Greenhouse Effect?

[Edward Coulter]

Commenting on the lack of a greenhouse effect on the moon as mentioned in the article. The article implied, or perhaps much more strongly, stated that the dark side of the moon is very cold. What is the dark side of the moon -- is it the side we cannot see from earth or as is the commonly mistakenly thought, that the sun never reaches the other side of the moon? The sun can see it though, every 2 weeks for 2 weeks of light and 2 weeks of darkness. The whole moon's surface receives equal amount of sunlight, just as does the earth. Its period of rotation being about 28 days makes for a slow sunrise and a long (2 week) day. Of course it would be cold in the dark and hot in the sun because there is no atmosphere to retain or to to disperse the heat or the cold. That, has nothing to do with an hypothetical greenhouse effect either, mostly the long day/night period and the lack of any means of heat storage and transfer. Oceans would be extremely useful for regulating day/night temperatures by storing daytime heat and distributing it to the night time coolness as by the trade winds etc. , but the moon has no oceans either to modulate temperatures.

By the way, how do you measure temperature on an airless world? On earth, we only measure the air temperature (in the shade) or the oceans, things that the moon does not have. So when it is said that the moon's daytime temperature reaches several hundreds of degrees, it is not the atmospheric temperature because there is none. It must be the surface dirt temperature, which obviously has nothing to do with a greenhouse effect. So in the absence of a "greenhouse effect" how can the moon get so hot in the sun? There is no such thing as a greenhouse effect. It becomes hot in a car parked in the sun with windows up because there is no air circulation to redistribute the heat. That is not a greenhouse effect, just a lack of air circulation.