Some years ago I was arguing with an otherwise intelligent[1] friend who doesn’t believe in global warming.
I said that the theory behind global warming is very simple and then… I failed to explain it in simple terms to a sufficiently intelligent critic like him.
A bit sheepishly I went and did some proper research, digging through actual science papers like this one.
Turns out: global warming is actually surprisingly complicated at every level!
This paper references the absorption and emission spectrum of CO2. That’s not a simple curve!! That’s just a sketch, a cartoon in undergraduate text books. The real spectrum looks like a complicated comb. Worse, these narrow lines interact with the similarly narrow lines of other molecules, exchanging energy through both collisions and photons. Then, it’s also important to model every isotopic combination and every excited state, especially in the upper atmosphere.
It turns out that the largest contribution to the observed warming is from some particularly hard-to-model scenario of a rare isotope in an excited molecule high in the atmosphere at a grazing angle in the Arctic region!
What reassured me was that the more I dug into the research the more I saw how earnest and hard working everyone involved was. Even when the science started to get above my level of comprehension I got the distinct impression that no stone was left unturned and every I was dotted and every t was crossed.
If you look hard enough you will eventually end up on a weirdly 90s looking site hosted on nasa.gov where some underpaid scientists have been patiently collating high resolution spectra matched to high-altitude balloon measurements. It’s a database that along with many others is used as the input into supercomputer simulations based on numerical codes also patiently developed by armies of scientists. It’s mind blowing how much science has accumulated and how little of it ever makes it into public discourse.
[1] Day traders read news sources that are very right-leaning, pro-big-business, etc… He’s a quant and book-smart, but it goes to show that we’re all products of our environments and not as self-determined as we’d like to believe.
I said that the theory behind global warming is very simple and then… I failed to explain it in simple terms to a sufficiently intelligent critic like him.
A bit sheepishly I went and did some proper research, digging through actual science papers like this one.
Turns out: global warming is actually surprisingly complicated at every level!
This paper references the absorption and emission spectrum of CO2. That’s not a simple curve!! That’s just a sketch, a cartoon in undergraduate text books. The real spectrum looks like a complicated comb. Worse, these narrow lines interact with the similarly narrow lines of other molecules, exchanging energy through both collisions and photons. Then, it’s also important to model every isotopic combination and every excited state, especially in the upper atmosphere.
It turns out that the largest contribution to the observed warming is from some particularly hard-to-model scenario of a rare isotope in an excited molecule high in the atmosphere at a grazing angle in the Arctic region!
What reassured me was that the more I dug into the research the more I saw how earnest and hard working everyone involved was. Even when the science started to get above my level of comprehension I got the distinct impression that no stone was left unturned and every I was dotted and every t was crossed.
If you look hard enough you will eventually end up on a weirdly 90s looking site hosted on nasa.gov where some underpaid scientists have been patiently collating high resolution spectra matched to high-altitude balloon measurements. It’s a database that along with many others is used as the input into supercomputer simulations based on numerical codes also patiently developed by armies of scientists. It’s mind blowing how much science has accumulated and how little of it ever makes it into public discourse.
[1] Day traders read news sources that are very right-leaning, pro-big-business, etc… He’s a quant and book-smart, but it goes to show that we’re all products of our environments and not as self-determined as we’d like to believe.