Aug 15 2007
Greenhouse Gas Experiment
Here’s an excellent, simple, and cheap experiment to verify the greenhouse effect from Tales From The Travels.
So, this guy with the poster was saying none of that really happened and I decided there had to be a way to prove him wrong. I ended up designing a very simple experiment that I’ve used in my astronomy labs since then. Using two 2-liter bottles and a couple of cans of Coca-Cola, I create two environments in the bottles. In one bottle, I pour the Coke in and agitate it within the bottle. In the other case, I agitate the Coke and remove the carbonation before pouring it in. This creates two environments that are identical with the exception that one has nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, and the other has a carbon-dioxide atmosphere. Then, you stopper them and put the two bottles in the sunlight with a thermometer in the stopper to measure the rise in temperature. My classes have consistently obtained results that show the carbon dioxide atmosphere goes up a couple of degrees higher than the nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. Clearly, the guy with the poster was wrong.
I plan on doing this experiment, and to report back here. I just need to get the supplies. The Coke and bottles won’t be hard to get, but I don’t have thermometers or bottle stoppers. And I have no idea where to get them!
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6 Responses to “Greenhouse Gas Experiment”
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Try using tissue paper or rags for the stoppers. I tried it once and it seemed to work OK. Check with a local high school to see if you can borrow the thermometers.
This article just appeared in the September issue of The Physics Teacher.
I hope you’ll do the time-lapse photography thing again, because sadly the ice/teatowel one has lost its edge now I know how it ends.
Just walk into a chemistry lab. You’re on a campus. You could just use erlenmeyer flasks with stoppers that have thermometers. Also, could pressurize with lab CO2, but make sure you have the right kind of regulator and set up the gas line properly to purge the flasks (use an outlet and purge for a while).
Try the test using Methane instead of CO2
You will find that this powerful greenhouse
gas does not warm up as fast as air.
Explain that if you can
This experiment only proves Boyle’s law, as the bottle with the co2 in it certainly has a higher pressure. With pressure increased and the volume of gas kept constant, the temperature will increase (PV = nRT)
[Response: No. The pressure is the same in both bottles. The bottles are agitated before being stoppered.]
Also for the people that don’t believe in the greenhouse effect.
Isn’t the fact that nights with cloud cover are warmer than nights with no cloud cover, a perfect and unrefutable example of the greenhouse effect in action?
It’s using the same process that CO2 uses to trap heat.