Estimates are made for the exchange of radiative fluxes between the Earth’s surface, its atmosphere, and free space on the basis of their average thermal structure and estimated values for the emissivity and absorptivity of those individual entities. The radiative fluxes obtained reflect nighttime conditions but also indicate the components of those fluxes that must be subtracted from the input solar flux for daytime conditions. The estimates show that infrared radiant energy is lost to free space from both the Earth’s surface and its atmosphere.
Under the normal atmospheric temperature structure there is no net radiation from the atmosphere that reaches the Earth’s surface to be absorbed by it, and thus the socalled “greenhouse effect”, as it is traditionally depicted, is devoid of physical reality. The only exception occurs during atmospheric inversion conditions, but even in the presence of such rare inversions, the radiant power lost to free space from the atmosphere as a whole overwhelms the radiant power absorbed by the Earth’s surface from the warmer inversion layer above it. Inversion conditions are thus the only ones in which the so-called “greenhouse effect” can possibly have any form of physical reality. But such inversion conditions, however, are present over only a small fraction of the Earth’s surface for limited periods of time. In addition, since the recent increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations have a trivial effect on the atmosphere’s total emissivity, the effect of those recent CO2 increases on the overall infrared radiative flux balance is insignificant.
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The analysis also suggests a cloud cooling mechanism for the Earth’s surface and its atmosphere that is significantly different from the one traditionally cited. Cloud blockage such as that reflected in the Earth’s albedo acts symmetrically with respect to both the input heating by solar radiation and the output cooling by infrared radiation to free space. On the other hand, it is shown that the increasing infrared emissivity of the atmosphere caused by the presence of clouds provides an effective cooling mechanism that is asymmetric.
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http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html
what I consider the definitive evidence that there is no greenhouse effect (increasing temperature with increasing carbon dioxide), and further, that the troposphere is warmed by direct absorption of a fraction of the incident solar IR radiation (in fact, Venus's atmosphere, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is warmed by the same fraction of incident solar IR), and not from the surface at all as the overwhelming consensus now believes.
This means that heat from the separately warmed surface does not further warm the atmosphere, it merely drives the general wind circulation and the weather. With respect to nighttime heat transport, and temperature inversions, I wrote in part, at
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/david-appell-lost-confused-and-double-standards/#comment-94734
that, "...the Sun's incident radiation quickly warms the troposphere directly beneath its rays ... to the Standard Atmosphere equilibrium, vertical temperature lapse rate--and the Earth's surface, separately heated by the Sun during the day, and prevented by the atmospheric lapse rate from further heating the atmosphere beyond transient/local effects (i.e., just those effects we call "weather", and "climate"), acts to cool the near-surface atmosphere during the night (so that many locations see a local temperature inversion near dawn)."
The Venus/Earth temperatures comparison shows there is not only no increase in temperature with an increase in carbon dioxide, but the difference in albedo between Earth and Venus, due to the thick, planet-wide cloud cover on Venus, also does not affect Venus's atmospheric temperatures above and below the clouds. Thus, the more scattered clouds on Earth also cannot do so here either. The Venus clouds only cool the atmosphere within the cloud (by about 5 degrees C, due, I conjecture, to a greater specific heat within the cloud).
Harry Dale Huffman