So what I’m reading is that these gas absorb the light from the sun and keeps it trapped on the earth.
What I don’t get is how is it letting the light and heat in from the sun in, but not the light and heat reflected from the Earth out? If it’s a barrier, shouldn’t it block both ways? If it’s not a barrier, how is it trapping the heat?
In: 950
The sun is really hot, about 6000 degrees. The light from the sun looks white. The earth is currently much cooler, about 60 degrees. The light (EM radiation) from the earth looks much ‘redder’, so red that you cannot see much of it. The gasses in the atmosphere allow most of the white sunlight to pass, whereas those same gasses absorb proportionately more of the redder light energy and that causes heating. The crazy thing is that you can get into a runaway situation. With enough water vapor in the atmosphere, there can be no balance between incoming and outgoing energy at current earth surface temperatures, as the water vapor absorbs too much. Only when the earth gets really hot, too hot for life to exist, will it radiate colors sufficiently ‘blue’ to readily escape the atmosphere. That’s when we become Venus 2.0.
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