Thursday, March 20, 2008

You Keep Using Those Equations. I Don't Think They Mean What You Think They Do...

"New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible

Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center. [...]

Miskolczi's story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution -- originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today -- ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down. "


NASA refused to publish his results. He's resigned from NASA, saying, "My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."
I noticed this defection from the Global Warming camp at The Common Room.

It made me think again about the movie Expelled ... possibly because of Jay Rogers' comments which are just about a review in themselves. His actual review can be read here. I am getting more and more interested in this movie.

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