Posted on 02/10/2011 9:29:16 AM PST by BillM
Truths:
1. Most of the Sun’s radiation that gets to the Earth’s lower atmosphere passes through substantially unabsorbed.
2. Most of the radiation is then absorbed on contact with the Earth’s surface. This includes the majority water and the minority land.
3. Most of the Earth’s surface is either water or moist vegetation.
Most of the radiation from the sun is converted to infrared wavelengths at or near the surface.
The water molecules absorb the infrared radiation causing increased vibration within the individual water molecules. This is converted into translational energy during intermolecular collisions.
Water is an unusual compound. Its molecular weight (18) is half that of nitrogen (28) and less than half oxygen (32). Water should by all rights be a gas.
The reason water is liquid or ice normally, is that water molecules are naturally attracted to each other and form large aggregates which are substantially heavier than air.
When liquid water absorbs infrared radiation or is otherwise stimulated it vibrates more quickly and more intensely. This breaks down that tendency to aggregate.
In fact, in order for an associated water molecule to break free and escape into the air, a specific amount of energy must be absorbed. This is called the Latent Heat of Vaporization.
In fact, this is a very large amount of energy as anyone who has boiled water knows.
It takes 1 calorie of heat to raise the temperature of liquid water by 1 Celsius degree.
It take 539 calories to change one gram of water to steam.
Transitions between solid, liquid, and gaseous phases typically involve large amounts of energy compared to the specific heat. If heat were added at a constant rate to a mass of ice to take it through its phase changes to liquid water and then to steam, the energies required to accomplish the phase changes (called the latent heat of fusion and latent heat of vaporization ) would lead to plateaus in the temperature vs time graph. The graph below presumes that the pressure is one standard atmosphere.
A more complete explanation of the above
All of the energy (539 cal/gm) must be lost by exchange or radiation in order for the steam to condense.
This is THE ESSENSE of the GREENHOUSE EFFECT.
Enormous amounts of energy (principally translational and vibrational) are carried from the surface into the atmosphere by fast moving free or loosely associated water molecules.
Collisions between water molecules and the majority nitrogen and oxygen molecules transfer the energy to the greater atmosphere. As the energy level of the water molecules diminishes, the probability that water molecules will reaggregate increases. This leads to condensation and has the effect of transferring that 539 calories per gram to the rest of the atmosphere.
Now for the Kicker!
Carbon dioxide does NOT form aggregates. It is not lighter than air and thus does not rise quickly. There is no phase change when carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide carries less than half the heat per molecule compared to water.
One gram of Carbon Dioxide heated at the surface by incident sunlight carries (2 * 539 = 1078) 1078 times less energy into the atmosphere than one gram of water.
Carbon dioxide represents 0.0387 % of the atmosphere. Water in the lower atmosphere represents 1% to 4% or 25 to 100 times the amount of carbon dioxide.
Combining the two statements above, Water is (25 * 1078 = 27,175) to (100 * 1078 = 108,700) times more responsible for greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.
It’s so refreshing to read science articles written by someone with a true education.
As opposed to reading Gore - level tripe coming from our MSM underclass.
I’ll have to respond later, but this is kind of backwards. Heat loss to space by evaporational cooling at the surface and condensation warming aloft works against global warming. It is a major source of global cooling.
Equating water vapor in the air to steam seems a stretch. I may be back after a little research.
??? 18 is not half of 28 and is not less than half of 32.
What do you think, that it is easy to turn hundreds of millions of people into zombies who worship Carbon Fraud?
Ask typical carbon Fraud idiot if he/she ever had icecubes in her drink. Did the drink spill out from the glass when the the ice melted?
The fact is, all this art of coercion was intended as a tool to defraud millions of people out of trillions of dollars through the fraud called Cap and Trade.
I believe there is still a legislation in U.S. that can be used against fraudsters - it's RICO.
Good news is that Chicago Climate Exchange was shut for good. In deafening silence of the fraudsters and their media. Wikilieaks show that U.S. Government was actively involved in pushing this fraud onto other nations who had more common sense and better education to see through the fraud.
We have to thank Ruskie hackers and Chicom diplomats for debunking this fraud.
That is the hardest part to swallow - it was not debunked by freedom loving Americans.
Water acts as a strong negative-feedback element against global warming. If the Earth gets warmer, then more evaporation happens, and more energy gets transported into the upper atmosphere to be released when water vapor condenses into rain.
Sorry, sloppy, the point is that the lighter gas H2O(18) rises in air while the heavier gas CO2(44) sinks.
In the current context, steam or water vapor assumes individual isolated molecules diluted in the air (N2/O2etc) matrix.
ABSTRACT:
"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere [historically] is the product of oceanic respiration due to the well-known but under-appreciated solubility pump. Carbon dioxide rises out of warm ocean waters where it is added to the atmosphere. There it is mixed with residual and accidental CO2, and circulated, to be absorbed into the sink of the cold ocean waters. Next the thermohaline circulation carries the CO2-rich sea water deep into the ocean. A millennium later it appears at the surface in warm waters, saturated by lower pressure and higher temperature, to be exhausted back into the atmosphere. Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation.
Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases. Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause [historically -etl]. Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase.
If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere."
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
_______________________________________________________________
Wrong. The most important players on the greenhouse stage are water vapor and clouds [clouds of course aren't gas, but high level ones do act to trap heat from escaping, while low-lying cumulus clouds tend to reflect sunlight and thereby help cool the planet -etl]. Carbon dioxide has been increased to about 0.038% of the atmosphere (possibly from about 0.028% pre-Industrial Revolution) while water in its various forms ranges from 0% to 4% of the atmosphere and its properties vary by what form it is in and even at what altitude it is found in the atmosphere.
In simple terms the bulk of Earth's greenhouse effect is due to water vapor by virtue of its abundance. Water accounts for about 90% of the Earth's greenhouse effect -- perhaps 70% is due to water vapor and about 20% due to clouds (mostly water droplets), some estimates put water as high as 95% of Earth's total tropospheric greenhouse effect (e.g., Freidenreich and Ramaswamy, 'Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models,' Journal of Geophysical Research 98 (1993):7255-7264).
The remaining portion comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other 'minor greenhouse gases.' As an example of the relative importance of water it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
_______________________________________________________________
Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System
Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many 'facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
_______________________________________________________________
Water Vapor Confirmed As Major Player In Climate Change
ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2008) — Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117193013.htm
“One gram of Carbon Dioxide heated at the surface by incident sunlight carries (2 * 539 = 1078) 1078 times less energy into the atmosphere than one gram of water.
Carbon dioxide represents 0.0387 % of the atmosphere. Water in the lower atmosphere represents 1% to 4% or 25 to 100 times the amount of carbon dioxide.
Combining the two statements above, Water is (25 * 1078 = 27,175) to (100 * 1078 = 108,700) times more responsible for greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.”
The reason water vapor rises is it is lighter than all gases, not just CO2. CO2 doesn't sink to any appreciable extent (e.g. the readings at the top and bottom of Mauna Loa are continuously compared and match pretty well). When water vapor rises it is part of the cooling process, transferring latent energy upwards where it is released with the water vapor condenses.
No Smoking Hot Spot (The Australian)
Those two articles take Greenhouse Theory at face value and by the criterion set up in the theory itself finds no evidence of warming on the basis of greenhouse effect.
The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
Harvard astrophysicist dismisses AGW theory, challenges peers to 'take back climate science'
It Is Impossible For A 100 ppm Increase In Atmospheric CO2 Concentration To Cause Global Warming
Those four articles each show that Greenhouse Theory has no basis in reality due to a direct conflict with the known laws of physics. No wonder the smoking gun "hotspot" can't be found.
Claim That Sea Level Is Rising Is a Total Fraud
That article pretty much puts the kibosh on any serious trend of planetary warming from any cause. Think about it. If there is absolutely no sign at all of rising sea levels how could the planet be warming? Beyond the centuries long slow warming of the earth and rising of the seas of course. But that is only a few millimeters per century due to the inter-glacial period we are in.
I love reading completely useless facts, that's how I know to look carefully at the rest. The role of CO2 is substantial in small concentrations and dry conditions. That's why CO2 is an important amplifying effect coming out of ice ages. But in our current interglacial, added CO2 has much less effect, that's why it doesn't really matter.
It’s not really all that clear and has nothing to do with warming the earth. The phase changes he describes are what cool the earth. It’s one of the reasons that the slight bit of warming from CO2 doesn’t matter, it gets partly canceled by the increased evaporation at the surface (cooling) and condensation aloft (releases heat out to space).
It’s not really all that clear and has nothing to do with warming the earth. The phase changes he describes are what cool the earth. It’s one of the reasons that the slight bit of warming from CO2 doesn’t matter, it gets partly canceled by the increased evaporation at the surface (cooling) and condensation aloft (releases heat out to space).
I am not sure what you are referring to here.
Funny, but the data from the ice core record doesn't seem to support that statement, although CO2 has most definitely played a role in warming at other times in the planet's history. That is, when it was at much higher concentrations than what we have today.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.