I have recently watched two videos on climate change by Sabine Hossenfelder. The first one deals with the understanding of the greenhouse effect. It is far from being as simple as taught in schools, with young people appearing on television coming out with suitable speeches as if they were Young Pioneers from the Soviet Union.
Inspired by this video, I went and searched to find out how much of the Sun’s radiation is in the visible part of the spectrum. Very few sources on the web actually give a value, and the most informative diagram I found came from Wikimedia. It is labelled in German, so here is a version with text in English added. From this it appears that above the Earth’s atmosphere, a third or less is found in the visible, but that the visible accounts for about half of the energy reaching ground level.
But it is in the infrared the much of the action happens, with different molecules concentrated at different heights in the atmosphere absorbing at different wavelengths.
It is the second video which somewhat surprises me, with its most alarming prediction.
I am reminded of the poem The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter IV:
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings."
Can anyone here spot any missing bits or mistakes in her argument?
