Recently the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued an “Endangerment Finding” stating that CO2 and 5 other green house gasses constituted a danger to public health and welfare. Many people are not aware that the Obama Administration, through the EPA’s finding, can now pass through environmental regulations that will force businesses to comply with the changes without going to congress in order to pass Cap and Trade Legislation. With this finding, the Administration could regulate CO2 by dictate from the White House to any degree it chooses.
by Dr. Miklos Zagoni, Dianna C. Cotter
Unable to disprove greenhouse effect in equilibrium
Earth’s Greenhouse Effect is constant and does not rise with human CO2 emissions. That is the main point of Dr Miskolczi’s results, called to the attention of the EPA in the ‘Endangerment Finding’ evaluation process. The EPA could not disprove this or Miskolczi’s conclusions.
What is little known is that the EPA held public comment sessions before issuing their finding. By law, the EPA is obligated to respond to substantive comments and some of those comments cited a Hungarian Physicist who discovered the Law and Constants that describe the Equilibrium of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi in 2004 and 2007 published his work and, to date, no Scientific study or authentic peer review (which is to say, something more substantive than random naysayers in the blogosphere whose livelihoods are dependent on the myth of Global Warming not being exposed) has been published which finds Dr. Miskolczi’s work in error.
The EPA itself made several errors in the attempt to understand Miskolczi’s work, and illustrates a number of incorrect arguments that have been used in the attempt to discredit the Doctor’s work. We will address these misconceptions here as they are repeated time and again in a show of complete misunderstanding of Miskolczi’s law and constant.
EPA: “The hypothesis that increased CO2 forcing will lead to a counterbalancing decrease in water vapor is highly speculative, and is not supported by the vast body of scientific literature.”
Response: “It is not hypothesis, and not speculative at all. It is based on a huge amount of radiative transfer calculations by Dr. Miskolczi’s High Resolution Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Code (HARTCODE, 1990), made on the TIGR global radiosonde data archive of the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (Paris, Director Hervé Le Treut, lead IPCC author). Details of the dataset and the results of calculations were published in Miskolczi & Mlynczak (2004). The relations revealed by Miskolczi explicitly were there implicit in the Kiehl-Trenberth 1997 global energy budget, but Miskolczi’s computations made them exact and clear. He took those flux relations as equations in his 2007 paper, and calculated the solutions of the new set of energy balance equations. The solution gives a theoretical equilibrium value of the clear-sky greenhouse effect, exactly equal to that given on empirical grounds in Kiehl and Ramanathan (2006).”
EPA: “A climate sensitivity of zero is completely incompatible with historical temperature variations, as it would imply an unchanging climate in direct contrast to historically recorded temperatures changes on all timescales.”
Response: “This is a complete misunderstanding. It is the surplus greenhouse temperature (33 degrees Celsius) that does not vary. The basic (or so called effective) temperature (now about 255 Kelvin, or minus 18 Celsius) varied, and is varying, according to the available energy. (This latter term includes the incoming energy from the sun, the effects of solar variations and orbital parameters, cloud and ice coverage, planetary albedo [reflectivity], ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, human industrial heat generation, geothermal heat production etc.). To be precise about the scientific content of Miskolczi’s statements, it is the ratio, not the difference, of the surface temperature (now about 288K) to the effective temperature that is an energetically uniquely determined constant. This ratio determines the greenhouse temperature, given the incoming available energy.”
EPA: “Miskolczi also claims that “On global scale, however, there cannot be any direct water vapor feedback mechanism, working against the total energy balance requirement of the system. Runaway greenhouse theories contradict to the energy balance equations and therefore, cannot work.” This demonstrates a lack of understanding of feedback mechanisms in the climate (see response in Volume 4 for a discussion of runaway climate).”
Response: “Their understanding of water vapor feedback is based on only one part of the effects (higher water surface temperatures lead to more evaporation and more greenhouse effect with further increasing temperatures). This is only one loop of the feedback. The other, revealed by the relations found in climate databases by Miskolczi, shows a strict energetic limit of this hypothetical (never happened) runaway feedback. (The case of Venus is absolutely different: closed cloud cover, contrary to Earth’s partial overcast, and its atmosphere is almost 100% CO2, whilst we have only 0.04% CO2).
EPA: “there is now evidence for global increases in uppertropospheric specific humidity over the past two decades, which is consistent with the observed increases in tropospheric temperatures and the absence of any change in relative humidity.”
Response: Yes, over the past two decades the NOAA NCEP/NCAR database (as can be seen also in the referred Miskolczi calculation) shows a slight increase in specific humidity, but the first two decades of the database (1948-68) shows a slight decrease, and the middle two decades (1969-1989) displays fairly stable conditions. On the whole 61 years in 1948-2008, there is a very stable atmospheric concentration of the total effective greenhouse gases (1% decrease in integrated water vapor content, and vast increase in CO2 and others). The whole process gives us a very stable 33 degrees Celsius average greenhouse effect, without any definite increase.
To summarize:
EPA’s answer only repeats their known position, full with the old unproved hypotheses (positive water vapor feedback, runaway greenhouse effect), without a real understanding of the logic that led to the new results. They do not give new data. The real debate would be if they said: Here are our numbers for the greenhouse effect since 1948, year by year, and here are our equations for the equilibrium value, let’s see where the differences might come from. — But without their numbers, no real discussion is possible.
Miskolczi’s numbers remained valid, unchallenged and un-falsified. The 61-yr global average mean greenhouse effect is the same as the theoretical equilibrium value, within 0.1C temperature difference. Nowadays the additional (greenhouse) temperature fluctuates around the 33 Celsius as it did 60 years ago and will do 60 years later, without showing an increasing trend. It is not possible that it grew up to 35 or 38 C, to produce 2 or 5 degrees warming. The EPA did not disprove this.
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Tags: CO2, Dianna C. Cotter, Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, Dr. Miklos Zagoni, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Global Warming, Greenhouse Effect