By Jim Steele

The CO2’s Greenhouse effect is solid science but only tells half the story. Due to the greenhouse effect of water vapor and CO2, the earth cools slowly enough to raise the average temperature above freezing and reach a life-enhancing 59F. You can feel the greenhouse effect when camping in the desert or dry climate. The sun can heat the surface to extremes, like the 1913 world record temperature of 134F in Death Valley California. But with cloudless nights and a reduced greenhouse effect night-time temperatures plummet.

In our lower atmosphere, greenhouse gases are saturated and intercept most exiting infrared radiation. So very little heat escapes radiatively from the surface. But that’s just half the story, and climate changes requires better critical thinking!

The earth’s surface does emit 10-20% of its infrared heat in wavelengths that do escape unimpeded through the “atmospheric window” unaffected by greenhouse gases. In contrast, only very specific wavelengths are emitted by atmospheric greenhouse gases. You can witness this difference on a cold winters day when rising smoke suddenly flattens out. Because the earth’s surface cools faster via the atmospheric window than the atmosphere, the smoke rises through the colder air cooled by the surface, but not through the warmer air above.

Despite the greenhouse gases’ radiative blocking in the lower atmosphere, inhabitants of the earth’s surface do not suffer from runaway heating. Most of the suns heat is transported away from the surface via rising convection currents that carry heat to altitudes where the atmosphere’s density is so reduced, greenhouse gases emit infrared heat that now easily escapes to space. Conversely, all surface heatwaves occur when that convection is suppressed!

Ninety-nine percent of our atmosphere is composed of oxygen and nitrogen and argon that are not greenhouse gases. Despite being carried into rarefied air, they cannot radiate away the heat they acquired from contacting the earth’s solar heated surface. If there were no greenhouse gases, there would be no cooling effect and the earth would indeed experience runaway heating. By transferring their heat to CO2 via collisions that happen millions and millions of times each second, CO2 then radiates heat back to outer space maintaining a climate equilibrium.

So, think critically and be grateful for CO2’s cooling effect.

For more details Watch: Global Warming Greenhouse Theory’s Greatest Weakness

It is not just a matter of how much energy increasing CO2 redirects towards the surface but how long it is trapped for that determines greenhouse gases’ warming effect. The contributions from 3 heat trapping mechanisms are examined: Greenhouse gases, heat domes and ocean barrier layers and how they contribute average global temperature and extreme weather.

Physics nerds read: Atmosphere and Greenhouse Gas Primer(2023)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.00808.pdf… by PhD atmospheric physicists Wijngaarden and Happer