Days
Commentator
Clouds are just water vapor. They reflect light and they hold heat back from rising (for a while) ... do you understand what "radiation" entails? Radiation is the generation of electromagnetic waves. The sun generates radiation, the earth generates radiation but not nearly on the same scale as the sun, clouds, however, are merely water vapor, they generate static electricity (lightning), but that isn't the same as radiation.Obviously I misstated the facts when I said evaporation releases energy. But 1) not all heat is absorbed in evaporation. 2) rain returns heat to the surface 3) the entire troposphere is a thin layer under tremendous pressure. Clouds radiate heat toward the surface.
Wow, I can't believe how messed up your basic sciences have become. Let's try this again. When the sun's radiation is absorbed, it produces heat. When water is heated, it changes state into gas. So the energy is absorbed into the water, which then heats the water, which is how 3/4ths of the earth's surface is warmed by the sun. The earth's oceanic surface is then cooled by evaporization and condensation, a process that transfers heat from the ocean surface to the upper atmosphere.
Here's where you are not comprehending that process: if you pour more heat into the earth's surface, it merely produces more rain, the process automatically takes off whatever heat you pour into it. It is a contained system, the water returns to the oceans in the form of rain. But not the heat, the heat dissipates into the upper atmosphere. And here's how that happens: the water molecules in the gaseous state have space to fly around until they expend their energy, once their energy is spent (aka as "cooling") they condeanse back into the liquid state. Condensation gives off more heat, so all this heat is released into the upper atmosphere. Most of this happens 6-8 miles high in the atmosphere, but gas molecules can fly as high as 700-800 miles high, it depends on how hot they are.
By the time water vapor has cooled off to the point of returning from a gas state to a liquid state, temperatures have fallen below 212 degrees F. Invariably, those new raindrops are cooled even more because the upper atmosphere is cold; did you know that the bottom of the ocean and the top of the atmosphere (the ionosphere) are both always minus 50 degrees C? As you climb higher into the atmosphere it gets cooler and cooler. So, those raindrops are 212 degrees F when they form, but they quickly lose all their heat in the upper atmosphere, and they actually warm up as they fall, that is why rain cools the lower atmosphere, it is absorbing heat as it falls.
You don't seem to understand the basic process... and it hasn't changed. If it ever does change, we won't be here any more... at least, not in this form.