What exactly is the greenhouse effect? And what does it look like if we view it from a new angle? Of course, we know the answer, and Raymond Pierrehumbert has written an excellent paper about it Infrared radiation and planetary temperature.
By Stephen Battersby. Look to Venus, and gulp. A phenomenon known as the runaway greenhouse effect may be responsible for the Venus we see today.
February 25, Scientists have observed an increase in carbon dioxide's greenhouse effect at the Earth's surface for the first time. The researchers, led by scientists from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley Labmeasured atmospheric carbon dioxide's increasing capacity to absorb thermal radiation emitted from the Earth's surface over an eleven-year period at two locations in North America.
Weatherless world - a bit like this maybe? Click image for details and larger version available. The climate of the Earth is profoundly affected by two competing processes: the greenhouse effect, which acts to warm the lower atmosphere and cool the upper atmosphere, and atmospheric convection thermals, clouds, precipitation which does just the opposite: cools the lower atmosphere and warms the upper atmosphere.
When an exploration team was scouring the jungles of Africa, they found it. Their original purpose for being there had been an attempt to find the cause of multiple dangerous diseases that had been sourcing from the region over the last few years, therefore finding a way to reduce the rising number of epidemics. What they found instead was something else entirely.
Planetary geologists think there is good evidence that Venus was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect which turned the planet into the boiling hell we see today. A similar catastrophe is almost certain to strike Earth in about 2 billion years, as the Sun increases in luminosity. But that raises an important question: is it possible that we could trigger a runaway greenhouse effect ourselves by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.
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