From AGU highlights, interesting, but readers should note that this is one point on Earth in Chile, not a summation of the atmospheric absorption, emission, and transmission of infrared radiation for the entire globe.
For first time, entire thermal infrared spectrum observed
The driving mechanism of the greenhouse effect, and the underpinning of modern anthropogenic warming, is the absorption, emission, and transmission of infrared radiation by atmospheric gases. The heat-trapping ability of a gas depends on its chemical composition, and each type of gas absorbs infrared radiation of different energies. The amount of infrared radiation that escapes into space depends on the net effect of the myriad gases in the atmosphere, with water vapor being the primary gaseous absorber of infrared radiation.
Water vapor absorbs a wide range of infrared radiation, masking the effects of other gases. In fact, in many spectral regions (or infrared radiation energy bands), water vapor is so strongly absorbing that it makes testing the accuracy of infrared radiation absorption parameterizations used in general circulation models difficult.
To surmount this obstacle, Turner et al. headed to a 5.3-kilometer (3.3 miles) altitude site in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where the air is extremely dry. Using a broad suite of spectroscopic equipment, they produce the first ground-based measurement of the entire atmospheric infrared radiation absorption spectrum—from 3.3 to 1000 micrometers—including spectral regions that are usually obscured by strong water vapor absorption and emission. Though the data collected will likely be valuable for a broad range of uses, the authors use their measurements to verify the water vapor absorption parameterizations used in the current generation of climate models.
Source:
Geophysical Research Letters,doi:10.1029/2012GL051542, 2012
Title:
“Ground-based high spectral resolution observations of the entire terrestrial spectrum under extremely dry conditions”
Abtsract:
A field experiment was conducted in northern Chile at an altitude of 5.3 km to evaluate the accuracy of line-by-line radiative transfer models in regions of the spectrum that are typically opaque at sea level due to strong water vapor absorption. A suite of spectrally resolved radiance instruments collected simultaneous observations that, for the first time ever, spanned the entire terrestrial thermal spectrum (i.e., from 10 to 3000 cm−1, or 1000 to 3.3 μm). These radiance observations, together with collocated water vapor and temperature profiles, are used to provide an initial evaluation of the accuracy of water vapor absorption in the far-infrared of two line-by-line radiative transfer models. These initial results suggest that the more recent of the two models is more accurate in the strongly absorbing water vapor pure rotation band. This result supports the validity of the Turner et al. (2012) study that demonstrated that the use of the more recent water vapor absorption model in climate simulations resulted in significant radiative and dynamical changes in the simulation relative to the older water vapor model.
UPDATE: The full paper is here (thanks to Leif Svalgaard)
Come on – you all know better than that. The Sun emits many thousands of times the amount of IR that the Earth emits. However, at the top of the atmosphere, the energy in those bands is small because of the 1/r2 decrease in intensity. In other words, the observed solar intensity is small because the Sun is far away .. not because it emits less.
JohnB says:
June 16, 2012 at 10:51 am
“I prefer to listen to every single national science body, and 97% of publishing climate scientists (yes, I do know how they got that figure), and basic physics, and, and. There’s a reason for it being called the mainstream. Tell me, Smokey, what WOULD you accept as evidence?”
JohnB, glad you asked. And thanks for confirming that you don’t think for yourself, but instead prefer to fall back on your constant weak appeals to authorities which have, every one of them, been corrupted by piles of annual grant money, by endless paid jaunts to international holiday party venues; by activists working tirelessly to insinuate themselves onto Boards, by status, by hefty journal and dues income, and by all the other corrupting influences that have destroyed the legitimacy of formerly respected journals and professional societies. With credulous head-nodders like you supporting them, they can cruise indefinitely on the grant gravy train.
As for your wholly bogus 97% number, that has been deconstructed so thoroughly here, and so often, that it gets tedious explaining it to you over and over again: your “97%” number is based on a rigged question answered by only a handful of respondents. Contrast that with the 31,000+ degreed scientists and engineers [more than 9,000 of them PhD’s in the hard sciences], who have co-signed the OISM Petition stating that the rise in CO2 is not a problem, and is in fact beneficial to the environment. The alarmist crowd cannot come close to those numbers. So much for your bogus ‘consensus’. To the extent that ‘consensus’ matters in science, skeptics are far more numerous, as the numbers show.
As for your appeal to “the mainstream”: Mao was mainstream. The Red Guards were mainstream. Lysenko was mainstream. Eugenics was mainstream. Bleeding as a remedy was mainstream. Naziism was mainstream. Sharia Law is mainstream. Pol Pot was mainstream. And yes, the fabricated climate scare is mainstream. Great company you’re in there.
You ask what I would accept as evidence. Apparently you comprehend nothing that has been explained to you: testable, empirical data is scientific evidence. Ice core data from both Hemispheres is evidence, and it shows that rises in CO2 always follow rises in temperature. Oxygen isotopes from stalagmites are evidence. Contrary to Michael Mann’s carefully cherry-picked treemometers, they show conclusively that the MWP was warmer than today, and the LIA was colder. The tropospheric hot spot would be evidence of rapid global warming – if it existed; but it doesn’t. Satellite temperature records are evidence; but they do not support your belief system, and further, they show that the planet is greening in lock-step with rising CO2. The centuries-long daily CET mercury thermometer record is evidence; it also contradicts your belief system. Quite a few other cities have mercury thermometer records going back centuries, and they reflect the same long term global trend as the CET. Data from those sources are evidence.
But peer-reviewed papers based on models are not evidence. They are speculative opinion, based on GIGO [gospel in; grants out]. GCMs are not evidence. UN/IPCC Assessment Reports are not evidence. And so on.
You are ignoring empirical, testable, reproducible scientific evidence, and instead placing your belief in the opinions of individuals and groups that are financially benefitting from climate alarmism. That’s not smart, John. Not smart at all.
OK, slow down with the Gish Gallop. Let’s talk CO2 lag. Of course CO2 didn’t initiate warming, pre-industrial revolution, as we weren’t buring fossil fuels. The 800 year lag in the 10,000 year ice age cycles is well understood. The Milankovic cycle starts the warming, the oceans outgas CO2, which then causes more warming. CO2 is a feedback. But it takes hundreds to thousands of years. Now, things are different. We *are* burning fossil fuels and so now CO2 is a forcing. It’s not that complicated.
And BTW, accepting the work of scientists in their field of expertise is not an appeal to authority, it’s common sense.
Hasta la bye bye (for this thread)
It was found that α [absorption by the air] changed from day to day, and with the clearness and hygrometric state of the atmosphere, but the mean absorption of the radiation from a vertical sun was, according to Pouillet, about 20 per cent.
p. 252
There are indications that the so-called constant is not constant, but varies with the condition of the sun. It would be better if some such title as “Solar Radiation Stream” were adopted to replace “Solar Constant.”
p.255
A TEXT-BOOK OF PHYSICS, J. H. Poynting and J. J. Thomson
Charles Griffin and Company, 1925.
JohnB says:
June 16, 2012 at 1:36 pm
And BTW, accepting the work of scientists in their field of expertise is not an appeal to authority, it’s common sense.
===========================================================
Not any longer. Anyway not in the field of “climate science”.
Generally, if what appears to be a scientific statement has political implications, it should be treated like a political statement possibly being biased, ideology driven or fraudulent.
All these attributes can be easily found in the AGW “scientific” statements.
Dear moderators, your evil spam filter has probably swallowed another comment of mine…
JohnB;
Hasta la bye bye (for this thread)>>>
And thus, having presented not a single orginal thought, not a single contribution to the discussion of the science, no information at all other than “the IPCC said so, and I believe them, so there!” he marches off in triumph, certain that he has bested his foes simply by declaring his belief system.
Anthony, seriously, you’ve got to do something about attracting a better class of troll. Time was when trolls on this blog raised actual issues and discussed actual science. Sure they got to looking awful silly awful fast, but at least we all learned from the discussion. The current crop of trolls seems incapable of articulating an argument other than “it was in a journal” or “the IPCC said so”.
“And BTW, accepting the work of scientists in their field of expertise is not an appeal to authority, it’s common sense.”
I cannot think of a more idiotic statement. Do you mean we do not check the work of “experts”? Then it is common sense to have blood letting.. flat earth.. etc etc..
trace backradiation wrt humidity. These are very simple expirements.
O H Dahlsveen says:
June 16, 2012 at 6:09 am
Myrrh says on June 16, 2012 at 12:40 am:
“———
AGW doesn’t have convection. Why not? Because they have no atmosphere —— —- —. Think of it as a fantasy fisics like a science fiction variation and it’ll keep you grounded“
============
Fourier is the “Father of the Greenhouse Theory” which only goes to show that they have never bothered to read – or have not understood a word of what he wrote.
Every meme has been crafted from pick and mix from real physics, and by writing out the real science history – that Arrhenius misunderstood him for a start, thinking he was saying the atmosphere was like glass when Fourier actually said it wasn’t.. So now we have this totally idiotic idea that the direct heat from the Sun can’t get to the surface of the Earth because it can’t get through the window pane of a greenhouse.. 🙂
And there is still more, – much more —
You couldn’t make it up, except somebody did… Someone who knew real physics, maybe several from different disciplines, must have had a great laugh putting together this AGW fisics and creating the meme ‘proofs’ like the spontaneous ideal gas diffusion of their molecules which they’re taught by its own molecular energy overcomes gravity to zip at great speeds into their atmosphere of empty space and thoroughly mixing by bouncing off the other ideal molecules is ‘proved’ by opening a bottle of scent in a classroom.
As well as saying that direct heat from the Sun doesn’t reach Earth’s surface, or they’ll admit to 1%, another of the memes they have in conjunction with “electromagnetic energy from the Sun is all the same” is “absorbed”. “Absorbed” meme means “it creates heat”. So, they say that all this nondescript “all electromagnetic energy is the same is absorbed and absorbed means it creates heat, therefore visible light heats land and oceans” – when it’s pointed out that visible light is scattered by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere because these molecules absorb visible light – they never come back to answer my question, how much does this mean visible light heats the atmosphere?
Another thing they do in hiding the real physics story is by not telling it clearly, a simple example here on wiki’s page on the Sun:
“Solar energy can be harnessed by a variety of natural and synthetic processes—photosynthesis by plants captures the energy of sunlight and converts it to chemical form (oxygen and reduced carbon compounds), while direct heating or electrical conversion by solar cells are used by solar power equipment to generate electricity or to do other useful work, ”
Yep, showing the difference between Heat and Light.. That visible converts to chemical, not heat, energy in photosynthesis and, that direct heating is by the real direct heat from the Sun, the thermal energy direct from the Sun, which actually is capable of heating land and oceans and us, of doing real work, and yeah, you can get a bit of electricity out of visible …, but only someone who knows the difference can see what is being said here. It goes over the heads of those who think the AGW meme “visible heats land and oceans and thermal infrared from the Sun doesn’t reach the surface”.
So they’re not really lying..
What do you make of this spiel here: http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/EnergyBalance/page6.php
Isn’t it actually saying that c59% of incoming “solar” energy is thermal infrared? And of that practically all of it must be reaching the Earth’s surface as direct heat before going back into the atmosphere by driving the weather systems. Because, water vapour is lumpy and anyway is but a small percentage of the total gases in the atmosphere.
O H Dahlsveen says:
June 16, 2012 at 6:09 am
——–
p.s. that leaves 41% for UV, Visible and Near and Short Infrared – none of which is thermal, i.e., none of these is direct heat from the Sun which is capable of moving matter into rotational/vibrational states and so heating it up.
“NIR and SWIR is sometimes called “reflected infrared” while MWIR and LWIR is sometimes referred to as “thermal infrared.”
Near-infrared NIR, 0.75-1.4 µm
Short-wavelength infrared SWIR, 1.4-3 µm
Mid-wavelength infrared MWIR, Also called intermediate infrared (IIR) 3-8 µm
Long-wavelength infrared LWIR, 8–15 µm
From the wiki page on infrared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
“Reflected” means that these are put into the category Light, not the catergory, Heat.
Not only because they are not hot, but as light they are reflected rather than absorbed, like reflective infrared red cameras v thermal imaging infrared cameras. The first captures the reflection of infrared off a body, as do normal visible light cameras, and the second measures how much heat is being radiated out from a body’s internal heat.
NASA used to teach: “Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared. ..Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all – in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV’s remote control.”
The difference between Light, sometimes called reflective, and Heat from the Sun.
Here’s another example of not telling the story clearly – on that same NASA page http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/infrared.html – they give size difference:
“”Near infrared” light is closest in wavelength to visible light and “far infrared” is closer to the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The longer, far infrared wavelengths are about the size of a pin head and the shorter, near infrared ones are the size of cells, or are microscopic.”
Take a look at this page and electromagnetic spectrum cartoon second picture down: http://www.windows2universe.org/sun/spectrum/multispectral_sun_overview.html
Although it goes a bit of the way to making things clear in pointing out that there are great differences in the order of magnitude between these wavelengths and not as the picture shows, it doesn’t deal with the appearance of visible being near pinhead size – and this is thermal infrared size, because visible will be even smaller than near infrared which is itself microscopic.
“JohnB says:
June 16, 2012 at 8:21 am
There is a mountain of evidence (Which supports the claim that ~3% of ~390ppm/v CO2 DRIVE climate change). It is summarised in the IPCC reports and a thousand other places. The problem is, you just don’t want to hear it.”
Thanks JohnB, I’ve just finished 3hrs worth of work cleaning the kitchen, I needed some light relief.
John B:
Pretty much all of the rest of the atmosphere is transparent to IR at the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs and re-emits
============================
This is Wrong. I posted this before,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png
Water trails off where CO2 absorbs the most, so about half of that bulge is already captured by water. The other two peaks sit in the middle of the distributions so are mostly irrelevant.
On the second chart “Total Absortion and Scattering” you can imagine a line which starts from the top right where water starts to trail down, cuts through CO2s effect and aligns where water continues falling. By my estimation that shows water is already blocking more than half in that band in which CO2 has effect.
With regard to the statement repeatedly made by some here about the “overlap” between H2O and CO2 absorption bands; Phil has made the point several times that these absorption “bands” are actually hundreds of very fine lines, each with it own specific frequency, characteristic of the structure and electronic states of the H2O and CO2 molecules. These frequencies are firsst order Temperature independent, since they are not part of any thermal continuum spectrum, which ios highly Temperature dependent.
So the fact that H2O and CO2 bands overlap, does not mean that the individual lines overlap. I am sure some of them do, but generally they don’t. I was looking at a section of an IR spectrum, in The InfraRed handbook.; absortion of a ten km horizontal atmospheric path at sea level, covering wavenumbers from 10900, to 11200, which is about an 0.025 micron wavelength range. The graph, just selected out of a larger spectrum, for effect, has something between 100 and 200 spectral lines in that 0.025 microns.
Now remember this is a sea level path through 10 km of air and molecules. So whatever line broadening due to Doppler, (Temperature) and density (collisions), is in effect here, and the individual lines are still being resolved. So H2O and CO2 lines can and do interleave, even through there is band overlap.
And Phil has reminded us about this several times; but some choose to ignore it. There’s also a plot of a N2 absorption from about 3.75 to 4.75 microns.
Carbon Dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle, all pure clean rain is Carbonic Acid (as is fog, dew, etc.) As fully part of that its main role in cooling the Earth from the 67%deg;C it would be without the water cycle, taking away heat from the Earth.
In other words, there is no Greenhouse effect because the 33°C figure given for its supposed ‘greenhouse gas warming’ from -18°C to 15°C, doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion created by taking out the water cycle which cools off the heated Earth through our weather systems, here as hot moist air rises because lighter than air cools off in the higher colder atmosphere and condenses out back to liquid water or ice, giving up its heat to cool the Earth by 52°C – think deserts.
Convection is the method of heat transfer in the Earth’s weather systems, because there’s a real gas atmosphere around us subject to gravity etc., not empty space full of the imaginary ideal gas hard dots of nothing molecules zipping around at great speed bouncing off each other and the walls of an imaginary container, which do not have volume or weight or attraction, where there is no sound and clouds appear by magic.
There is a great deal of difference between the beam heat direct from the Sun, the concentrated travelling in straight lines thermal energy of the Sun on the move to us capable of doing work, thermal infrared, and the dissipated thermal energy in the upwelling from Earth, directionless and insignificant in the greater movement of real volume gases in convection from our heated Earth, our wind systems created by differences in temp/pressure of volumes of hot and cold air. AGWScience Fiction doesn’t have this – it can’t account for wind either.
Except what it produces in insult to real physics, as someone put it, by pulling it out from below the belt line..
As others have asked, where is the detail of this study? What were they measuring?
Thank you Myrrh for your comments on: June 16, 2012 at 4:50 pm and June 16, 2012 at 5:51 pm.
I think we have much in common you, Fourier and I and as you probably know Fourier did write in 1824: “The heat of the sun, coming in the form of light, possesses the property of penetrating transparent solids or liquids, and loses this property entirely, when by communication with terrestrial bodies, it is turned into heat radiating without light.”
These old-timers wrote nothing they had not researched or found out by experimentation.
Also note that they used the term radiation long before Electromagnetic (EM) Radiation was theorized & discovered by experimentation. They also knew that the smallest building blocks of matter or what we now call atoms would vibrate at different speeds as they gained or lost energy. – When molecules were touching these vibrations were transferred by touch and this had to be distinguished from the newly dicovered EMR and was named conduction and rising hot air got the name convection.
Yet they knew for a fact that “heat” cannot be transferred by EMR. – That’s why a 100 Watt light-bulb has a larger glass dome than does a 60 Watt one
Nowadays, unfortunately, every kind of heat-transfer is called EM Radiation.
jonathan frodsham says:
June 15, 2012 at 11:00 pm
Extracts of “CARGO CULT SCIENCE” by Richard Feynman: Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.
==================
Climate science specifically excludes the facts that disagree with the theory. The hockey stick is a prime example. Only those trees that match current temperatures are used, while the trees that don’t match are hidden from the study.
The problem is that those trees that don’t match, they are telling you that the trees that do match are likely an accidental match, that you can’t place much weight on their reliability. So, by hiding these trees, climate science makes it appear that trees are a much more reliable measure of temperature than the evidence supports.
Why do this? Because Climate Science is a pseudo science. It is not searching for the truth. It is searching for evidence that supports a predetermined conclusion. The evidence that supports this conclusion is included in the studies. The evidence that does not support the conclusion is hidden from the final report.
“Hide the decline” as revealed via Cliamtegate is a prime example of this, where the IPCC poster child was shown to be a result of selection bias. A more recent example is the “southern hemisphere hockey stick” which was recently retracted from publication. In this case the “experimenter expectation” effect likely played a role, where an obvious mistake got past the researchers, peer review, and “climate scientists” such as “Real Climate”.
Instead, the error was first publicly identified on Climate Audit. After the fact the researchers claimed they discovered the error first, but this was only after CA Audit published the error. If in fact the researchers did discover the error first, it suggests they knowingly withheld this from the public until CA announced the error. This raises the question about whether the researchers would have released their knowledge of the error except for CA. If Climate Science history is an indication, they would not have made this error public. They would have allowed the erroneous paper to go forward, because it supported the predetermined conclusion.
George E. Smith; says:
June 16, 2012 at 12:17 pm
It’s getting a little tiresome reading and rereading all the misinformation and misleading information that gets repeated here, about what the sun, and the earth and black bodies, do and do not emit and or absorb; constantly dispensed by MikeB and others; Myrhh.
Hmm.
June 15, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Well the last time I checked, the human eye stopped responding to electromagnetic waves, and converting that energy into the mental machinations in the eye and the human brain to produce the sensory effect that we call “LIGHT”; which therefore by definition IS visible, around an upper limit of 800 nm, and a lower limit of 400 nm.
Converting that energy into “mental machinations in the eye and the human brain to produce the sensory effect that we call “LIGHT”; which therefore by definition IS visible”
Gosh, what does that mean?
You have a strange way of phrasing when you talk about heat and light. Now if you’d said the eye converts visible energy into chemical energy which is the first step in the process of vision, that would make sense. Just as plants convert visible light to chemical energy in their process of photosynthesis to create sugars. Note, photo – means light, not heat. Visible light is not converted into heat, which is thermal energy, but into chemical energy.
Here’s a good description of how the eye works: http://www.visionfortomorrow.org/how-vision-works/
“The retina contains a chemical called rhodopsin, or “visual purple.” This is the chemical that converts light into electrical impulses that the brain interprets as vision. The retinal nerve fibers collect at the back of the eye and form the optic nerve, which conducts the electrical impulses to the brain.
..
“How We See (or Perceive Light)
Humans need light to see. When light enters the eye, it first passes through the cornea, then the aqueous humor, lens and vitreous humor. Ultimately the light reaches the retina, which is the light-sensing structure of the eye. When light contacts the rods and and the cones in the retina, a series of complex chemical reactions occurs. The chemical that is formed (activated rhodopsin) creates electrical impulses in the optic nerve. The nerves reach the optic chasm, where the nerve fibers from the inside half of each retina cross to the other side of the brain, but the nerve fibers from the outside half of the retina stay on the same side of the brain. These fibers eventually reach the back of the brain (occipital lobe). This is where vision is interpreted and is called the primary visual cortex. Some of the visual fibers go to other parts of the brain to help to control eye movements, response of the pupils and iris, and behavior.”
Visible light exists, we don’t create visible light, we are able to perceive it, as some critters can perceive infrared or ultraviolet; by a complex process we can see what it is – that is not saying the same thing as”
“the sensory effect that we call “LIGHT”; which therefore by definition IS visible”by definition”
that is visible light”
No it isn’t. The visible light energy as such doesn’t exist any more inside our brain, it has been first converted to chemical energy, activated rhodopsin, which then produces electrical impulses which show us the property of it, which colour it is. The colour is not the visible energy itself.
Visible light, the energy, is capable of producing electricity, that’s how its energy is captured in photovoltaic cells in solar panels. It is not capable of heating matter which requires a more powerful energy to move the whole molecule of matter into vibrational/rotational states, kinetic energy.
Here’s something that looks like it might have legs – http://www.designbuzz.com/moss-table-biophotovoltaics-produces-electric-energy-plants.html
“Biophotovoltaic tableMoss Table comprises of conductive fibers that captures electrons to produce energy. Biological materials like cyanobacteria, vascular plants, algae and moss indulge in the act of photosynthesis, which is exploited in a useful way. A lot of energy is wasted during the process of photosynthesis, but with this technology it will be used well. The table includes little moss pots that double as bio-electrochemical devices, which in turn convert chemical energy into electrical energy with the help of various biological materials or photosynthesizing plants.
Organic compounds are released as waste as moss photosynthesizes, which are further broken down by bacteria to release electrons. These electrons are trapped by the conductive wires in the design, which generate an electric current between five to ten microamps. The electric current is sent into the battery to be used for various purposes like powering a table lamp. A higher amount of energy will be generated (over 500 joules) when 112 moss pots are used together in the design. Sadly, the Moss Table is not for sale as of now …”
So that means that the Infra-red spectrum begins at 700-800 nm; not 3.3 microns. And between 750 nm and 3.3 microns, common GHGs suchas H2O and CO2 have very significant absorption lines and bands between 750 nm and 3.3 microns.
Neither do we create the thermal energy absorbed by us, as we don’t create “by definition that is visible light”. We first perceive, sense, the original thermal energy on our skin, as we perceive light, as the property, nature of it.
However, there’s more to the Sun’s heat energy than this. The effect of absorbing heat energy direct from the Sun, which is thermal infrared, is heat energy itself as it physically heats us up by moving our molecules of water into vibrational states by convertion into kinetic energy, the energy of movement which is heat…
The energy of movement, which is itself heat, which is thermal energy. Not to be confused with temperature, see heat capacity of water. Rub your hands together, that is mechanical energy converting to heat. So note, it’s not the original heat energy from the Sun. Heat heats things up, creates heat, which thermal energy can be transferred by conduction, convection AND radiation.
So, the thermal energy of the Sun, heat, on the move to us, heat, is absorbed by us and land and oceans, and heats us up which then becomes our own thermal energy, heat.
So that means that the Infra-red spectrum begins at 700-800 nm; not 3.3 microns”
They’re not talking about infrared light, they’re talking about thermal infrared radiation; near and short infrared are not thermal, they’re classed with Light, not Heat. That’s why this is about “thermal infrared spectrum observed”, from the Greek thermo, heat, not photo, light.
Because they are different they have different effects on matter, they are capable of doing stuff depending on their own particular nature. All energy is not the same. A gamma ray is not a radio wave. A radio wave can pass through brick walls, visible light can’t. Come back to real science, begin with the naming of parts…
Rather taken with the idea of electricity from moss, am having a look at what else is around, lots of interesting research on this page: http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Solar:Photosynthesis_Imitation
and this from one of them: New Technique Enables Scientists to Track Molecular Energy Transfer in Photosynthesis
http://phys.org/news3559.html
“Photosynthesis should make any short-list of Nature’s spectacular accomplishments. Through the photosynthetic process, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer energy from sunlight and initiate its conversion into chemical energy with an efficiency of nearly 100-percent. If we can learn to emulate Nature’s technique and create artificial versions of photosynthesis, then we, too, could effectively tap into the sun as a clean, efficient, sustainable and carbon-neutral source of energy for our technology.
“Nature has designed one of the most exquisitely effective systems for harvesting light, with the steps happening too fast for energy to be wasted as heat,” Fleming said. “Current solar power systems, however, aren’t following Nature’s model.”
Two main question are:
How much is absorbed by H2O and doesn’t end-up absorbed by these greenhouse gasses?
and
How much is absorbed by these greenhouse gasses that would be absorbed by H2O anyway?