/sci/ - Science & Math

This is the Earth's blackbody radiation curve. It heats up from the sun and emits in a much lower spectrum than the sun. Way off in the infrared.

This infrared radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere by the following chemicals. I will skip the calculus for you. Instead the magical calculus fairy will give you the answer.

We can calculate exactly how much energy hits the earth. Just take a light probe outside, average it over time, multiply it by the size of the Earth, and you get exactly how much radiation we receive from the sun. Plug it in to Staffan-boltzmann's energy equation:
https://byjus.com/jee/stefan-boltzmann-law/

You get a temperature of 285 degrees Kelvin. That's very not the temperature of the earth. That's below freezing. The Earth is 315 degrees. That's because energy from the Earth is being absorbed on it's way out of the atmosphere by gasses in the atmosphere. It then reemits that energy and has a 50% chance to send that energy right back where it came from (because it releases energy in a sphere as I said before). That total energy is the extra 30 degrees temperature of the Earth. The atmosphere of the Earth acts like a blanket which traps heat. Without that blanket we freeze.

On to the calculus fairy. The calculus fairy tells us that 85% of the heat trapped by the atmosphere is water vapor. 10% of the heat trapped by the atmosphere is CO2 and the remaining 5% is other chemicals like Nitrous oxide and methane.

10% of 30 is what?
3 degrees.

Double the CO2 in the atmosphere what MUST happen?
The temperature must go up by 3 degrees. We have almost doubled CO2 in the atmosphere already. It has gone from 280 to 420.

End of argument.