I just picked up my loan of Climate Change: Picturing the Climate and was thumbing through it when I came across this definition.

greenhouse gases: Any gas that, by an accident of chemistry, happens to absorb radiation of a type that the Earth, by an accident of history, would like to lose. …

My other first impression is that the pictures are fantastic. The image on page 134 is satellite image off the West coast of the United States that show some stratus and stratocumulus boundary layer clouds with the effects of humans visible in ship tracks, smoke from fires, and air pollution in a major city. It looks like it’s from MODIS sometime during the summer, but the caption doesn’t say.

There’s some really nice underwater pictures of flora and fauna. Just a reminder that had I chosen to be a marine biologist, I could be SCUBA diving in Hawaii right now.