1.

[MUSIC PLAYING]
2. DANIEL P. SCHRAG: To understand the basic physics of climate change,
3. one has to think about the Earth's radiation budget.
4. Now we measure the Earth's radiation budget
5. in units of energy per unit time per unit area.
6. The reason for this is that we think about how much incoming radiation
7. energy there is per unit time.
8. So that would be a unit, like a watt per square meter, which
9. then tells us how much energy is received
10.per square meter of the Earth's surface.
11.Now, the Earth's surface temperature in general
12.is controlled by the solar radiation the Earth receives from the sun.
13.There is a small amount of geothermal energy
14.that the Earth receives from the internal heat of the Earth.
15.That flux is something like a tenth of a watt per meter squared on average.
16.That's really tiny compared to the solar radiation,
17.which is several hundred watts per meter squared.
18.At a very superficial level, we can think
19.of the incoming solar radiation being mostly in the visible spectrum, which
20.is short wavelength.
21.That is the visible light we see, also a little bit of ultraviolet light.
22.And that penetrates the Earth's atmosphere.
23.And some of it is reflected by white clouds.
24.Some of it is reflected by white things on the surface,
25.like deserts, or like ice sheets.
26.And that light then would be reflected back to space.
27.But whenever the visible light actually hits something darker
28.on the Earth's surface, that material absorbs the energy
29.and heats up a little bit in response to the energy flux
30.that it receives from that solar radiation.
31.As you know, when you go outside on a sunny day,
32.you feel the warmth in response to your body encountering the solar radiation
33.from short wave radiation.
34.And you absorb that energy and turn it into heat.
35.Well, heat itself is a form of radiation, but in a longer wavelength.
36.And so we emit that heat back to the atmosphere.
37.So when the surface of the earth absorbs the visible light
38.that it receives from the sun, the temperature increases
39.and radiation is radiated back out towards space
40.so that essentially there's an exchange of short wave for long wave radiation.
41.Over a relatively short time scale, there's an energy balance
42.so that the amount of incoming energy from the sun
43.is balanced by the amount of outgoing energy, which is a combination of both
44.the sunlight that's reflected directly back to space
45.and the long wave radiation that comes from the interaction with the Earth's
46.atmosphere on the surface, and its heating up and radiating long wave
47.radiation.
48.And so you can actually match up the incoming short wave
49.radiation with the outgoing short wave plus long wave radiation.
50.In this context
51.one can think about the role of greenhouse gases
52.as increasing the surface boundary layer of the Earth.
53.What greenhouse gases do is they absorb infrared radiation,
54.long wave radiation as it's coming off the surface,
55.and ultimately then re-radiating that back down and back out to space.
56.The reason they're called greenhouse gases
57.is they work much like a greenhouse.
58.A greenhouse is a glass enclosure where it lets in visible light from the sun
59.and heats up during the day.
60.But because the glass is relatively opaque to infrared radiation,
61.to long wave radiation, the heat stays inside
62.even though the visible light can penetrate.
63.And as a result, the temperature inside a greenhouse on a cold, sunny day
64.is much, much hotter than what it would be outside.
65.Essentially, that's what's happening with the entire atmosphere
66.of the Earth, where the greenhouse gases essentially give you a layer,
67.much like, uh, covering yourself with a thick comforter on a cold night.
68.They essentially absorb infrared radiation,
69.re-radiating it back to space and back down to the surface,
70.but essentially increase the altitude at which the Earth is in this energy
71.balance state where the incoming radiation is
72.the same as the outgoing radiation.
73.One way to think about the Earth's energy budget
74.is to compare the Earth with our neighboring planet Venus.
75.So Venus is about the same size as the Earth, and it's closer to the sun.
76.So that means it gets roughly twice as much solar radiation per unit area
77.as the Earth.
78.So you would expect Venus to be a lot hotter,
79.and sure enough, it is.
80.It's about 460 degrees Celsius at the surface of Venus.
81.It's pretty steamy.
82.But if you look at the energy budget of the two planets,
83.one actually sees that Venus being closer to the sun
84.is not the primary reason why Venus is so hot.
85.The Earth gets about 340 watts per meter squared of incoming solar radiation
86.on average around the Earth's surface.
87.And about 100 watts per meter squared of that is reflected back to space.
88.Most of it is from bright clouds in the Earth's atmosphere.
89.A little bit of it is from the surface of the Earth
90.and from especially the polar ice caps that are very white.
91.So a little more than 2/3 of the incoming solar radiation
92.is actually absorbed by the Earth's surface
93.and is turned into heat and ultimately to outgoing infrared radiation.
94.In contrast, the surface of Venus is much, much brighter than the Earth.
95.Venus receives about 650 watts per meter squared of incoming solar radiation.
96.But almost all of that, roughly 500 watts per meter squared,
97.is reflected back to space because the surface of Venus is so bright.
98.In truth, the situation with Venus is a little more complicated
99.because it's not the surface of Venus that's
100. so bright and reflecting the sunlight.
101. It's actually the atmosphere itself.
102. There's a lot of sulfate aerosols in the Venusian atmosphere.
103. And so figuring out exactly what the albedo of Venus
104. would have been if it had the same atmosphere of the Earth
105. is a hypothetical question that's kind of difficult to solve.
106. But the real point is that it's not being closer
107. to the sun that makes Venus so hot.
108. It's actually its ultra greenhouse atmosphere.
109. What that means is that if the Earth and Venus had the same atmosphere,
110. Venus would actually be colder than the Earth
111. even though it's closer than the sun because the amount of solar radiation
112. that's actually absorbed at the planetary surface
113. is actually much smaller than the Earth, and therefore
114. if it had no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
115. or if it had the same amount as the Earth,
116. it would be substantially colder.
117. Venus' atmosphere is 100 times denser than the Earth
118. and composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, as well as some other trace
119. gases that make it a very powerful greenhouse atmosphere.
120. And that's why the surface of Venus is 460 degrees Celsius.
121. In contrast, the atmosphere of the Earth has a very strong greenhouse effect.
122. The total greenhouse effect is about 30 degrees Celsius.
123. So that means that if we didn't have an atmosphere,
124. the Earth's surface temperature would be about 30 degrees colder
125. than it is today.
126. But it's still mild compared to the ultra greenhouse on Venus.

1. cript. Skip to the end.

2.
3. [MUSIC PLAYING]
4. DANIEL P. SCHRAG: Let's take a look at the energy balance of the Earth
5. in a little bit more detail.
6. The first thing we have to talk about is the wavelength
7. of different types of radiation, of different types of light.
8. If we look at the electromagnetic spectrum,
9. we can describe different types of radiation, different types of light,
10.as having different wavelengths.
11.So visible light has a wavelength between 0.7 and 0.4 micrometers
12.or microns.
13.Ultraviolet light has an even smaller wavelength, below 1/10th of a micron.
14.And infrared radiation, what we think of as heat,
15.has a much longer wavelength, from about 1 micron up to about 1,000 microns.
16.There are also microwaves, which have even longer wavelengths.
17.And also x-rays, which are much shorter wavelengths than ultraviolet radiation.
18.And the other important thing to remember
19.is that the wavelength is inversely correlated with energy.
20.That is, high energy radiation has shorter wavelengths.
21.And lower energy radiation has higher wavelengths.
22.We'll come back to this in a minute.
23.When we think about planetary energy balance,
24.we often talk about a blackbody radiation.
25.What we're thinking about here is a body,
26.like a planet, that is black, so that it actually absorbs radiation
27.at all wavelengths.
28.And blackbody radiation describes how the infrared radiation emits as it
29.heats up, as a function of temperature.
30.There are some basic laws of radiation that we need to cover.
31.First, all objects emit light, emit radiant energy.
32.And hotter objects emit more energy than colder objects.
33.So the amount of energy radiated is proportional to the temperature
34.of the object.
35.It's actually a little more complicated than just directly proportional.
36.It actually goes as temperature to the fourth power.
37.This is what's called the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
38.And we often call it blackbody radiation.
39.Essentially, it describes the flux of energy
40.as a function of the surface temperature of the object.
41.We have a simple equation here where F is the flux of energy
42.measured in watts per meter squared.
43.T is temperature raised to the fourth power.
44.And sigma is a constant that is universal across all blackbodies.
45.The last thing we need to know is that objects
46.that are hotter emit light at shorter wavelengths.
47.This is called Wien's law, where the wavelength of light
48.equals 3,000 divided by the temperature in Kelvin.
49.So let's take these two radiation laws, the Stefan-Boltzmann law that
50.describes the radiation flux from a blackbody as a function
51.of its temperature, and the Wien's law that describes the wavelength of light
52.from an object.
53.Let's consider two objects in our solar system,
54.the sun, which is the source of our energy, and the Earth.
55.The sun is roughly 6,000 Kelvin at its surface.
56.And the Earth is about 300 Kelvin at its surface, a little bit less than that.
57.If we apply Wien's law, the sun emits light
58.at a wavelength of about 1/2 a micron.
59.That's right in the middle of the visible spectrum.
60.Whereas, the Earth emits light at about 10 microns,
61.which is in the infrared spectrum.
62.So that explains, basically, why you get this energy balance between short wave
63.and long wave at the Earth's surface.
64.If we take those temperatures and plug them into the Stefan-Boltzmann law,
65.where we raise the temperature to the fourth power,
66.we get that the flux of energy from the sun is about 7 times 10
67.to the 7th watts per meter squared.
68.Whereas, the flux of energy from the Earth
69.is about 460 watts per meter squared, much, much less.
70.That's not that surprising.
71.Let's dig a little deeper into the Earth's energy balance
72.and its interaction with solar radiation.
73.We have to remember, first, some basic geometry, that the area of the circle
74.is pi r squared.
75.We're going to approximate the Earth as a circle,
76.even though it's not perfectly circular.
77.And of course, the area of a sphere is 4 pi r squared.
78.We can describe a simple energy balance, where
79.the amount of energy delivered to the Earth from the sun
80.is equal to the energy lost from the Earth as infrared radiation.
81.If it wasn't in balance over relatively short time scales,
82.the Earth would heat up or cool off, depending
83.on whether it had an excess of energy or a deficit of energy.
84.So we can write this very simple energy balance equation that
85.just says, energy in equals energy out.
86.So how much solar radiation reaches the Earth?
87.Well, remember, we said that the sun emits 7 times 10
88.to the 7th watts per meter squared.
89.But of course, as the sun's energy is emitted out to space,
90.only a very small fraction actually reaches the Earth,
91.because it's spread out over a greater and greater area.
92.That means that every planet has its own solar constant, because it's
93.a different distance away from the sun.
94.Planets that are further away from the sun, that energy from the sun
95.is spread out over a much greater area, a greater sphere.
96.And therefore, they have a very much smaller fraction
97.of that total solar energy.
98.So if you think about this from the perspective of the sun,
99.solar radiation is traveling towards the Earth
100. and sees a circle that would be the side of the planet turned
101. towards it at any one time.
102. That would be just a circle defined by the Earth's radius.
103. So we can write the simple equation where
104. the incoming energy is just equal to the solar constant, S-nought, times pi r squared.
105. But it turns out this isn't quite correct.
106. And the reason, we already talked about
107. is that not all of the solar energy reaches the Earth's surface.
108. Some of it is reflected away, both by clouds,
109. by aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere that we'll talk about in a minute,
110. and also by bright areas of the Earth's surface.
111. So we have to describe something called albedo,
112. which is the percent of short-wave radiation
113. that is reflected back to space and is never absorbed and turned into heat.
114. So we adjust the total incoming solar radiation, S-nought times pi r
115. squared, by a factor 1 minus A, where A is the albedo of the Earth.
116. And that just describes the fraction of incoming solar radiation
117. that's actually absorbed by the Earth's surface
118. and turned into heat, as opposed to direct reflection back to space.
119. The Earth's albedo today is about 30% or 0.3.
120. So about 70% of the incoming solar radiation
121. is actually absorbed by the Earth's surface.
122. So to complete the energy balance, we have
123. to describe how much energy the Earth emits.
124. The energy out is just equal to the total flux of energy
125. from the Earth as a blackbody times the area of the Earth.
126. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, we can calculate that the flux out
127. is simply sigma times T to the 4th times 4
128. pi r square, the surface area of the Earth.
129. Because the Earth is emitting energy from all
130. of its surface at any one time.
131. So if the energy in equals the energy out,
132. we can now expand this simple equation, canceling pi r squared from both sides of the
equation.
133. We end up with a simple relationship where S-nought times 1 minus the albedo
134. equals sigma T to the 4th times 4.
135. Or rearranging, we get T to the 4th power
136. equals the solar constant times 1 minus the albedo divided by 4 sigma.
137. We can plug-in our known values for these different constants here.
138. So the solar constant is 1,370 watts per meter squared.
139. The albedo is 0.3.
140. Sigma, the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, is 5.67 times 10 to the minus 8.
141. So when we plug all those constants in, we
142. get a surface temperature of 255 Kelvin, or about minus 18 degrees Celsius.
143. Wait a second.
144. That's a little bit too cold for the surface of the Earth.
145. What did we do wrong?
146. Is the Earth's surface really minus 18 degrees Celsius?
147. No, of course not.
148. It's really about 288 Kelvin or about 15 degrees Celsius.
149. We have a problem.
150. The difference between what we observe, about 15 degrees
151. Celsius, and the calculated temperature, minus 18 degrees Celsius,
152. is about 33 degrees.
153. Why are we off by 33 degrees?
154. Why is the Earth's surface 33 degrees warmer
155. than we would expect from this simple energy balance calculation?
156. The answer, of course, is the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect.
157. Our calculation assumed that there was no atmosphere at all.
158. It was just a blackbody radiation calculation,
159. assuming that the Earth emits directly to space
160. and that the surface of the Earth is in radiative equilibrium directly.
161. Because the Earth has an atmosphere, it's about 33 degrees warmer
162. than it would be otherwise.
163. That's why the greenhouse effect is so important.
164. End of transcript. Skip to the start.

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