Abstract

Correspondence to: Dimitre Karamanev ([email protected]) Recently, an Editorial titled Global warming is due to an enhanced greenhouse effect, and anthropogenic heat emissions currently play a negligible role at the global scale (Kleidon et al., 2023) was published in the journal Earth System Dynamics. In it the Chief Editors state: "From time to time, we receive submissions at Earth System Dynamics claiming that global warming, or at least a significant part of it, is caused by factors other than the direct and indirect effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. A number of these submissions claim that the increase in observed temperatures is due to the emission of heat from human activities… Such submissions would not have passed peer review in Earth System Dynamics as they ignore basic textbook knowledge and would indeed typically be rejected prior to entering the open-discussion peer review phase." It should be emphasized that discoveries "ignoring basic textbook knowledge" are among the strongest drivers of science (Newton, 1687; Einstein, 1905; Galilei, 1590) and should not be ignored unless they are deemed incorrect. And the determination of their correctness is performed in a peer-review process. On a smaller scale, it was recently found that the assumption that the motion of free rising and free falling rigid bodies are governed by the same physical principles (Newton, 1687; Galilei, 1590) was incorrect (Karamanev and Nikolov, 1992). While this discovery was "ignoring basic textbook knowledge" at the time, the peer-review process confirmed that Galileo and later Newton were wrong in that regard (mainly because the phenomena of turbulence was unknown at their respective times), and the new discovery is now part of the mainstream knowledge base (Green, 2008; Chhabra and Basavaraj, 2019). Further, the Editorial states: "A quick look at the global surface energy balance illustrates this clear picture: human primary energy consumption amounted to 595 EJ in 2021 (BP, 2022), which translates into an average heat release of 18.9 TW. When averaged over land, this yields 18.9 TW / (29% x 510x10 12 m 2) = 0.13 W m −2 (as in Jin et al., 2019), while globally, this yields 0.04 W m −2 when evenly distributed over the Earth's surface. This heat release is minute compared to the downwelling flux of longwave radiation of 346 W m −2 (Stephens et al., 2012) and the observed radiative forcing change at the top of the atmosphere of 2.7 W m−2 that can clearly be attributed to the increase in greenhouse gases (Forster et al., 2021). The greenhouse gas forcing