# Tag Info

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There is no doubt that the sooner the mitigation effort happens, the greater will be its impact. In other words, the impact on year 2100 climate of the sequestration of 20 billion tons $\ce{CO2}$-eq right now, is much bigger than the impact that the same action will have in 30 years from now. Therefore, a mitigation action today is much cheaper than one ...

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I think you’re not far off with your understanding, but maybe I can put in a few comments to make things clearer. I often get confused because most diagrams for the Earth energy budget and net radiation balance show more infrared leaving the surface than is ever supplied by solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere in the first place… As you can see, ...

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It is because longwave (LW) correspond to a negligible part of the solar radiation and shortwave corresponds to a negligible part of solar radiation. You can make an experiment yourself using NASA's Radiance calculator. By adjusting the parameters for Earth's and the Sun you will get the following plot of energy flux at different wavelengths (The red line ...

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It is important to keep in mind the black-body approximated radiation for the Earth and the Sun. Notice how small the long-wave energy radiation is from the sun and how Earth's radiation peaks there. I would speculate that this question has something to do with the fact that Earth's surface is heated by solar shortwave radiation, and that Earth's lower ...

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We'll take an example of Venus as a poster child for runaway greenhouse effect. First of all, let's talk of day/night changes. At the surface level there is little to no change as Venus has an albedo of 0.77, i.e. its atmosphere reflects back 77% of light. Compare this to Earth's albedo of 0.3. So in the overall energy balance of Venusian atmosphere the ...

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Yes, there are horizontal radiation fluxes. These can change the heating rate by 10-40 K hr$^{-1}$. They also change depending on the extent of the atmosphere you may be considering. One can also imagine that they are a bit stronger during the sunrise and sunset, when the sun is not directly overhead and the beam has a larger horizontal path length. There is ...

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diagrams for the Earth energy budget and net radiation balance show more infrared leaving the surface than is ever supplied by solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere in the first place. Is this because they count percentages or units of radiation twice? because some is re-emitted back? Consider the simpler case of a blackbody. The incoming radiation ...

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