I have great admiration for Prof Merrifield. The way he explains physics is just wonderful, it's like a perfectly balanced construction, or a great gymnast's routine. Everything falls into place.
Daniele Messina He doesn't explain physics, he explained how junk science works. He claims co2 forces the earth to send it more radiation in order to maintain some equilibrium. Nonsense. Take a teddy bear at room temperature, and cover it with ice from the freezer. According to this crank, the teddy bear must heat up to 40°C, to counteract the 0°C, in order match the receiving radiation from the room (20°C). What a junk scientist. He claims that some claim this violates thermodynamics, but then lies about the fact that it does indeed violate thermodynamics. This guy is a flagrant liar or imbecile.
My mind was BLOWN INTO A MILLION PIECES when he reverse explained that for each kilometer you go down, the temperature increases and I just lost it. Incredible explanation!!!
This was really insightful since I've never really considered the actual mathematics that goes behind the greenhouse effect. This was a really interesting video. Thanks for making this!
Do the water thiing plllease!!!! its like... water moles they are "liquid" only cause theyre switching between crystal and vape many many times per second and some on the outermost edge of the thin electro forcefield that makes water drop shaped (they all "want" in or at least believe its theyre choice when theyre magnetic pole nature shapes the outermost edge as small as possible by attracting all to the center or,,, (like gravity does on larger scale) as spherical as possible,, think emperor penguins in a blizzard taking turns on the edge) .... cause they be like that Mickey Mouse head shape.. water is so cute! Then.. after you paid no attention to it, they get thrown out cause of the "jigggle" action.. the more jiggles (temperature) the more get thrown out of the magnet area of the main mass and drift away probably never to see that particular group of waters (is that allowed to call it that?).. so exhale and send trillions on tehyre wayyy ahhh. Inhale and absorb and let become part of you all the courtesy of modern atmosphere.
@@dextertreehorn I never said this was complex mathematics, I just said it was mathematics I hadn't considered before because the greenhouse effect in both pop science and high school are merely quantitative.
@@Israel220500 but the equation he uses is for the whole planet. with that illustration its says the whole surface of earth is heated evenly and at the same time. but if you could show me where i am in correct i would appreciate it.
He forgot to mention that there is no perfect blackbody radiator in the universe including the sun. The Earth radiates at an emissivity of about .8 to .9. The atmospheric layer has an emissivity of perhaps .2, which makes it a negligible radiator. He is probably assuming the Earth is a perfect blackbody which is not true. While the atmospheric radiator isn't an effective radiator at all being it has an emissivity of .2 at best. All gases have extremely narrow absorption bands including CO2. According to the Planck Distribution, the absorption band of CO2 and the center radiation band of the Earth do not coincide. CO2 absorbs strongly at 15 microns and the Earth radiates the most radiation at 10 microns. Only a small fraction of the Earth's radiation is available for CO2 absorb.
The single best explaination I ever seen. Thank you! Finally after all these years! I understand this things myself but it is impossible to find perfectly good explanations to link to when trying to demysify this subject to chronic midwits.
Brillant video. Thanks for this and all the other content. BTW, the interviewer does not get enough credit - he does a fantastic job of guiding the conversation and asking questions us layman would ask to solicit answers we can digest.
Dear Professor Michael Merrifield, please are you able to provide some reliable peer reviewed public source links to studies that have quantified the amount of heat produced in the atmosphere w.r.t increase of carbon dioxide concentration? Thanks.
"Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010" published 25/02/2015 Authors - D. R. Feldman, W. D. Collins, P. J. Gero, M. S. Torn, E. J. Mlawer & T. R. Shippert 21k Accesses 165 Citations
This is a great video. It shows the basic analysis for the greenhouse effect quantitatively, rather than just hand-waving, and as Prof Merrifield said, shows how no physical laws are broken. I haven't seen any other videos explaining this basic calculation (although I haven't been looking too hard)....
In radiational heat transfer, one cannot add components. Two cups of coffee at 50 Celsius each do not add to one larger cup at 100 Celsius, yet that is what this charlatan is pretending... He needs a refresher course in basic Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer. Unfortunately, 98% of the audience is technically illiterate, and does not see obvious non-sense presented to them as fact.
I cant find what he means with the average moon temperature. How did he get to that number? Moon has over 100 on bright side and minus under -200 on the dark one. I see you can do the average from these two, but that is so pointless and doesnt really fit with what he showed us...
In answer to my own question...I think the argument presented would hold only if the emissivity were equal to one. In other words the air would have to be a black body. How thick a layer of air would be required in order for it to behave as a black body? What happens if the air is not a black body?
9:40 Real estate agents rarely mention that the temperature drops by 6 degrees for every kilometer of increase in elevation. So if you want to avoid the heat, find a nice mountain.
Well, it's more complicated. Yucca Valley California or Phoenix Arizona are way higher in elevation than Branson Missouri, and San Francisco California is AT sea level, BELOW San Diego California. So there are also many other climatic variables at play.
Well, it's more complicated. Yucca Valley California or Phoenix Arizona are way higher in elevation than Branson Missouri, and San Francisco California is AT sea level, BELOW San Diego California. So there are also many other climatic variables at play.
17:23 Venus has a surface pressure of 93bar; the cylinder pressure in a diesel engine is from 10 to 20 bar. This is more that enough to explain the extreme temperature. Why do these people never mention that? They used to.
Constant pressure doesn't increase temperature. A change in pressure does increase temperature temporarily until the extra heat dissipates after some time passes, or it is exhausted. The pressure in a diesel engine cylinder changes rapidly in cycles while the surface pressure remains mostly constant on Venus.
Venus's atmosphere is loaded with IR absorbers, mainly C02, which are heated up by sunlight at high altitudes. Gravity increases its pressure low down where the kinetic energy (temperature) is in balance with potencial energy (pressure) like on our Earth. This is the thermal gradient observed on any planet with an atmosphere (Mars has no substancial pressure). At 53km high in the atmosphere, temperature and pressure are close to Earth's ones.
from 13:00 to 14:20 can use your explanation of things in the video up to that point to explain why the atmosphere of Jupiter is so thick? Based on what you said there is not much of an explanation about pressure beside earlier in the video when you said gas expands and contracts as it raises or descends. So is Jupiters atmosphere so thick because it is so big then? Would we be crushed if earth were the size of Jupiter?
In this video Professor Merrifield keeps saying that glass absorbs IR light, which is low-energy, but in another video from 2011 about transpaency of glass, diamonds etc Professor Moriarty says that it's high-energy UV light that gets absorbed by transparent materials and even runs an experiment. I'm in a bit of confusion about whether both UV and IR photons get absorbed by glass somehow or one of these two statements is not quite correct.
It depends totally on the properties of the specific type of glass involved. Common glass absorbs most of the ultraviolet radiation from the sun, but not all of it. You can still get a tan through the window glass of your automobile, but not nearly as fast as in direct sunlight. Infrared is mostly absorbed, but the higher the wavelength, the more of it passes through. And some glass is specifically formulated to make it more transparent or opaque to infrared or ultraviolet. So it depends totally on exactly what kind of glass you have.
except there is no surface to stop convection like a green house has ( he mentioned that with the lapse rate) but not so much how -40 degree high level atmosphere is warming the surface .. it does not.
he had beautiful explanations and diagrams .. I don't care. I want to see an experiment that demonstrates doubling CO2 will actually raise the temps .. no magical roof to push heat back from a cold mass of air like the fancy equation .. an experiment .. that is science .. the equations are a fancy guess.
This reminds me of one of my physics instructors at UCSB, Dr. Hansma. The explanation is utterly clear and intuitive. It always amazes me how people who deny climate change have such disdain for people who understand climate and then cherry pick facts to 'prove' that the experts are wrong, all while having absolutely no understanding of climate, whatsoever.
Denier is such a puerile term. Modern climate alarmist theories have only been around a few decades and we have this hysterical cult labelling eminent atmospheric physicists as "deniers". It's almost as if we've entered a time machine and gone back to the middle ages!
@@lovelyjubbly7456 If you have any real arguments, then publish your findings. Every scientist dreams of overturning the current state of the art. Aim high!
Andrew, would you also be amazed to learn that the co2 level in our atmosphere is very low compared to the past and yet none of the catastrophic events confidently predicted by many these days, occurred?
@@arnesaknussemm2427 I'd be amazed if by 'past' you meant in the last few hundred years. If you meant 10 or 20 million years ago, I would not be amazed as that is established scientific fact. In the Cretaceous period, for example, sea level was about 100 meters higher than it is now. Keep in mind that it is not just the level of CO2 that matters but the rate at which it changes (up or down). If the rate is faster than a species can migrate or evolve to cope with the change, that species can die out. This has actually happened in the past and is starting to happen now. For example, in Hawaii, birds are starting to move up mountains in order to stay in their preferred climatic zones. However, some of the birds are now at the top of mountains and have nowhere else to go. They will likely die off on the island.
And not to mention that the 93 bar pressure on Venus is so high that CO2 is a supercritical fluid and doesn't actually have the optical properties of a gas but rather that of a liquid. The pseudoscientist probably failed to mention that because they get confused about phases of matter and optics.
Thoroughly enjoyable and well explained but I have a question. Assuming solar irradiation is constant, (which it isn't but for the sake of argument), then how can it increase the amount of energy in the atmosphere? Mondays photons and consequent infrared are surely gone by Tuesday. Then we get another days dose, and that goes. It is a conveyor belt of sorts, but the energy it conveys does not change? Can that question be addressed or is it misconceived and if so why? Energy in = energy out, no net gain over time?
No he explains this... This whole section is about the fact that while it's called the "greenhouse effect" The physics is quite different from the green house because greenhouses heat up by stopping convection while the greenhouse effect stops loss due to radiation
@@peterweetbeter Maybe not exactly like a car with open doors. Open doors increases convection so less warming effect, as you say. But Earth’s atmosphere isn’t convectively open. It is just radiatively open in certain wavelengths. The greenhouse effect is the temperature balance achieved when radiation in and out become equal, and global warming represents an ongoing imbalance (less out than needed).
Love the cooling stacks belching water vapor being used as an image of carbon dioxide. That is a nuclear plant. It does not make carbon dioxide as a byproduct. That is condensing water vapor. You can't see carbon dioxide as it doesn't interact with visible light.
Hello there! Thanks for the video. I have a question though: how is it possible that, as you say "the sunlight is mostly optical light?" Isn't it rather that most of the sun's IR are actually absorbed on the way in??? Thanks
Folk, all that happens with a doubling of CO2 is the height to extinction occurs at 1/2 the height. If 15 nm extinguishes at 32 feet at 400 ppm, then at 800 ppm, the height is 16ft. Total energy is not affected. It just gets absorbed earlier. Adding more does nothing. above that height. Game over. The model he shows is silly nonsense. He claims a certain height at a temperature, which is silly. Radiation occurs along the entire column of air, not at some lever. He claims that some height there are no more CO2 molecules to hit. No, it is well mixed all the way up. The problem with AGW theory starts with this fake model that does not occur. All the peer reviewed paper are based on this impossible view of the world. Radiation according to Stephan Boltzmann says at 15 C we get 390 w/m^2. Your wall in your basement is like four old light bulbs in 1 M^2? Note even close! NO Way. SB is off by about 20 times in the 15 C range and gives a wrong answer. Earth should be 50 degree or more, not -18 as claimed. Air COOLS the ground and conduction gives us the lapse rate, just like you find in your wall with insulation, a linear gradient. Convection speeds up the flow and then places the energy in above the ground where no more 15 nm can get to CO2 from the ground. It all then just passes energy around and then radiation occurs along the entire column to space. Radiation to space then occurs in all molecules, including N2 and CO2, as well as H2O, where open bands allow energy to go freely past. If the radiation up high hits another CO2, that CO2 absorbs and sprays out black body radiation, of which about 1/2 then can go to space via un attenuated bands. The reason for the fake AGW is found in this fake model used by this idiots. The SB is also not valid and only 2-3% is actually radiation with the rest conduction and convection. Folk these people are incompetent. Learn what Height to Extinction is. Done in a lab. Easy to understand. CO2 is not an issue at all, just as water is not. Neither is Methane. All that happens is the height to extinction drops. Like doubling the fog you see half the distance. Double it again you can see 1/4th as far as originally. Simple and easy to understand. No fear. Just know these people are useful idiots. Another analogy is red paint. First coat, pink. Add another, more red. After several coats, adding more coats does nothing to the color. Another example is sunglasses. Flip shade. imagine ten shade. first one does most, second a little more, by the time the 10 shade is on you can't see anything. Height to extinction....it just lowers or the distance shortens, that is all. Add more does not make you see more. It makes you see less distance. Happy to discuss this. This fraud must end.
I grew up in a world where it was understood that the mass of the atmosphere explained the "extra energy" at the surface of a planet due to the kinetic energy within the gas itself - literally The Kinetic Theory of Gases. I was shocked when I found out that these pseudoscientists are claiming the entire effect is due to IR radiation from the gas. The level of idiocy these pseudoscientists are presenting is seriously disturbing. They wouldn't last a week in the the real world of applied sciences. If you do the SB equation for Mars you find that the effective emissivity of the planet is 0.997, or in other words the CO2-rich atmosphere that has more than 10 times the CO2 than Earth's atmosphere is only "back radiating" (according to the pseudoscience hypothesis) 0.3% of the emissions from the surface, yet these pseudoscientists claim that CO2 is responsible for about 25% of Earth's "greenhouse" effect. The surface temperature of Mars is actually within 99.7% of the predicted temperature without an atmosphere because it contains very little kinetic energy, that is if you follow real physics principles and laws.
And furthermore, CO2 has higher emissivity than the bulk air, thus if it has any special effect it actually helps energy radiate out of the atmosphere, though the net effect is very close to zero.
Well this is better than trying to explain it with all the higher math. So I get the point that the emission height is now a bit higher: 5.4km to 5.5km. The strato is apparently cool & needs to increase its T in order to radiate better (warmer air radiates more IR away). Now I've come across more than one article on co2 saturation & it make sense that further addition of co2 is not going have any more major effect. Nearly all that carbon is saturated & co2 behaves logarithmically relative to temp. The illustration commonly displayed is that if co2 goes from a porous wall to a dense wall, then effectively it's going to block those IR rays from exiting to any higher layer. So yes the IR accrued heat will remain below this, but the distance of bouncing off the ground keeps getting halved because of more than ample co2. Not that I believe it's doubling anyhow--how could it be when all these renewables are going up & carbon capture is getting started & the decarbonated concrete looks as if it will become the new player.
"Blue shift" and "Red shift" refer to _apparent_ changes in the wavelength of light due to relative motion. For example, if I shine a laser light at you while you're standing still with a detector, you will measure a certain wavelength of light. If you move toward me while measuring light from the same laser, you'll measure a shorter (bluer) wavelength. Moving away, you'd measure longer (redder) wavelengths. This red and blue light is red and blue (longer and shorter wavelengths, respectively) in the same sense, but there is no red-shift or blue-shift because there is no relevant motion. Instead, the blue light in this case is absorbed by electrons and _some of_ that energy is re-emitted as redder (less energetic) light, then more is re-emitted as redder light, then more, until it's gone. Here's an analogy to explain this essentially quantum effect: If you don't have much money (like an electron being in a low-energy state) and I give you a ten dollar bill, you may spend a few dollars in one place, then a few dollars somewhere else. (Each expenditure being less than the original ten corresponds to the re-emitted photons having less energy, and redder wavelength, than the original.) You could spend all ten dollars at once somewhere, just as some of the electrons will re-emit the whole load of energy as light of the original wavelength. But, unless you already have money when I give you the ten bucks, you won't ever emit a bluer photon (spend more than ten bucks). So, on average, the re-emitted light (the money you spend later) will come in lower-energy-than-original, redder, (less than ten-dollar) amounts.
Point 10 While it's already known that swings in water vapor as much as 400% in days isn't given any weight while tiny CO2 increases 2ppm in a year signals runnaway temperatures the other factor is even more embarrasing for warmers. Water vapor has an IR bandwith greater than CO2 interacting about 4 times more effectively. These factors alone should sink the the alarmists claims alone.
Could the position of the photosphere be dependent on the location of the observer? It is the altitude from which the emitted radiation enters the observer's detector. What I am getting at is that at altitude x, emitted radiation is reabsorbed at altitude y but at altitude 2x, the radiation will still be absorbed. It will just be adsorbed at a greater distance, say 2y. It is not linear but the photons should still eventually be absorbed and reemitted. Wouldn't the photosphere exist only in the presence of an observer and not exist in the absence of an observer?
It's important to note that we actually have no idea when a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect would start. It's pretty likely that it's a long way from where we are now, but it's worth pointing out that the error bars on that conclusion are huge.
It's an immeasurably small change. Only the lighter weight C in CO2 is being added to the atmosphere. The two heavier O's were already there. And only 400 in every million atmospheric molecules are CO2.
I wish I learned some of this in my Climatology class. It was comprehensive but I didn’t see the layering diagram you use around the 12 minute mark. Fancy stuff
Point 6 GHG radiation is a product of diminishing returns and cannot be absorbed back onto the surface of higher energy. The illustration is even colored deceptively blue comming in, orange going up and red comming back down. Energy always flows to lower states, it's not "trapped" in a feedback loop of increasing gains.
Your awesome firstness has been recognized. Youre literally the first human to stumble on this the first great explanation of this debated phenomenon. Enjoy your day!
I don't understand: when sigma T⁴0 equals all the energy coming into the system where does the energy for the second sigma T⁴0 in the atmosphere come from that is radiated downwards? Did I miss something?
but he says that all incoming F is already one sigma T0^4 - There is no way for the downwards sigma T0^4 to be "created" out of nowhere. Think of it like this: for every point in the diagram you have to be able to write down a balanced energy equation. If we only look at above the atmosphere its F=sigma To^4. below the atmosphere at the point where F hits the earth its F=sigma T1^4. Now if both equations are correct that just means sigmaT1^4 = sigma T0^4. I guess he oversimplified this so much that the equations don't actually make sense anymore.
@@maxid87 the amount of energy released is sigma T^4, you're confusing energy released with energy absorbed. In that case there would be a factor 2 as well as a 1/4piheight^2 * 4piarea^2 correction. Which is a faff to keep writing.
@Eben King oh really, then why do the have an emission factor rating up to E? Do you know? but you are absolutely right, this is a mistake often made and most people have no clue.
I was wondering about the space mirror thing. So it's about putting multiple giant mirrors in space to deflect away the sunlight. But as you put it here, why can't we just put mirrors on the ground? Visible light comes in not absorbed by the atmosphere, and then it leaves, also as visible light so it's not absorbed. Why do people think that putting mirrors in space instead of simply on the ground would be better?
Well putting mirrors in outer space would be better in the sense that they would block 100% of the radiation from the Sun that they were intercepting. But of course there is the Practical issue of trying to get huge mirrors into outer space, so they would not be better in that sense. But on the ground the mirrors would still reflect a great deal of the sun's energy, just not nearly 100%. But the idea of putting them in space would free up the land space that would otherwise be dedicated to mirrors if they were installed on earth. and if they were put in space, they wouldn't even really have to be mirrors. As long as they block the sunlight they would shade the Earth and result in cooling.
Doesnt the output energy of the "greenhouse layer" have to be divided by 2 up and down so that the total energy is the Sigma T0 to the fourth combined?
The Stefan-Boltzmann equation, I = sigma*(T0)^4, gives intensity which is power per unit area. In other words, the quantity, I, is independent of how much area you are considering. To get energy, you have to multiply by I by some area, A, and duration of time, t. So E = A*t*sigma*(T0)^4. It is at this step where the factor of 2 comes in. If you want total energy, you have to multiply by the area on the bottom and top of the layer (2A), or if you only care about one direction you only multiply by the area on that side which will be half. He doesn't explicitly express things in term of energy since the actual value of A is arbitrary however since he does care about radiation from both above and below, he kept the factor of 2.
No, the Sigma T0 to the fourth is a normalized heat flow, not a total heat flow (measured in W/m2, not in W). The calculations made in the video doesnt incorporate surfaces areas (ground and layer) cause it is not necessary to obtain the results. Therefore, the Sigma T0 to the fourth must not be divided by two...
No. And it has nothing to do with area as suggested by the other answers. The reason you don't have to divide by two is because the Earth as a system is in thermodynamic equilibrium. All energy that comes from the Sun in form of visible light HAS TO leave some time later, otherwise the Earth would quickly become hotter than the Sun. We know how much energy comes from the Sun, hence the same energy leaves, but the energy coming and leaving is in form of photons/waves of different frequency (visible light coming from the Sun is converted into infrared wave before leaving). Now because the atmospheric layer in this simple model is symmetric we put the same energy going down as well. Contrary to what it looks like this does not break the rules, energy is not created here but some photons make several rounds between the Earth surface and the atmospheric layer. What's important is that they ALL leave at some point. (Not really the same photons obviously, I'm trying to simplify the picture a bit)
Due to conservation of energy (earth in equilibrium), the output energy radiated up into space of the "greenhouse layer" has to be equal to the incoming energy from the sun, that and that alone determines T0 the temperature of the "greenhouse layer". However, that "greenhouse layer" has two sides and because it has a temperature of T0 it also radiates that amount of energy back down.
Thank you so much for the best explanation I have EVER seen on how the greenhouse effect works and were the uncertainty come from. 1 billion thumbs up!
It was a dark and stormy night when the Great Pumpkin rose from the patch, shedding his hair plugs to the wind and infecting a new generation with knownothing syndrome...a self replicating genetic disorder linked to mass hysteria.
Can somebody help me with one ecological/fysical problem I am dealing with? I am currently perplexed by question whether the water present in the soil can have influence on this process or not, do somebody here have some ideas regarding this problem? You see, we are currently facing severe drought here in central Europe, which is mainly caused by bad agricultural practices that lead to lower ability of the land to absorb and hold rainwater. I know that moisture in the soil through evaporating can cool the surface several degrees celsius. That means the T1 temperature in the professors diagram gets lower, leading to less IR radiation emmited by the surface. That should lead to decrease in GH effect. I am afraid however this might not change the overall equilibrium, just change the distribution a bit. Not able to decide on my own though. What are your ideas on this? These agricultural practices drying and eroding soil are worldwide issue, and their implementation overlaps with global temperature rise just as CO2 levels do. Thanks for replys. This problem is inspired by documentary by hydrologist Stefan Valo (its in slovakian though), he claims that drying soil is partly responsible for global warming process. I am not convinced that its influence is so big, but i like that its original way of thinking and also interesting from physics point of view.
You forgot to mention one important piece that relates to the second law of thermodynamics. Overall the energy input is the same as energy output (otherwise we'd cook). The important part is that what we get from the Sun as input is high energy, low entropy photons (visible) and what we put out are low energy high entropy photons (infrared). And because the energy in = energy out we radiate out more photons than we recieve. So for every visible photon absorbed by the Earth several infrared will be radiated out to maintain equilibrium. THAT is why we can have complex molecules, plants and overall perform WORK (such as walking or thinking).
Dziban Molniya lighten up. I've never been a denier. I've always trusted the science community. If you Google greenhouse effect you get a lot of bad explanations. This is the best explanation I've ever been able to find. Save your shaming for people who actually deny it's a thing.
Yeah, I agree with Bell's. While there was nothing in this that I didn't already know, I've tried to explain this to others and always failed. This explanation is simple, correct, assumes no prior knowledge and elegantly builds one block at a time. It's a masterpiece that I'll be linking to many times in the future.
Can we invent car shields that reflect UV light in its entirety so as to not get Suntanned when driving? In fact, make everything with a window reflect UV light so as to not get tanned
Note: the scientifically controversial part is *how much* additional greenhouse gases heat the planet, not *if*. The trend currently is that our models were too conservative and that we can expect more heating than previously assumed.
I feel kind of tricked now. I studied physics a long time and have been thinking all this time that greenhouses worked because of the greenhouse effect.
20 years ago in school we learned that if we don't get the air pollution (and therefor climate change) under control, we might be headed towards another ice-age, because once the glaciers and polar caps melted away it would dilute the water so far down that the gulf stream dies away and can't pump warm water into colder climates: ice rebuilds and reflects even more heat into space, speeding up the icing...and so on. does this still hold true or have there been other findings by now?
It only proves that "they" will push a theory that fit's their agenda when they have no idea what will actually happen. Way too many variables to be able to predict.
I don't think he meant 20 years exactly it was an approximation. However, I do remember reading magazine articles in (I think) Popular Science when I was in my early teens about global cooling and the next ice age which puts it roughly about 1975. WOW, I nailed the year - I just did a search for "the next ice age Popular Science article" and found the article in Newsweek on April 28, 1975, Newsweek published a provocative article, “The Cooling World,” Scores of similar articles, some with even more dire predictions of a “little ice age” to come, appeared during the 1970s in such mainstream publications as Time, Science Digest, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Popular Science, and National Geographic.
This is a pretty weak argument, especially looking at the amount of scientific papers, that predict warming and its dangerous effects for our society. The argument about the cooling prediction in the 70s comes often. Matter of fact ist, that only 7 papers back then predicted a cooling, while over 40 predicted warming. Today, no one is predicting a cooling earth and the evidence for warming is enormous. It is not just popular media, but study after study from different fields that predict warming and the effects it will have.
Why have a picture of a cooling tower giving off green house gas (red circles), cooling towers dont dump gas from power plants.. they give off steam from condensing the water thats being fed back to the plant in order to get reheated and put through the turbine again
@@Dundoril true but water vapor also removes it self from the atmosphere as rain. Where as co2 we would need to do something to remove it once we have put it into the atmosphere
@@Dundoril Understood. I left the comment you originally replied to specifically to call out this subliminal attack on utilizing nuclear fission. We can and should be utilizing nuclear fission reactors. I am not against solar and wind but nuclear fission reactors should be apart of our energy mix
Without even a mention of kinetic energy. Watching these pseudoscientists attempt to explain how an atmosphere works is like watching a chimpanzee pretend to drive a car.
The Stefan law gives you the amount of power radiated per unit area (W/m^2). Because of the symmetrie of the layer it radiates in all directions equally
6:10 NO. You said Energy In equals Energy out, but then you're Also allowing the temperature to rise by fifty-five degrees. That's the violation, I think, that people are referring to...Or no?
In a thermal equilibrium the energy in equals energy out. With higher CO2 concentrations the temperature rises until it is in equilibrium again. No this does not violate any laws.
can you guys do a video on the new "schrodingers cat reimagined" scientific america article? it apparently demonstrates quantum theory is inconsistent or something, i dont get it.
Point 4 GHG's absorbing IR will also share heat with the Nitrogen and Oxygen through kinetic process (Convection) so the assumption that it radiates the same amount heat back is only true when thermal equalibrium is reached in the atmosphere.
3:18 - NO - GHGs DON'T produce radiation depending on their temperature, and they DON'T "heat up" due to absorbed long-wave infrared radiation. Gas temperature is a function of the kinetic energy of the gas molecules. GHGs absorb LW IR internally, in bending and stretching of the molecular bonds. There is NO increase in kinetic energy, and therefore NO heating. The downward LW IR from GHGs heats the surface, which transfers heat to the atmosphere by conduction and convection - not even mentioned here. Flawed from just 3 minutes in.
@Redzone 2119Clearly they DO believe what they're saying is true, and that reveals their ignorance. Many "explanations" on here show how greenhouses work - which is useful but totally irrelevant to the subject of the "greenhouse effect". Very badly named, in my opinion.
So you are saying that gh gases don't actually change temperature when they absorb or emit longwave ration? If so, I never knew that. But because that energy is nevertheless absorbed and re-emitted in the same way, it would have the exact same effect, right? So maybe this explanation just avoids that extra detail.
Actually, I just did a lot of research to try to validate your statement that "GH gases do not heat up when they absorb ir radiation." I could not find any scientific article to verify that. And it does not make sense to me at all. There was a reason why I didn't "know" that- because it isn't true. When a gas is absorbing radiation, that "bending and streching" of the molecules is called heat. Otherwise, you will have to come up with another word for what that is. It certainly isn't changing the chemistry of the molecule like in charging a battery. It's not charging it up electrically like a capacitor. That energy is being stored in the form of heat. Heat, by definition, is the measurement of molecular vibration. So yes, infrared radiation ABSOLUTELY DOES turn into heat when it is absorbed by a greenhouse gas. I will not say that it "warms" the gas, because the literal meaning of "to warm" is to increase the temperature; however the actual temperature is dictated by the balance of all the incoming radiation, outgoing radiation, as well as convective and conductive exchange, so the actual temperature might not actually rise. But the LW IR radiation that they absorb is converted to heat. Their own heat is what allows them to radiate IR. If those gases were at absolute zero, they would not radiate any heat at all. They don't reflect IR heat like a mirror. They absorb it and re-emit it.
More CO2. So? Most of that is absorbed by the sea, turning it acidic, killing coral reefs. Plants need CO2, it's true, but more CO2 does not result in more plants.
This will remain one of my favorites. I also have an idea perhaps for the Objectivity series. It is all quite nice, but a bit UK-centric. Why not visit national archives in other countries as well? I am sure there are great things to show there as well.
Another pseudoscientist that needs to go back to university physics 101. The temperature of the Earth's surface is explained by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, not back radiation hypothesis.
@@Kaepsele337 Typically when someone wants to make a point, they provide reasoning for a statement. If they are a NPC, they typically make snarky and meaningless comments.
@@bobbyt9431 Alright then. You called the Prof in this video a pseudoscientist, because the temperature of the surface of the earth is not determined by black body radiation. A point which is not only clearly stated in the video, but is actually the main content of the video. Therefore I concluded that you haven't watched or comprehended the video beyond the beginning. I thought this was such ridiculous trolling that a snarky reply would suffice.
Great and very informative video. Like always! However, please consider the usage of 'audio effects' (if that annoying sound is even worth being called an audio effect) in your next video. :-)
Well he would definitely get the blame if CO2 emissions increased. But a better economy means a more efficient economy which may produce lower CO2 output.
Of course he would get the blame because he and his appointees are *actively working* to reverse every policy and regulation aimed at lowering emissions....including gutting the EPA, unilaterally backing out of a global climate agreement and pushing for more coal and less alternative energy sources.
This isn't a criticism, it's a question: Why do you (and Martin) use Centigrade when it has generally been dropped in favour of Celsius almost everywhere else? I'm aware it's the same thing, it's just been causing an itch in my curiosity for a while :)
Colin Jones It’s mostly a generational thing. The SI temperature unit was Centigrade from ~1750 until renamed ~1950 to Celsius to honour a Swedish (I think) scientist. So Centigrade was in old textbooks until they were replaced. As the generation of scientists “rolls over” both will co-exist until Celsius takes over the majority of usage.
Love this man. However I am a bit confused. It appears that energy in = energy out ? But some of the energy in gets converted to mass by trees and plants etc. by way of photosynthesis. Then given the enormous amount of energy being converted to mass on the earths surface, Is the earth getting heavier?
That part of the equation is very very small. Plus the process is reversed when trees and plants decompose in nature, so the effect is kind of canceled out.
At the end he makes a very specific point about the runaway greenhouse effect. If that happens, we essentially boil. Just because that is unlikely does not mean that our current trajectory is not sending us to catastrophic positive feedback loops that will cause many extinctions, disruption and destruction of trophic relations (food for many beings decreases or disappears), alteration to weather patterns, alteration of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, and so therefore upwelling, and so therefore feeding migrations, and so therefore breeding cycles. And many other major disruptions causing phenological mismatch and extinction. A runaway greenhouse feedback would essentially just be throwing the pot onto the camp fire and calling it a day, hence why he mentions that after talking about Venus...RGE is probably absolute worse case scenario for ALL life on earth, including microbes (look at Venus).
The answer is simple: it does absorb infrared light coming in... But the amount of infrared is small because the sun is much hoter than earth and the energy distribution of the light emitted by an object increases with temperature... So for the sun most energy is emitted in the visible spectrum, for the earth it's mainly infrared.
@@Dundoril what u said is meaningless at best, and wrong otherwise. if the atmosphere can absorb all the infra red radation going out - how come it wasnt absorbed coming in? please dont invent questions that werent asked, and then answer them instead.
@@yonatanshenhav1208what? You asked why the atmosphere does not absorb infrared light coming in... I Answered this question: it does absorb infrared light coming in. Btw. Nobody said that it can absorb all infrared light.
@@Dundoril i suggest u read again what u answered, and realize it doesnt answer the question. i will repeat the question the 3rd time - if an X amount of infra red radiation is absorbed by atmosphere going out - why couldnt that X amount be absorbed going in? please avoid saying unrelated information - just answer that simple question
Point 8 Crediting surface temperature directly with atmospheric temperature is backward. Just like the whole claiming that positive reinforcement is a leading factor and not just a supportive element.
I have great admiration for Prof Merrifield. The way he explains physics is just wonderful, it's like a perfectly balanced construction, or a great gymnast's routine. Everything falls into place.
Agreeing with previous speaker.
as all things should be
Of course you do, and doesn't matter he doesn't tell you the weather is engineered, no better ProFessor than a great indoctrinator.
@@RosyOutlook2 Sorry but how is the weather engineered? And if it were, why would Mike know?
Daniele Messina
He doesn't explain physics, he explained how junk science works. He claims co2 forces the earth to send it more radiation in order to maintain some equilibrium. Nonsense.
Take a teddy bear at room temperature, and cover it with ice from the freezer. According to this crank, the teddy bear must heat up to 40°C, to counteract the 0°C, in order match the receiving radiation from the room (20°C). What a junk scientist.
He claims that some claim this violates thermodynamics, but then lies about the fact that it does indeed violate thermodynamics. This guy is a flagrant liar or imbecile.
My mind was BLOWN INTO A MILLION PIECES when he reverse explained that for each kilometer you go down, the temperature increases and I just lost it.
Incredible explanation!!!
This was really insightful since I've never really considered the actual mathematics that goes behind the greenhouse effect.
This was a really interesting video. Thanks for making this!
The Primeval Void, oh this "complex" mathematics.
I want to believe!
Do a video on how water can evaporate without the temperature getting to 100 degrees
Do the water thiing plllease!!!! its like... water moles they are "liquid" only cause theyre switching between crystal and vape many many times per second and some on the outermost edge of the thin electro forcefield that makes water drop shaped (they all "want" in or at least believe its theyre choice when theyre magnetic pole nature shapes the outermost edge as small as possible by attracting all to the center or,,, (like gravity does on larger scale) as spherical as possible,, think emperor penguins in a blizzard taking turns on the edge) .... cause they be like that Mickey Mouse head shape.. water is so cute! Then.. after you paid no attention to it, they get thrown out cause of the "jigggle" action.. the more jiggles (temperature) the more get thrown out of the magnet area of the main mass and drift away probably never to see that particular group of waters (is that allowed to call it that?).. so exhale and send trillions on tehyre wayyy ahhh. Inhale and absorb and let become part of you all the courtesy of modern atmosphere.
@@dextertreehorn I never said this was complex mathematics, I just said it was mathematics I hadn't considered before because the greenhouse effect in both pop science and high school are merely quantitative.
@@zacharieetienne5784 I think you replied to the wrong thread.
Not a single thing that I didn't already know, but OMG, I've never seen it presented so clearly and simply. This was Feynman level teaching.
r/iamverysmart
the earth isn't flat. this is a terrible illustration.
@@deeveevideos It's just a illustration, not an accurate simulation. This is only meant to show what's going on, nothing is at scale.
@@Israel220500 but the equation he uses is for the whole planet. with that illustration its says the whole surface of earth is heated evenly and at the same time. but if you could show me where i am in correct i would appreciate it.
Feynman would call this guy a C-rate pseudoscientist.
He forgot to mention that there is no perfect blackbody radiator in the universe including the sun.
The Earth radiates at an emissivity of about .8 to .9. The atmospheric layer has an emissivity of perhaps .2, which makes it a negligible radiator.
He is probably assuming the Earth is a perfect blackbody which is not true. While the atmospheric radiator isn't an effective radiator at all being it has an emissivity of .2 at best.
All gases have extremely narrow absorption bands including CO2. According to the Planck Distribution, the absorption band of CO2 and the center radiation band of the Earth do not coincide. CO2 absorbs strongly at 15 microns and the Earth radiates the most radiation at 10 microns. Only a small fraction of the Earth's radiation is available for CO2 absorb.
Sounds impressive. But that is about all, it "sounds".
The single best explaination I ever seen. Thank you! Finally after all these years! I understand this things myself but it is impossible to find perfectly good explanations to link to when trying to demysify this subject to chronic midwits.
Brillant video. Thanks for this and all the other content. BTW, the interviewer does not get enough credit - he does a fantastic job of guiding the conversation and asking questions us layman would ask to solicit answers we can digest.
Dear Professor Michael Merrifield, please are you able to provide some reliable peer reviewed public source links to studies that have quantified the amount of heat produced in the atmosphere w.r.t increase of carbon dioxide concentration? Thanks.
"Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010" published 25/02/2015
Authors - D. R. Feldman, W. D. Collins, P. J. Gero, M. S. Torn, E. J. Mlawer & T. R. Shippert
21k Accesses
165 Citations
This is a great video. It shows the basic analysis for the greenhouse effect quantitatively, rather than just hand-waving, and as Prof Merrifield said, shows how no physical laws are broken. I haven't seen any other videos explaining this basic calculation (although I haven't been looking too hard)....
In radiational heat transfer, one cannot add components. Two cups of coffee at 50 Celsius each do not add to one larger cup at 100 Celsius, yet that is what this charlatan is pretending...
He needs a refresher course in basic Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer.
Unfortunately, 98% of the audience is technically illiterate, and does not see obvious non-sense presented to them as fact.
I have an exam tomorrow and this is part of the material
Thanks guys hahah
I cant find what he means with the average moon temperature. How did he get to that number? Moon has over 100 on bright side and minus under -200 on the dark one. I see you can do the average from these two, but that is so pointless and doesnt really fit with what he showed us...
What is the emissivity of the atmosphere at the altitude where its temperature is -18 C?
In answer to my own question...I think the argument presented would hold only if the emissivity were equal to one. In other words the air would have to be a black body. How thick a layer of air would be required in order for it to behave as a black body? What happens if the air is not a black body?
• 𝜖(𝜆)=𝛼(𝜆), and
• Q=F(surface)-F(atmosphere)=0
@@shaynefowley5689 Thanks for your response. I think at any given wavelength the emissivity would be proportional to the density.
why telephone rings every time sunbeam hits a surface :D
That sound was so annoying...
it has a similar sound to my alarm
Everyone knows the phone rings every time you get into the shower
It's science
took me like 3min into the video to realize that
9:40 Real estate agents rarely mention that the temperature drops by 6 degrees for every kilometer of increase in elevation. So if you want to avoid the heat, find a nice mountain.
Well, it's more complicated.
Yucca Valley California or Phoenix Arizona are way higher in elevation than Branson Missouri, and San Francisco California is AT sea level, BELOW San Diego California. So there are also many other climatic variables at play.
Well, it's more complicated.
Yucca Valley California or Phoenix Arizona are way higher in elevation than Branson Missouri, and San Francisco California is AT sea level, BELOW San Diego California. So there are also many other climatic variables at play.
17:23 Venus has a surface pressure of 93bar; the cylinder pressure in a diesel engine is from 10 to 20 bar. This is more that enough to explain the extreme temperature. Why do these people never mention that? They used to.
Constant pressure doesn't increase temperature. A change in pressure does increase temperature temporarily until the extra heat dissipates after some time passes, or it is exhausted. The pressure in a diesel engine cylinder changes rapidly in cycles while the surface pressure remains mostly constant on Venus.
@Trebor Same temperature as the room where the gas container is located.
Venus's atmosphere is loaded with IR absorbers, mainly C02, which are heated up by sunlight at high altitudes. Gravity increases its pressure low down where the kinetic energy (temperature) is in balance with potencial energy (pressure) like on our Earth. This is the thermal gradient observed on any planet with an atmosphere (Mars has no substancial pressure). At 53km high in the atmosphere, temperature and pressure are close to Earth's ones.
from 13:00 to 14:20 can use your explanation of things in the video up to that point to explain why the atmosphere of Jupiter is so thick? Based on what you said there is not much of an explanation about pressure beside earlier in the video when you said gas expands and contracts as it raises or descends. So is Jupiters atmosphere so thick because it is so big then? Would we be crushed if earth were the size of Jupiter?
In this video Professor Merrifield keeps saying that glass absorbs IR light, which is low-energy, but in another video from 2011 about transpaency of glass, diamonds etc Professor Moriarty says that it's high-energy UV light that gets absorbed by transparent materials and even runs an experiment. I'm in a bit of confusion about whether both UV and IR photons get absorbed by glass somehow or one of these two statements is not quite correct.
UV light travels through glass, thats why doctors recommend you use sunblock while driving.
All solids and liquids are nearly 100% opaque to all IR, including glass.
It depends totally on the properties of the specific type of glass involved. Common glass absorbs most of the ultraviolet radiation from the sun, but not all of it. You can still get a tan through the window glass of your automobile, but not nearly as fast as in direct sunlight. Infrared is mostly absorbed, but the higher the wavelength, the more of it passes through. And some glass is specifically formulated to make it more transparent or opaque to infrared or ultraviolet. So it depends totally on exactly what kind of glass you have.
I appreciate the example. But it doesn't represent the variable of the ground layer. What is the variable of concrete to grass to shingles.
Professor Merrifield has a clear way of describing most everything. The way he built up the topic was great!
But keep your ears plugged when experts in the field point out flaws in this theory? Okily Dokily.
@@lovelyjubbly7456 Flaws like what?
except there is no surface to stop convection like a green house has ( he mentioned that with the lapse rate) but not so much how -40 degree high level atmosphere is warming the surface .. it does not.
@@Martintfre What do you mean?
he had beautiful explanations and diagrams .. I don't care.
I want to see an experiment that demonstrates doubling CO2 will actually raise the temps .. no magical roof to push heat back from a cold mass of air like the fancy equation .. an experiment .. that is science .. the equations are a fancy guess.
Is there video showing oceans influence?
Sixty Symbols is back with another awesome video. Prof Merrifield has a very amazing way to explain things and I love that about him.
Thank you!
This reminds me of one of my physics instructors at UCSB, Dr. Hansma. The explanation is utterly clear and intuitive. It always amazes me how people who deny climate change have such disdain for people who understand climate and then cherry pick facts to 'prove' that the experts are wrong, all while having absolutely no understanding of climate, whatsoever.
Denier is such a puerile term. Modern climate alarmist theories have only been around a few decades and we have this hysterical cult labelling eminent atmospheric physicists as "deniers". It's almost as if we've entered a time machine and gone back to the middle ages!
@@lovelyjubbly7456 If you have any real arguments, then publish your findings. Every scientist dreams of overturning the current state of the art. Aim high!
Andrew, would you also be amazed to learn that the co2 level in our atmosphere is very low compared to the past and yet none of the catastrophic events confidently predicted by many these days, occurred?
@@arnesaknussemm2427 I'd be amazed if by 'past' you meant in the last few hundred years. If you meant 10 or 20 million years ago, I would not be amazed as that is established scientific fact. In the Cretaceous period, for example, sea level was about 100 meters higher than it is now.
Keep in mind that it is not just the level of CO2 that matters but the rate at which it changes (up or down). If the rate is faster than a species can migrate or evolve to cope with the change, that species can die out. This has actually happened in the past and is starting to happen now. For example, in Hawaii, birds are starting to move up mountains in order to stay in their preferred climatic zones. However, some of the birds are now at the top of mountains and have nowhere else to go. They will likely die off on the island.
Very nice video. Especially the part about Venus.
And not to mention that the 93 bar pressure on Venus is so high that CO2 is a supercritical fluid and doesn't actually have the optical properties of a gas but rather that of a liquid. The pseudoscientist probably failed to mention that because they get confused about phases of matter and optics.
Thoroughly enjoyable and well explained but I have a question. Assuming solar irradiation is constant, (which it isn't but for the sake of argument), then how can it increase the amount of energy in the atmosphere? Mondays photons and consequent infrared are surely gone by Tuesday. Then we get another days dose, and that goes. It is a conveyor belt of sorts, but the energy it conveys does not change? Can that question be addressed or is it misconceived and if so why? Energy in = energy out, no net gain over time?
In total, it doesn't increase the amount. More greenhouse effect means that the troposphere has more energy - but the stratosphere has less!
@grindupBaker Well, thanks. Your comment helps a lot to spot my error. Not.
@grindupBaker And a cooling stratosphere does somehow not decrease the energy in the atmosphere...?
Nice explanation!
Justin Y. and so nice simplifing too.
As green ideology ("Preneolithicism") in general. Very handy and sympathic!
Wow a Justin Y. comment that isn't popular
At 16.50min mark did he just shoot down CO2 as a greenhouse effect, because a “greenhouse” with IR transparent glass, still warms up?
No he explains this... This whole section is about the fact that while it's called the "greenhouse effect" The physics is quite different from the green house because greenhouses heat up by stopping convection while the greenhouse effect stops loss due to radiation
16:34 Does this mean that actual greenhouses are not warmed by "the greenhouse effect"?
Yes. An actual greenhouse and "the greenhouse effect" are different things that have a similar result.
Green house's warm because the roof prevents convective cooling.
@@cloudpoint0 It's not similar because the atm. is open like a car with open doors, so less effect.
@@peterweetbeter
Maybe not exactly like a car with open doors. Open doors increases convection so less warming effect, as you say. But Earth’s atmosphere isn’t convectively open. It is just radiatively open in certain wavelengths. The greenhouse effect is the temperature balance achieved when radiation in and out become equal, and global warming represents an ongoing imbalance (less out than needed).
Love the cooling stacks belching water vapor being used as an image of carbon dioxide. That is a nuclear plant. It does not make carbon dioxide as a byproduct. That is condensing water vapor. You can't see carbon dioxide as it doesn't interact with visible light.
Rather looks like a petroleum or coal power plant. Which does indeed emit CO2 (which isn't visible, but so what?).
A flat eather might say:
Flat earth model used to explain greenhouse effect... so greenhouse effect proves the earth is flat!
If I'm not mistaken that is a logical fallacy called "Begging the Question"
Thanks sixty symbols and thanks to Professor Michael Merrifield. Well, balance explanation.
Hello there! Thanks for the video. I have a question though: how is it possible that, as you say "the sunlight is mostly optical light?"
Isn't it rather that most of the sun's IR are actually absorbed on the way in??? Thanks
@grindupBaker thanks so much. I'm going to take time to digest all this. brillant
Folk, all that happens with a doubling of CO2 is the height to extinction occurs at 1/2 the height. If 15 nm extinguishes at 32 feet at 400 ppm, then at 800 ppm, the height is 16ft. Total energy is not affected. It just gets absorbed earlier. Adding more does nothing. above that height. Game over.
The model he shows is silly nonsense. He claims a certain height at a temperature, which is silly. Radiation occurs along the entire column of air, not at some lever. He claims that some height there are no more CO2 molecules to hit. No, it is well mixed all the way up.
The problem with AGW theory starts with this fake model that does not occur. All the peer reviewed paper are based on this impossible view of the world.
Radiation according to Stephan Boltzmann says at 15 C we get 390 w/m^2. Your wall in your basement is like four old light bulbs in 1 M^2? Note even close! NO Way. SB is off by about 20 times in the 15 C range and gives a wrong answer. Earth should be 50 degree or more, not -18 as claimed. Air COOLS the ground and conduction gives us the lapse rate, just like you find in your wall with insulation, a linear gradient. Convection speeds up the flow and then places the energy in above the ground where no more 15 nm can get to CO2 from the ground. It all then just passes energy around and then radiation occurs along the entire column to space.
Radiation to space then occurs in all molecules, including N2 and CO2, as well as H2O, where open bands allow energy to go freely past. If the radiation up high hits another CO2, that CO2 absorbs and sprays out black body radiation, of which about 1/2 then can go to space via un attenuated bands.
The reason for the fake AGW is found in this fake model used by this idiots. The SB is also not valid and only 2-3% is actually radiation with the rest conduction and convection.
Folk these people are incompetent. Learn what Height to Extinction is. Done in a lab. Easy to understand. CO2 is not an issue at all, just as water is not. Neither is Methane. All that happens is the height to extinction drops. Like doubling the fog you see half the distance. Double it again you can see 1/4th as far as originally. Simple and easy to understand. No fear. Just know these people are useful idiots.
Another analogy is red paint. First coat, pink. Add another, more red. After several coats, adding more coats does nothing to the color.
Another example is sunglasses. Flip shade. imagine ten shade. first one does most, second a little more, by the time the 10 shade is on you can't see anything. Height to extinction....it just lowers or the distance shortens, that is all. Add more does not make you see more. It makes you see less distance.
Happy to discuss this. This fraud must end.
I grew up in a world where it was understood that the mass of the atmosphere explained the "extra energy" at the surface of a planet due to the kinetic energy within the gas itself - literally The Kinetic Theory of Gases. I was shocked when I found out that these pseudoscientists are claiming the entire effect is due to IR radiation from the gas. The level of idiocy these pseudoscientists are presenting is seriously disturbing. They wouldn't last a week in the the real world of applied sciences.
If you do the SB equation for Mars you find that the effective emissivity of the planet is 0.997, or in other words the CO2-rich atmosphere that has more than 10 times the CO2 than Earth's atmosphere is only "back radiating" (according to the pseudoscience hypothesis) 0.3% of the emissions from the surface, yet these pseudoscientists claim that CO2 is responsible for about 25% of Earth's "greenhouse" effect. The surface temperature of Mars is actually within 99.7% of the predicted temperature without an atmosphere because it contains very little kinetic energy, that is if you follow real physics principles and laws.
And furthermore, CO2 has higher emissivity than the bulk air, thus if it has any special effect it actually helps energy radiate out of the atmosphere, though the net effect is very close to zero.
@@bobbyt9431 Wow, someone who can think for a change. Thanks for the comments.
Very nice video. One thing I don't understand is why the temperature does not drop off more rapidly around the photosphere?
nice video but stop showing cooling towers when talking about CO2 (and i mean CO2, not greenhouse) please, PLEASE. That's water vapor....
Is the actual mean temp of the moon -18C?
i love sixty symbols and im extremely excited to start my physics course at nottingham in september
Well this is better than trying to explain it with all the higher math. So I get the point that the emission height is now a bit higher: 5.4km to 5.5km. The strato is apparently cool & needs to increase its T in order to radiate better (warmer air radiates more IR away). Now I've come across more than one article on co2 saturation & it make sense that further addition of co2 is not going have any more major effect. Nearly all that carbon is saturated & co2 behaves logarithmically relative to temp. The illustration commonly displayed is that if co2 goes from a porous wall to a dense wall, then effectively it's going to block those IR rays from exiting to any higher layer. So yes the IR accrued heat will remain below this, but the distance of bouncing off the ground keeps getting halved because of more than ample co2. Not that I believe it's doubling anyhow--how could it be when all these renewables are going up & carbon capture is getting started & the decarbonated concrete looks as if it will become the new player.
took me a while to figure out where those sounds were coming from, I thought I was going mad
Does those wave lengths that come in from the Sun come in as blue shift then turned into red shift when returned from the earth?
"Blue shift" and "Red shift" refer to _apparent_ changes in the wavelength of light due to relative motion. For example, if I shine a laser light at you while you're standing still with a detector, you will measure a certain wavelength of light. If you move toward me while measuring light from the same laser, you'll measure a shorter (bluer) wavelength. Moving away, you'd measure longer (redder) wavelengths.
This red and blue light is red and blue (longer and shorter wavelengths, respectively) in the same sense, but there is no red-shift or blue-shift because there is no relevant motion. Instead, the blue light in this case is absorbed by electrons and _some of_ that energy is re-emitted as redder (less energetic) light, then more is re-emitted as redder light, then more, until it's gone.
Here's an analogy to explain this essentially quantum effect: If you don't have much money (like an electron being in a low-energy state) and I give you a ten dollar bill, you may spend a few dollars in one place, then a few dollars somewhere else. (Each expenditure being less than the original ten corresponds to the re-emitted photons having less energy, and redder wavelength, than the original.) You could spend all ten dollars at once somewhere, just as some of the electrons will re-emit the whole load of energy as light of the original wavelength. But, unless you already have money when I give you the ten bucks, you won't ever emit a bluer photon (spend more than ten bucks). So, on average, the re-emitted light (the money you spend later) will come in lower-energy-than-original, redder, (less than ten-dollar) amounts.
Point 10 While it's already known that swings in water vapor as much as 400% in days isn't given any weight while tiny CO2 increases 2ppm in a year signals runnaway temperatures the other factor is even more embarrasing for warmers. Water vapor has an IR bandwith greater than CO2 interacting about 4 times more effectively. These factors alone should sink the the alarmists claims alone.
Yawn.
@@BrentonSmythesfieldsaye Answer this then what role does temperature feedback play in water vapor content.
@@1965ace Please stop your silly mischief. It's not your field of expertise so stop pretending it is. I don't need to care about your silly questions.
@@BrentonSmythesfieldsayeYou must be a swimmer who thinks it makes you a fish. Going to college doesn't make you smart , look up Dunning Kruger.
Could the position of the photosphere be dependent on the location of the observer? It is the altitude from which the emitted radiation enters the observer's detector. What I am getting at is that at altitude x, emitted radiation is reabsorbed at altitude y but at altitude 2x, the radiation will still be absorbed. It will just be adsorbed at a greater distance, say 2y. It is not linear but the photons should still eventually be absorbed and reemitted. Wouldn't the photosphere exist only in the presence of an observer and not exist in the absence of an observer?
It's important to note that we actually have no idea when a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect would start. It's pretty likely that it's a long way from where we are now, but it's worth pointing out that the error bars on that conclusion are huge.
What about pressure? Does earths pressure change with the added greenhouse gases? Is that significant in the temp change as well?
It's an immeasurably small change. Only the lighter weight C in CO2 is being added to the atmosphere. The two heavier O's were already there. And only 400 in every million atmospheric molecules are CO2.
Wait -- so when the neighbor leans on the fence and makes small talk about the weather... he's really talking about physics?
Cool video! It's the first time I really got the idea how the greenhouse effect works (especially the rise of the -18C zone). Thanks a lot!
when you're explaining a physics topic: *it turns out that...* xD
= "What follows is the result of a mathematical argument which, out of mercy, I will spare you:"
Only a question :
Why as you go down though the atmosphere the temperature drops in a constant way?
Julian that's very naughty of you. Notice the resulting sound of crickets? 😂
I wish I learned some of this in my Climatology class. It was comprehensive but I didn’t see the layering diagram you use around the 12 minute mark. Fancy stuff
Point 6 GHG radiation is a product of diminishing returns and cannot be absorbed back onto the surface of higher energy. The illustration is even colored deceptively blue comming in, orange going up and red comming back down. Energy always flows to lower states, it's not "trapped" in a feedback loop of increasing gains.
Video literally said "no views" i guess this is the first time i am this early
Your awesome firstness has been recognized. Youre literally the first human to stumble on this the first great explanation of this debated phenomenon. Enjoy your day!
I don't understand: when sigma T⁴0 equals all the energy coming into the system where does the energy for the second sigma T⁴0 in the atmosphere come from that is radiated downwards? Did I miss something?
maxid87 the IR is radiated in all directions, half up into space, half down to Earth.
How? If one half is already equal to "all" incoming energy where does the other half come from?
@@maxid87 one half isn't equal to all, both halves together are
but he says that all incoming F is already one sigma T0^4 - There is no way for the downwards sigma T0^4 to be "created" out of nowhere. Think of it like this: for every point in the diagram you have to be able to write down a balanced energy equation. If we only look at above the atmosphere its F=sigma To^4. below the atmosphere at the point where F hits the earth its F=sigma T1^4. Now if both equations are correct that just means sigmaT1^4 = sigma T0^4. I guess he oversimplified this so much that the equations don't actually make sense anymore.
@@maxid87 the amount of energy released is sigma T^4, you're confusing energy released with energy absorbed. In that case there would be a factor 2 as well as a 1/4piheight^2 * 4piarea^2 correction. Which is a faff to keep writing.
Carbon Dioxide would never come out of those thicker cooling towers, just steam.
You are right but the moisture being emitted is also considered a greenhouse gas so its still valid
There is a huge smokestack in the same shot. It's a coal plant. How did you not see it?
MadSpacePig
You are technically correct but that seems a bit nitpicky =P
@Eben King oh really, then why do the have an emission factor rating up to E?
Do you know?
but you are absolutely right, this is a mistake often made and most people have no clue.
Eben King It's not a nuclear plant cooling tower. See my previous comment, follow the link.
I was wondering about the space mirror thing. So it's about putting multiple giant mirrors in space to deflect away the sunlight. But as you put it here, why can't we just put mirrors on the ground? Visible light comes in not absorbed by the atmosphere, and then it leaves, also as visible light so it's not absorbed. Why do people think that putting mirrors in space instead of simply on the ground would be better?
Well putting mirrors in outer space would be better in the sense that they would block 100% of the radiation from the Sun that they were intercepting. But of course there is the Practical issue of trying to get huge mirrors into outer space, so they would not be better in that sense. But on the ground the mirrors would still reflect a great deal of the sun's energy, just not nearly 100%. But the idea of putting them in space would free up the land space that would otherwise be dedicated to mirrors if they were installed on earth. and if they were put in space, they wouldn't even really have to be mirrors. As long as they block the sunlight they would shade the Earth and result in cooling.
Doesnt the output energy of the "greenhouse layer" have to be divided by 2 up and down so that the total energy is the Sigma T0 to the fourth combined?
thought the same thing
The Stefan-Boltzmann equation, I = sigma*(T0)^4, gives intensity which is power per unit area. In other words, the quantity, I, is independent of how much area you are considering.
To get energy, you have to multiply by I by some area, A, and duration of time, t.
So E = A*t*sigma*(T0)^4.
It is at this step where the factor of 2 comes in. If you want total energy, you have to multiply by the area on the bottom and top of the layer (2A), or if you only care about one direction you only multiply by the area on that side which will be half.
He doesn't explicitly express things in term of energy since the actual value of A is arbitrary however since he does care about radiation from both above and below, he kept the factor of 2.
No, the Sigma T0 to the fourth is a normalized heat flow, not a total heat flow (measured in W/m2, not in W). The calculations made in the video doesnt incorporate surfaces areas (ground and layer) cause it is not necessary to obtain the results. Therefore, the Sigma T0 to the fourth must not be divided by two...
No. And it has nothing to do with area as suggested by the other answers. The reason you don't have to divide by two is because the Earth as a system is in thermodynamic equilibrium. All energy that comes from the Sun in form of visible light HAS TO leave some time later, otherwise the Earth would quickly become hotter than the Sun. We know how much energy comes from the Sun, hence the same energy leaves, but the energy coming and leaving is in form of photons/waves of different frequency (visible light coming from the Sun is converted into infrared wave before leaving). Now because the atmospheric layer in this simple model is symmetric we put the same energy going down as well. Contrary to what it looks like this does not break the rules, energy is not created here but some photons make several rounds between the Earth surface and the atmospheric layer. What's important is that they ALL leave at some point. (Not really the same photons obviously, I'm trying to simplify the picture a bit)
Due to conservation of energy (earth in equilibrium), the output energy radiated up into space of the "greenhouse layer" has to be equal to the incoming energy from the sun, that and that alone determines T0 the temperature of the "greenhouse layer". However, that "greenhouse layer" has two sides and because it has a temperature of T0 it also radiates that amount of energy back down.
Thank you so much for the best explanation I have EVER seen on how the greenhouse effect works and were the uncertainty come from. 1 billion thumbs up!
explain orangehouse effect please
Acidhouse
It was a dark and stormy night when the Great Pumpkin rose from the patch, shedding his hair plugs to the wind and infecting a new generation with knownothing syndrome...a self replicating genetic disorder linked to mass hysteria.
It's what happens when you trust Monsanto with your vegetable garden
CO2 emissions decreased in the US in 2017 - actually reached a 67 year low per capita
the problem is not so much the per capita co2 emissions but the overall emissions.
Can somebody help me with one ecological/fysical problem I am dealing with?
I am currently perplexed by question whether the water present in the soil can have influence on this process or not, do somebody here have some ideas regarding this problem? You see, we are currently facing severe drought here in central Europe, which is mainly caused by bad agricultural practices that lead to lower ability of the land to absorb and hold rainwater. I know that moisture in the soil through evaporating can cool the surface several degrees celsius.
That means the T1 temperature in the professors diagram gets lower, leading to less IR radiation emmited by the surface. That should lead to decrease in GH effect.
I am afraid however this might not change the overall equilibrium, just change the distribution a bit. Not able to decide on my own though.
What are your ideas on this? These agricultural practices drying and eroding soil are worldwide issue, and their implementation overlaps with global temperature rise just as CO2 levels do. Thanks for replys.
This problem is inspired by documentary by hydrologist Stefan Valo (its in slovakian though), he claims that drying soil is partly responsible for global warming process. I am not convinced that its influence is so big, but i like that its original way of thinking and also interesting from physics point of view.
You forgot to mention one important piece that relates to the second law of thermodynamics.
Overall the energy input is the same as energy output (otherwise we'd cook).
The important part is that what we get from the Sun as input is high energy, low entropy photons (visible) and what we put out are low energy high entropy photons (infrared).
And because the energy in = energy out we radiate out more photons than we recieve. So for every visible photon absorbed by the Earth several infrared will be radiated out to maintain equilibrium.
THAT is why we can have complex molecules, plants and overall perform WORK (such as walking or thinking).
I seem to remember them covering that in another video.
@@gasdive I thought it was a different channel that covered it in detail.
1:00 ~ equilibrium how much coming in is same amount as going out
@4121Z0N4 what on Earth are you on about? It seems line something you're very passionate about but you are utterly incomprehensible.
Could you guys do a video on convection vs radiation?
That beeping in the background
Sounds like a faint phone ringing, made me pause and look around a couple times :/
I don't know why they bothered giving the rays a sound. More annoying than useful. I first thought it was a phone ringing in another room as well.
Excellent video. Thanks. Maybe a future one could be about oceans and tectonic plates.
the sun is a deadly lazer
Excellent video, concise and beautifully explained.
Thank you
Thank you SO MUCH for this. I've needed this explanation for so long. It makes sense now.
You needed an explanation for a long time but never bothered to do even a two-minute google search? You're part of the problem.
Dziban Molniya lighten up. I've never been a denier. I've always trusted the science community. If you Google greenhouse effect you get a lot of bad explanations. This is the best explanation I've ever been able to find. Save your shaming for people who actually deny it's a thing.
Also if you read the other comments I'm not alone. It's more complex than it is usually explained.
Yeah, I agree with Bell's. While there was nothing in this that I didn't already know, I've tried to explain this to others and always failed. This explanation is simple, correct, assumes no prior knowledge and elegantly builds one block at a time. It's a masterpiece that I'll be linking to many times in the future.
You all are useful idiots that should have taken a physics class at some point in your life.
Clicked on this video thinking I wouldn't learn anything. Super wrong but super glad.
Wait the moon is -18°C? That doesn’t seem that cold ... this is on the surface or? 😅
Livin That Life that is the AVERAGE temperature. It's much hotter in the sunlight and much colder without any sunlight
Basically -18 is the average of some very extreme temperatures.
With no atmosphere I mean
It doesn't matter that much anyway, it's the average temperature of the rocks, since there's no atmosphere to conduct heat...
A statistician is a person who, if you put their head in an oven and feet in ice, feels fine on average.
Can we invent car shields that reflect UV light in its entirety so as to not get Suntanned when driving? In fact, make everything with a window reflect UV light so as to not get tanned
Glass already does that.
Yes but only certain frequencies off UV, not all
Note: the scientifically controversial part is *how much* additional greenhouse gases heat the planet, not *if*. The trend currently is that our models were too conservative and that we can expect more heating than previously assumed.
Well that is just wrong
I feel kind of tricked now. I studied physics a long time and have been thinking all this time that greenhouses worked because of the greenhouse effect.
I guess I was pretty naïve. Explanation starts at 16:04
20 years ago in school we learned that if we don't get the air pollution (and therefor climate change) under control, we might be headed towards another ice-age, because once the glaciers and polar caps melted away it would dilute the water so far down that the gulf stream dies away and can't pump warm water into colder climates: ice rebuilds and reflects even more heat into space, speeding up the icing...and so on. does this still hold true or have there been other findings by now?
Well, the amount of water being moved in the Gulf stream has halved over the last century. But the Greenland ice is still melting.
It only proves that "they" will push a theory that fit's their agenda when they have no idea what will actually happen. Way too many variables to be able to predict.
I don't think he meant 20 years exactly it was an approximation. However, I do remember reading magazine articles in (I think) Popular Science when I was in my early teens about global cooling and the next ice age which puts it roughly about 1975.
WOW, I nailed the year - I just did a search for "the next ice age Popular Science article" and found the article in Newsweek on April 28, 1975,
Newsweek published a provocative article, “The Cooling World,”
Scores of similar articles, some with even more dire predictions of a “little ice age” to come, appeared during the 1970s in such mainstream publications as Time, Science Digest, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Popular Science, and National Geographic.
I agree, so why would it be any different today.... It's not.
This is a pretty weak argument, especially looking at the amount of scientific papers, that predict warming and its dangerous effects for our society. The argument about the cooling prediction in the 70s comes often. Matter of fact ist, that only 7 papers back then predicted a cooling, while over 40 predicted warming. Today, no one is predicting a cooling earth and the evidence for warming is enormous. It is not just popular media, but study after study from different fields that predict warming and the effects it will have.
Why have a picture of a cooling tower giving off green house gas (red circles), cooling towers dont dump gas from power plants.. they give off steam from condensing the water thats being fed back to the plant in order to get reheated and put through the turbine again
So they actually produce a greenhouse gas: water vapor
@@Dundoril true but water vapor also removes it self from the atmosphere as rain. Where as co2 we would need to do something to remove it once we have put it into the atmosphere
@@jasonbirchoff2605still a greenhouse gas :-) but yes I was needlessly pedantic I know.
@@Dundoril Understood. I left the comment you originally replied to specifically to call out this subliminal attack on utilizing nuclear fission. We can and should be utilizing nuclear fission reactors. I am not against solar and wind but nuclear fission reactors should be apart of our energy mix
Flat earth physics |||
Without even a mention of kinetic energy. Watching these pseudoscientists attempt to explain how an atmosphere works is like watching a chimpanzee pretend to drive a car.
@@bobbyt9431 It's a simplified model to explain the basics. And what do you mean no mention of kinetic energy?
Why is the atmospheric layer radiating like that for two sides instead of radiating half for each side?
Potasmic the radiation emitted is proportional to sigmaT^4 the factor 2 was left out for convenience
The Stefan law gives you the amount of power radiated per unit area (W/m^2). Because of the symmetrie of the layer it radiates in all directions equally
inb4 cLImaTe ChAnGE ISn'T reAl
too late =/
I tried :(
6:10 NO.
You said Energy In equals Energy out, but then you're Also allowing the temperature to rise by fifty-five degrees. That's the violation, I think, that people are referring to...Or no?
In a thermal equilibrium the energy in equals energy out. With higher CO2 concentrations the temperature rises until it is in equilibrium again. No this does not violate any laws.
If this topic interests you, you should give potholer54 a look.
I haven't watched any of his videos for a few months now. Thanks for the reminder!
seconding this recommendation
That guy is ignoramus maxima.
@@bobbyt9431Yawn
until min 12 I was annoyed by the telephone ring outside of my room. Than I realized that it was the light of the sun in the video.
Oh wow, i have a constant.
Congrats.
In cool greek notation!
That means we can blame all this on you then
Kinda inaccurate at 15:42 with the towers. The "smoke" is often just steam vapor from heated up water condensing in the atmosphere.
200 views in less than 10 minutes. That was quick
can you guys do a video on the new "schrodingers cat reimagined" scientific america article? it apparently demonstrates quantum theory is inconsistent or something, i dont get it.
These animations prove the Earth is flat ! ^^
How can an animation prove anything?
Point 4 GHG's absorbing IR will also share heat with the Nitrogen and Oxygen through kinetic process (Convection) so the assumption that it radiates the same amount heat back is only true when thermal equalibrium is reached in the atmosphere.
Thank you for using Celsius degrees, not that confusing temperature unit called Fahrenheit.
Its not confusing when you've grown up with it =P
Actually, Celsius is very confusing when you are doing heat flow. Kelvin is the only scale that makes sense.
David Messer, Kelvin and Celsius are the same system up to a constant term.
constant offset, not factor.
Yes, you are correct. My bad. I've replaced "factor" with "term".
3:18 - NO - GHGs DON'T produce radiation depending on their temperature, and they DON'T "heat up" due to absorbed long-wave infrared radiation.
Gas temperature is a function of the kinetic energy of the gas molecules. GHGs absorb LW IR internally, in bending and stretching of the molecular bonds. There is NO increase in kinetic energy, and therefore NO heating.
The downward LW IR from GHGs heats the surface, which transfers heat to the atmosphere by conduction and convection - not even mentioned here.
Flawed from just 3 minutes in.
@Redzone 2119Clearly they DO believe what they're saying is true, and that reveals their ignorance. Many "explanations" on here show how greenhouses work - which is useful but totally irrelevant to the subject of the "greenhouse effect". Very badly named, in my opinion.
So you are saying that gh gases don't actually change temperature when they absorb or emit longwave ration? If so, I never knew that. But because that energy is nevertheless absorbed and re-emitted in the same way, it would have the exact same effect, right? So maybe this explanation just avoids that extra detail.
Actually, I just did a lot of research to try to validate your statement that "GH gases do not heat up when they absorb ir radiation." I could not find any scientific article to verify that. And it does not make sense to me at all. There was a reason why I didn't "know" that- because it isn't true. When a gas is absorbing radiation, that "bending and streching" of the molecules is called heat. Otherwise, you will have to come up with another word for what that is. It certainly isn't changing the chemistry of the molecule like in charging a battery. It's not charging it up electrically like a capacitor. That energy is being stored in the form of heat. Heat, by definition, is the measurement of molecular vibration. So yes, infrared radiation ABSOLUTELY DOES turn into heat when it is absorbed by a greenhouse gas. I will not say that it "warms" the gas, because the literal meaning of "to warm" is to increase the temperature; however the actual temperature is dictated by the balance of all the incoming radiation, outgoing radiation, as well as convective and conductive exchange, so the actual temperature might not actually rise. But the LW IR radiation that they absorb is converted to heat. Their own heat is what allows them to radiate IR. If those gases were at absolute zero, they would not radiate any heat at all. They don't reflect IR heat like a mirror. They absorb it and re-emit it.
What about an increase in plant growth?
What about it.
well, since there is more CO2...
More CO2. So? Most of that is absorbed by the sea, turning it acidic, killing coral reefs.
Plants need CO2, it's true, but more CO2 does not result in more plants.
CO2 is not the limiting factor in plant growth. Water is.
David Wührer, why in industrial farming we use CO² to speed up growing?
This will remain one of my favorites. I also have an idea perhaps for the Objectivity series. It is all quite nice, but a bit UK-centric. Why not visit national archives in other countries as well? I am sure there are great things to show there as well.
Another pseudoscientist that needs to go back to university physics 101. The temperature of the Earth's surface is explained by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, not back radiation hypothesis.
Robert W - yes, just another guy bending the fundamental laws of physics.
So you only watched the first couple of minutes of the video?
@@Kaepsele337 Typically when someone wants to make a point, they provide reasoning for a statement. If they are a NPC, they typically make snarky and meaningless comments.
@@bobbyt9431 Alright then.
You called the Prof in this video a pseudoscientist, because the temperature of the surface of the earth is not determined by black body radiation. A point which is not only clearly stated in the video, but is actually the main content of the video.
Therefore I concluded that you haven't watched or comprehended the video beyond the beginning. I thought this was such ridiculous trolling that a snarky reply would suffice.
Apparently you can't read to the end of a sentence or can't comprehend that he is not considering the Kinetic Theory of Gases at all.
Great and very informative video. Like always! However, please consider the usage of 'audio effects' (if that annoying sound is even worth being called an audio effect) in your next video. :-)
Not catastrophic!? CLIMATE DENIER!!!111
this was phenomenal
"Fake News"
-Trump 2020
Trump says that every day, not just in 2020
And he is lying now as he will be lying then.
doesn't even matter. Last year America emitted its lowest amount of CO2 per capita in 67 years
Do you think Trump had anything at all to do with that?
Well he would definitely get the blame if CO2 emissions increased. But a better economy means a more efficient economy which may produce lower CO2 output.
Of course he would get the blame because he and his appointees are *actively working* to reverse every policy and regulation aimed at lowering emissions....including gutting the EPA, unilaterally backing out of a global climate agreement and pushing for more coal and less alternative energy sources.
This isn't a criticism, it's a question:
Why do you (and Martin) use Centigrade when it has generally been dropped in favour of Celsius almost everywhere else?
I'm aware it's the same thing, it's just been causing an itch in my curiosity for a while :)
Colin Jones
It’s mostly a generational thing. The SI temperature unit was Centigrade from ~1750 until renamed ~1950 to Celsius to honour a Swedish (I think) scientist. So Centigrade was in old textbooks until they were replaced. As the generation of scientists “rolls over” both will co-exist until Celsius takes over the majority of usage.
Love this man. However I am a bit confused. It appears that energy in = energy out ? But some of the energy in gets converted to mass by trees and plants etc. by way of photosynthesis. Then given the enormous amount of energy being converted to mass on the earths surface, Is the earth getting heavier?
That part of the equation is very very small. Plus the process is reversed when trees and plants decompose in nature, so the effect is kind of canceled out.
At the end he makes a very specific point about the runaway greenhouse effect. If that happens, we essentially boil. Just because that is unlikely does not mean that our current trajectory is not sending us to catastrophic positive feedback loops that will cause many extinctions, disruption and destruction of trophic relations (food for many beings decreases or disappears), alteration to weather patterns, alteration of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, and so therefore upwelling, and so therefore feeding migrations, and so therefore breeding cycles. And many other major disruptions causing phenological mismatch and extinction.
A runaway greenhouse feedback would essentially just be throwing the pot onto the camp fire and calling it a day, hence why he mentions that after talking about Venus...RGE is probably absolute worse case scenario for ALL life on earth, including microbes (look at Venus).
I wish this information was broadcasted to all people on earth
So do we - we might pick up some extra subscribers! :)
did anyone understand why the atmosphere doesnt absorb the infrared light coming in? i'd love to understand it, but i didnt understand his explanation
The answer is simple: it does absorb infrared light coming in... But the amount of infrared is small because the sun is much hoter than earth and the energy distribution of the light emitted by an object increases with temperature... So for the sun most energy is emitted in the visible spectrum, for the earth it's mainly infrared.
@JustinCase I have answered the question right now. Any more questions?
@@Dundoril what u said is meaningless at best, and wrong otherwise. if the atmosphere can absorb all the infra red radation going out - how come it wasnt absorbed coming in? please dont invent questions that werent asked, and then answer them instead.
@@yonatanshenhav1208what? You asked why the atmosphere does not absorb infrared light coming in... I Answered this question: it does absorb infrared light coming in.
Btw. Nobody said that it can absorb all infrared light.
@@Dundoril i suggest u read again what u answered, and realize it doesnt answer the question. i will repeat the question the 3rd time - if an X amount of infra red radiation is absorbed by atmosphere going out - why couldnt that X amount be absorbed going in? please avoid saying unrelated information - just answer that simple question
Why does Dr. Merrifield look progressively less and less well kept? Did he get tenure or something?
Is that "sunlight" sound effect from the movie sunshine?
Point 8 Crediting surface temperature directly with atmospheric temperature is backward. Just like the whole claiming that positive reinforcement is a leading factor and not just a supportive element.
Psuedo-intellectual waffle.