A new and comprehensive review of the literature concerning the greenhouse effect - the idea that certain gasses in the atmosphere replicate a greenhouse for the eary and cause "warming" as measured by average global temperature - was published in January 2009 by two German physicists - Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner (link here to the actual paper).
They find no compelling evidence in physics for the greenhouse effect and cast doubt on the meaning of the average global temperature, something I have always puzzled about. When I asked a climatologist about this measure he provided a good analogy. Imagine taking everyone's cell phone number in the world and then averaging it. We would then have a global average cell phone number. Great! What could we do with it? Nothing! What does it mean? Nothing.
Just as the bush fires and house fires were ravaging Melbourne, there were floods in Northern Australia - on the same day. Today, it is -15C here in Edmonton, but +11 in London. The average of these two temperatures is -2 - what does this tell us?
I think this is a very important paper (difficult to read, unless you are a physicist or a mathematician) and full of useful insights. The key message: don't assume that tne greenhouse effect is a reality before you have read this paper.
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