Re: Greenhouse

["Richard W. Tarara" <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

----------
> From: William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com>
>
> Think of the high temperature within a car on a sunny day.  The car is
hot
> because it has trapped the hot which would otherwise get spread
throughout
> the entire atmosphere by convective mixing.  So, it's not hard to explain
> why the inside of your car gets hot during the day.  It's harder to
> explain why the temperature inside doesn't rise to infinity! 

Of course it's not too difficult to explain--once the air inside rises to
high enough temperatures the glass and other components of the 'walls' will
rise in temperature via conduction.  The outside surfaces can then be
cooled by convection/conduction and even by radiation (nothing says that a
hot piece of glass can't radiate in the infra-red).  Again, these cooling
processes (other than the radiative) _are not_ available to the earth.

> Oooo, interesting tack:  the temperature inside a greenhouse would rise
to
> infinity if not for conductive and RADIATIVE cooling processes.  SO, for
a
> real greenhouse, the "greenhouse effect" doesn't explain the high
> temperature inside, instead it explains the COOLING process which keeps
> the temperature from rising towards infinity!  Twisted enough for ya? 

Huh?  

 
Rick