Friday, March 7, 2008

Greenhouse equations "totally wrong"

John Reynolds at Grey Canada alerts us to new results in climate science. A NASA atmospheric physicist re-derived the equations governing the greenhouse effect and came up with a new result showing that the runaway warming previously predicted is impossible. Full story here:

The theory was developed by ... Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Ames Research Center.

... his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.

NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money" ... funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.

Miskolczi resigned in protest, [...] His theory was eventually published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in his home country of Hungary.

The conclusions are supported by research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last year from Steven Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs...

... used his theory to model not only Earth, but the Martian atmosphere as well, showing what he claims is an extremely good fit with observational results.
It will be interesting to see how well the new theory stands up in the longer run. But this is how science is supposed to proceed. Nothing is ever "settled" for all time. With issues like "global warming", however, politics makes it much more difficult for theories at odds with the prevailing political and scientific orthodoxy to be seriously considered much less accepted.

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