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Sometimes the jaw dropping moments break through the floor. For U.S. national security professionals (and, well, anyone associated with intelligence in the United States or any allies), Donald Trump’s blustering blabbering of extremely sensitive material to the Russians is causing lots of jaws to break lots of flooring.  (Perhaps a good time to be in the floor repair business??)  But, while he is really good at it, it is isn’t only Trump who causes jaws to drop.

Shared with me this morning was a paper ‘published’ by Omics Online (for a perspective re Omics and here) by its newly created (Dec 2016 first issue) “Environment Pollution and Climate Change” ‘journal’.  This paper, “The Refutation of the Climate Greenhouse Theory and a Proposal for a Hopeful Alternative,” led to multiple jaw breaking floor events in just a few moments. (Anyone know a good floor repair team?)  With this item in a (claimed to be) ‘peer-reviewed’ journal, we have  an excellent example of the proliferation of nonsense and the very sad reality of the need for thoughtful people to take the time and energy to refute that nonsense.  To provide a perspective, someone just sent me this note:

Truth is at a disadvantage

Ok, I just looked at the paper. It is a joke right?

And, the ‘refutation’ challenge doesn’t only eat up time and energy … but creates the chasing the lie challenge. (Churchill’s adage, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”) The lie remains there, to be counted in ‘peer-reviewed’ material, to be used/abused by unknowing knaves and deceivers alike, with the truth missed by the knave and knowlingly ignored by the deceiver.

As to that “Refutation …”, who really has the energy to dissect every line of “it is a joke, right” monstrosities? Let’s give a few items for reflection:

What is an analogy?

Her eyes were cotton candy.

Right, anyone think that we’re going to be getting cavities from licking her eyes?

One of the most commonly known science analogies is the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, that the atmosphere works sort of like the glass of a greenhouse to retain solar radiation. Evidently, this entirely wrong according to this breakthrough article … The journal reviewers evidently need to check a kid’s guide to analogies as they let this one through to publication.

It needs no professional knowledge to realize that some assumptions of the greenhouse theory are questionable. ….

Any artificial greenhouse needs a solid transparent roof, which is absent in the case of the atmosphere. Rather, the atmosphere represents an open system in which complicated physical processes occur. But even in a greenhouse the texture of the bottom acts an important part. Moreover, the scale of a greenhouse is much smaller than the scale of the atmosphere which implicates different regularities.

Okay, excuse me for some perhaps confusing technical lingo: WTF!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Just parsing that idiocy could take pages but let’s make it simple:

• The “Greenhouse” is an analogy. An analogy “compares two things that are mostly different from each other but have some traits in common.”
  • Dissimilar: humans build greenhouses but not the planetary atmosphere; greenhouses are smaller than the atmosphere; …
  • ‘traits in common’: physical understood (to more or lesser degrees) processes that lead to warming by retaining solar radiation.
• If the greenhouse effect is ‘so wrong’, why isn’t Earth much colder and why is Venus hotter than Mercury?
• The Earth’s atmosphere is essentially a closed, not an open system: both greenhouses and the earth’s atmosphere ‘leak’, sort of, but they still are both closed systems.
• Etc …
• Etc …
• Etc …

Oh, the pain …

Oh, a little radiation won’t hurt

Lots of things are out there in trace amounts … and those miniscule amounts can, well, kill.

does not need much imagination to conclude that a carbon-dioxide concentration of 0.04% (=400 ppm), as it is roughly present in the atmosphere, will not lead to any perceptible warming-up of the whole gas quantity which is 2500 times larger

Yup, one could have a robust game of Skeptical Science‘s climate-science denial by the numbers with this ‘peer-reviewed’ article.  Let’s turn to #75: “CO2 is just a trace gas”.

What the science says? Small amounts of very active substances can cause large effects.

…

Saying that CO₂ is “only a trace gas” is like saying that arsenic is “only” a trace water contaminant. …

• That ibuprofen pill can’t do you any good; it’s only 3 ppm of your body weight (200 mg in 60 kg person).
• Your children can drink that water, it only contains a trace of arsenic (0.01 ppm is the WHO and US EPA limit).
• Don’t worry about your iron deficiency, iron is only 4.4 ppm of your body’s atoms (Sterner and Eiser, 2002).

….

A doubling of the trace molecule CO₂ from 280 ppm to 560 ppm is still a trace, but just like with arsenic, the difference between a small trace and a larger trace is fatal.

Again, let me refer you to #75.

Let’s add some sprinklers …

Remember that ice cubes can solve global warming?

Well, big sprinklers evidently are the real solution to pursue:

In spite of this, the carbon-dioxide is always washed out by rain which impedes an unlimited accumulation.

Problem solved … no more CO2 in the atmosphere … and, therefore, none of that pesky bizarre ‘greenhouse effect’ which, evidently, isn’t even possible because the earth isn’t surrounded by solid panes of glass … and …

Pause for head hitting wall …

Okay, break over …

Seriously … seriously … serious people need to spend time refuted absurdities like this?

In any event, time for me to go find someone to fix the flooring broken by my jaw dropping.

UPDATE:

See Seems Omics International will publish anything for another look at this ‘article’. From that post,

It’s, of course, utter nonsense, so I’m not planning on saying much.

What is remarkable is that, according to the PDF, it was accepted less than a month after being received. I’ve been looking through some of my recent papers, and even mostly uncontroversial papers that receive quite positive reviews tend to have a couple of months between being received and being accepted. Here, however, is a paper that, if right (which it is not), would rewrite our understanding of one of the most important scientific topics of the current age, and it takes less than a month. You’d think it might undergo a bit more scrutiny. You’d also like to think that the $519 article processing charge didn’t play a role in the speediness of the decision making (you might, however, be wrong if you did think this).