Blinds on the greenhouse window create cooling. Clouds are nature’s blinds









Blinds on the greenhouse window create cooling. Clouds are nature’s blinds

Greenhouse Effect; Everybody Talks About It But Few Know What It Is

By Dr. Tim Ball Thursday, January 6, 2011

It is amazing how people have very strong opinions about ideas and terms they don’t understand. Greenhouse effect is one of these and lack of understanding about it is exploited to dictate global energy and economic policies at great and unnecessary expense.



They claim the Earth’s atmosphere is like a greenhouse. It isn’t. Most don’t know how ‘official’ greenhouse science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim it works. Some think it’s the same as global warming because they associate greenhouses, which some call hothouses, with high temperature.







According to estimates—and virtually all numbers are estimates—the earth’s temperature is approximately 15°C (59°F), known as the annual average global temperature. It varies as the earth warms or cools, based on the amount of energy coming from the sun and leaving the earth to space. The temperature should be –18°C (-0.4°F) so the greenhouse effect is used to explain why it is 33°C (59.4°F) warmer. Over time the temperature varies mostly because of variations in the solar energy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says it is change in CO2. They say they’re 90% certain CO2 from human sources explains temperature change since 1950. The problem is that in every record over any time period the temperature increases before CO2 increases. The entire exercise of the IPCC was to make unfounded assumptions about CO2 as a greenhouse gas and then manufacture mechanisms to try and maintain the charade when the evidence consistently contradicts.



Greenhouse Effect Theory

The ‘official’ explanation says sunlight, called insolation for incoming solar radiation, is Shortwave energy. Wavelength is determined by the distance from one peak to the next and is called Shortwave when less than 3 micrometers and Longwave if more.





Figure 1: Comparison of energy wavelengths for the Sun (left) and Earth (right).



Figure 1 shows the sunlight on the left side with the visible portion in the colours of the rainbow. Your eye is a receiver and can only receive light with wavelengths between 0.4 and 0.7 micrometers. You can’t see wavelengths to the left of the violet so they are called ultraviolet (UV). Wavelengths right of the red are called infrared. All of them pass through the atmosphere, but UV can’t pass through the glass of the greenhouse and that is the first major difference. In the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) 95% of UV is ‘used’ to produce ozone, which causes a warming.



Once the remaining Shortwave hits a surface inside the greenhouse, it is absorbed by molecules and sets them in motion (Brownian Movement). People say they feel the sun but what they feel is the sun making the molecules in their skin move more rapidly. The same effect is felt when you rub your hands together, and through friction, make the molecules move.



Surface molecules in the greenhouse strike the air molecules touching them, setting them in motion. This transfer of heat energy is known as Longwave energy on the right side of Figure 1, however, this cannot pass through the glass and thus is trapped, causing a steady temperature rise. The glass acts like a one-way valve letting in shortwave and not letting Longwave out – the so-called Greenhouse Effect. Unless you put blinds on the window or open the door to let the heat escape, the temperature keeps rising.



It’s claimed some gases in the atmosphere act like the glass in the greenhouse. Of the total greenhouse gases Water Vapor (H2O) is 95 percent by volume, Carbon dioxide (CO2) is 3.85% and Methane (CH4) 0.4%. Official IPCC theory claims they allow Shortwave in, but trap Longwave going to space. Figure 2 shows the amount of absorption of each greenhouse gas. A major problem glossed over is that H2O and CO2 overlap so you don’t know at the top of the atmosphere which gas is absorbing the Longwave.