3.5 Absorption/Emission is not Reflection 3.5.1 An inconvenient popularization of physics Figure 16 is a screenshot from a controversial award-winning “documentary film” about “climate change”, specifically “global warming”, starring Al Gore, the former United States Vice President, and directed by Davis Guggenheim. This movie has been supported by managers and policymakers around the world and has been shown in schools and in outside events, respectively. Lewis wrote an interesting “A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth” evaluating Gore’s work in detail . From the view of a trained physicist, Gore’s movie is rather grotesque, since it is shockingly wrong. Every licensed radio amateur, knows that what is depicted in Figure 16 would be ,Callsign of R.D.T.: DK8HH 46 Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner Figure 16: A very popular physical error illustrated in the movie “An Inconvenient truth” by Davis Guggenheim featuring Al Gore (2006). true only, • if the radiation graphically represented here was long wave or short wave radiation; • if the reflecting sphere was a certain layer of the ionosphere [147]. Short waves (e.g. in the 20 m/14 MHz band) are reflected by the F layer of the ionosphere (located 120 - 400 km above the Earth’s surface) enabling transatlantic connections (QSO's). Things depend pretty much on the solar activity, i.e. on the sun spot cycle, as every old man (OM) knows well. The reflective characteristics of the ionosphere diminish above about 30 MHz. In the very high frequency (VHF) bands (e.g. 2 m/144 MHz band) one encounters the so called Sporadic-E clouds (90 - 120 km above the Earth’s surface), which still allow QSO's from Germany to Italy, for example. On the other hand at the extremely low frequencies (ELF, i.e. frequency range 3 - 30 Hz) the atmosphere of the Earth behaves as a cavity and one encounters the so called Schumann resonances [148]. These may be used to estimate a lower bound for the mass of the photon16 and, surprisingly, appear in the climate change discussion . However, the radio signal of Al Gore’s cellular phone (within the centimeter range) does not travel around the world and so does not Bluetooth, Radar, microwave and infrared radiation (i.e. electromagnetic waves in the sub millimeter range). Ionosphere Radars typically work in the 6 m Band, i.e. at 50 MHz. Meteorological Radars work in the 0.1 - 20 cm range (from 90 GHz down to 1.5 GHz), those in the 3 - 10 cm range (from 10 GHz down to 3 GHz) are used for wind finding and weather watch [150]. It is obvious, that Al Gore confuses the ionosphere with the tropopause, the region in the atmosphere, that is the 16As a teaching assistant at Hamburg University/DESY, R.D.T. learned this from Professor Herwig Schop[1]per. Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects . . . 47 boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. The latter one is located between 6 km (at the poles) and 17 km (at the equator) above the surface of the Earth.17 Furthermore, Al Gore confuses absorption/emission with reflection. Unfortunately, this is also done implicitly and explicitly in many climatologic papers, often by using the vaguely defined terms “re-emission”, “re-radiation”.