Global Warming & the Flood

This would be a good exercise for you to work out yourself.From approximately what height have you seen rain fall?From approximately what height are you proposing the flood waters fell?Approximately what volume of water have you seen fall as rain? (You might want to look at The wettest place).Approximately what volume of water are you proposing fell as flood waters?The energy released in falling is the volume of water times its density (1 gram per cubic centimeter) times the distance that it fell. How does this compare with the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima?

Yup, you are wrong. The old "heat rises" bit refers to convection in relatively small volumes¹ of gases and liquids in a gravitational field. When you consider the Earth and its atmosphere as a whole the only way that heat leaves that system is by radiation … and radiation is slow and inefficient. Essentially all heat generated within a hundred miles or so of the Earth's surface goes into heating up the Earth.-------------¹When you start talking about the whole atmosphere a big chunk of it rising in one place must be balanced by some other big chunk of it falling in some other place.

The accumulation of heat would reasonably be distributed throughout the entire volume of the atmosphere and flood waters per day, but as Bill Murray says, "It just doesn't matter!!". At the end of the 40 days you get all that heat built up. Heat can be thought of as a quantity of stuff; it's not like temperature, which is a measurement of a quantity of stuff. You are adding a whole bunch of heat by your scenario, and subtracting a very little heat by radiation to space, and whether you add it over an hour or a day or 40 days or a year doesn't matter much. What people have been calculating is the total heat added, not the rate at which heat is added, and the total heat added doesn't depend on the time period over which it's added. Now, if you start calculating the radiation to space, you would typically calculate that as a rate of heat loss per day or whatever; a little more is going to be lost over 40 days than is lost over an hour. But people have done these calculations before … the result ain't good for your scenario.