that Fourier wrote his stuff in 1827, rather than the correct data 1824. Of course, Fourier ALSO wrote a paper in 1827 (see here: http://www.academie-sciences.fr/membres/in_memoriam/Fourier/Fourier_pdf…) which discusses his ideas on the temperature of the planets.

[Actually the 1827 and 1824 articles are very closely related; one is, I suspect, a re-tread of the latter. See http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/fourier_1827/index.html -W]

And it gets worse: they attack B&R for summarising Arrhenius incorrectly, but B&R are referring to Arrhenius 1896 paper, rather than the less well-known 1906 paper. (the former paper states "A simple calculation shows that the temperature in the arctic regions would rise about 8° to 9°C., if the carbonic acid increased to 2.5 or 3 times its present value. In order to get the temperature of the ice age between the 40th and 50th parallels, the carbonic acid in the air should sink to 0.62--0.55 of its present value (lowering of temperature 4°-5°C.)", that is pretty much the 6 degrees B&R note). They could, of course, have noted that B&R were apparently not aware of Arrhenius correction, but funnily enough Arrhenius is often noted to have found a too high climate sensitivity for CO2 doubling without feedbacks.

What is it with these guys and their apparent hatred of several people? What is it with the reviewer not noting these ad hominems? Or alternatively, what is it with the Editor not demanding G&T write a reply that actually goes to the substance of the rebuttal, rather than spouting venom at anyone and everyone with false claims and lying by omission?

If this would have been a journal with any credibility, I would have written a comment to the Editor and the Publisher, kindly asking them to get some science back in their articles. Publishing nonsense is bad enough, publishing a diatribe is injury to insult.

G&T seem to be at it again:

On the Barometric Formulas...

In case anybody has been holidaying on Neptune, here's a link to Tamino's summary of Goddard's Venus nonsense on some stupid denialist blog. I post it here because, well, you'll see. Lulz don't come much lulier than this!

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/goddards-folly/

Occurs to me that greenhouse effect denial is a bit like the "evolution would break the second law of thermodynamics" argument of the creationists. You're really getting somewhere when your opponent tries to invalidate your entire theory by rewriting the laws of physics!

> G&T seem to be at it again
Yeah, they claim there the atmosphere of Venus is opaque.
Refuted: http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

re: #31
Yes, p.12-13 is interesting reading.
Clearly, their previous paper was correct. They say so. :-)

@John Mashey:

What did Naomi Oreskes say/write again? Something about the arrogance of physicists? Surely she must be joking, they ARE right. They are theoretical physicists, backed by some kind of meteorologist in Alaska (Kramm) !

I'm at a conference today so I don't really have time to read it properly, but in that G&T preprint, they make the simplifying assumption, really early on, that v(r,t) is independent of r. That is, that the wind is the same everywhere. And then they assert that this is more general than v(r,t) == 0. Sigh.

re: #36

I think you are thinking of:
Myanna Lahsen, Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist "trio" supporting the backlash against global warming.
That's about the GMI "trio" (plus Fred Singer, really).

Physicist Arthur P. Smith wrote a nice essay The Arrogance of Physicists in 2009.

But, it wasn't Oreskes, at least not in the Oreskes/Conway book (I did a search for "arroga" and got no hits). In any case, their "Merchansts of Doubt" comes out later this month. Pre-order now...

Note: lest there be any misunderstanding, both arrogance and accomplishment in physics are likely to be distributed normally, and without doing a serious study, I'm not sure there is a strong correlation. There are certainly physicists who know everything wrong in another field without bothering to learn. I studied ~200 of those last year, but they ranged in ability from Nobel physicist & a few NAS members ... down to ...not very good...

On the other hand, I also know some top physicists who have no problem asking lots of questions and studying a new area, and knowing what they know and what they don't. They don';t rush around disproving well-known things.

Some physicists do fall prey to {I'm a theoretical physicists, and here are a bunch of equations, and Greenhouse is wrong] or [I'm a statistical physicist ... and it's all cycles, or anything that isn't AGW.] I've found 2 books by ex-nuclear physicists, both of which (Hayden & Alexander) think E-G Beck is good, and Hayden likes G&T besides... But hey, good enough for Hayden to make the cut for speaker at Heartland #4, coming up May 16-18. (Nuclear physicist) Gerald Marsh speaks there as well.

Thanks John, Myanna Lahsen it is. Easy to confuse the two, no? :-)

Marco says in comment #30:

If this would have been a journal with any credibility, I would have written a comment to the Editor and the Publisher, kindly asking them to get some science back in their articles. Publishing nonsense is bad enough, publishing a diatribe is injury to insult.

This journal does have credibility, in fact. It has a low impact factor, but I believe it is particularly good as English language accounts of work in China and Asia, especially in condensed matter physics. The greenhouse effect is not their normal bailiwick, but it is intended to cover quite a lot of ground. You can get a feel for their main focus by looking though subheadings on their Editorial board.

I do not think we want the journal to suddenly be overwhelmed by emails from irate bloggers. However, it would not be at all out of place, IMO, for someone who is professionally involved in physics, and who publishes themselves, to send a courteous email.

Here, for example, is what I sent to the three main editors back in March 2009, a couple of months after the first paper came out.

Dear editors,

In recent weeks, a paper that was published in IJMP(B) vol 23 #3 (Jan 30, 2009) has been popping up on several internet forums. The paper is "Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics" by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner.

On reading the paper for myself, I was amazed to find it riddled with errors that a first year level thermodynamics student should be able to correct.

It is at present being picked up and disseminated by people who have some kind of objection to the notion of anthropogenic global warming, and who willingly seize upon any argument, however fallacious, that could help raise any doubts on the conclusions of conventional climatology in this regard. But the defects of this paper are not about how climate might be impacted by *changes* to the composition of the atmosphere. The paper seeks to overthrow the very notion that greenhouse gases can warm a planet's surface at all!

There is widespread confusion amongst the general public on the science relating to climate, and the community is very poorly served by such basic errors being published in a conventional scientific journal. Many people who are interested in the topic but not particularly expert in thermodynamics are being confused on really fundamental points of physics as a result.

It appears that the article was published as a "review paper" rather than a "research paper", which I suspect means that it appeared by invitation and did not go through as careful a review process as research papers submitted to your journal. I would request that you arrange to have this paper examined properly by physicists with some background in basic thermodynamics, and if they confirm that the paper makes many elementary errors, that you confirm this publicly in your journal. Ideally, and for the standing of your journal, I think the paper should be formally retracted or repudiated.

In the meantime, I am writing some more thorough accounts of the errors in the paper at a major internet physics forum, which is widely used by students and where one of the posters there had asked about the paper. The thread of discussion is at http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=300667 and my contributions are given under my forum pen-name "sylas". There are a number of other physicists who have also noted various of the errors in this paper. The articles in the forum are, however, my own work.

With best wishes -- Chris Ho-Stuart (aka "sylas")

I note for the record that the link above to physicsforums is no longer useful. Physicsforums has decided to close down discussions related to climate change, which is why I recently started a new board for such discussions.

The reply I had from one of the editors, the one who handled the original paper, said simply:

Dear Dr. Ho-Stuart,

the best way is to summarize the mistakes in this paper (that a "first year level thermodynamics student" should be able to correct) in a brief publication. The journal will be glad to consider your contribution.

My own initial feeling was that the level of discussion for rebutting the paper was not worthy of a science journal. I still feel that, in fact, but was persuaded to join in the effort of making a rebuttal in any case when Eli Rabbet started to put together a formal response.

I'm trying to visit the climatephysicsforums.com, but all I get is an error page from my Firefox 3.0 browser with:

=================
Content Encoding Error

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem

============

...On the other hand, IE7 seems to work ok. You might want to talk to your site admin about making it browser-friendly, though. A lot of people use Firefox.

Okay, granted that this is a theoretical journal, even so I would have expected the editors to be just a little circumspect about publishing a paper purporting to overturn a well established feature of atmospheric physics. I can't believe they'd look at the paper and not say, okay maybe we need to get somebody who really knows this field to give it a basic sanity check.

I've no problem entering the physicsforum site using FF3.6.2 via WMC's link at the top.

Luna_the_cat says:

I'm trying to visit the climatephysicsforums.com, but all I get is an error page from my Firefox 3.0 browser with:

That's strange! I am in charge of the board, and I used Firefox as well; currently at Firefox 3.6.3

We were having problems with one of our host's servers recently, but that was manifesting as empty pages (0 bytes) for some urls, and it has since been fixed.

I'd very much appreciate an email to admin "@" climatephysicsforums.com concerning any problems like this! Let me know the time it occurs and the URL used. The idea that it works better on IE7 than Firefox is appalling!

@sylas -- sent. A difference between Firefox 3.0 and 3.5+ maybe?

Grr. I have online access to IJMP-A, but not B. Don't tell this lazy bunny that he has to trudge to the library to read the reply.

I still don't think anybody actually read the initial paper before publication. Even if any reviewers were completely unfamiliar with the physics, the bluster and accusations were inappropriate.

Or perhaps the editor is friends with G+T. Wanting to have a little irresponsible fun with climate scientists is another possibility.

Luna, if problems persist with FF3.whatever-you-have, try the /Help/Report Broken Website menu and tell them it's fine with FF3.5+; might be useful for Firefox to know.

Being friends with G&T. I wonder if they're insufferable in real life, too.

Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 incorrectly report deflate support (RFC 1950) in http requests but actually expect RFC 1951 data. The upshot of this is that older versions of standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox may not be able to accept non-standard data produced by servers that have been adapted to work with the brain-damaged Microsoft product. At a guess I'd say that something of the sort is happening here.

Server-side fix for the above: get the system admin to turn off deflate support on the web server. If this cannot be done, you'll just have to advise the users how to perform a client-side fix (see below).

Client-side fix: if you have an old version of Firefox that complains about this site, upgrade to a more recent browser. If that is not possible, type about:config into the address bar, find the http-accept-encoding parameter in the list, and edit it to remove "deflate" from the list of accepted encodings. This will force all websites to send data using a content encoding your browser can handle without problems.

Er, the parameter name is network.http.accept-encoding

Thanks for that, Tony. I have passed on those suggestions to the zetaboards people who manage the server. If anyone out there tries the client side solution, either by upgrading to a newer Firefox or by using "about:config" in the address bar to alter settings and remove "deflate" from the "network.http.accept-encoding" parameter, then please let me know what result you have. I would like to know if this solves the problem, or if it does not solve the problem.

You can email me as "admin at climatephysicsforums.com"

Re :#36

You call them theoretical physicists?! Of which century? The 18th.? Has the 1st law of thermodynamics been deleted from the undergraduate syllabus or did these characters skip a few lectures? Whatever the cause, they appear to have jettisoned the 1st law in order to modify the 2nd.

Many good editors would know enough physics to think twice about this stuff even before sending it out to referees. No prior experience in climate science required.

The Spectator is now quoting this paper as a final disproof of AGW + a new set of unpleasant and unsubstantiated allegations.