So first step in actually doing something about climate change is

understanding the climate, and so now we're going to dig into the details
about the climate system. We'll begin with how it's constructed. Now the
climate system really is an interacting system that involves several critical
subsystems: the ocean or hydrosphere all the water on the earth, the atmosphere,
the cryosphere, that's all the ice on the earth, and the biosphere, the life on
Earth which participates in the climate system. Now this system is being forced
externally by other factors, like the output of the Sun which is heating the
oceans in the atmosphere, and it's interacting with the atmosphere, with
greenhouse gases which we'll talk more about later, which play a very important
role in modulating earth's temperature. So you've got the ocean, the water in the
ocean, and there's water in rivers and lakes, and some of that water evaporates
into the atmosphere in the form of water vapor, which is a gas. And water vapor is
actually a greenhouse gas, so it interacts with the heat energy that's
trying to escape from the surface. You've got clouds that form in the atmosphere.
You have the vegetation and the land surface and the properties of the
surface of the earth, which influence what happens to incoming sunlight, which
influences the ability of soils to respirate carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, the ability of soils and vegetation to put moisture into the
atmosphere. And so all of these systems are interacting with each other in terms
of the physics, in terms of the thermodynamics, in terms of the exchanges
of gases. All of the processes that, as we will see are important in understanding
the dynamics of the earth system, the dynamics of the climate system.
So next let's talk in more detail about the first subsystem, the atmosphere. Now
the atmosphere is actually divided into different layers, the lowest layer we
call the troposphere, Tropos meaning change, and it's where the weather that
we experience happens, it's the most dynamic part of the atmosphere. And the
troposphere extends up to roughly 10 to 14 kilometers above the surface of the
earth so it's where we live, it's where the weather that we experience happens,
and one important feature of the troposphere is that temperatures
decrease as you go up, as you increase your altitude temperatures cool that
leads to more unstable behavior. That's why weather happens in that part of the
atmosphere. Now when you get to the top of the troposphere you meet the
stratosphere, the next layer up, and in the stratosphere temperatures actually
start to warm as you go up, believe it or not, it actually gets warmer as you go up
into the stratosphere. So the stratosphere is far more stable
and it in essence serves as a lid on the weather systems. So we're going to focus
largely on the troposphere the first 10 to 14 kilometers again because that's
where weather happens, that's where we live, most of the things that we care
about happen within the troposphere. Most of the climate changes that will talk
about happen within the troposphere. But the stratosphere also plays an
important role it turns out that that's where the ozone layer is. In the
stratosphere, oxygen is actually photodissociated by incoming sunlight, by
ultraviolet radiation, and that gives us an ozone layer. And the ozone layer is
important, it absorbs some of that incoming high frequency radiation from
the Sun what we call ultraviolet radiation that would otherwise be
harmful to life on the surface of the Earth, and it shields us from that
harmful radiation. It also plays an important role in climate change and in
the effect of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.
As we'll see later on, when you increase greenhouse gas concentrations the
troposphere warms up, but the stratosphere actually cools, and that
means that if we want to detect the signal of human influence on the climate,
if we want to look for a fingerprint that tells us that the warming actually
comes from the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, the fingerprint we
would look for would be a warming troposphere, but a cooling stratosphere
we'll come back to that later. Finally let's talk about atmospheric
composition. Now as you can see in this diagram the atmosphere is mostly
nitrogen and oxygen, about 99% of the atmosphere is made up of nitrogen and
oxygen, and only 1% accounts for all of the other trace gases, including all the
greenhouse gases. Turns out though, those greenhouse gases can be very potent, even
in low concentrations they can have a profound impact on the properties of our
atmosphere. Now here's some key characteristics of the atmospheric
composition. It's in general well mixed, the various constituents of the
atmosphere are pretty much uniform around the globe, and that's because of
the mixing by the atmosphere due to weather systems and turbulence, and so
that's one of the key assumptions is that our atmosphere is relatively well
mixed. Furthermore we can assume that the atmosphere behaves by and large as an
ideal gas and that allows us to use the ideal gas law, an important sort of
property that helps us describe the physical attributes of the atmosphere. So
let's talk briefly about the ideal gas law, most of you saw this in high school
chemistry, perhaps the famous PV=nRT that describes how pressure and
temperature are related, in a gas. Well in the atmosphere we no longer have a V, we
don't have a finite volume, a container. The gas is free to go anywhere at once
and so we'll end up using a slightly modified version of the ideal gas law,
but it'll be the same ideal gas law that you saw in high school chemistry. We're
going to use that to understand the physical properties of our atmosphere.
Now there are some exceptions to this rule, some gases like methane which is an
important greenhouse gas have very strong sources and sinks, that means that
in some regions the concentrations of those gases are higher or lower than in
other regions. Now atmospheric water vapor can present
even more of a challenge because it does the most non-ideal thing that a gas can
possibly do- it can change phase water vapor can condense into water, and that
water can freeze and turn into ice. Water vapor is actually found in all three
phases: gas, liquid, and solid, on earth. And so we have to take account of that in
fact water vapor, the gaseous form of water, is a very important greenhouse gas
and it adds to the greenhouse effect, it's an amplifying factor when it comes
to climate change. We'll talk more about that later on in the course. So here we
know here we understand that the atmosphere is mostly made up of oxygen
and nitrogen, but one percent of the atmosphere is made up by all of those
other trace gases: ozone, methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor. And the carbon
dioxide is only found in concentrations of a fraction of a percent in the
atmosphere, so you might think that it wouldn't have much of an influence, but
it turns out that it's so potent a greenhouse gas, that even in those small
concentrations, it can have a profound impact on Earth's climate. So let's take
a few moments to talk about the concept known as the greenhouse effect, this is a
critical part of the climate change story.
Greenhouse gases comprise less than 1% of the atmosphere, but they have a
profound impact on the atmosphere because of their potent properties. Now
the major human emitted greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide,
methane, and nitrous oxide, yes laughing gas is a greenhouse gas that's produced
by human activity. Now a key property of the greenhouse gases, a radiative
property,
has to do with how these gases interact with the heat energy, the
radiation that Earth produces and tries to send out to space to cool off.
Well these greenhouse gases trap and store some of that heat energy as it's
trying to escape. Now this isn't quite the way an actual greenhouse works, an
actual greenhouse blocks wind currents that would help take away the heating
caused by the sunlight that's coming through the glass of the greenhouse. In
the atmosphere what's happening is that the Sun is warming the planet, the planet
is trying to cool off by sending heat energy out to space, but the greenhouse
gases intercept some of that heat energy and some of it they allowed to escape
out to space, but some of it they actually send back down towards the
surface of the earth. That means that the earth has to produce even more of that
outgoing heat energy to cool off enough to balance the heating of the Sun. And
that causes the temperature of Earth's surface to rise.
That's the greenhouse effect. So in this chapter, we focused on the components of
the climate system: the ocean, the atmosphere, the biosphere, the cryosphere.
We looked in detail at the structure and composition of the atmosphere, and we
focused in particular on the role of so-called greenhouse gases and the
greenhouse effect because as we will see the greenhouse effect is fundamental to
understanding the science of the human impact on our climate.
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