Just what is a Greenhouse?

A greenhouse is a building constructed of sheets of glass which lets solar radiation in (and hence energy) while limiting the loss of that energy to the atmosphere by stopping infrared radiation and presumably by the insulation properties of glass, loss of heat by conduction or convection too. (I expect to be Brignelled on this point but that is a price one accepts, in good humour. Actually to be Brignelled is an honour while to be Lambertised is another matter).

The standard view is that it is glass's ability to stop the infrared energy from escaping that is the principal mechanism of the greenhouse but a critic of the Number Watch has pointed out that it is the limiting of convection which produces the greenhouse effect. Personal experience tells me that the flat I rent in a large apartment building, when internally heated and all doors and windows remain closed, remains warm for quite a period of time, so at the risk of being hoist on my own petard, I might agree that convection might be a plausible explanation for the greenhouse effect.

Not to matter, I like to think through scientific problems myself rather than look up an entry in some authoritative source in a mindless fashion.  This is a common ploy used by the illiterate actually - rather than counter one's argument by counter argument, one is instead confronted with a URL pointing to some other opinion. Debating a robot has never been a satisfactory experience.

I recall from my youth that the greenhouses in the Warriewood district of Sydney's northern beaches all had frosted glass panes. To keep the heat in or because there was a surplus of frosted panes which had an unusual source in the market.

But the crucial fact in the greenhouse effect is that a mechanical filter is in operation - mechanical because the gas inside the greenhouse has been physically isolated from the rest of the earth's atmosphere by the glass roof and walls of the greenhouse. Take this filter away and the gas previously constrained by the greenhouse is now free to disperse into the rest of the gas, or the atmosphere.

So is there such a thing as a Greenhouse gas? No. The reason a greenhouse works is because two phases of matter are in physical contact - a solid shell of solid SiO2 encapsulating a gas, thus quarantining that gas from the rest of the gases of the atmosphere. However no gas is capable of physically stopping energy from escaping to space as a greenhouse effect - hence there is no such thing as a greenhouse gas. An obscure concept but clearly one invented by the scientific illierati in the Gang_Green camp.

To assert so is also to advertise an appalling ignorance of geophysics. You see, while CO2 might absorb a small part of the thermal spectrum, being a gas it will re-equilibrate with the other gases and transfer that energy to space. CO2 cannot retain its temperature in the earth's atmosphere. It might in a bottle of soda-water, and then we have the SiO2 as glass, encapsulating the water and dissolved CO2, acting in the traditional greenhouse fashion.

Gases also have a peculiar property of occupying the space in which they occur. On the earth that is limited to the surface of the earth and we now are presented with another enigma. If gases are gases and expand to fill the available space, then why does not the earth's atmosphere of gas disperse out into space?
Constrained by gravity? So one suspects, but with a so-called vacuum out there in space, what stops the gases forming our atmosphere from escaping? After all, all gases, without exception, expand to fill the available space available.

Has your scribe lost his marbles? No, he has always had a sense of uneasiness with the precepts of Victorian, Gas-Light era science based on the mechanics of a science based on Newtonian ideas whose author knew nothing about electricity.

Your scribe suspects that electricity might be force to further study to explain this.