British scientists devise new way of observing greenhouse world

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ritish scientists have devised a new way to observe the greenhouse world, enabling researchers to measure with exquisite accuracy how atmospheric carbon dioxide builds up, migrates, evolves and absorbs radiation.

The technique will allow more accurate predictions about how much the Earth is likely to warm over the next few decades as a result of the inexorable rise in atmospheric CO2 – from car exhausts, power station chimneys and burning forests – that drives global warming and climate change.

More than a century has elapsed since the Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius first predicted the greenhouse effect, but scientists have until now only been able to establish the way CO2 absorbs light, with accuracies of about 5% at best.

Read the Guardian story - “A quantum of carbon: scientists devise new way to observe greenhouse effect”.