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Thursday, November 3, 2011

Global Warming Is Caused By Radiation!

Of course it is.

It's not ionizing radiation -  it's infrared radiation.  The Sun's ultraviolet light (high energy relative to visible light) is degraded on Earth and re-emitted by our planet as infrared light (low energy relative to visible light).

The CO2 molecule has a quantized vibrational state.  It loves to vibrate by absorbing IR at the frequency of  667/cm, which happens to be close to the peak frequency associated with the Earth's IR radiance.

On the other hand, water vapor doesn't absorb at this frequency, it favors frequencies below 450/cm.  So even though there is more water vapor in our atmosphere than CO2, CO2 has greater influence on global temperature increase.

CO2 is a problem.

The bad news is...we're not doing enough about it.

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