Why is water less of a concern as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?

By T.L. Winslow (TLW), the Historyscoper™

© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved.

Original Pub. Date: Jan. 10, 2022. Last Update: June 5, 2025.



A Lesson in TLW's New Real Climate Science Course


Why is water less of a concern as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?

Why is water less of a concern as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?

Neither of them is a concern except to the global Marxist-run U.N. IPCC octopus of kept scientists, academics, journalists, politicians, and bankers, who are desperately trying to push over the fake physics hoax that there are such things as greenhouses gases and only they can save us from them after giving them hundreds of trillions of dollars.

After trying in vain for 30+ years to frame atmospheric CO2 as a greenhouse gas to stir alarm and panic to make useful idiots who will gladly sacrifice all their fossil fuel wealth and lifestyle to them, the IPCC lie machine has started hedging their bets by trying to frame atmospheric H2O too.

This is hilarious, because H2O is Nature’s refrigerator and air conditioner, cooling the Earth, not warming it.

If it weren’t for the water (71% of surface area), the land would probably be all desert and practically unlivable. Either way, CO2 has nothing to do with weather or climate, and its only purpose is to feed plant photosynthesis that anchors the chain of all life, autotrophs and heterotrophs.

Even more funny if it weren’t so sad, there are no such things as greenhouse gases that trap infrared heat radiation from Earth’s surface and use it to heat the atmosphere and even reheat the surface with its own heat.

Ever see a hot air balloon? After it filling with hot air, making it buoyant, then let it go, it rises toward space until it cools back down and falls. When it returns to the surface, all the original heat has been dissipated by entropy into the Heat Death of the Universe. It’s called convection, the main process cooling Earth’s surface of the heat deposited daily by solar radiation, which is the only thing that warms Earth’s surface, after which the atmosphere merely helps cool it. When the solar radiation hits surface water, some of it evaporates after sucking large amounts of heat, cooling the surface even more, after which it rises like other gases, cooling with height until the ambient reaches 0C and forming ice crystals, which we see as clouds. The clouds then block more solar radiation from reaching the surface while warming on the sunny side to turn the ice crystals to water droplets, which eventually fall as freezing precipiation, cooling the surface even more.

Earth’s atmosphere is not a greenhouse but a giant chimney, so open your mind and shake off their spell.

After convection/evaporation, the only Earth surface cooling process remaining is thermal radiation, which since the Earth’s surface is a black body follows the Planck black body radiation curve of emitted power vs. wavelength, in which the peak power wavelength is inversely proportional to absolute temperature T, decreasing with increasing T. The U.N. IPCC's big lie here is to lead you to believe that just because the surfaces of the Sun and Earth are black bodies, so is atmospheric CO2.

Zonk! Moose hockey detector went off! No atmospheric gas absorbs or emits any radiation, much less at all wavelengths like black bodies. Instead, only gas molecules that can form electric dipoles can absorb photons one at a time into their vibrational and rotational energy modes, then reemit them in a different direction at the same or longer wavelength, leaving the molecule's temperature unchanged.

Black bodies can never be gases, only solids and liquids like the Earth's surface is composed of. Each photon that isn't reflected is absorbed into the surface's internal energy density, slowly raising its temperature, while simultaneously trying to cool by emitting black body radiation at a far longer lower energy wavelength, which is why surface temperature bottoms out overnight then begins climing throughout the day and peaking out in the afternoon, cycling each 24 hours and shifting range throughout the year over the four seasons. None of this has anything to do with any greenhouse effect, it's just black body radiation law.

To repeat, the wavelength peak of Planck black body radiation is proportional to the reciprocal of wavelength, so that means that the photons are reemited at the same or colder temperatures as the ones absorbed. Worse, Planck black body radiation has a total power over all wavelengths proportional to the 4th power of the temperature in Kelvin (known as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law), whereas gas photon radiation is monochromatic and not dependent on gas temperature as long as it doesn’t get so hot that it ionizes and turns into plasma like on the Sun.

Worse, a photon emitted by one CO2 molecule is easily absorbed by another CO2 molecule, repeatedly, until some remaining fraction finally is repelled by the much hotter surface and ends up heating nothing before entropy disperses it harmlessly.

So atmospheric CO2 radiation hitting the surface from all the miles of Earth's atmosphere is on the order of a few watts per square meter, while the original 0.4-0.8 micrometer solar radiation maxes at about one thousand watts per square meter. That dinky 15 micron radiation is going to raise global temperatures? Really? Pfft! I smell some methane :)

Speaking of few watts per square meter, solid dry ice radiates a total of about 80 watts per square meter, way more than atmospheric CO2. Try heating your kitchen this winter with a big block of dry ice and see how low the global Marxists have sunk to push their moneymaking scam.

Check my work with this free online Stefan Boltzmann Law calculator:

Stefan Boltzmann Law Calculator

I’m not framing the IPCC unless they’re framing themselves.

Here’s an example of their endless lies that all aim to make atmospheric CO2 seem like a dragon in the sky when it’s really a unicorn that doesn’t exist:

"Averaged over the entire Earth surface, the incoming solar energy amounts to 341.3 Watts per square metre (W/m²), most of it being visible light. Of this incoming energy, 102 W/m² get directly reflected back into space. W hite surfaces like clouds have a higher reflectivity, scientists speak of high albedo. The same can be said about the polar ice caps which are efficient reflectors. In short, the darker a surface, the lower the reflectivity, thus the albedo. Hence, 161 W/m² get absorbed by the surface and most of it is transformed from visible light into heat, or infrared radiation, for example an asphalt street in summer absorbs light efficiently and can get really hot as result of the transformation into long-wave or infrared radiation. Gases, dust, and aerosols within the atmosphere absorb the remaining 78 W/m².

Looking at the outgoing energy flows, a warm surface creates thermals which transport 17 W/m² back into the atmosphere while the evapotranspiration of water from the surface transports another 80 W/m² into the atmosphere. Together, they amount to 97 W/m², so it would perhaps make sense to think that there is only a maximum of 64 W/m² left to be emitted as infrared radiation. However, the surface radiation amounts to a total of 396 W/m², which is almost 2.5 times the incoming solar radiation."

2.5 more radiation hits the Earth's surface than came in from the Sun? Here's the fake physics big lie, palmed off like indisputable scientific fact, complete with their usual 3-decimal place accuracy:

"This is where the greenhouse effect comes into play: a significant amount of energy is essentially trapped in the atmosphere. Certain greenhouse gases such as water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides, and even some hydrofluorocarbons are absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation. So they reflect a total of 333 W/m² of energy, in the form of heat, back to Earth’s surface. " - Earth’s Radiation Balance - ClimaTalk - Climate is Talking

Reflect energy in the form of heat? This bucket of mental manure stinks. Their hand-waving is like showing a color film in black and white and describing flowers. yet true believers in the U.N. IPCC regularly swallow it and think it's pure ambrosia.

Maybe the IPCC’s biggest lie is that any amount of atmospheric radiation at any wavelength absorbed by Earth’s surface automatically raises its temperature by the 4th root of the power by inverting the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.

Even leftists would call this the tail wagging the dog, because only solar radiation from the super-hot Sun (5500C) can raise Earth’s surface temperature at all, and usually to a maximum of about +50C after all the cooling processes, so dinky weak frigid CO2 15 micron radiation can’t raise the surface temperature at all, or above -80C, as demanded by the Second Law of Thermodynamics that says that a colder body can’t raise the temperature of a hotter body by any means, including radiation, which applies in the small and the large because the atmosphere’s temperature is always lower than the surface’s since it is composed of heat radiated or convected away from it.

In fact the air temperature systematically drops 18.8F per mile (9.8C per km) with height via the thermodynamic lapse rate based on dissipation of heat energy via conversion to work to expand against the decreasing pressure, soon dropping below 0C, the temperature of ice. So what heat is trapped up there? If there was any it was all swamped out.

The IPCC must think people have the word DUMB-SS stamped on their foreheads to make them think that the ironclad Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn’t apply with CO2.

Back to CO2’s thermal radiation.

Can you heat your kitchen in the winter with a big block of dry ice? No way. Its thermal radiation is virtually indistinguishable from that from atmospheric CO2, which is at a wavelength of 15 microns, whose Planck black body radiation temperature is -80C, a little colder than dry ice and can't melt an ice cube. For the IPCC to claim that CO2's thermal radiation keeps the Earth from freezing, and threatens climate Armageddon is a candidate for greatest fake physics hoax in history after the flat Earth theory.

NASA atmospheric transmission graph

Want proof that the IPCC is lying to your face to get what they want? Here’s a graph straight from IPCC main org. NASA showing that almost all upgoing thermal radiation from the Earth in the wavelength range of 8–13 microns is transmitted to the top of the atmosphere. What they don’t tell you is that that range covers all normal Earth surface temperatures, namely, +89C to -50C. The absorption/scattering levels for water vapor and CO2 are way colder or hotter than that, hence irrelevant. The blip for methane is close to 8 microns hence is too hot. There is another small blip around 9 microns (+48C) for oxygen/ozone, but that’s up in the stratosphere, outside the troposphere where weather happens.

No wonder that the IPCC avoids discussions of thermal physics and instead churns out boatloads of the best fake “global average temperature” (GAT) money can buy. No surprise, GAT is itself a nonphysical statistic cooked up in computers only they control, which they can make come out any way they want after it’s analyzed and seen to be pure fart gas meant to be used like the old Soviet Five-Year Plans to announce harvests that never happened.

Watch the IPCC wave their hands in the air when an intelligent novice questions why a total GAT increase of 1.8F (1.1C) since 1880 means anything, when nothing in Nature can even detect it since daily temperatures swing by tens of degrees F?

A global warming of 1.8° F (1° C) seems small, so why is this change in global temperature a concern?

When you have the time, study my deep analysis of GAT that exposes it as a Marxist unicorn:

What Is the Use of Global Temperature If It Really Doesn't Exist?

A real physical statistic would be yearly maximum temperature, which doesn’t go up even by fractions of 0.1C like GAT can be made to do, and won’t sell their scam. In fact, that statistic hasn't gone up since 1913 before there was a Big Oil for global Marxists to frame.

Even funnier if it weren’t so harmful, they’ve been trying to push over carbon tax credits to punish people for their CO2 emissions, but they can never push over a tax on the ocean, or can they? They're already trying.

Taxpayers To Foot The Bill If Risky Carbon Capture Projects Go Tits Up
WARNING: The secret UN carbon tax that's about to fleece America

So “greenhouse gases” are only a concern to the IPCC because they wish to use them as dummy corporations to destroy capitalism (economic freedom) by fooling government leaders into dismantling the fossil fuel industry that it underpins, and replace it with a Marxist police state where “everybody owns nothing and is happy”, like the slaves in “Gone With the Wind” owned nothing and were happy. In reality the elite leftist super-billionaires who pull the strings will own everything and everybody.

Global Marxists have turned the scientific-academic community into useful idiots who believe their fake version of thermal physics without question, because they all know that the real goal is to score a V for their anti-capitalist team, and lying to non-Marxists is always on the table with Marxists.

Why don't thermal physicists unite in shouting the global Marxists down and getting them dismantled before they do more damage? Because global Marxists' standard playbook is to control the narrative to monopolize the debate while relentlessly silencing honest open criticism by any crime however lowdown. This is the world I live in, and if y ou're lucky enough to read this I hope you don't let the Marxists cage your brain to be afraid to even look at my honest nonpolitical truth about thermal physics. If you think I'm somehow owned by Big Oil's evil capitalis pigs and am being secretly paid to spread misinformation to give them more time to ruin the world for filthy lucre, ask yourself who's demanding all the money and power in the world to shut whom down?

I'm politidizing science? That's what the global Marxists did. They started it and I'm just trying to finish it. If there were no global Marxists where would be no greenhouse effect or relentless schemes for frame Big Oil as evil. Indeed, the climate wouldn't even be an issue. All along Big Oil exists only because their products and services are in great demand to furnish us with our modern affluent comfortable convenient unlmited-horizon lifestyles, all of which Marxists hate. So don't make this about me or Big Oil, it's about them. Wake up and realize that they've been trying to turn black white and white black to get their hands on the green. Just say no and tell them to stuff it, you're not falling for it anymore.

I'm so relentlessly smeared and shadow-banned that I've become the name that cannot be named as the global Marxists quake in their boots at the thought of anybody even listening to me and blowing the whistle on their money-making scam. Please give me a chance to present my version of thermal physics, and decide for yourself who's telling the truth. Then email me to get in my address book for possible mass mailings one day if/when some lucky smart rich people discover me and bankroll me to reach the masses, which can cause their whole house of cards to topple quicker then Pres. Biden.

There is no Greenhouse Effect by TLW - my best shot at a viral article bringing the U.N. IPCC octopus down. Please study it and do your part spreading it.




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