Dessler on the Greenhouse Efect
NOTE: Apologies, sometimes, somehow Blogger disappears links to videos. Usually Eli catches this, but this time it stayed blank for some hours.
Down below, Eli asked the bunnies to criticize and correct the "explanation" of the greenhouse effect used in a study about attitudes toward climate change and efforts to deal with the problem. The principle thing missing was explaining how the decrease in temperature with altitude is the physical basis of the situation. Andy Dessler takes on the issue in his explanation of the greenhouse effect.
Eli points out that the explanation of the anti-greenhouse effect at the end is a clear way of explaining why increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases such as the CFCs, HFCs etc cool the stratosphere, where the temperature does increase with altitude.
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4 comments:
Link to Dessler?
He should drop everything about hypothetical planets with isothermal atmospheres or increasing-temp-with-altitude planets. It's completely irrelevant. (Yes, we all know that there's portions of our atmosphere where temperature increases with altitude, but those are far above the effective radiating altitude.) Perhaps instead he should open the video with an explanation of why temperature must decrease with altitude in our troposphere, then finish with the first 2/3 or so of the existing video (up to the material I suggested he drop).
Indeed, I don't think it's even possible to have increasing temp with altitude at the effective radiating altitude. It's possible well away from the effective radiating altitude, but if you had an increasing temp with altitude at the effective radiating altitude, then very quickly the layer just above the effective radiating altitude would radiate its heat away, both the space and to the the layer just below the effective radiating altitude until an equilibrium was reached that had decreasing temp with altitude.
Take a look at the puzzler
At least in the middle of a strong greenhouse absorption it is.
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