Bunny's got a new puzzler
At Rabett Run Lodge where all the Rabetts went for the holidays, the girls wouldn't let the guys watch football, so Eli spent New Years on the couch looking at this. No accounting for nerds. According to the Beeb
Scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock from EADS Astrium visits the Royal Institution’s new Young Scientist Centre to carry out a simple experiment that shows how CO2 traps heat. -BBC
Watch the video (opens in new window)
Clue on the flip side:
Alexander Graham Bell would have figured this out.
Posts
15 comments:
She generated CO2 using a reaction between vinegar (aqueous solution of acetic acid) and sodium bicarbonate. That means some water vapor will enter the bottle along with the CO2.
They also have the lamps set up close to the bottles, so there will be some convective heat transfer from the lamp to the bottles. The control bottle essentially provides the baseline for that.
I love her British accent!
When I clicked on the video and she started talking, it wasn't loud enough, so I clicked on the volume control. The volume goes to 11! Love it!!!!
I watched that video some time ago, and was annoyed by how it was portrayed. My thought was that she was simply showing that CO2 absorbs differently than nitrogen and oxygen. That, in itself, will not explain to you why the earth's surface would then be warmer; as you say, it's only part of the story.
Beyond that, the lamp she's using will be producing rather shorter wavelengths than the earth's emission. At least, so I would think. So I'd guess she'd be hitting a different absorption band.
Setting up a bench top (or kitchen-countertop) apparatus that showed all the relevant features of radiative transfer and lapse rate would be pretty difficult.
Then again, I don't get the clue with Bell, so maybe I'm off.
teach me a lesson to assume I know what a video is, without watching it.
I had seen this one
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8417920.stm
but the experiment looks to be the same, so my criticism is the same. Simply showing that CO2 absorbs IR does not explain the entire effect.
does Eli care to weigh in on the earthquake puzzler?
Harlan Ellison, audio.
Definitely not safe for work.
Turn the audio down, now.
Then listen.
http://www.deepshag.com/sound/sermon.mp3
From http://www.deepshag.com/artists/ellison.html
Via http://harlanellison.com/heboard/unca.htm
Which has cute bunnies.
Incomplete, but I thought it was quite nicely done. My only real criticism would be that she says the lamps are acting like the sun, but it's the parts of them acting like the Earth (emitting infrared radiation) that matter for CO2 absorption.
In essence, proof of absorption (which this is) is all the underlying basic science you need to conclude you will have a Greenhouse effect - the rest is, as Wittgenstein might say, tautology (mathematically forced by the properties of the physical system). Nevertheless, sometimes even tautologies need to be demonstrated to the dimwitted, so it would be nice to have a more direct table-top demo of the whole effect.
But this one isn't bad at all. Much better than I was expecting.
Its a common school level demonstration to show that some gases absorb radiation. It does what it does.
Fuller description here designed for students up to sixteen.
www.rsc.org/education/teachers/learnnet/JESEI/co2green/teachers.pdf
Atmoz threatens to investigate, controls water vapour, gets in a bit of product placement and fails to deliver:)
http://atmoz.org/blog/2007/08/15/greenhouse-gas-experiment/
Arthur you might like this one. Its an altogether more elegant attempt to demonstrate the different considerations in the greenhouse effect
http://www.practicalchemistry.org/experiments/the-greenhouse-effect,296,EX.html
Rod
I don't think the practicalchemistry experiment is a good idea at all, at least if I understand it - but maybe I don't fully understand it because I don't get the point of the "lead flags" either. In any case, it's not coming close to the temperature differential that you have in the real atmospheric case, which as we discussed last time is an essential element to getting warming of the surface.
Arthur
:) I think I am well below your radar. It was part 2 of the demo which caught my eye particularly after your comment 'parts of them acting like the Earth etc.' but on consideration I don't think anything actually different is happening there.
IEHO, there are two things here.
1. The CO2 is absorbing IR light from the lamp. The lamps go out far enough. WHICH absorption is another question. At best it is the asymmetric stretch @ 2565 cm-1, although it might be some combination of overtones/harmonics. (basically combinations of stretches and bends). A lot of polymers used in water bottles have good IR transmission, although not as far out as the bending modes of CO2 @ 526 cm-1.
2. The absorbed IR is being degraded to heat by collional energy transfer from vibration to translation.
What is not being captured is the IR emission by the thermally excited CO2 and, of course, how the temperature differential at the top of the atmosphere acts as a limitation on emission in the CO2 i
So it captures two parts of the greenhouse effect, but
woohoo. i award myself one carrot for wondering about which absorption band was involved.
On the hint: Alexander Graham Bell discovered the photoacoustic effect, turning it into, what else, a telephone.
Iain Stewart demonstrates infrared radiation absorption by CO2
Cymraeg llygoden
OK, this anonymouse (AKA Marco) is getting majorly confused now. The Rabett points to the bending and (asymmetric) stretching vibrations of CO2, but those are at much different wavenumbers than this mouse has ever seen them. 2565 cm-1? 526 cm-1? I see them around 2350 and 670 or so (haven't checked the exact numbers). Did I just correct the bunny, or am I to hang my head in ultimate shame?
Just picked them off a web site with modes of motion. I'll check. The 670 looks right
Turns out that there is another reason that this experiment may not have been picking up radiation effects at all, but rather convective/conductive differences between pure CO2 and air: an argon control should become a requirement for any tabletop CO2 experiemnt...
http://www.tufts.edu/~rtobin/Wagoner%20AJP%202010.pdf
-M
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