Carbon dioxide and climate: an astrophysical perspective

Abstract

In this survey the earth is viewed from the astrophysical perspective, i.e. using global mean values of environmental parameters. The role of carbon dioxide is described in the processes of energy transfer from the earth's surface to space, which determine “global climate” as measured by the mean surface temperature. Analogies and differences between the problems of the terrestrial atmosphere and those of the solar and stellar atmospheres are examines, both in the computation of model atmosphere and in remote sensing of atmospheric temperature and composition. Subsequently, the temporal astrophysical perspective, with a review of the evolution of CO 2 abundance and climate on astrophysical or geological time scales, on earth as on Venus (the runaway greenhouse) and on Mars is introduced. Variation of CO 2 may have been critical to the maintenance of an environment in which life could originate and evolve, and may itself have been affected by life. On human time scales, the recent and continuing increase in atmospheric CO 2 raises new problems, which are briefly surveyed. It is argued, that the differential greenhouse effect of increased CO 2 in the earth's atmosphere is essentially identical to the “blanketing effect” of spectral lines on the temperature structure of stellar atmospheres. The methods used by astrophysicists in such studies are reviewed and compared with those used to evaluate the differential greenhouse effect of CO 2 in radiative-convective models of the earth's atmosphere. The latter methods remain relatively crude, but recent results by different authors are in reasonably good agreement; however, the astrophysical perspective, i.e. the use of one-dimensional global mean models, remains a gross simplification of the real complexity of the earth's climate system, which is also true in stellar atmospheres.