Existence of Noah's Ark

Titanium is also a terrifically difficult metal to extract from the ore or to work into finished forms. Maybe Noah found some discarded high-tech golf clubs to rework into rivets?

But it ain't 15 cubits......pretty unscriptural if you ask me, RR.

It's exactly that cycle that requires a constant source of heat - lots of heat - to evaporate all the water that's going to make clouds. And then the vapor must give up that heat to something - probably not the vacuum of space, though - in order to condense and fall. Ain't gonna work, RR. Not with real physics and thermodynamics, unless you're willing to boil Noah.

Two reasons: to remove (noncondensable) air that would lower the effectiveness of freon condensation and, more importantly, to remove any water that would make ice and plug things up. Nothing to do with the vacuum of space.

The water leaves the system because you've reduced the applied pressure to below its vapor pressure AND because you have quite a large heat source - all that copper and such at room temperature - to supply the heat of vaporization that enables the change from liquid (or solid) water to vapor to occur. Even with that large of a mass of metal, how long do you hold a vacuum on the unit? Half an hour, perhaps, to be sure you've evaporated a quarter-teaspoon of water?The problem isn't so much the water as the heat, RR. A single gram of water vapor in Noah's stratosphere gives off 540 calories of heat when it condenses to raindrops. That's enough to heat ten grams of water down below Noah's boat by 54 degrees C of nearly 100 degrees F. You just don't have a heat sink in the upper atmosphere to carry that sort of heat away on bigger than a one-hurricane scale.

Hail falls from a thunderhead because those cumulonimbus clouds go up to 60,000 feet or more, and the temperature is way cold up that high. Relatively warm updrafts carry water droplets up there. They freeze and start to fall (they give up their 80 calories per gram of heat in the process of freezing, intensifying the updrafts.) If the winds are strong enough, the little sleet balls get blown up again, gathering ice as they travel.
I learned the calories and the how-long-it-takes-to-vacuum-transfer-a-gram-of-hexadeuterobenzene in college, and the ice in the car air conditioner part from not pumping the system down. Strictly shade-tree HVAC stuff, and now I leave it to you pros. Too much stuff to know how to do for me.And do any of you know what a cumulonympho cloud is?

I think, without bothering to calculate it out, that the heat from kinetic energy probably isn't the big player here. Far more important in any *worldwide* flood is the means to drive such a huge heat engine everywhere at once. If it's raining all over the world (that was a song once, I think....) you must provide 540 calories of heat per gram of water you evaporate on the surface, you must get rid of that same 540 calories per gram up in the clouds as you recondense that vapor, and you somehow must transport the vapor up through the falling rain to where it can make more raindrops!And the size of this heat flow ain't 'zactly small - if we take your 4 inches of rain per hour, I calculate 100,000 grams of water per hour for each square meter of the Earth's surface. That comes to 54,000,000 calories for each of the (several!) square meters on Earth, each hour for forty days and forty nights, getting transferred from rock to water, and then from water vapor to outer space. In (physically) countercurrent flow. (I don't remember what calories come out to in Btu's, RR. Sorry.)Hurricane Ivan didn't have this problem. He was only a couple of hundred miles across, and had the whole warm Caribbean to wander on and suck heat and water vapor from. I'll bet, though, that the heat flow problems are precisely what keeps hurricanes from getting larger than they do - the physics of our atmosphere just won't allow them to.A cumulonympho? That's a f***ing thunderstorm!

Heat is being lost to space from our atmosphere all the time - night and day. Much of it leaves as infrared and far infrared radiation - some as reflected visible light. If you want numbers, I can find some - it's been measured quite accurately by sattelites.