On Monday evening, after a long day of lectures, I was given a chance to introduce the Fireworks concept to a few highly respected climate sientists, four of which were conference speakers. It was probably not my personal reputation, but rather my affiliation with Marcel Crok, that sufficed to be granted this great favour!
Attendees: Prof. Dr Tom Segalstad (Univ. of Oslo), Prof. Dr Larry Gould (Univ. of Hartford), Prof Dr Fred Singer (NIPCC), Prof. Dr Sebastian Lüning ( co-author of Die Kalte Sonne, geologist), Dr Thomas P. Sheahen (Western Technology) and Prof. Dr Jeffrey Foss (Univ. of Victoria BC)
Not on the picture: John Kehr (author of The Inconvenient Sceptic)
Because it had been a very tiring day, I tried to be brief and to the point, concentrating on the Fireworks simulation. But the calculation of the emission of latent heat of the Hadley Cell to space, based on the simulation, certainly met with a lot of interest too.
Most of the attendants did not see the radiation theory as their core competence and were careful in formulating their reaction, but in general my feeling was that the theory was considered to be promising.
A “special appearance” was made by John Kehr, who as an outsider has figured out how the atmosphere works, comparable with my efforts, though definitely more thoroughly so. However, he framed it in a completely different way. I intend to read his book The Inconvenient Sceptic and see if the two concepts can be combined.
I am very grateful for the opportunity given to me to present my thoughts, and I would like to thank those present for their interest and valuable reactions and advice.
I enjoyed the excellent and thought-provoking presentation very much. It is this kind of discussions that eventually will help to further develop more robust climate models in the long run. I would like to congratulate Theo Wolters for his effort and his willingness to discuss his results with other scientists in an open and fruitful manner. His work will hopefully contribute to the scientific advancement in this field.
Sebastian Luning
Co-author “Die kalte Sonne”
http://www.kaltesonne.de
I do not pretend to understand Theo Wolter’s complete approach, but was beginning to scratch the surface, and liked what I saw very much. Although I am no expert in the area, I saw that his approach was new, and seemed an ingenious new way of analyzing heat flow via radiation from the surface of the Earth through the atmosphere. The usual methods rely on the concept of optical depth, but Wolter’s employs a simpler concept. Sometimes great progress can be made by means of the right simplification, and this seemed to me to be the promise of his approach.
The presentation by Theo was refreshing, in that it presented new ideas. Science is about testing new ideas, and finding out how well such new ideas fit observed data. The radiation hypothesis beloved by IPCC is not fitting the observations; not for the last 14 years, and not for the past, considering the known warm and cold periods in the past (including glacial and interglacial times). The atmospheric concentration of the trace gas CO2 is definitely NOT the only and simple answer to an understanding of how the climate is changing, and has been changing many, many times in the past. Therefore we need new ideas to test, hopefully leading us to a better understanding. But this is difficult, because of the numerous parameters influencing our climates on the Earth, making our climates stochastic. And hence difficult, if not impossible, to predict using ordinary linear methods and statistics.
Tom V. Segalstad
http://www.CO2web.info