GI research gains attention in Natural Science
January 25, 2012
A paper in the journal Natural Science titled "Scrutinizing the atmospheric greenhouse effect and its climatic impact,"
by the Geophysical Institute's Gerhard Kramm and Ralph Dlugi, has been downloaded almost 1,000 times since its recent
appearance on the Scientific Research website.
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 and the World Meteorological Organization quantifying
this effect by two characteristic temperatures, secondly, the explanation of Ramanathan
et al. 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.
View the paper online.
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