Author(s)

Gerhard Kramm, Ralph Dlugi

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In this paper, we scrutinize two completely different explanations of the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect: First, the explanation of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the World Meteorological Organization (W?MO) quan- tifying this effect by two characteristic temperatures, secondly, the explanation of Ramanathan et al. [1] that is mainly based on an energy-flux budget for the Earth-atmosphere system. Both explanations are related to the global scale. In addition, we debate the meaning of climate, climate change, climate variability and climate variation to outline in which way the atmospheric greenhouse effect might be responsible for climate change and climate variability, respectively. In doing so, we distinguish between two different branches of climatology, namely 1) physical climatology in which the boundary conditions of the Earth-atmosphere system play the dominant role and 2) statistical climatology that is dealing with the statistical description of fortuitous weather events which had been happening in climate periods; each of them usually comprises 30 years. Based on our findings, we argue that 1) the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect cannot be proved by the statistical description of fortuitous weather events that took place in a climate period, 2) the description by AMS and W?MO has to be discarded because of physical reasons, 3) energy-flux budgets for the Earth-atmosphere system do not provide tangible evidence that the atmospheric greenhouse effect does exist. Because of this lack of tangible evidence it is time to acknowledge that the atmospheric greenhouse effect and especially its climatic impact are based on meritless conjectures.

Physical Climatology; Statistical Climatology; Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect; Earth-Atmosphere System

Kramm, G. and Dlugi, R. (2011) Scrutinizing the atmospheric greenhouse effect and its climatic impact. Natural Science, 3, 971-998. doi: 10.4236/ns.2011.312124.