## Thursday, March 06, 2008 ... /////

### Hungarian conversion: runaway greenhouse warming impossible

In this weekly dose of peer-reviewed skeptical climatological literature, we visit Hungary.

Ference Miskolczi: Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres
Amusingly enough, the author interprets the differential equations describing the absorption of infrared light by the atmosphere as a realization of equations of general relativity and discusses a term missed by Arthur Eddington and Arthur Milne around 1922. ;-)

It's too early and I don't quite understand what the author is doing and cannot confirm the work - and some readers will hopefully try to follow the actual paper - but the results are as follows.

In his modified model, the near-surface air temperature is higher, the surface temperature is lower, and the climate sensitivity is much lower than the IPCC numbers. Some of the predictions of his model are claimed to be successfully compared to data from both Earth and Mars.

Most importantly, the actual greenhouse warming is claimed to be strictly bounded from above: it cannot exceed a certain limit. This is what I used in a naive model of greenhouse warming and I am slightly skeptical that a corrected mistake could justify such an unusual outcome.

Nevertheless, it is at least found in a peer-reviewed paper. And indeed, it is a robust explanation of the absence of runaway climate changes in the geological past as well as the constant overestimates of warming trends by the popular greenhouse models.

Miskolczi wrote the paper a few years ago but his colleagues in NASA killed it until it was published in Hungary.
Daily Tech: Basic greenhouse equations "totally wrong"
adds a fascinating story of Miklós Zágoni who used to be Hungary's most outspoken scientific supporter of the Kyoto protocol. He has read Miskolczi's paper, fell in love with it, and saw the light. ;-) There is no longer any crisis for him and he is trying to explain the paper and its magnificent agreement with observations to others.

This story reads like a fairy-tale. A kind of goulash fairy-tale.

Hat tip: Marc Morano