Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases

Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases

From the Jennifer Marohasy blog, March 3, 2009

CLIMATE is complex but in an attempt to understand the effects of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide on global temperatures simplified General Circulation Models (GCMs) have been developed and are used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Al Gore, in his famous movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, explained that as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, more energy is trapped, warming the planet.   This assumption is central to the GCMs and the current consensus on climate change.

Some sceptics complain that the GCMs do not realistically simulate climate because there are many processes that can’t be adequately modelled including cloud formation.  Michael Hammer, an engineer who specializes in spectroscopy, is also sceptical of the GCM but his criticism is more fundamental.  In the following paper, using the basic laws of spectroscopy, he shows that a significant portion of energy loss from the Earth’s surface is by direction radiation to space at wavelengths not absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This is in direct contrast to the IPCC explanation that there is low radiation from the Earth’s surface to space and potentially high radiation from the atmosphere to space.

Science is a process of getting it wrong and hopefully learning – on this single issue Michael Hammer and the IPCC can’t both be right.

Read the full post here