Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

Earth on Fire: The Overheating Planet

NOTE ON POPULAR POSTS

The reason some popular posts are tagged ‘no title’ is not because they have no title—they all do—but because the old Blogger embedded the title at the top of text, and the new software does not see that. You can see the titles in capitals at the start of each snippet. (It would be nice if Blogger introduced an upgrade program that could fix this little problem.)

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Saturday 16 October 2010

CARBON-DIOXIDE DRIVES OF GLOBAL TEMPERATURE

Water vapoUr and clouds are the major contributors to Earth's greenhouse effect, but a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study by Andrew Lacis and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York shows that the planet's temperature ultimately depends on the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide.

The notable feature of the team's study of the nature of Earth's greenhouse effect was to identify the importance of non-condensing greenhouse gases--such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons. Without them, water vapour and clouds could not provide the feedback mechanisms that amplify the greenhouse effect. The study's results were published on the 15th of October in Science. The consequence is that carbon-dioxide is responsible for 80% of the greenhouse effect.

Full story in ScienceDaily.