Questions about Environment/Global Warming (1) What molecular properties allow C
ID: 121303 • Letter: Q
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Questions about Environment/Global Warming
(1) What molecular properties allow CO2 to be a greenhouse gas while N2 is not a greenhouse gas? (2) What is meant by the "atmospheric window"? (3) As atmospheric CO2 increases, do you expect the amount of infrared radiation leaving the earth in the atmospheric window to increase or decrease? Why? (4) Is the increase in radiative forcing of CO2 the same going from 300 to 400 ppm as from 400 to 500 ppm? (5) What information and what sort of numerical model is needed to compute the equilibrium climate response for a CO2 doubling? (6) What information is needed to compute the global warming potential of N20? (7) Why is it not possible to represent individual clouds in climate models? (8) If it takes 1 day of computer time to do a 100-year computer climate simulation with a model having 100km horizontal resolution, roughly how many days of computer time would be needed to do a similar run with a model that has 50km horizontal resolution? (9) What additional processes are depicted in earth system models that are not typically depicted in global climate models? (10) What does it mean to spin up a climate model, and how many model years are typically required for spin-up? What properties of the climate system are most responsible for requiring this long spin-up time? (11) What are the main processes controlling the rate of rise of CO2 in the atmosphere? (12) Rank these reservoirs in terms of amount of carbon they contain: Atmosphere, Soil, Oceans (13) Why is the ocean able to absorb carbon dioxide as atmospheric CO2 rises? How long were (14) Qualitatively, how did atmospheric CO2 vary over the glacial interglacial cycles? these cycles? What sort of processes might have caused these natural CO2 changes? (15) When discussing greenhouse gases, what is meant by "atmospheric lifetime"? (16) Does CO2 have a well-defined lifetime? Why or why not?Explanation / Answer
1.) Molecules of carbon dioxide (CO2) can absorb energy from infrared (IR) radiation. This animation shows a molecule of CO2 absorbing an incoming infrared photon (yellow arrows). The energy from the photon causes the CO2 molecule to vibrate. Shortly thereafter, the molecule gives up this extra energy by emitting another infrared photon. Once the extra energy has been removed by the emitted photon, the carbon dioxide stops vibrating.
This ability to absorb and re-emit infrared energy is what makes CO2 an effective heat-trapping greenhouse gas.
N2 not able to absorb IR radiation thats why it is not greenhouse gas.
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