More G & T

It's fun to see how bad bad writing can be,
this promised to go to the limit.
...................Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard

There is a certain awful fascination to reading Gerlich and Tscheuschner. One hundred fifteen pages of incoherent nonesense. An example from their attempts to disprove greenhouse effect claims:

In his popular textbook on meteorology Moller claims:

In a real glass house (with no additional heating, i.e. no greenhouse) the window panes are transparent to sunshine, but opaque to terrestrial radiation. The heat exchange must take place through heat conduction within the glass, which requires
a certain temperature gradient. Then the colder boundary surface of the window pane can emit heat. In case of the atmosphere water vapor and clouds play the role of the glass."

Disproof: The existence of the greenhouse effect is considered as a necessary condition for thermal conductivity. This is a physical nonsense. Furthermore it is implied that the spectral transmissivity of a medium determines its thermal conductivity straightforwardly. This is a physical nonsense as well.

Consider the first sentence of the "disproof." Huh? Nothing in the cited passage says anything like this. The statements that the operation of a standard greenhouse depends in part on conductivity is hardly the same as saying thermal conductivity depends on the greenhouse effect. The last sentence of the disproof is equally disconnected from any logical context. The whole thing is similarly incoherent. Errors of logic, errors of science, and pure disconnected thought streaming dominate the text. Babbling (with equations and diagrams!!) by the looney on the street corner, and some idiot published it. (The Editors of The International Journal of Modern Physics.)

The most substantive (and therefore hilariously wrong) claim in the paper is the claim that the greenhouse effect violates the second law of thermodynamics, because it depends on energy flowing from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer ground. More precisely, it depends on the fact that some of the radiation emitted by the ground is absorbed by the atmosphere, re-emitted, and returns to the ground. The fallacy, of course, is that the second law doesn't say anything about forbidding the movement of energy from cooler body to warmer body - what it forbids is net movement of energy from cooler to warmer. If Earth emits energy into the vacuum of space, essentially none of it returns. When it emits it into the atmosphere, some fraction returns - the point of the second law being that that fraction is less than one if the atmosphere is cooler than the Earth. This is freshman or high school level thermodynamics prof.

One bit of amusing effrontery is the dedication of the work by one of the authors to the great astrophysicist S. Chandrasekar, on the grounds that they had met (once!) in Chicago. That should give Chandra a spin in his grave - his hallmark was clarity, precision and meticulous accuracy - the opposite of everything in the Gearhead and Kachoo paper.

But hey, I too did once stay in a Holiday Inn Express.