From rmg3@access5.digex.net Wed Jan 14 12:50:33 EST 1998
Article: 168209 of sci.environment
Path: news2.digex.net!digex!digex.net!not-for-mail
From: rmg3@access5.digex.net (Robert Grumbine)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Breaking news on carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas
Date: 14 Jan 1998 10:20:23 -0500
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Status: O

  It has been complained that there haven't been observations of
carbon dioxide in a lab actually being a greenhouse gas (i.e.,
being absorbing of infrared radiation).  In my recent reading,
I've come across some citations to just such lab experiments:

Tyndall, Phil. Mag, 22, 277, 1861
Schaeffer, Ann. Phys. 16, 93, 1905
Angstrom, Archiv fuer Matematik, Astron. och Fysik, vol 4, no 30, 1908
E. v. Bahr, Ann. Phys., 29, 780, 1909

  As a group, these experiments demonstrate that CO2 does indeed
absorb in the infrared, determine the absorption as a function of
CO2 content, and discover that the absorption increases with 
increasing pressure even when that total pressure is provided by
non-CO2 gasses.  Quite remarkable.

  Of course it helps to have some idea of the implications of such
revolutionary work.  Fortunately some has recently been provided:
Arrhenius, Phil. Mag., 41, 237, 1896.
Chamberlin, J. Geol., 7, 545, 1899.


-- 
Robert Grumbine rmg3@access.digex.net http://www.access.digex.net/~rmg3/
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much 
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they 
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences