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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Whoops, I linked the wrong one. The normal idea is to mix baking powder and vinegar in a jar to create CO2 and then compare it to various controls, like here.

That experiment seems to demonstrate that a jar with a higher concentration of CO2 in it will be hotter than a jar with regular air in it, after a period of being heated by an external source (eg a heat lamp) for 5 to 10 minutes.

The “greenhouse effect” however isn’t quite this. It is rather that the surface of the Earth is said to supposed to be -18C, but then the surface of the Earth heats the atmosphere which in turn heats the surface of the Earth to a higher temperature, raising it by +33C to reach +15C. i.e. the atmosphere is externally heated (by the Earth) and it then heats its heat source (the Earth) to a greater than original temperature.

As such the experiment you cited doesn’t demonstrate this. It would need to, for example, show that the gas in the jar ends up raising the heat source (e.g. the heat lamp)'s temperature.

The “greenhouse effect” however isn’t quite this. It is rather that the surface of the Earth is said to supposed to be -18C, but then the surface of the Earth heats the atmosphere which in turn heats the surface of the Earth to a higher temperature, raising it by +33C to reach +15C. i.e. the atmosphere is externally heated (by the Earth) and it then heats its heat source (the Earth) to a greater than original temperature.

Specifically what's warming is not "the Earth" but the oceans and troposphere. The other layers of the atmosphere are actually cooling because of the enhanced greenhouse effect within the troposphere. So it's not the "heat source" that is being heated (most of the infrared radiation being captured by GHGs comes from radioactive decay of elements within the Earth's crust).

(most of the infrared radiation being captured by GHGs comes from radioactive decay of elements within the Earth's crust)

Earth's internal power = 44 TW. Sunlight striking the Earth = 170 PW = 170,000 TW.

(from Atomic Rockets' Boom Table)

Even accounting for albedo reflecting like 30% of that number straight back into space, Earth's internal heating is a tiny contributor to its energy balance. It's not like the giant planets, where internal heat is much more significant to overall energy balance (because radioactive heat scales with mass i.e. radius^3 and leftover heat from their formation scales with radius^5 while solar heat scales with radius^2, and also because they're further from the Sun); Neptune actually does radiate over twice as much energy as it receives from the Sun, though I don't think this is true of the others.