By Judith Curry
In Part I, we critiqued Claes Johnson’s chapters in the book Slaying the Sky Dragon. In Part II, I have posted a published article by Martin Hertzberg, who authored a chapter in the Dragon book. My original motivation for doing these threads is to try to lay to rest the debate over the fundamental physics of infrared radiative emission of gases such as CO2 and H2O.
Rather than critique the papers myself (I merely provided an opinion, rather than a substantive critique), I decided to see if “crowd sourcing” the critique would work. This would only work if very knowledgeable experts showed up and made substantive contributions. In Part I, the contributions of experts such as maxwell, Pekka Perilla, Tomas Milanovic, Dave N., Eli, and several others were particularly illuminating, and they did a much better job that I would have been able to do myself. Lets see how Part II turns out.
Claes Johnson engaged in Part I with a large number of comments, although nearly everyone whom he replied to seemed to think that his comments were not responsive to the criticisms (some of which were quite devastating to his argument). Ken Coffman (publisher of the Dragon book) also engaged, and by the end of the thread, he seemed to develop a respect for some of the experts and was seeking to learn from them. I view this as a good sign.
I am hoping that Johnson learns from this that if he wants his scientific arguments to be taken seriously, that publishing them in a politically motivated book does not help his credibility and does not motivate people to take his arguments seriously.
I am hoping that Ken Coffman is learning that some discrimination and quality control might be needed in the writings that he publishes if his publishing house is to have any continuing credibility regarding science books. I am hoping that John O’Sullivan will find better scientific horses to back in his quest to debunk AGW (or better yet, just fight the policies he doesn’t like and stay out of the science).
I am especially looking to hear the reactions to these threads from the “lurkers.” Part I has received a very large number of hits (one of the greatest “hits” ever at Climate Etc.), so it seems a large number of lurkers have been reading this. Did you change your mind about anything? Did you learn anything? Who was convincing, who wasn’t? Etc.
I am also interested in reactions from Claes Johnson, Ken Coffman, John O’Sullivan. John and Claes asked for this; did it meet your expectations? I’m not sure that anyone who has followed this closely regards Claes’ arguments as having survived this scrutiny, do you view it this way?
Sent via email:
Here is one comment that I have received via email, that I have permission to post:
It is exasperating that results easily demonstrable by simple laboratory experiment continue to be challenged by some members of this group. However superficially ingenious their arguments, they fly in the face of experiments that even children can perform with readily-available materials, as well as contradicting proven results in astrophysical theory. I do not propose to contribute further to this group: it is not a sensible deployment of my time. –
Monckton of Brenchley