  A recent paper states that ultraviolet backradiation from the solar
transition region and upper chromosphere strongly affects the degree of
ionization of minority stages at the top of the photosphere, i.e., in the
temperature minimum of the one-dimensional static model atmospheres presented
in that paper. We show that this claim is incompatible with bservations and we
demonstrate that the pertinent ionization balances are instead dominated by
outward photospheric radiation, as in older static models. We then analyze the
formation of Halpha in the above model and show that it has significant
backradiation across the opacity gap by which Halpha differs from other strong
scatttering lines.
