Greenhouse effect on the moon?

Neither the earth nor the moon is a "black body". Both the moon and the earth are warmer than they "should be" -- even though one has no CO2 at all

Yes, that’s right, there is a “greenhouse effect” on our moon and it’s even greater than here on earth. The idea of an atmospheric “greenhouse effect” was invented to justify why earth is supposedly “warmer than it should be” if there was no atmosphere.

As we now know from NASA’s research, even our moon is “warmer than it should be”, by a whopping 40 degrees C where earth is a mere 33 degrees “warmer”.

“We’ve been told that the earth’s surface is quite a bit warmer than calculations predict. Theory has it that heat-trapping “greenhouse gases” account for a 33° Celsius disparity. But it turns out that our airless moon is also quite a bit warmer than predicted. Might something be wrong with the prediction method itself, then? It’s a natural question to ask, so let’s look into it.”

“The Earth is not “unusually” warm. It is the application of the predictive equation that is faulty. The ability of common substances to store heat makes a mockery of blackbody estimates. The belief that radiating trace gases explain why earth’s surface temperature deviates from a simple mathematical formula is based on deeply erroneous assumptions about theoretical vs. real bodies.”

The justification for calculating the temperature that earth “should be at” is shown to be incorrect. It’s based on a formula that is used to convert irradiation levels to temperature and vice versa, based on a blackbody. Earth nor any planet that we know of behaves like a blackbody. All planets literally absorb some of the solar heat during daytime and emit some of that during nighttime. Our moon is the perfect example of that: it has no atmosphere and receives as good as the same level of irradiation as earth does.

Our atmosphere is shown to act as a coolant during the day and a retarder of cooling during the nighttime; the amount of retardation depending on the relative humidity of the atmosphere, which in turn determines the total heat content of a given volume of the atmosphere.

But at all times our atmosphere acts as a conveyor of heat, never a creator of heat. This essay puts it into perspective.

It does not matter what our atmosphere is made of, it is the surface, including the oceans, that makes it “warmer than it should be”.

And yes, seeing that carbon dioxide is actually a good radiator, the only possible effect it can have on the atmosphere is to increase its cooling efficiency; it can’t possibly make the atmosphere warmer. Adding a coolant gas to a coolant atmosphere, what else could you expect?

Please spread this paper far and wide, as it clearly proves by means of direct observations that no atmosphere is needed to be “warmer than calculated”. Nothing to do with CO2 after all.

More HERE. (See associated PDF)


Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).