Die Fachbegutachtung

Below is Eli's translation from the German of Jörg Zimmerman's take on G&T. The Rabett will excerpt parts of this for a final part in our opus, taking care to desnark. Eli realizes that everyone else is right damn you all, and we have to desnark to put the paper where it belongs.

At the time he wrote this Jörg did not have access to the IJMP paper so there will be some minor differences, different page numbers, etc. which should be allowed for, and that does not detract from the many valid points he makes.

Scientific debate occurs primarily in peer-reviewed journals. The system has been established to save time and resources. In principle, if everything were published, everyone who wanted to play scientist could submit manuscripts to the journals. That would result in publication of a phonebook thick journal every week in every field of which 90% would be useless. Expert reviews should select submissions so that the journals are readable. How well this works depends on how much time the referees take, how carefully they work and how close their own work is to the articles they review. Expert peer review is no guarantee that the work is correct. Over time the value of the work becomes obvious when others build on it, the work is frequently cited by others, whether it stands up to criticism (some papers will be commented on and this can lead to corrections), and how it matches with the work of others (good work can be replicated and the results can be confirmed by other methods). Publication usually requires two (or more) positive evaluations from volunteer referees who are themselves experts in the same field as the submitted manuscript. Normally, the referees are anonymous. In highly specialized areas, there are often only a few qualified specialists and there is a good chance that you can guess from the comments, who the referees were.

The system obviously has its weaknesses. There are negligent referees, there are those that want to wreck havoc on their competitors or wink at their friends and those who are simply overwhelmed. The latter is more likely if the submission is at the outer limits of the journal’s usual focus because the editor will have difficulty choosing competent reviewers. Some reviewers hide behind their anonymity, some fear, perhaps, that they could no longer be independent judges if the review were not anonymous. There will always be a debate about the flaws of peer review, improvements will be proposed, but for all its weaknesses, it is the system that we have and for 90% of submissions it seems to work. Unfortunately, some believe that peer review will ensure that only proper, serious, well-written articles will be published. This expectation is naive. In general, peer review ensures that 50-70% of submitted contributions will be published (more or less, depending on the reputation of the journal) and after peer review most of the articles have some value, especially if the paper is relevant to the reviewer’s own work.

Sometimes peer review fails so badly that you have to slap your head and stand speechless.

(That's Georg Hoffmann who takes on the dreaded Krammbot in the comments at Prima Klima)

The fabrication that aspires to be a scientific article

The physicists Gerlich and Tscheuschner have created a fabrication that had circulated for three years previously amidst great fanfare in denialist circles. In all seriousness they claim that they have disproved the greenhouse effect. We should not have to seriously discuss this. It is so obviously wrong that one’s time should not be wasted. There are people who still claim that a perpetual motion machine can be built, that the theories of relativity are wrong or the world was created in six days. These are not the subject of serious scientific discussion and should be eliminated by peer review. Yet, be that what it may, Gerlich and Tscheuschner have found a physics journal to house their contribution. It is the International Journal of Modern Physics, B, not a journal of geophysics, climatology or meteorology but a journal that publishes articles about condensed matter, high temperature superconductors, and statistical and applied physics. To attentive observers this immediately raises red flags that something is seriously wrong. You would not expect editors of such a journal to have much expertise about climate. According to the published rules of the journal all review articles, such as that of Gerlich and Tscheuschner must be invited which is still more concerning.

In spite of all this, this fabrication has been published in a scientific journal so we are obligated to say what is rotten with it. That is not simple to do. The manuscript is unusually long. The electronic edition has 115 pages. To be sure review articles that long have been published, but this submission does not resemble a review article. The stated issue, the greenhouse effect, can be handled in fewer than ten pages. A response to the article by Arthur Smith used nine pages to show that there is a greenhouse effect. If this was really a review of all relevant literature on the greenhouse effect, it could be somewhat longer, but this is exactly what was not done here. Scarcely any of the references deal with the supposed theme of the paper, making the submission a parody of a review article.

Another sign is that the authors mainly talk about “problems” that are not really problems. These are then "resolved", but they were never relevant to the real issue.
For example, one of these deals extensively with the contribution of heat conduction. However, the greenhouse effect is an effect of the radiation budget of the earth. Heat conduction in the atmosphere is tiny compared to radiation and convection. It can be neglected and is thus irrelevant.

The work is full of polemics, which should not be found in a scientific publication. In that regard, large sections appear not to be a scientific contribution, but a political comment with technical background. That should also be a warning sign that it is a work without scientific value trying to imitate a journal article. One is driven to presume that the paper is so long to convey the appearance of scientific competence through overcomplicated discussions of irrelevant problems where actual technical expertise is lacking.

The list of references is another sign of this. It includes many books, including textbooks, without page numbers. Therefore one would have to read the entire book to discover where it supports a statement in the article. One can occasionally do this in special circumstances, e.g. if introductory texts are referred to, but even then it is best to use page numbers. As done here, it is not helpful. The books cited are in part works of opinion and political polemics. Many of the references are to polemics or anonymous contributions from the Internet or from the gray literature. In addition, newspaper articles are cited, very unusual in a scientific article. A major proportion of the cited literature has no relation to the greenhouse effect or to questions of radiation balance. Obviously including a discussion of temperature reconstructions of the last 2000 years is not relevant, especially not if it is just used to bash Michael Mann. A number of well known deniers are quoted, so to speak back scratching among comrades. For historical CO2 levels the key citation is to a paper published in a sociology journal by a retired secondary school teacher E. Beck. If such citations are placed on the same level as those of Keeling and other reputable researchers, then it becomes clear that this is not a serious presentation of research on CO2 mixing ratios in the background atmosphere. (At a second look, this reference is not used in the text – it remained there from an earlier version of this work.)

The falsification starts in Section 1, Introduction, which occupies only 9 pages (!) and which is stuffed with irrelevancies. For the greenhouse effect thermal conductivity of CO2 or other gases is unimportant. Further, the IPCC’s basic argument about the greenhouse effect is not, as G & T argue, that there must exist a mysterious consensus, but from the cited literature (see below).

The atmosphere is not a greenhouse

One now comes to section 2. First, in 2.1 the authors entrap us into a long, overcomplicated calculation, to show that the Stefan-Boltzmann Law does not apply, to emission and absorption from molecular vibrational bands. This is true, but is also known, and for the greenhouse effect it is not relevant. The Stefan-Boltzmann law is not used to calculate the greenhouse effect in any except the simplest models. It serves only in simplified models to estimate the magnitude of the greenhouse effect. In Section 2.2, the sun is described as a black radiator at a temperature of about 5780 degree. What a surprise! One would have to refer to a textbook or even cite the relevant literature. This attempts to inflate the authors’ contributions in an effort to make them appear to be scientific. In 2.3 and 2.4, they then explained that a car on a beautiful summer day is hot inside, and a very long, complicated explanation of why this is so follows. Long explanations, pages without any reference to the actual topic, namely the greenhouse effect, but in which many of the same polemics against scholars such as Raschke are hidden. In 2.5 they add an experiment about a greenhouse made of potassium or sodium chloride instead of glass. This way visible and infrared light can pass the windows. This is to demonstrate that a greenhouse blocks the transport of heat by convection. This has no relation to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. All this would make sense for a polemic, or as a teaching example selected to explain the atmospheric greenhouse effect to students, but there is no connection to scientific work on the greenhouse effect. Putting everything together, again, the main message of Section 2 is that a greenhouse functions not by blocking infrared radiation, but by stopping turbulent heat convection. Since the atmospheric greenhouse effect is associated with the radiation budget of the earth, this whole discussion is irrelevant.

In Section 3, the authors search wide and far for a definition of the greenhouse effect. Section 3.2 is an overview of, no, not the scientific literature, but gray publications and press clippings from deniers and just about anything else from anyone anywhere. This is something I've never seen in a journal article. In 3.3 we find arbitrary statements of what the greenhouse effect is taken from anonymous sources found hither and yon (referred to as Anonymous 1, 2 and 3, completely untraceable. They could even have been invented by the authors) and a dictionary. It would be funny if it were not so sad. There are textbooks in which the greenhouse effect is explained precisely. One only needs to use them. This strange collection Gerlich & Tscheuschner can partly refute at least formalistically. But that is not relevant. This is yet another strawman attack, of which I have already described several.

Among the citations, for example, there is one correct description of the greenhouse effect issued in 1995 by the German Meteorological Society (GMS). The authors attempt to refute it. They attack, not the basic message of the statement, but claim that it confuses heat and thermal radiation (this is not the case). They try to convince us that the concept of a radiation budget is meaningless. That is nonsense and it is not justified by them in the slightest. They assume that radiation from the atmosphere is only emitted toward the ground. This is a straightforward barefaced lie, because the text of the GMS statement explicitly states that the radiation is emitted in all directions. This is a perfect example of the author’s approach. Such a thing should never get through peer review.

In another place, Rahmstorf’s explanation is ripped from its context in which he explains that atmosphere itself emits longwave radiation which thereby contributes to surface heating in addition to solar radiation thus warming the surface. The authors pretend that Rahmstorf had alleged that the greenhouse effect involves the reflection of radiation from the surface by the atmosphere. That is not what was written, and would of course be wrong. The authors then claim to have refuted Rahmstorf. Such reasoning might be suited to the beer cellar, the pub, the country club, or wherever you partake of your beverage of choice, but does not belong in a scientific journal.

Section 3.4, quotes from a report by the U.S. Department of Energy, that the designation "greenhouse effect" is misleading, because greenhouses do not work the same way as the atmospheric effect does. This does not prove what G & T assume it does, that there is no clear definition of the greenhouse effect and that it would be impossible to experimentally observe the greenhouse effect. Even worse, at this point, G & T claim that virtually no one can reproduce model calculations on the greenhouse effect. This statement is not substantiated. They try to make it appear as a quote, but the reference is only to the “Journal of Irreproducible Results”. Not an article in the journal, or an issue. The entire journal. Perhaps this was meant to be a "joke", but one that has never been seen in a serious article.

In another example, G & T quote elsewhere from an article by Bakan and Raschke in a booklet, in which the later correctly explained the greenhouse effect and also point out that the comparison with a real greenhouse is superficial. What prevented the authors from looking more closely at the literature they cite?

A biased overview of the history of the greenhouse effect

In Section 3.5 Gerlich and Tscheuschner then partially describe how Gore's popular-science lecture is wrong. For a scientific paper this is irrelevant and only polemical. For the most part, the section shows that reflection and the absorption / emission of radiation are different. That surprises no one. Again, it is simply irrelevant. Section 3.6, after a brief mention of the pioneering work of Tyndall and Fourier, shows why Arrhenius’ calculations were flawed. A century has passed since then, with higher-resolution spectra, much better models and better data on the composition of the atmosphere which all allow for improved calculations. The question arises about what is going on here, because it is well known that the Arrhenius’ calculations had problems, and they are now only of historical interest.

Obviously, this is just part of the polemic which extends throughout the paper: they search for examples of erroneous or incomplete explanations, and then refute, what no one wants to defend. An overview of modern work follows in the same section. There, however, the authors assemble a selective and misleading compilation, in order to give the appearance that model calculations predict everything and nothing. They make much of the fact that in a large set of calculation that overall predicted significant warming, there were a few that predicted cooling that were not featured. Throughout there are political shots directed at the green movement. In something published in 2009, one would hope that the IPCC Third and Fourth Assessment Reports would be accurately quoted, including their expectations for future increases in global temperature, but also the JASON, the Charney-and the Nierenberg Reports from 1979 and 1983 are missing. It is additionally striking that while the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports are actually cited in an entirely different place and not here where they should have been. It is obvious that the authors were not interested in providing a proper representation of current climate research.

Radiation Balance

In Section 3.7 on page 58 after interminable political polemics and irrelevant discussions of everything except the relevant science they finally begin dealing with the problem which is actually the basis of the greenhouse effect. First they claim that the concept of radiation balance is false because no law of conservation of intensity can be formulated. But that is irrelevant, because we can formulate a conservation law for the transferred energy. If one assumes a stationary case in which the energy of the Earth plus atmosphere remains constant a matching radiation budget can be built. Nothing else is behind the radiation balance diagrams. These are complete, because energy is conserved and therefore the amount of energy absorbed by and emitted from the earth must be equal and they are, as observed by measurements at least within their error limits. G & T deliberately misunderstand this, and then attempt to rebut what no one claims.

On page 61, using Equation 73, they derive the temperature of a planet without an atmosphere using radiation balance. Here, the radiation from the Earth is set equal to the solar radiation at the Earth, but the effect of the known albedo of the earth, 0.3, is described as being used to "tune" the equation although what this actually means is explained in all relevant textbooks. There is a confusing explanation of how the effective solar intensity striking the surface is reduced by the well-known factor of ¼, due to the fact that the sun shines on only one side of the Earth at a time and the angle at which the light strikes the surface outside of the equator. One has to look in the footnotes to find the explanation of what are described as tuning parameters in the text is really the measured albedo, and this is probably only there because of the repeated criticisms of this section which have appeared since 2007.

If the correct factors are used, one finds the known temperature of the earth without an atmosphere of 255 K. The authors then explain that the difference between this value and the observed temperature of the Earth's surface is the greenhouse effect. That is correct, only the authors falsely call this effect "fictitious". One has to remember that the back radiation from the atmosphere can be measured. Further satellites measure a mean radiation temperature of the atmosphere into space of about 255 Kelvin. It is obvious that the mean temperature of the earth's surface must be much higher, because otherwise it would be completely covered with ice. Institutions such as the Goddard Institute for Space Science and the Hadley Center, have determined the mean temperature of the earth's surface to be about 288 Kelvin. This temperature difference is practically a definition of the greenhouse effect on the basis of measurements and is misinterpreted by G & T.

Then the authors show that a derivation of the temperature of the earth gives different results when the earth is assumed to have a uniform temperature or a temperature distribution. A temperature distribution leads to a lower average temperature. This is also well known and trivial. In the extreme case of a planet that cannot rotate where the sun only shines on one side, the calculated temperature is very much lower than an Earth with a homogeneous temperature distribution. As with any idealization, the homogeneous surface temperature is not used in current models but only as an illustration, so this result is not relevant. It does not prove that there is no greenhouse effect, but only is a simplified model of providing a lower limit for the greenhouse effect. This is the exact opposite of what G & T wanted to prove.

Although G&T do not ever actually come to grips with a realistic model for the greenhouse effect, they then proclaim that they have falsified it. But they have only shown that a simplified model is a simplified model. That we knew.

G & T then show you cannot find a closed, exact solution for the radiation balance of a rotating Earth. That may be the case, but it is not a problem, because one can find numerical solutions for radiative transfer models with given boundary conditions and not that one has to calculate accurate surface temperature distributions from radiation balance condition.

They then refer to a publication of Schack in which the IR absorption of the atmosphere due to H2O and CO2, is calculated when the CO2 concentration rises. What this contributes is not clear. It furthers the polemics but does not contribute anything meaningful to understanding the greenhouse effect.

3.8 discusses heat conduction. It is irrelevant because heat conduction contributes little to energy distribution in the atmosphere which is primarily determined by radiation, latent heat and convection. Then in 3.9 the Laws of Thermodynamics are discussed. Behind this lurks the claim that the greenhouse effect requires heat transfer from the colder atmosphere to the warmer ground. This is not the case, rather the greenhouse effect requires a radiative interchange of heat between the atmosphere and the surface, in agreement with the Second Law, which also makes this point irrelevant. It is pathetic because of how quotes from Rahmstorf, among others, which explain the situation are deliberately misunderstood.

Attack on climate science in general

Section 4 carries the grandiloquent title "Physical fundamentals of climate science." Textbooks provide such things. The authors want to show that such fundamentals are not associated with the practice of climate science. Climate science is seemingly equated with climate models. Each climate model is based on a particular abstraction of nature with a matching set of physical, chemical, geological and biological equations. It is absurd, to try to make a single overarching statement about them. G & T quote, for example, criticisms of the models by the physicist Dyson which prove nothing or they cite a press release (!) of the British weather service, to present a counter position. They insinuate that climate models are not capable of adequately reliable statements about the future climate, because forecast models only give reliable predictions for a few days in the future {not in the IJMP version[JZ1]). I have already explained that this comparison is wrong: Weather forecasts are initial value problems, climate models solve boundary value problems, they have nothing to do with each other. G & T do not understand what they are reporting on here. Continuing, the authors make apparently scientific statements about the equations of fluid dynamics in order to show that models simplify nature too much to have any value. I have deliberately used such plain words - it is what is behind the statements of G & T's. Their statements are not provable and also nonsensical. Models are fundamental tools of science. Each model has a scope and associated uncertainties. Whether the results of the model are significant, must be determined in each case. Global judgments are nonsensical.

In 4.2 there is a long list of potentially relevant physical equations, without any demonstration of where and in what way they are relevant. Even worse equations appear that can be neglected in climate models, such as those for heat conduction, or such as Maxwell’s equations, that, to be sure are the basis of electromagnetic phenomenon, but without which one can describe the natural absorption and emission of radiation by greenhouse gases. Moreover, the basic equations are discretized in models (they are solved at grid points, in the atmosphere and the oceans), and as far as necessary, simplified. That is attacked without the authors demonstrating for even one model the extent to which these simplifications make the actual results for the given application useless. The criticism appears to be formally correct, but virtually has no substance and is irrelevant.

Section 4.3 is even worse, where the authors attempt to make a philosophical statement about what a scientific theory should look like, and, of course, "prove" that according to their statements in 4.2, climate models are not scientific. They falsely claim that the existence of a consensus in climate science is wrong and in any case was based on polls. Comically, the section ends with a polemic against the blog Real Climate.

Conclusion:

In summary, enormous time is taken to contradict what no one believes. G&T never attack the greenhouse effect which they don’t understand and don’t want to understand

What appears to be a scientific contribution hides a political polemic. Such things should not be published in any journal that wants to be recognized as serious. Something like this should not be published by anyone who wants to be accepted as a scientist. But unfortunately it has happened.