"In the same way, greenhouse gasses trap more IR in the atmosphere. Heat is being added in increasing quantities. The Earth's systems may respond dynamically but the heat energy will keep coming with the GHGs.
And you're trying to tell me that it's not reasonable to expect warming?"
It's a matter of degree. Greenhouse gases create a greenhouse affect, without any greenhouse gases, planet Earth would have an average temperature of about 35 C degrees cooler, so instead of global temperature around 15C it be around -20 C.
The Moon is on average has a lot dark material, so it would warmer, but it you superglued all it's surface dust together and added an atmosphere which didn't have a greenhouse affect the moon's average temperature would probable be around O C, if you spray painted the entire surface white the average temperature would lower to around 20 C. The more atmosphere you added to the Moon wouldn't add much temperature, but it would make a more uniform air temperature and of course increase the force of the winds racing from warm sunlit side to the much colder unlit side. The coldest air on this Moon would in the area tens of hours before the start of it's day and the hottest area of the Moon would be tens of hours before the Sun sets, the Equator region would hottest, the polar region coolest. Hot air goes up, cold air falls down. Hot air is less dense, cold air is more dense. The surface topography would affect where the cold air flowed from coldest region.
Now, instead using a non greenhouse air, say you used CO2- a greenhouse gas- and say you added enough CO2 so that you had an atmospheric pressure 1/5th of Earth of around 2.5 psi. This would a huge atmosphere because moon has less gravity than Earth [1/6th it's gravity {I made it 1/5 because this gives enough pressure that one could breathe on the Moon without pressure suit- so it's *vaquely* reasonable:}]. So, you have a spray painted white Moon, with a atmosphere roughly as high as Earth's of pure CO2 gas. Does the Moon become an oven? No it certainly does not. You would need to do the math, but I would say you would add say 10-30 C to the average temperature, so it would be quite unbearably hot in the hottest areas and quite unbearable cold in coldest areas and of course vicious winds would be howling across the surface. Now if you added water to this atmosphere, you really going to make this place hellish. Because water is also a greenhouse gas, a far more efficent greenhouse gas than CO2, you could add only a relative small amount of water and increase the global temperatures by another 10-30 C, making hot areas hotter, but making the cold areas much warmer, but still cold enough so you get rain and possibly snow.
Ok, throw that model out. Now, let's make the Moon into Venus, we need 90 atmospheres of CO2- which could be impossible because of the Moon's low gravity. Now, do you have a hot oven? Not really. But you would have a near uniform global temperature. A oven at low temperature, but nowhere near Venus' temperature because the Moon is further from the Sun and recieves slightly less than half of the Sun's energy per square meter. And from Earth the Moon would dazzling bright, and finally to conclude this reflected light from our little venus would probable add more global temperature to Earth than the trace quantity of CO2 in our atmosphere.
Space/Science » in reply to Uninteresting rhetoric
re: Uninteresting rhetoric
The whole thread (40 posts)
- Analysis of the GCR contribution to climate change.
- re: Analysis of the GCR contribution to climate change.
- here ya go
- re: here ya go
- Obviously you don't understand how funny that is.
- re: here ya go
- here we don't go
- re: here we don't go
- re: here we don't go
- care to make this debate more interesting?
- re: care to make this debate more interesting?
- Interesting debate
- Uninteresting rhetoric
- "We know why." No. You don't.
- re: Uninteresting rhetoric
- Uninteresting rhetoric
- care to make this debate more interesting?
- re: here we don't go
- re: here we don't go
- here we don't go
- re: here ya go
- here ya go
- I would expect the CRF to change with time...
- re: Analysis of the GCR contribution to climate change.
