Weekly Climate And Energy News Roundup #456
The Week That Was: 2021-05-22 (May 22, 2021)
Brought to You by SEPP (
www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “…increasing the concentration of an absorbent gas does not always produce a proportional increase in heat uptake, because there is progressively less [heat energy] to be absorbed. — From “Tyndall’s climate message, 150 years on” By Richard Black, BBC [Black failed to explain that CO2 was one such gas.]
Number of the Week: – $18 Trillion for Zero
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Absorption and Radiation of Heat: In 1861, “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction” by Irish physicist John Tyndall was published. He was the first to recognize that different atmospheric gases absorb heat (infrared radiation) to different extents and at different wavelengths. In effect, he described and analyzed the molecular basis of the greenhouse effect and named atmospheric gases that absorb and re-emit infrared radiation “greenhouse gases.” He realized the dominant one is water vapor. He developed infrared spectroscopy, the study of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation as a function of wavelength (or frequency).
In 1905, using infrared spectroscopy American physicist William Coblentz published the results of a large study of compounds with wavelengths between 1000 nanometers to 16,000 nanometers. That year he accepted a position with the National Bureau of Standards in Washington (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD.). He founded the Bureau’s radiometry section and headed it for 40 years until his retirement in 1945. Radiometry is a set of techniques for measuring electromagnetic radiation.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/24/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-456/
