Water canopy

From EvoWiki

Creationists have proposed a number of ad hoc hypotheses to prop up the Noachian Deluge. One such, an attempt to account for where the Flood-waters were hiding before the event, is the "Water Canopy", also known as the "vapor canopy". The basic idea is, all the excess fluid was floating up above the Earth in vapor form until Flood-time, at which point it condensed and dropped as catastrophic rain.

There are numerous problems with this claim. The first is that water is a greenhouse gas. Adding that much water vapor to the atmosphere would have greatly increased the temperature of the earth, utterly extinguishing anything like most modern life.

Further, how did the Vapor Canopy stay aloft? Given the simple fact of the mass of water involved, the atmospheric pressure at sea level should have been on the order of 900 times greater than it is today, lest the Canopy fall to Earth prematurely. But Noah was not crushed into a thin paste by 900 atmospheres of pressure — or if he was, he courageously did not allow this handicap to keep him from his God-given task of constructing the Ark.

Even if the Earth magically stays cool despite the rampant greenhouse effect and the canopy somehow manages to stay around a few hundred years until the flood, there is yet more problems. Vapor of the Water Canopy must have been at a considerable altitude about the Earth's surface. Likewise, the aggregate mass of the Water Canopy was significant. This is a problem, because when a large mass falls, it carries a good supply of kinetic energy; when that mass hits the ground, its kinetic energy has to go somewhere — which it does, typically in the form of heat. Calculations of the heat that would be released by the Water Canopy's collapse and rain indicate that Noah should have been parboiled as well as being crushed to paste.