How Can Atmospheric Co2 Actually Cause The Earths Surface To Warm?

How Can Atmospheric Co2 Actually Cause The Earths Surface To Warm?

I’m going to try make this as simple as possible, so it’s going to sacrifice a little in the way of detail. And still going to be a bit long. Various substances (gasses in this case) are broadly speaking transparent T have a refractive index of close to 1, and visible light passes through them mostly just fine. However, not all frequencies pass through equally. In spectrometry this is known as an Absorption Line | COSMOS Now when an atom or molecule absorbs a photon, that energy is likely to be reradiated. It can be radiated out in any direction, and is just as likely to return in the direction it came from. So it bounces around for longer. It still radiates relatively quickly - we are talking a couple extra hours, not weeks. (But think. Even a few extra hours of daylight in summer give us the difference between summer and winter) Greenhouse gasses are particularly good at absorbing IR (heat rather than visible light) http.//irina.eas.gatech.edu/EAS8803_Fall2009/Lec6.pdf That is in fact what defines them as being members of that class. (The most important one in our atmosphere is actually water vapour. Clouds. Humidity. That’s why a clear evening leads to a chilly night, while overcast weather is quite warm in the evening. Deserts are COLD at night) So to answer your question, the energy very much is radiated away, it just lingers for longer. This is very good news. Our moon, with almost zero atmosphere to speak of (it actually does have one, believe it or not) has temperatures ranging from -200 to +200 degrees Celsius That’s not comfortable at all. We have a good few kilometres of nice thick air, which acts as a “blanket” That doesn’t mean it’s heating up - it means it tends to average out the spikes, which suits us fine. There is a bit of a feedback mechanism here. Cold places the water vapour precipitates out quicker, letting them cool faster. And if t remain below freezing, water ice has a high albedo, so “bounces” most visible UV and IR spectra away quickly (which is why you wear suntan lotion when skiing. You are getting double the UV you usually do.) Warm areas gather more clouds and humiture. And so get warmer. Luckily, instead of getting hot and cold spots which stay that way, this causes winds as these temperature and pressure differences equalise. So one downside to a higher global average temperature is more hurricanes, cyclones and other windy weather. An upside is increased rainfall, more vigorous plant growth, and greater biodiversity. It is very important to note one thing. We are unable to make good predictions when it comes to CO2. We have correlations in temperature and CO2 levels. We have models galore. What you do to test a model is put in your assumptions, formulas etc, and then test it against reality. If it checks out, it might be useful as a predictive tool. Right now our models generally fail this test. We are pretty certain that increasing the CO2 content is a BadThing. How bad, at what heights this has greatest impact, or what it implies IS NOT CLEAR. We are not sure how quickly the CO2 levels dissipate. Not very quickly it seems. Water vapour, an even more significant GG, is a GOOD thing to have. We don’t like deserts tbh. But that’s the mechanics of how this works. It’s not like we can trap enough heat to fry ourselves, but quite simply, we prefer it cool and dry to hot and humid. (Hot and dry isn’t too bad oddly. I’ve lived in Saudi Arabia and on the mocambique coast, both of which get to 40 degrees not uncommonly, and I’ll take the dry one any day, as long as I have access to drinking water.) Plants and many animals prefer it the other way around. So as always, when someone asks one of these questions, I need to stress that directly or indirectly, every single society which has fallen apart is down to changing climate. A plague which kills half a population is largely survivable by a society. Drought and resultant famine and war are often NOT. We absolutely need to understand the environment we live in, and how we interrelate with it. Telling people that this is “settled science” is a very very dangerous lie. We need to know a LOT more.