How is global warming affected by the relative transparencies of the atmosphere to long and short wavelengt?
542481
Let us try a slightly different explanation the the prior. \nFor discussion sake we will call the Long wave energy low frequency and the short wave energy high frequency.\n\nThe incoming Solar energy has many frequencies of energy, some is reflected by clouds, some is absorbed by clouds.  Some of the energy is simply absorbed in the air.  However, of the 1360 Watts per square meter reaching the outer atmosphere nearly 340 Watts ends up being absorbed by the earth and nearly 550 Watts is reflected from the surface of the earth.  \n\nThe reflected energy is at a slightly higher frequency and most passes back out into space, unless it is absorbed by by Clouds.  The balance of the earth based or Terrestrial absorbed energy is at a lower frequency and is radiated back towards space.  This earth based energy is readily absorbed by the Greenhouse Gasses that make up part of the earths atmosphere.  Once this energy has reached the Greenhouse Gasses it is re-radiated back towards the earth.\n\nIt is the character of Greenhouse Gasses to intercept the 20 micro meter energy of earth based radiant energy and return it towards the earth.  As a general rule the 900 nano meter energy of water vapor passes through the Greenhouse gasses and escapes into space.  So it is a combination of earth based energies and Greenhouse Gasses that contribute most to Global Warming.  If you reduce the amount of land or the amount of Greenhouse Gasses more of the incoming solar energy is returned towards space.\n\nDave Cooke
1154290
climate change is a natural effect. Global Warming is caused by man.
859112
I do agree,they claim el nino is responsible,some claim global warming. The semi cold weather with wet,cloudy days is depressing not to mention it brings on aches and pains......Illness The cold snowy days seem to bring excitement, to cold for the germs. My personal theory is the whole Earth has shifted orbit just enough to mess the weather up. Scientifically I would go with global warming or the green house effect. We have used and released so much freon or R-12 into the atmosphere, plus other pollutants its really damaged are enviorment all for comfort. Maybe we should go back to horse and buggies..lol
336978
It is certainly true that there have been periods in history that have been hotter than it is now before the rise of the combustion engine and heavy deforestation that ultimately lead to the greenhouse effect. Let me say that the 1.2 degrees Celsius increase that we have observed since the rise of the machine and the human effect on the environment is really insufficient to prove what effect of global warming really is. Additionally, the most abundant greenhouse gas is water vapor (making up about 95% of the abundance of all the greenhouse gases). These two facts basically say that there is no support EXPERIMENTALLY for the theory. Yet the theory is correct: with  a build up of greenhouse gases in all the strata of the atmosphere causes infrared light to reflect several more times off of the earth's surface than it normally would, causing a net increase in thermal energy over long periods of time. I am very much a pro-environment scientist, so I can say without bias that the theory is definitely correct, yet we do not currently know what factors (global warming or something else entirely) we can attribute heat changes to, and therefore, we do not know how much global warming will affect us. Only time will really tell...
931932
According to the National Academy of Sciences, the Earth's surface temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, with accelerated warming during the past two decades.  As the earth grows warmer and more greenhouse gases are trapped in the atmosphere we will see changes in weather patterns and average seasonal temperatures.  Coastal flooding and severe storms will happen more often.\n\nThese sites should help you.
517695
tradewinds\n"During El Niño events, the normal pattern relaxes. The tradewinds weaken, particularly west of the Dateline, and the piled-up water in the west sloshes back east, carrying the warm pool with it. The region of rising air moves east with the warm pool, and so does the pumping of heat and moisture into the upper atmosphere. Deflections in the normal wind patterns distort the usual paths of the jetstreams, pushing them from their accustomed places, which eventually causes the changes in the weather that the rest of the world experiences. With weakened tradewinds, the deep cool waters coming up in the east slow their ascent. The food supply for plankton dwindles, and the effect travels up the food chain. When eastern sea surface temperature becomes warm, the east-to-west temperature contrast is small, and so the tradewinds weaken even further, leading to a complete collapse with essentially flat conditions across the entire equatorial Pacific."
1152346
It has EVERYTHING to do with climate, season, winds, etc.\n\nThe Coriolis effect, which results from the Earth’s rotation, plays an important role in large-scale circulation of the atmosphere. As viewed by an observer on Earth, air appears to be deflected to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. This results in areas of low pressure rotating counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern hemisphere, with the opposite being true for areas of high pressure. If the Earth’s rotation were to suddenly reverse itself, these patterns would also be reversed. The westerlies would become easterlies and the northeast trades would blow from the northwest. \n\nChanges in the Earth’s rotation would have an effect on ocean currents, which can influence local climates. The El Niño and La Niña phenomena that affect global climate patterns on a periodic basis. \n\nOne large component of a location’s climate that would not likely be affected would be the effect of seasons, which are more dependent on the tilt of the Earth’s axis than they are on the Earth’s rotation.
978974
The missing link between air pollution and gobal warming is a concept that you've probably heard of before known as the greenhouse effect.  \n\nThe greenhouse effect is caused by an increase in certain pollutants (known as greenhouse gasses) that are released into the atmosphere.  If enough water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane (and other culprits) are present in the atmosphere, it turns the atmosphere into a "greenhouse" in a way.  Short wavelength infra-red radiation that comes from the sun has enough energy to get through the layer of greenhouse gasses and enter our lower atmosphere, but when these rays contact the Earth, they lose some energy.  \n\nAfter they lose energy, they become longer wavelength infra-red rays, which tend not to have enough energy to break back through the layer of gasses.  These rays are absorbed by the greenhouse gasses, then sent back down to the Earth, further heating the planet.\n\nBasically, if you increase the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, you let the same amount of heat in, but not as much heat gets out.  The overall temperature of the Earth rises, polar ice caps melt.  Bad stuff happens.\n\nThe best example of this is Venus, which has a thick layer of carbon dioxide (among other things) in its atmosphere.  Thus, the mean temperature of Venus is around 737K, far hotter than Mercury at 440K, even though Mercury is closer to the sun.  \n\nHope this helps.
237892
The degree to which humans are effecting the climate is unclear.  There are so many variables that even the most powerful computers or networks of computers can't effectively model them all.  Even if there were computers powerful enough, the honest answer is we don't understand enough about the world around us to know how each system effects the other.\n\nLooking back further than the VERY short timespan that humans have kept climate records, we see that in the past the world has been much much colder during certain periods, but also much, much much warmer during others.  We are now in what you would call "Ice House" conditions, where we cycle between long (100,000 year) glacial periods, and relatively short interglacial (~15,000 year) periods.  Right now we're sitting 2/3rds of the way into one the interglacial periods.  The slight fluctuation that is occuring now may be related to humans, or may be part of the natural cycle.  In any event, it has occured before, when there was no more human CO2 contribution than from campfires.\n\nAll this getting colder stuff happened when the space betwen North and South America closed off, which was once what was called the "Isthmus of Panama".  Before then, times were much much hotter, and correspondingly sea levels were higher too.  This was because the water could go around the equator and exchange hot water from Pacific to Atlantic.  Now, the only seawater exchange is North-South, and around the poles, so you can imagine that this would tend to act to depress temperatures.\n\nAnyways, long story short: We don't really know.  Personally, I think we should worry less about this global warming stuff, and more about reducing air and water pollution and dealing with the increasing water shortages around the world.
305628
many different factors, one being us. Humans speed the natural process of global warming, just like an ice age, the earth every few million years goes through a process of warming, but greenhouse gases and other things that humans do have been speeding up the process. However, we are not the ones that cause it, since it's a natural cycle, so basically this was bound to happen. This has nothing to do with the end of the world or anything crazy like that. Some theories suggest that this will bring another ice age (a lot of water evaporates and creates a thick layer of clouds, preventing the sun from reaching the surface...the temperature gets colder and an ice age occurs. We will probably not live to see these events since they happen over a Long period of time.
1086453
Hey all I have is my G.E.D. but I found this to be interesting:\n\nThe Earth as an infrared emitter\n\nThe Earth's surface and the clouds absorb visible and invisible radiation from the sun and re-emit much of the energy as infrared back to the atmosphere. Certain substances in the atmosphere, chiefly cloud droplets and water vapor, but also carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, and chlorofluorocarbons, absorb this infrared, and re-radiate it in all directions including back to Earth. Thus the greenhouse effect keeps the atmosphere and surface much warmer than if the infrared absorbers were absent from the atmosphere.
664935
NO because of all the new cars and fossil fuel that people are burning. because of that the hi concentration of Co2 in the atmosphere Will result in global warming. In the last 100 years the global temperature has GROWN by 1 degree Celsius. and in the next 50 years or so the temperature Will rise by another 3 degrees resulting in freak weather.
264265
Based on basic science, observational sensitivity studies and the climate models referenced by the IPCC, temperatures may increase by 1.4 to 5.8 °C between 1990 and 2100 [2]. This is expected to result in other climate changes including rises in sea level and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation. Such changes may increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and hurricanes, change agricultural yields, cause glacier retreat, reduced summer streamflows, or contribute to biological extinctions. Although warming is expected to affect the number and magnitude of these events, it is difficult to connect any particular event to global warming. Much of the evidence is statistical; a significant increase in certain events which is correlated with warming.
1082968
I read in new scientist that there there is a certain current in the Atlantic that transports hotter ocean water from the south to the north.\n\nWhat happens here is the arctic ice will cool the temperature of the water down and it will thus flow south again.\n\nWith global warming there will be a constant flow of hot water to the north thus raising the water level there. So all places on the northern hemisphere would get affected first. \n\nI'm not too sure I got all the facts right but it has something to do with a current though.
377959
Global average temperature is subject to a couple of external and internal influences. Position relative to the sun and sun spot activity are major external influences which occur in cycles of various repeat rates (sun spots seem to oscillate in a ten year cycle, frex, and might be related to the El Ninjo phenomenon).\nInternal influences include composition of the atmosphere, reflectivity of the surfaces and unusual particle pollution (e.g. after huge fires, like a couple of years ago in Spain and Portugal, or after volcanic eruptions).\n\nGases have varying heat capacity: diatomic gases (oxygen, nitrogen) are "the norm" and rather limited in their ability to take up heat.\n\nGas molecules store heat by rotating or vibrating (they also speed up when heated, but transfer that energy quickly via collisions). A diatomic gas can store significant amounts of energy only by  a vibration along the bond between the atoms and by rotation around the center of this bond on an axis perpendicular to it.\n\nTriatomic molecules (water, CO2, Ozone) can vibrate along two bonds, which allows them to store more energy. The longer CO2 molecule (still straight) can store more energy by the same rotations diatomic gases have, plus it can vibrate out of the straight form. Water is an angled molecule and can have additional vibrations along that angle.\n\nPolyatomic molecules like e.g. methane have lots of ways of rotating and vibrating, which allows them to store a lot more heat than normal atmosphere.\n\nThe greenhouse gases as a rule have a higher heat capacity than diatomic gases. Main culprits are CO2 and CH4, with one molecule of CH4 having more heat capacity than several molecules of CO2.\n\nBoth these gases are emitted by both technical and natural processes. Our atmosphere was in an equilibrium state without any technical processes.\n\nTechnical processes also produce other effects, such as cloud cover. Airoplane exhausts form ice clouds in the upper atmosphere which can reduce the amount of solar energy (through reflection) by as much as 10%, counteracting the greenhous effect their CO2 and H2O emissions produce.\n\nClimate is a very unstable equilibrium and can easily be tipped either way by small causes. That makes it extremely hard for experts to predict changes, and not much easier interpreting past changes. One problem with discussing human influence on the climate is that there is no comparision value for climate without human influence, we don't have another earth to experiment with.\n\n\nAll these facts somehow contributed to the rise of average global temperature. Locally, that may mean that the climate grows colder...\n\nThe rise has been observed, a trend is expected. Exact causes are hard to nail down, and the balance may be tipped radically into the other direction if the gulf stream gets cut off (though not as radically as Hollywood suggests).
17237
Global temperature has gone through many changes, some of which were natural cycles grounded in astronomy (solar activities, changes in earth's orbit), others of which have been natural catastrophes like meteoric strikes or huge volcanic eruptions. \n\nThe rapid consumption of fossile fuels and the production of other greenhouse gases doubtlessly has influenced the average temperature and increased the rise of it. Whether it is the sole determining factor cannot be said, because all observations can only be made overlaid with all the natural factors.\n\nFor this reason, experts still debate...
237175
It does not increase the temp. of the earth. It changes the weather pattern of the earth. What increases the temp. is tall of the cows farting, cars, and global warming itself.