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The Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis is based upon flat earth mathematics.
It would appear the guys-n-gals at Quantumville recalled the high-school formula for determining the surface area of a disc consists of its radius squared times pi (i.e., r² × π) and how the greater surface area of a sphere consists of its radius squared times pi times four (i.e., r²π × 4).
Thus a disc with a radius of 1 will have a surface area of pi (i.e., 3.14) and the same disc converted to a sphere will therefore have a surface area four times more than the original disc (i.e., 12.57). Applying this mathematical thinking to the terraqueous planet we all live on their abstractive minds effectively reduced it to a flat disc which has been expanded four times.
Then they mentally painted this flat earth black.
Thereupon they reduced the (measured) insolation of the oblate spheroid known as Planet Earth to a quarter of its real-world strength – and directed it to impinge upon every square millimetre of their phantom planet twenty-four-seven forever and a day – thereafter applying a radiance versus temperature constant and thus they had their flat earth temperature of -18° Celsius.
As this is at odds with the +15° Celsius real-world temperature they confected the “greenhouse effect” to account for the missing 33° Celsius.
This is where the weirdity of a blackbody flat earth bathed twenty-four-seven with quadruply-weakened sunbeams turns into utter bizarrerie as they deemed some trace gases in the frigid upper troposphere, busily absorbing infrared light radiating from the blackbody surface and emitting it in all directions, to be thus radiating some of it back to the heat-source and thereby raising its temperature via this ‘back-radiation’ thaumaturgy the requisite thirty-three degrees (from -18°C to +15°C).
Moreover, this sci-fi scenario conveniently ignores how the other atmospheric gasses constituting some 99% of the air we all breathe – which are heated at ground-level by conduction and thence by convection as hot air rises and cold air sinks to such an extent as to dominate in determining the thermal structure of the lower atmosphere (troposphere) – are also emitting infrared light in all directions.
Furthermore, no externally heated substance – be it heated by conduction (direct transference from the heat source), by convection (heated gases rising and mingling and mixing with sinking cooler gases), or by radiation (via the heat source emitting infrared light) – can actually raise the temperature of its heat-source (let alone to such a precise degree as 33° Celsius, no more and no less, provided some specified trace gases remain at pre-industrial parts-per-million levels).
(This real-world matter-of-factness does not apply to all the phantom planets in the noncausative quantum solar system, of course, which are busily raising the surface temperature of its central star – the heat-source for all those blackbody flat planets – above 5778° K via a massive-scale variant version of this phantasmagorical ‘back-radiation’).
To summarise:
The physical earth is not flat.
The physical earth is not black.
The physical earth is not static (it is constantly rotating).
The physical earth is not bathed with quadruply-weakened sunbeams.
Sunlight does not impinge upon every square millimetre of the physical earth twenty-four-seven (only during daytime).
Sunlight does not impinge with equal intensity upon every square millimetre of the daytime hemisphere (most obliquely at polar latitudes and dawn-dusk regions).
All atmospheric gases are heatable (not just several trace gases).
All heated atmospheric gases radiate infrared light (not just several trace gases).
The physical atmosphere insulates the daytime hemisphere from heating-up to unliveable temperatures (unlike its nearest neighbour the airless moon).
The physical atmosphere insulates the nighttime hemisphere from freezing to unliveable temperatures (unlike its nearest neighbour the airless moon).
In the physical world no externally heated substance can raise the temperature of its heat-source.
In the physical world some specified trace gases can (as evidenced in notable past eras) exceed by several thousand parts-per-million those several hundred parts-per-million pre-industrial levels deemed sacrosanct by influential doomsayers and/or panicmongers.
tl;dr: there is no “greenhouse effect” in reality (nor “greenhouse gases” either).
The greenhouse effect is so trivially shown experimentally that it's a fairly standard activity for 6th grade kids to do.
I'm wondering where you got this rather interesting sequence of thoughts from. There are a whole bunch of various obvious errors that jump out - for example you seem to be confused as to what is actually warming, as you seem to think the Earth itself is a single system (like when you say no substance can raise the temperature of its heat source).
Actually that does not demonstrate the greenhouse effect!
From the PDF at the link: "This activity mirrors how a greenhouse works, but it’s not exactly the same as the greenhouse effect that is taking place in the Earth’s atmosphere."
The effect of the actual greenhouses is due to the glass preventing the air dissipating its heat due to convection.
The poorly-named “greenhouse effect” doesn’t actually explain how greenhouses work, it has to do with the so-called “back-radiation”.
Do you have a link to an experiment that demonstrates the actual effect in action? It should be easy to find one if the effect is real.
Whoops, I linked the wrong one. The normal idea is to mix baking powder and vinegar in a jar to create CO2 and then compare it to various controls, like here.
That experiment seems to demonstrate that a jar with a higher concentration of CO2 in it will be hotter than a jar with regular air in it, after a period of being heated by an external source (eg a heat lamp) for 5 to 10 minutes.
The “greenhouse effect” however isn’t quite this. It is rather that the surface of the Earth is said to supposed to be -18C, but then the surface of the Earth heats the atmosphere which in turn heats the surface of the Earth to a higher temperature, raising it by +33C to reach +15C. i.e. the atmosphere is externally heated (by the Earth) and it then heats its heat source (the Earth) to a greater than original temperature.
As such the experiment you cited doesn’t demonstrate this. It would need to, for example, show that the gas in the jar ends up raising the heat source (e.g. the heat lamp)'s temperature.
Specifically what's warming is not "the Earth" but the oceans and troposphere. The other layers of the atmosphere are actually cooling because of the enhanced greenhouse effect within the troposphere. So it's not the "heat source" that is being heated (most of the infrared radiation being captured by GHGs comes from radioactive decay of elements within the Earth's crust).
Earth's internal power = 44 TW. Sunlight striking the Earth = 170 PW = 170,000 TW.
(from Atomic Rockets' Boom Table)
Even accounting for albedo reflecting like 30% of that number straight back into space, Earth's internal heating is a tiny contributor to its energy balance. It's not like the giant planets, where internal heat is much more significant to overall energy balance (because radioactive heat scales with mass i.e. radius^3 and leftover heat from their formation scales with radius^5 while solar heat scales with radius^2, and also because they're further from the Sun); Neptune actually does radiate over twice as much energy as it receives from the Sun, though I don't think this is true of the others.
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