I wish I had known in 2000, that Stoat's William Connolley had transcribed and blogged the following note from The Philosophical Magazine 1909, vol 17, p319-320, The reason being that it is the journal in which John Tyndall FRS published his experiments on the same subject half a century earlier, a subject I wrote of here in 2014:
Bill presents" the full tect and his comment on why he thinks Wood's second-to-last paragraph " regrettable and wrong."
XXIV. Note on the Theory of the GreenhouseBy Professor R. W. Wood (Communicated by the Author)THERE appears to be a widespread belief that the comparatively high temperature produced within a closed space covered with glass, and exposed to solar radiation, results from a transformation of wave-length, that is, that the heat waves from the sun, which are able to penetrate the glass, fall upon the walls of the enclosure and raise its temperature: the heat energy is re-emitted by the walls in the form of much longer waves, which are unable to penetrate the glass, the greenhouse acting as a radiation trap. I have always felt some doubt as to whether this action played any very large part in the elevation of temperature. It appeared much more probable that the part played by the glass was the prevention of the escape of the warm air heated by the ground within the enclosure. If we open the doors of a greenhouse on a cold and windy day, the trapping of radiation appears to lose much of its efficacy. As a matter of fact I am of the opinion that a greenhouse made of a glass transparent to waves of every possible length would show a temperature nearly, if not quite, as high as that observed in a glass house. The transparent screen allows the solar radiation to warm the ground, and the ground in turn warms the air, but only the limited amount within the enclosure. In the "open," the ground is continually brought into contact with cold air by convection currents. To test the matter I constructed two The bulb of a themometer was inserted in each enclosure and the whole packed in cotton, with the exception of the transparent plates which were exposed. When exposed to sunlight the temperature rose gradually to 65 oC., the enclosure covered with the salt plate keeping a little ahead of the other, owing to the fact that it transmitted the longer waves from the sun, which were stopped by the glass. In order to eliminate this action the sunlight was first passed through a glass plate. There was now scarcely a difference of one degree between the temperatures of the two enclosures. The maximum temperature reached was about 55 oC. From what we know about the distribution of energy in the spectrum of the radiation emitted by a body at 55 o, it is clear that the rock-salt plate is capable of transmitting practically all of it, while the glass plate stops it entirely. This shows us that the loss of temperature of the ground by radiation is very small in comparison to the loss by convection, in other words that we gain very little from the circumstance that the radiation is trapped. Is it therefore necessary to pay attention to trapped radiation in deducing the temperature of a planet as affected by its atmosphere? The solar rays penetrate the atmosphere, warm the ground which in turn warms the atmosphere by contact and by convection currents. The heat received is thus stored up in the atmosphere, remaining there on account of the very low radiating power of a gas. It seems to me very doubtful if the atmosphere is warmed to any great extent by absorbing the radiation from the ground, even under the most favourable conditions. I do not pretent to have gone very deeply into the matter, and publish this note merely to draw attention to the fact that trapped radiation appears to play but a very small part in the actual cases with which we are familiar. |
Why is his second to last paragraph wrong?
Comments and correction to this section are welcome!Firstly, note that unlike the experiments described earlier, this paragraph merely expresses his opinion.
Second, although the troposphere is subject to convection, the stratosphere is not.
Third, in contradiction to his assertion about "the very low radiating power of a gas", the troposphere is largely opaque to infra-red radiation, which is why convection is so important in moving heat up from the surface. Only in the higher (colder) atmosphere where there is less water vapour is the atmosphere simultaneously somewhat, but not totally, transparent to infra-red and thus permits radiation to play a part.
W. M. Connolley, June 2000.
Apart from the opacity of plate glass to 10 micron room temperature blackbody radiation, I think the salient difference is one of infrared optical depth- Wood's
" enclosures of dead black cardboard, one covered with a glass plate, the other with a plate of rock-salt of equal thickness." filled with ambient air"
cannot have been very large because optical crystals of NaCl were not grown commercially until decades later, and clear plates or cleavages of natural rock salt rarely exceed ten centimeter size- Tyndall had his own custom made for the 1859 apparatus illustrated in The Philosophical Magazine:
If Wood built ten cm. wide cubic windowed black boxes- longer ones would need a moving telescope mount to keep the sun shining down them-they would contain a liter of ambient air ( then around 300 ppm CO2) per 10 cm of depth, or roughly 300 micrograms of CO2 and 10 milligrams of water vapor at 55% humidity
The atmospheric column as whole however weighs roughly a kilo per cm2, or 100 kg per 100cm2 and proportionately present an infrared optical depth some five orders of magnitude smaller than Wood's thermometer enclosures. So the roughly 45 degree solar warming he reports is the work of the carbon black on his "dead black cardboard enclosures " not the micrograms of CO2 within them.
Tyndall bought a 3,000 fold increase in his experiment's thermometric finesse by the simple expedient of filling his rock salt windowed tubes completely with CO2 or hydrocarbon vapors instead of air.
