‘Greenhouse Gas Effect Does Not Exist,’ a Swiss Physicist Challenges Global Warming Climate Orthodoxy

Thomas Allmendinger, an independent Swiss physicist, has conducted a series of experiments published in peer-reviewed scientific journals that call into question the physical principles of the greenhouse gas theory.  Thomas Allmendinger, an independent scholar educated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has dared to challenge the conventional politically correct climate dictum that CO2 is a greenhouse gas with unique global warming properties.  In a series of articles published in scientific journals, Allmendinger has argued that his experimental research with the thermal absorption of infrared radiation (IR) has proved that “atmospheric trace gases such as carbon dioxide do not have any influence on the climate.”

The theory of greenhouse gases traces back to an 1827 publication by French physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier entitled “Mémoire sur les temperature du globe Terrestre ed de espaces planétaires,” [in English: “Memoir on the temperatures of the terrestrial globe and planetary spaces.”]  Like many metaphors in science, the greenhouse image is deceptive in that it suggests certain gases like water vapor and CO2 act as a shield preventing infrared radiation (IR) emitted by the sun and absorbed by Earth from escaping at night into outer space.

A source as supposedly authoritative as NASA still elaborates on the greenhouse gas effect as follows:

“A real greenhouse is made of glass, which lets visible sunlight through from the outside.  This light gets absorbed by all the materials inside, and the warmed surfaces radiate infrared light, sometimes called “heat rays,” back.  But the glass, although transparent to visible light, acts as a partial shield to the infrared light.  So, some of this infrared radiation, or heat, gets trapped inside.  The result is that everything inside the greenhouse, including the air, becomes warmers.”

This NASA description is reminiscent of a gardening website that explains the complicated physics in these simplistic terms: “While the sunlight gets in, the heat cannot get out,” a description that attributes the greenhouse effect to heat convection.  But rather than blocking IR from escaping the glazed undercoating of greenhouse gas, atmospheric greenhouse gases “shield” against the escape of IR to outer space by absorbing the escaping IR energy.  Conventional IR physics going back some 200 years relies predominantly on spectrographic analysis, from which is derived the presumption that only dipole gases like water vapor or CO2 can absorb infrared radiation.  Most of the atmosphere is composed of oxygen (O2) and nitrogen (N2), neither of which are dipole gases.

In 2016, Allmendinger published a paper entitled “The thermal behavior of gases under the influence of infrared radiation” in the International Journal of Physical Sciences.  Here Allmendinger addressed the conventional wisdom that “any IR-activity of molecules or atoms requires a shift of the electric dipole moment, so that two-atomic homo-nuclear molecules (like O2 or N2) are always IR-active.”  Allmendinger insisted this proposition “must be regarded as a theorem and not as a principal natural law” because “numerous examples of nonpolar substances are known where an interaction with electromagnetic radiation occurs, e.g., at halogens where even colored and thus visible light is absorbed.”  What Allmendinger found surprising was physical scientists had relied almost entirely on spectrographic analysis to measure the molecular absorption of IR energy by gases.  He stressed that “apparently no thermal measurements have been made of gases in the presence of IR-radiation, particularly of sunlight,” even though the primary climate concern with greenhouse gases involves the thermal absorption of IR energy.

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