May 11 2009

What is a greenhouse gas?

Published under Off Topic

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.

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    • 7 Responses to “What is a greenhouse gas?”

    1. # Gavinon 11 May 2009 at 5:22 pm

      (grin) You’d be surprised how hard that was to get by the copy editor…..

    2. # Ianon 12 May 2009 at 12:03 pm

      “had I chosen to be a marine biologist, I could be SCUBA diving in Hawaii right now” -

      Or in a cinderblock bunker analyzing data…

    3. # Dave Andrewson 06 Jun 2009 at 1:18 pm

      Gavin,

      “(grin) You’d be surprised how hard that was to get by the copy editor….”

      So does this mean the underwater pictures are not actually relevant?

    4. # Eli Rabetton 27 Jun 2009 at 9:20 pm

      Eli gotta disagree on that “accident of chemistry” it’s clearly molecular design

    5. # Chrison 04 Jul 2009 at 9:50 pm

      Atmoz,

      Just noticed that June global temps (satellite data) are approximately that same as those in 1980 (on average). So maybe the authors can explain between their pretty pictures when greenhouse warming actually kicks in. So, we have had 30 years of essentially no warming, but we should expect 4-7 C temperature rise for the next 90 years. Talk about your hockey sticks.

    6. # Watch Gossip Girl Onlineon 29 Jul 2009 at 3:39 am

      Wow, Just imagine I could be scuba diving in Hawaii right now, soaking up the sun!
      Hmm, just gonna have to wait till summer here…

    7. # Hank Robertson 23 Aug 2009 at 1:55 pm

      > Climate Change: Picturing the …
      [?? please check title] — copy editor

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