Seems OMICS International will publish anything

A new paper in the Environment Pollution and Climate Change journal (published by OMICS International) claims to have provided a refutation of the climate greenhouse theory. 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).

I had a quick skim through the article and rather gave up when it started arguing (on page 5) that it’s incorrect to use the cross-sectional area of the Earth when determining the amount of energy we receive from the Sun, and also incorrect to use the surface area of the Earth when determining how much we – on average – radiate. This is just silly.

To give you a final flavour of the paper, I’ll quote from the conclusions:

In fact, it would be feasible to refute the climate greenhouse theory already by some simple arguments:

Okay, let’s see these simple arguments.

The fact, that the atmospheric carbon-dioxide has increased while the average global temperature has increased, too, does not at all reveal a causal relationship but solely an analogous one.

Indeed, but it’s extremely difficult to explain the rise in global surface temperature without including the influence of increasing atmospheric CO₂. The reason that we think that increasing atmospheric CO₂ is the main cause of the rise in global surface temperature is not only because it is consistent with our understanding of its influence, but also because it is extremely difficult to construct a physically plausible alternative.

Moreover, a greenhouse needs a solid transparent roof which is absent in the case of the atmosphere.

What? Really? This is one of the simple arguments? Referring to it as the greenhouse effect is simply an analogy, and an imperfect one at that. This isn’t a refutation of the theory, but an indication that the author hasn’t given this much thought at all.

And finally, it seems unlikely that the extremely low carbon-dioxide concentration of 0.04 percent is able to co-warm the entire atmosphere to a perceptible extent.

And an argument from incredulity to end. Brilliant! I suspect I don’t really need to say anything more. I’ve never published anything in an OMICS International journal (at least, I don’t think I have) and, after this, I certainly don’t have any intention of starting now.