Tuesday, January 14, 2020

RayP Explains It All

Obi-Wan described the Mos Eisley Spaceport as a place to be cautious, that a Bunny could never find a more wretched den of scum and villainy.  In Eli's humble opinion and that of many others, Obi-Wan never visited USENET.  But even at USENET, one can encounter a passing Jedi, in this case RayP who provides the most economical explanation of the greenhouse effect that the Rabett has seen

For an optically thick atmosphere, it is the Top of the Atmosphere budget plus the lapse rate that dominantly control the surface temperature.  The surface budget is relatively unimportant.  Another way of looking at it is that the atmosphere is so opaque to IR that the radiation to space is determined by just the first one optical depth from the top, which, loosely speaking, reaches into the mid trop.
Perhaps too terse, so let's go to the pictures,


7 comments:

Tony said...

Thanks for posting this. That graph might come in quite handy in helping to debunk the 'saturated CO2' myth.

KenH said...

There's also this from Andrew Dessler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=4PAbm1u1IVg&feature=emb_logo

KenH

EliRabett said...

Glad to be of some help Tony, Andy of course is always a help.

KenH said...

I find your explanation posts very helpful and I keep a folder with some of them - Judge Alsup, Green Plate effect, Peter Ward, gravity, saturation, Greenhouse etc. I'm sure I'm missing many, but I put them in as I find them.

EliRabett said...

One of the projects for this year is going to be an online book, Best of Bunny :) Eli will get some printed to put under the Christmas tree for your uncle

Chris A. said...

Usually I am the last to criticize Ray Pierrehumbert, but to say the surface budget is relatively unimportant is simply wrong if taken literally.
Maybe he wanted to state, that the surface budget is dominantly determined by the two factors a) power of solar irradiation and b) the lapse rate, for which in case of a) can be looked at as quite constant and of b) being a consequence of existence and concentration of GHGs. Thus the GHE determines the budget at the surface by processes not happening at this surface - but to me that is not the same as naming the surface budget "unimportant".
(Maybe I'm to hard on such a language issue or it's just me being non-native english speaking and missing something?)

izen said...

Did this in 2015
https://izenmeme.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/co2_stx_1.gif