Questions tagged [greenhouse-gases]
Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat into the Earth's atmosphere these gases are Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) Perfluorocarbons (PFCs) Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and et cetera.
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Why is CO₂ abundance in the atmosphere still small?
Given the fact that industries emit about 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year just in the US, why is it still such a small part of the atmosphere's composition (0.04%)?
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How to combine different air pollutants into a common measure?
I'm examining several pollutant variables -- like CO2, lead, NOX etc -- and wondering how I can weight them appropriately to have some kind of comparability. Not all pollutants are equally bad for the ...
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How to convert hourly measured GPP from µmol m-2 s-1 to daily data with unit of gC/m2/day?
I have hourly-observed gross primary production data with the unit as µmol m-2 s-1, how can I convert it to daily data with unit of gC/m2/day?
The data is like this:
...
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What is the climate footprint of burning lignite coal - once you account for the athmosheric cooling effect of sulfur dioxide?
Sulfur oxides have a strong but short lasting athmosheric cooling effect. Vulcanic eruptions provide test of that. Lignite or "brown coal" has a reputaion as a paricularly "dirty" ...
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How much does overpopulation affect the carbon dioxide concentration in the air in terms of just breathing?
I'm not talking about other artificial human activities like fossil fuels or cars or cattle farming. I meant just in terms of breathing, how much did the CO2 level of the earth increase because of the ...
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Why did the air not heat up in this experiment demonstrating the atmospheric greenhouse effect?
In the paper "Experimental Verification of the Greenhouse Effect" (full version: "Verification of the Greenhouse Effect in the Laboratory", Hermann Harde, Michael Schnell 2022), ...
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GHG emissions per company per year (carbon footprint database)
Which countries require corporations to report their GHG emissions (eg tonnes of CO2 or GWP emitted), and where can I find those numbers per company?
I'm trying to find companies who do high-energy ...
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Why doesn't earth radiate at wavelengths where there is strong absorption?
Having in mind the absorption of IR radiation by various atmospheric gases, why is there almost no outgoing radiation into space where absorption is strong?
At the $CO_2$ 15um wavelength, there is ...
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How can a single layer atmospheric model for the greenhouse effect be consistent with adiabatic temperature gradient and optical depth considerations?
I'm completely lost...In an elementary course on meteorology, we recently learned how to explain the greenhouse effect in terms of a simple single-layer atmosphere model.
Based on the image below ...
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Why is dependence of radiation forcing on CO2 concentration logarithmic?
As a newbie on climate science and meteorology I'm trying to understand the almost logarithmic behavior of CO2 concentration on radiation forcing
$$F(c) = A \cdot \ln \frac{c}{c_0}$$
and why there is ...
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How can combusted methane from landfill samples be quantified? [closed]
Background:
For my studies I'm wanting and attempting to make a landfill greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) model that predicts the amount of greenhouse gas equivalent emissions ($GHG_{eq}$ [tonnes/year]) ...
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Does visible light warm the earth?
I read that most radiation reaching us from the sun is visible light. Yet, heat can only be radiated away from earth as infrared.
Is this correct? If so, why can the oceans (say) absorb heat from ...
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Why is the global warming potential of methane and ozone so much higher than CO2?
When sources describe global warming potential of different gasses, such as in this paper on radiative forcing, methane and tropospheric ozone respectively are given GWP values of around 29 and 65. ...
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How to calculate greenhouse effect for planet as well as for the atmosphere?
I recently found a calculation on how to calculate the greenhouse effect for Earth from another question here, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the calculations that were provided in one of the ...
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How quickly can global means surface temperatures react to changes in CO2?
I am interested in whether short term (approximately decadal) variations in atmospheric CO2 would be observable in the consequent variability in Global Mean Surface Temperatures (GMSTs) as a result of ...
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Is there a simple model for the interaction between greenhouse gases and infrared radiation?
I am thinking (in the simplest model) that the Earth emits $N$ photons per unit time, some proportion $p$ hit a greenhouse gas particle and will be re-emitted back towards the earth with a probability ...
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Why does the mainstream greenhouse gas theory for global warming ignore the mass of the surface?
The theory says that the energy absorbed by carbon dioxide is returned to the Earth's surface and raises its temperature.
But, the surface has mass, earth, soil, rocks, etc., and this needs energy if ...
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What is the atmospheric percentage of oxygen produced by trees and phytoplankton every year?
I know that every year carbon sinks remove ~20Gt of CO2 (about half of our emissions), and release a comparable amount of O2 , But I want to know how much O2 the carbon sinks produce annually ...
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Does carbon dioxide preferentially accumulate in one layer of the atmosphere?
Just as Ozone concentration peaks at around 20 km in the stratosphere, having a distribution around higher and lowers layers of the atmosphere, does the same happen for carbon dioxide or other ...
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How does atmospheric pressure remains constant even though we have released 43 billion tons of $\ce{CO2}$ in one year?
I've heard that the concentration of CO2 has been increased in the air.
It should have increased atmospheric pressure, right?
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Are wetlands a net source or net sink of GHGs?
Are wetlands a net source or net sink of GHGs? On the one hand, they store a lot of carbon. On the other hand, they emit methane, a potent green house gas.
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Why can't we increase cloud coverage of the Earth to reduce mean temperature by flooding basins to increase evaporation?
There are millions of square kilometers of below sea level dry land, mostly in desert areas. Reducing the mean temperature of the earth by 2 °C requires increasing cloud cover of stratus clouds by ...
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How serious is the issue of vast quantities of methane release from an ice-free Arctic?
A bunch of climate scientists claim that humans will go extinct by 2026, when humanity crosses the major tipping point known as "Arctic Blue Ocean Event (BOE)".
According to the climate ...
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How to calculate the back radiation from greenhouse gases?
How would one go about calculating the value for back radiation(324 in this diagram) if it wasn't provided.
According to this website, it is "equivalent to 100 percent of the incoming solar ...
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Is it true that methane is responsible for nearly one-third of all warming?
BBC says that the latest IPCC report says methane is responsible for 0.3°C out of 1.1°C of all cumulative warming since pre-industrial times.
According to the IPCC, around 0.3C of the 1.1C that the ...
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What exactly is "Land-Use Change and Forestry"?
What exactly is "Land-Use Change and Forestry" and why is it sometimes hugely positive (Indonesia) but sometimes hugely negative (China)? Isn't it supposed to be a type of source, not sink (...
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Can a planet be heated by the green house effect to a temperature higher than that created by its incident and net absorbed, peak external radiation?
In that the green house effect, as caused by various atmospheric gases (e.g., H2O, CO2, CH4, etc), acts as an insulating layer which only retards the escape of heat from the planet, it would seem that ...
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How to convert CO2 emission from gC/m2/day to Tonnes?
I have an ODIAC Global CO2 emission dataset. The dataset is provided in netCDF (.nc) format and the resolution of the dataset is 1x1 degree. The unit of the dataset is gC/m2/day. I need to convert it ...
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How to convert mol m-2 s-1 CO2 emission to Megaton day-1 (MtCO2 per day)?
I am working on the global CO2 emission using a model dataset. The model provides the CO2 emission in mol m-2 s-1. How to convert mol m-2 s-1 CO2 emission to Megaton day-1 (Mt per day)?
Regards
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Why don't green house gases escape into space?
I have never heard an explanation as to what traps GHGs. What holds them in place? Has research been conducted to assess the efficacy of say triggering a change in their chemical composition into a ...
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sulfur hexafluroide as a greenhouse gas and its atmospheric journey
Maybe a simple question, but if sulfur hexafluoride is 6 times heavier than air then how does it get into the high atmosphere. All be it in low quantities now, but there is a large stock of the stuff ...
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Relation between Magnitude of Greenhouse Effect and the Concentration of GHGs like $CO_2$
The Average Surface Temperature of the Earth is calculated by the following equation:
$$\sigma T_s^4=\frac{(1-A)\Omega}{4}+\Delta E$$
where,
$\sigma$= Stefan-Boltzmann Constant
$T_s$= Average Surface ...
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How hot the earth will be if we have 20% CO2 in the atmosphere instead of ~0.04? and how cold would it be if doesn't have any CO2?
I know Earth once had this amount in the past, but if we got the former atmosphere with around 20% of CO2, how much the temperature will rise? assuming the atmosphere is still dominated by 78% ...
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Find planetary temperature
I’ve asked this on Worldbuilding, but can anyone find/make me a formula that can be used to predict the mean temperature of a planet, while factoring in greenhouse effect?
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What potential geoengineering technologies could help a country "achieve its Paris (agreement) targets"?
CNN's China to expand weather modification program to cover area larger than India ends with the following sentence:
"While China has not yet shown signs of 'unilaterally' deploying ...
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Would a water rocket be better/worse for greenhouse effect compared to more standard methalox/kerolox cycles?
So there is a company called Arcaspace whose launch vehicle gimmick is that by replacing the first stage boosters, which are generally either solid/cryogenic propellants with water/steam propulsion. ...
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What part does methane play in the process of producing biogas?
I should point out first that I don't know the first thing about environmental science, I study mathematics, and the reason I am asking this question is because I want to understand the processes ...
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Why don't dewdrops form on a cloudy night?
The reason behind the non- formation of dewdrops on a cloudy night is the non-attainment of below dew point temperatures. It happens as the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) is not allowed to escape ...
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USA and UK government report on plane emissions: 200% difference... which is right?
The report's respective ratio of 1 passenger car vs one long haul plane are 40% versus 110%:
Image 1 (DEFRA):
car = 171 plane = 195 (110%)
Image 2 (EPA):
car = 4096 plane = 1760 (40%)
If the ...
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How has the increase in global CO2 been attributed to an anthropogenic cause?
How has the increase in global CO2 been attributed to an anthropogenic cause?
It would seem to me that this could be definitively determined on the basis of placing gas spectrometers on the exhausts ...
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Time it takes for a gas to go to the equator [closed]
The question is the following:
In order to understand the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases we need to understand their transport, both vertically and horizontally. It takes _______ time for a ...
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How can we best objectively quantify climate change mitigation urgency? [closed]
Quantifying climate change mitigation urgency seems to have three aspects:
(1) Green House Gas reduction targets required to meet a specific goal such as 2C.
The first guesstimate seems to be zero ...
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Which method is used to calculate tonnes carbon from tonnes CO$_2$ equivalents of GHGs?
It appears that all GHGs are first translated into Carbon Dioxide Equivalents (CDEs) and that calculation is fairly straight forward.
Many report in tonnes of Carbon instead of tonnes CDE. I am ...
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What is the global warming potential (GWP) of any gas over a 1 day time frame?
Since in 100 years, the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is 28-36, what will be the GWP in 1 day time frame?
Can it be calculated that way?
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Can anyone explain the reason why CO$_2$ increases global temperatures (not the simplistic greenhouse analogy provided for public consumption)?
The greenhouse effect analogy of global warming is that atmospheric carbon dioxide CO$_2$ absorbs some of the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth, and redirects a portion of that radiation back ...
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Time for water vapor to generate more greenhouse effect than latent heat?
I have an argument with a climate change denier.
He says the rise of water vapor in the atmosphere causes a "much larger" cooling effect by taking vaporisation heat from the ground than the ...
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Ocean Greenhouse Gases Released by Meteorite Impact
A huge amount of $\small\mathsf{CO_2}$ is absorbed by the ocean and stored in the ocean, and methane is stored as clathrates. For every mega-meteorite or asteroid that impacts on land, two hit the sea....
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The climate effect of the Russian industrial collapse in the early 90's
In 1982 ExxonMobil made this diagram with a slightly excess of the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. Can this error be explained by the Russian industrial collapse in the ...
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CO₂ level is high enough that it reduces cognitive ability. Isn't that a reason to worry?
I think the level of carbon dioxide in the air is high enough to reduce the intelligence of humans. This has nothing to do with climate change.
Except that both mean we should reduce CO₂.
I never ...
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Why is Carbon Dioxide a Greenhouse Gas whereas Ammonia is not?
Why are some gases Greenhouse gases while some are not?
I did search this on the net but didn't get any clearcut/credible answers.
What exactly is the property that is common among Ozone, Water Vapour,...
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