It's like a River, not a Window. Why greenhouse gasses do not trap much heat.

A significant portion of the infrared wavelengths are not affected by greenhouse gasses.

Radiation goes around greenhouse gasses to equilibrate, because any wavelength will do. Lindzen and Choi showed that this occurs.

For analogy: If you put a pan of water outside during the summer, it will evaporate. Put a lid over half of the pan, and it will evaporate at almost the same rate, because the rate of heat entering will determine the evaporation rate, not the manner in which the vapor escapes.

If greenhouse gasses were blocking the escape of radiation like a window, there would be a continuous build up of heat which would never stop. Heat coming in must equal heat going out over the long run.

Radiation is absorbed and re-emitted in the atmosphere over and over. It is absorbed by greenhouse gasses at their fingerprint wavelengths and then re-emitted as black-body radiation. The difference is that greenhouse gasses only absorb part of the black-body wavelengths allowing the rest to go through the atmosphere to cool the planet.

mesh

This is a mesh. A black, polypropylene mesh of this sort is used to cover greenhouses and restrict light. Global warming alarmists are assuming greenhouse gasses do this. They don't. If you pour a gallon of water over the mesh, how much goes through? Half a gallon? It all goes through. Radiant cooling of the atmosphere goes around the blocked areas just as water does, because heat equilibrates.

Warmists (promoters of greenhouse gasses causing global warming) rapidly reduce their arguments to a simple logic based on the nature of a window. If you paint half of a window black, half as much light goes through. The result is supposed to be a build-up of heat.

This really matters, because there is almost nothing stable in the quagmire of climate change other than the window logic. All of the arbitraries and questions are interpreted by warmists on the basis of the window logic. The hacked files show that the dominating and deciding scientists tailor their results to justify the window concept.

The alternative is the concept of a river. If you build a concrete barrier half way across a river, the same amount of water flows down the river. The only effect is a slight back-up (height increase) behind the barrier.

Atmospheric radiation functions like a river, not a window. If it didn't there would be no end to the continuous build-up of heat. You can't have less energy leaving the earth than entering. Both quantities have to be equal over the long run. Only the river concept equalizes incoming and outgoing energy. The window concept does not.

Lindzen and Choi (Geophysical Research Letters, July 14, 2009) recently showed through satellite measurements that the river model is correct. They showed that increases in surface temperature result in increases in outgoing radiation as measured by satellite.

What then is the mechanism for the river concept? First of importance is that the atmosphere emits radiation from a three dimensional source, not a two dimensional surface. When scientists apply the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to the atmosphere, they are analyzing it as a two dimensional surface.

As a three dimensional source of radiation, the atmosphere emits radiation much more effectively than a two dimensional surface. Heat in the atmosphere is radiated as black-body radiation. This means the radiation covers a wide bandwidth from visible light at 0.8 microns of wavelength to about 50 microns. The amount tails off at low levels beyond 50 microns.

Greenhouse gasses only absorb the shorter wavelengths of black-body radiation. For carbon dioxide, there are three "fingerprint" absorption bands at 2.7, 4.3 and 15 microns. Other greenhouse gasses including water vapor fill in most of the space between the CO2 bands.

The longer wavelengths of black-body infrared radiation go around the greenhouse gasses and into outer space to cool down the planet. So why does not painting part of the spectrum black increase the temperature of the earth? To a very slight extent it does, just like a small amount of back-up occurs behind a barrier half way across a river.

But radiation gets diverted around the barrier which greenhouse gasses create. This occurs through absorption and re-emission. As greenhouse gases absorb radiation, they instantly convert the energy to heat. Heat is vibratory motion. It means molecules bump into each other and set each other into motion.

The heat created by greenhouse gases absorbing radiation gets re-emitted as black-body radiation. This means the wide band of infrared radiation from 0.8 to 50 microns is emitted by all molecules in the atmosphere, as heat in the atmosphere is converted into black-body radiation.

Part of that block-body radiation (the longer wavelengths) gets emitted into space with little interference from greenhouse gasses. This means that if radiation is not leaving the earth at the shorter wavelengths, it will leave at the longer wavelengths.

Of course, there has to be some increase in heat within the atmosphere as short wavelengths get converted into longer wavelengths—the back-up effect. So warmist scientists will say: who? Me? This is what we've been saying all along. Not quite. They certainly have not been correcting the errors of the public on this concept. The propagandists who speak for all and feed their ignorance to the public fall back on the window concept as if it could not be questioned and call their opponents names for questioning it.

Could not the globe be heating up due to the back-up energy in the river concept? It's a lot smaller amount of energy than people realize. It's so small that any claimed result has to be contrived, as the hacked files demonstrate.

If the propagandists who force their ignorance onto society knew that their concept of a window being painted over by greenhouse gases is not correct, they might be less obnoxious in attacking their opponents.

The fake equation (fudge factor) for supposedly determining how much heat is added to the atmosphere with an increase in CO2 is dependent upon the window concept, not the river concept. Climatologists are locking in the window concept with that equation.