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36 views94 pages

(Ebook) Global Warming Understanding The Forecast by David Archer ISBN 9781405140393, 1405140399 Full Digital Chapters

Educational resource: (Ebook) Global Warming Understanding the Forecast by David Archer ISBN 9781405140393, 1405140399 Instantly downloadable. Designed to support curriculum goals with clear analysis and educational value.

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Global Warming

ARCHER: “fm” — 2007/9/25 — 10:24 — page i — #1


Dedication

To George Lockwood
and the spirit of curiosity

ARCHER: “fm” — 2007/9/25 — 10:24 — page ii — #2


Global Warming
Understanding the forecast

David Archer
University of Chicago

ARCHER: “fm” — 2007/9/25 — 10:24 — page iii — #3


© 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

The right of David Archer to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the
UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by
the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Archer, David, 1960-


Global warming: understanding the forecast/David Archer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-4039-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-4039-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Global warming. 2. Global temperature changes. 3. Greenhouse effect, Atmospheric.
4. Global warming–Political aspects. 5. Global warming–Economic aspects.
I. Title

QC981.8.G56A73 2007
551.6–dc22
2006009415

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10.5/12.4 Minion


by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed and Bound by TJ International, Padstow, UK

The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which
has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices.
Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental
accreditation standards.

For further information on


Blackwell Publishing, visit our website:
www.blackwellpublishing.com

ARCHER: “fm” — 2007/9/25 — 10:24 — page iv — #4


Contents

Online models vi
Preface vii

1 Humankind and climate 1

Part I The greenhouse effect 7


2 Blackbody radiation 9
3 The layer model 19
4 Greenhouse gases 29
5 The temperature structure of the atmosphere 41
6 Heat, winds, and currents 54
7 Feedbacks 69

Part II The carbon cycle 83


8 Carbon on Earth 85
9 Fossil fuels and energy 99
10 The perturbed carbon cycle 113

Part III The forecast 127


11 Is it reliable? 129
12 The forecast 146
13 Decisions, decisions 169

Glossary 187
Index 193
Color plates appear between pages 168 and 169

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Dedication

To George Lockwood
and the spirit of curiosity

ARCHER: “fm” — 2007/9/25 — 10:24 — page ii — #2


Online models

A model of infrared radiation in the atmosphere


http://understandingtheforecast.org/Projects/infrared_spectrum.html
A model of visible + infrared radiation in the
atmosphere http://understandingtheforecast.org/Projects/full_spectrum.html
A model of the geological carbon cycle
http://understandingtheforecast.org/Projects/geocarb.html
ISAM Integrated assessment model for future climate change
http://understandingtheforecast.org/Projects/isam.html
A Hubbert’s Peak calculator
http://understandingtheforecast.org/Projects/hubbert.html
The Kaya Identity model for the growth of the human footprint
http://understandingtheforecast.org/Projects/kaya.html
Browsing the results of a coupled climate model
http://understandingtheforecast.org/Projects/bala.html

ARCHER: “fm” — 2007/9/25 — 10:24 — page vi — #6


Preface

Global Warming: Understanding the forecast is based on class lectures for undergraduate
nonscience majors at the University of Chicago, developed by Ray Pierrehumbert and
myself. The class serves as partial fulfillment of our general education or “core” science
requirements. We teach the class, and I have written this textbook, in a mechanistic
way. We aim to achieve an intuitive understanding of the ropes and pulleys of the
natural world, a fundamental scientific foundation that will serve the student longer
than would a straight presentation of the latest predictions.
The text aims at a single problem – assessing the risk of anthropogenic climate change.
The story ranges from science to economics to policy, through physics, chemistry,
biology, geology, and of course atmospheric science. We see the distant past and the
distant future. In my opinion, by looking at a problem from many angles, the student
gets a pretty decent view of how a working scientist really thinks. This is as opposed to,
say, taking a survey tour of some scientific discipline.
The text is suitable for students of all backgrounds. We do make some use of algebra,
mostly in the form of what are known as (gasp) story problems. The student will be
exposed to bits and pieces of chemistry, physics, biology, geology, atmospheric science,
and economics, but no prior knowledge of any of these topics is required. One can
learn something of what each field is about by learning what it is good for, within the
context of the common unifying problem of global warming.
I have provided a project associated with each chapter after the first, either a computer
lab or a paper-and-pencil exercise, suitable to do in lab sessions or as homework.
The first three are paper-and-pencil exercises, aimed at building a foundation for
understanding the computer lab exercises that follow. The models run on our computers
at the University of Chicago, which can be accessed through web pages. No special setup
of the computer is required and students can work just as equally well in a computer
lab as in Starbucks (actually, it would be interesting to see if that’s true).
This book has benefited through thoughtful reviews by Andy Ridgwell,
Stefan Rahmstorf, Gavin Schmidt, and a fourth anonymous reviewer. The web interface
to the models benefited from inputs by Jeremy Archer. The visible/infrared radiation
model was constructed by Ray Pierrehumbert and Rodrigo Caballero. The ISAM carbon
cycle model was provided by Atul Jain. The back cover photo of the glacier was taken
by Lonnie Thompson. The project in Chapters 11 and 12 makes use of model output
provided by G. Bala, and was plotted using ferret, developed at the NOAA PMEL.
Instructors may request a CD with solutions and artwork from the book via this
email address: [email protected]

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ARCHER: “fm” — 2007/9/25 — 10:24 — page viii — #8
1
Humankind and climate

Everyone always complains about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.
Mark Twain

The glaciers are melting, but is it us?


Is it really possible that human activity could alter the weather? As I write, it is a crisp,
clear fall day. What would be different about this day in a 100 years, in a world where
the chemistry of the atmosphere has been altered by human industrial activity?
There is no doubt that the Earth is warming. Mountain glaciers are disappearing. The
Arctic coast is melting. The global average temperature records are broken year after
year. The growing season has been getting longer. Plans are being made to abandon
whole tropical islands as they sink into the Pacific Ocean. Shippers are awaiting the
opening of the Northwest Passage that early explorers searched for in vain, with the
melting of the sea ice in the Arctic. The Atlantic has had so many hurricanes this season
that we are running out of letters in the English alphabet for names, having to resort to
Greek letters – we are now up to epsilon.
Of course, the world has variable weather all by itself, naturally. Is it likely that some
of our recent weather has been impacted by human-induced climate change, or how
much of this would have happened anyway? If humans are indeed changing the climate,
do we know if this is a bad thing? How does the future evolution of climate compare
with the climate impacts we may be seeing today?

Weather versus climate


We should distinguish at the outset between climate and weather. Weather is chaotic,
which means that it cannot be forecast very far into the future. Small errors in the
forecast grow with time, until eventually the forecast is nothing but an error. By climate,
we mean some sort of an average of the weather, say averaged over 10 years, more or less.
We cannot predict the details of rain versus shine on Tuesdays versus Saturdays very
far into the future, but we can hope to forecast the average rainfall in some location at
some time of year. Weather is chaotic, but by taking the average, we arrive at something
that is not chaotic, which seems to be in some ways predictable. We will return to this
topic in Chapter 6.
Human-induced changes in climate are expected to be small when compared with
the variability associated with weather. Temperature in the coming century is projected

ARCHER: “chap01” — 2007/9/25 — 10:15 — page 1 — #1


2 Humankind and climate

to rise by a few degrees centigrade (Chapter 12). This is pretty small compared with
the temperature differences between the equator and the poles, between winter and
summer, or even between day and night. One issue this raises is that it is trickier to
discern a change in the average when the variability is so much greater than the trend.
Careers are spent computing the global average temperature trend from the 100+ year
thermometer record (Chapter 11).
A small change in the average relative to a huge variability also raises the question
of whether a change in the average will even be noticeable. One way that the average
weather matters is in precipitation. Ground water tends to accumulate, reflecting rain-
fall over the past weeks and months and years. It may not matter to a farmer whether
it rains on a Tuesday or Saturday, but if the average rainfall in a region changes that
could spell the difference between productive and nonproductive farming. A change
in the average climate will change the growing season, the frequency of extreme hot
events, the distribution of snow and ice, the optimum growth localities of plants and
agriculture, and the intensity of storms.
In addition to day-to-day weather, there are longer-lasting variations in climate.
One past climate regime was the Little Ice Age, approximately 1650–1800, bringing
variable weather, by some records 1◦ C colder on average, to Europe. Before that was the
Medieval Optimum, perhaps 0.5◦ C warmer over Europe, coincident with a prolonged
drought in the American southwest. We will discuss the causes of these climate changes
in Chapter 11, but for now it is enough to observe that relatively small-sounding
average-temperature shifts produced noticeable changes in human welfare and the
evolution of history. The climate of the Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago, was
so different from today that the difference would be obvious even from space, and
yet the average temperature difference between then and today is only about 5–6◦ C
(Chapter 8). Another implication of these natural climate shifts is that it makes it more
difficult to figure out whether the present-day warming is natural or caused by rising
greenhouse gas concentrations and other human impacts on climate.

Forecasting climate change


The fundamental process that determines the temperature of the Earth is the balance
between energy flowing to the Earth from the Sun and energy flowing away from the
Earth into space. Heat loss from Earth depends on the Earth’s temperature, among
other things (Chapter 2). A hotter Earth loses heat faster than a cooler one, all else
being equal. The earth balances its energy budget by warming up or cooling down,
finding the temperature at which the energy fluxes balance, with outflow equaling
inflow. The feedback is analogous to a sink with water flowing in from a faucet. The
faucet fills the sink at some constant rate, while outflow down the drain depends on
the water level in the sink. The sink fills up until water drains out as fast as it comes in
(Chapter 3).
The increase in outgoing energy with increasing temperature of the Earth results in a
feedback which stabilizes the temperature of the Earth so that the energy fluxes in and
out balance each other (Chapter 7). It is possible to change the average temperature

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Humankind and climate 3

of the Earth by altering the energy flow either coming in or going out. In our sink, one
way to raise the water level is to turn up the faucet and wait a few minutes. The water
will rise until it finds a new equilibrium water depth. We can also alter the water level
by partly constricting the drain. Egg shells and orange peels work well for this purpose.
If the drain is partially obstructed, the equilibrium water level will rise.
The incoming energy to Earth might change if the Sun changes its brightness. It is
known that there is a small variation in the brightness of the Sun correlated with the
number of sunspots. Sometimes sunspots disappear altogether, presumably changing
the solar output. The Maunder Minimum was such a period, 1650–1700, and coincided
with the Little Ice Age.
Some of the incoming sunlight is reflected back to space without ever being absorbed
(Chapter 7). It we somehow make the Earth brighter, more reflective, it will tend to
cool. Clouds reflect light, and so does snow. Bare soil in the desert reflects more light
than vegetation does. Smoke emitted from coal-burning power plants contains particles
that can reflect light. Thus, changes in cloudiness, land cover, and smoke can change
climate.
The climate-forcing agent at the heart of the global warming problem is the green-
house effect from rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. CO2 , a greenhouse gas,
makes it more difficult for energy leaving the Earth to escape to space. Water vapor
and methane are also greenhouse gases. Most of the gases in the atmosphere are not
greenhouse gases, but are completely transparent to infrared (IR) light. The outgo-
ing energy from the Earth passes through them as if they were not there. Greenhouse
gases have the ability of absorb and emit IR light. The impact they have on climate
depends on their concentration because the more the gas, the more the light absorbed
(Chapter 4). The strength of the greenhouse effect also depends on the temperature
structure of the atmosphere (Chapter 5).
Water vapor is a tricky greenhouse gas because the amount of water vapor in the
atmosphere is determined by climate. Water tends to evaporate when the air is warm
and condense as rain or snow when the air is cool. Water vapor, it turns out, amplifies
the warming effects from changes in other greenhouse gases. This water vapor feedback
doubles or even triples the temperature change we expect from rising atmospheric CO2
concentration. Clouds are very effective at absorbing and emitting IR light, acting like
a completely impenetrable greenhouse gas. A change in cloudiness also affects the
incoming visible light energy flux by reflecting it (Chapter 7).
Human activity has the potential to alter climate in several ways. Rising CO2 concen-
tration from combustion of fossil fuel is the largest and longest lasting human-caused
climate forcing agent, but there are other greenhouse gases, such as methane (CH4 ) and
other hydrocarbon molecules, nitrous oxide, and ozone, the concentrations of which
are also changing because of human activities. Particles from smoke stacks and internal
combustion engines reflect incoming visible light, altering the heat balance. Particles
in otherwise remote clean air may change the average size of cloud droplets, which has
a huge but very uncertain impact on sunlight reflection (Chapter 10).
Many of these climate drivers themselves respond to climate, leading to stabilizing or
destabilizing feedbacks. There are several examples where the prehistoric climate record
shows more variability in climate than models tend to predict, presumably because there

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4 Humankind and climate

exist positive feedbacks in the real world that are missing in the models. For example,
climate cools, so a forest changes to a tundra, allowing more of the incoming sunlight
to be reflected to space, cooling the climate even more. A naïve model with forests that
does not respond to climate would underestimate the total amount of cooling. In the
global warming forecast, the feedbacks are everything. The forecast would be much
easier in a simpler world (Chapter 7).
The forecast for the coming century is also tricky because some parts of the climate
system take a long time to change, such as the melting of an ice sheet or the warming
of a deep ocean. Coming back to our sink analogy, not only do we have to estimate the
eventual change in the water level in the sink, but we also need to predict how quickly
it will rise. For the sink this is not so bad whereas for climate it makes prediction
considerably harder (Chapter 12).

Carbon, energy, and climate


Climate change from fossil fuel combustion is arguably the most challenging environ-
mental issue we face because CO2 emission is at the heart of how we produce energy,
which is pretty much at the heart of our modern standard of living. The agricultural
revolution, which supports a human population of 6 billion people and hopefully more,
has at its heart the industrial production of fertilizers, a very energy-intensive process.
It’s not easy to stop CO2 emission, and countries and companies that emit lots of CO2
have a strong interest in continuing to do so (Chapter 9).
The energy we extract from fossil fuels originated in the nuclear fires of the Sun.
Visible light carried the energy to Earth, where it was converted by photosynthesis in
plants into chemical energy in chemical bonds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other
elements. Plants have two motives for doing this, one to store energy and the other
to build CO2 molecules from the atmosphere into the biochemical machinery of life
(Chapter 8).
Most of the biological carbon we use for fossil fuels was photosynthesized millions
of years ago. Over geologic time, some of the biological carbon has been converted into
the familiar fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal. Coal is the most abundant of
these, while the types of oil and gas that are currently being extracted will be depleted in
a few decades (Chapter 9). Stored carbon energy is used to do work, in plants, animals,
and now in automobiles, by reacting the carbon with oxygen to produce CO2 . In living
things this process is called respiration, explaining why we need to breathe (to obtain
oxygen and get rid of CO2 ) and eat (to get biological carbon compounds) (Chapter 8).
CO2 is released into the atmosphere to join the beautiful cacophony that is the
carbon cycle of the biosphere. Trees and soils take up and release carbon, as does the
ocean. Cutting of tropical forests releases CO2 into the atmosphere, while forests in
the high latitudes appear to be taking up atmospheric CO2 . Most of the CO2 we release
into the atmosphere will eventually dissolve in the ocean, but this process takes several
centuries. A small fraction, about 10%, of the CO2 released will continue to alter climate
for hundreds of thousands of years into the future (Chapter 10).

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Humankind and climate 5

Assessing the risk


Is mankind creating a global warming trend? We can try to answer this question by
comparing the history of the Earth’s temperature with the history of the different
reasons why temperature might have changed, what we call climate forcings. The Sun
is more intense at some times than others. Volcanos occasionally blow dust into the
stratosphere where it reflects sunlight back to space. Greenhouse gases and smokestack
aerosols are two anthropogenic climate forcings. The conclusions we will come to are,
first, that it is getting warmer and, second, that it is easy to explain the warming as
caused by increased greenhouse gas concentrations, but impossible to explain them as
occurring naturally (Chapter 11).
The forecast for the climate of the coming century is for a temperature increase of
2–5◦ C by the year 2100. The amount of warming depends not only on the intensity of
feedbacks with water vapor and clouds, but also on the time-dependent evolution of the
climate system as it changes from one state to another. The feedbacks affect not only the
intensity but also the response time of climate to the new greenhouse gas concentrations.
An increase in temperature of a few degrees does not sound catastrophic, and for
some parts of the world it may not be. We can get an idea of the effect of such a
temperature change by looking into the past, at natural climate shifts that occurred
through the last 1000 years, perhaps 0.5–1◦ C changes, or at the end of the glacial
maximum, a warming of about 6◦ C on global average. Temperature changes as small
as the 0.5◦ C medieval warm time in Europe were associated with prolonged drought in
the American southwest, of sufficient intensity to spell the end of the Mayan civilization
(Chapter 12).
When we ask questions about the impact of global warming on humanity, we begin to
enter the realm of the social sciences, especially of economics. Using models, economists
can forecast the future just as meteorologists or climatologists can. One approach is
to compare the predicted costs of predicted climate change against the predicted costs
of avoiding climate change. It is of course difficult to put a monetary value on the
natural world, but for what it is worth the projections are that reducing CO2 emissions
substantially might cost a few percentage of the global net economic production. That
certainly would be a lot of money if you were looking at it piled in a heap, but in an
economy that is growing by a few percent per year, a cost of a few percent per year would
only set the trajectory of economic production back by a year or two (Chapter 13).
Economics is an awkward tool for use in global warming decision making, however.
For one thing, it seems crass to represent the demise of the natural world, biodiversity,
and wilderness as a simple monetary cost. Economics is not well suited to comparing
costs across long stretches of time because of a concept called the discount rate. Finally,
economic forecasts in general are trickier than climate forecasts because the underlying
laws of economics are not as simple and immutable as they are in the physical world.
Ultimately, the question of climate change may be a matter of ethics and fairness, as
much as one of profit and loss.
Greenhouse gas emission to the atmosphere is an example of a situation called the
tragedy of the commons. The benefits of fossil fuel combustion go to the individual

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6 Humankind and climate

whereas the costs of climate change are paid by everyone. In this situation there is a
natural tendency for everyone to overexploit the commons. The solution to this is some
form of collective regulation. International negotiations have resulted in an agreement
called the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to limit emissions of CO2 gas. The Kyoto Protocol,
if successful, would curtail emissions by about 6% below 1990 levels, while carbon cycle
models show that eventual cuts of order 50% would be required to truly stabilize the
CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
Carbon emissions could be lessened quite a bit by conservation and efficiency.
Sources of carbon-free energy such as wind and solar energy are rapidly being scaled up.
A forecast of the amount of energy that civilization will require in the coming century
suggests that large, new sources of energy may be required in the future. Nuclear energy
is essentially carbon-free but it would take a new nuclear power plant of current design
built every other day for the next 100 years to keep up with the forecast energy demand.
New ideas include solar cells on the Moon, beaming energy back to Earth as microwave
radiation, or high-altitude windmills, mounted on kites tethered in the jet stream.
With our growing technological and intellectual prowess, as well as our exploding
population, we are inevitably taking over the job of managing the biosphere. May we
do it wisely!

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Part I
The greenhouse effect

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ARCHER: “chap02” — 2007/9/25 — 10:16 — page 8 — #2
2
Blackbody radiation

Energy travels through a vacuum between the Sun and the Earth by means of
electromagnetic radiation, or light. Objects can absorb energy from light, and they can
also emit light energy, if the vibrations of their chemical bonds generate oscillations of the
electrical field. An object that can emit all wavelengths of light is called a blackbody. The
spectrum of light from a blackbody sparked the development of quantum mechanics, a
revolution in physics and natural philosophy.

Heat and light


Heat is simply the bouncing-around energy of atoms. Atoms in gases and liquids fly
around, faster if it is hot and slower if it is cold. Atoms with chemical bonds between
them stretch, compress, and bend those bonds, again more energetically at a high
temperature. Perhaps you knew this already, but have you ever wondered how we can
feel such a thing? Atoms are tiny things. We can’t really feel individual atoms. But it
doesn’t take any state-of-the-art laboratory technology to tell how fast the iron atoms
in your stove burner are bouncing around. All you have to do is touch it, if you dare.
Actually, another method may be occurring to you, that you could look at it; if it’s hot,
it will glow. It glows with blackbody radiation, which we’ll get back to later.
You can feel the hot stove because the energetic bounciness of the stove atoms gets
transferred to the atoms in your nerves in your fingers. The fast-moving atoms of the
burner bounce off the atoms in your finger, and the fast ones slow down a bit and the
slower ones bounce back with a little more energy than they started with. Biological sys-
tems have evolved to pay attention to this, which is why you can feel it, because too much
energy in our atoms is a dangerous thing. Chemical bonds break when they are heated
too much, and we could cook ourselves. Burning your finger by touching a hot electric
stove burner is an example of heat conduction, the easiest form of heat flow to imagine.

Energy through a vacuum


A thermos bottle is designed to slow the flow of heat through its walls. You can put
warm stuff in there to keep it warm, or cool stuff to keep it cool. Thermos bottles
have two walls: an inner and an outer wall. In between the two walls is an insulator.
A vacuum is a really good insulator because it has no molecules or atoms of gas in it
to conduct heat between the inner and outer walls of the thermos. Of course there will
still be heat conduction along the walls. Let’s think about a planet. There are no walls,

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10 The greenhouse effect

however thin, connecting a planet to anything. The space between the Earth and the
Sun is a pretty good vacuum. We know how warm it is in the sunshine, so we know
that heat flows from the Sun to the Earth. Yet, separating the Sun from the Earth is 150
million km of vacuum. How can heat be carried through a vacuum?
Light carries heat through a vacuum. Electrons and protons have a property called
electric charge. What an electric charge is, fundamentally, no one can tell you, but it
interacts through space via a property of the vacuum called the electric field. A positive
electric field attracts a negatively charged electron. This is how, in the olden days, a
TV tube hurled electrons toward the screen in a picture-tube television until electronic
flatscreens came along. It functioned by releasing an electron and then pushing it
around through the electric field. The electric field interacts with another property of
the vacuum called the magnetic field.
If the strength of the electric field at some location, measured in volts, changes with
time, and if the voltage oscillates up and down for example, this will cause a change
in the magnetic field, such as a compass would point to. This is how an electromagnet
works, converting electrical field energy into magnetic field energy. Going the other
direction, if the magnetic field changes, it can produce an electrical field. This is how a
generator works.
It turns out that the electric and magnetic fields in a vacuum fit together to form a
closed cycle like the ringing of a bell. The up-and-down oscillation in an electric field will
cause a complementary oscillation in the magnetic field, which reinforces the electric
field in turn. The two fields “ring” together. Such a little bundle of electric and magnetic
waves can in principle hurl through the vacuum forever, carrying energy with it.
The ringing of the electromagnetic field in light differs from the ringing of a piano
string, in that light can come in any frequency. Frequencies, of oscillators or of light
waves, have units of cycles per second (hertz, Hz) and are denoted by the Greek letter ν
(pronounced “new”). It turns out that different frequencies of light travel at the same
speed in a vacuum. Within some nonvacuum medium, such as air, water, or glass,
different frequencies of light might vary in their speeds a little bit, which is how a prism
separates white light into its component colors. But in a vacuum, all light travels at the
same speed. The speed of light in a vacuum, c, is a fundamental constant of nature.
The constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum makes it easy to relate the frequency
of light to its wavelength, the distance between the crests of a wave. We can figure out
what the relationship is between frequency and wavelength by thinking geometrically,
imagining the wavy line in Fig. 2.1 to be moving past us at some speed c. If the crests
are 1 cm apart and moving at 10 cm/s, then 10 crests would move past us every second.
Alternatively, we can make use of units. Pay attention to units, and they will lead you
to virtue, or at least to the right answer. Problem: assemble the two things we know, ν
and c, such that the units combine to be the same as the units of λ. Solution:
 
cm c[cm/s]
λ =
cycle ν[cycle/s]

Don’t take my word for it, check and make sure that the units are the same on both
sides of the equation.

ARCHER: “chap02” — 2007/9/25 — 10:16 — page 10 — #4


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