| name | climate-science |
| description | Climate physics, forcing, feedback, and attribution. Covers the greenhouse effect and radiative forcing, climate sensitivity, fast and slow feedbacks, the paleoclimate record, detection and attribution science, regional climate impacts, and the distinction between weather, climate variability, and forced climate change. Use when reasoning about global warming mechanisms, interpreting temperature or CO2 records, evaluating attribution claims for extreme events, or distinguishing signal from natural variability. |
| type | skill |
| category | environmental |
| status | stable |
| origin | tibsfox |
| modified | false |
| first_seen | "2026-04-12T00:00:00.000Z" |
| first_path | examples/skills/environmental/climate-science/SKILL.md |
| superseded_by | null |
Climate Science
Climate science is the intersection of atmospheric physics, oceanography, paleoclimatology, and statistics, unified by the question of how Earth's energy budget behaves across scales from weather to billions of years. This skill covers the core machinery: the greenhouse effect, radiative forcing, climate sensitivity, feedbacks, the paleoclimate record, detection and attribution, and regional impacts. The content is grounded in the published IPCC literature and avoids both dismissal and catastrophism.
Agent affinity: commoner (systems and feedbacks), leopold (ecological consequences at land scale), carson (persistent perturbations and their pathways)
Concept IDs: envr-greenhouse-effect, envr-climate-feedbacks, envr-climate-evidence, envr-attribution-science
The Planetary Energy Budget
At equilibrium, the energy Earth absorbs from the Sun equals the energy Earth radiates to space. The global mean incoming solar flux at the top of atmosphere is 340 W/m^2 (the solar constant ~1361 W/m^2 divided by 4 for the Earth's sphere-to-disk ratio). Of that:
- ~100 W/m^2 is reflected back to space (planetary albedo ~0.3, from clouds, ice, and surfaces).
- ~240 W/m^2 is absorbed by the atmosphere and surface.
- ~240 W/m^2 must leave as longwave infrared for energy balance to hold.
If only the surface radiated to space directly, the mean surface temperature required to balance 240 W/m^2 would be about 255 K (-18 C). Earth's actual mean surface temperature is about 288 K (+15 C). The 33-kelvin difference is the greenhouse effect.
The Greenhouse Effect
Greenhouse gases โ water vapor, CO2, CH4, N2O, O3, and halocarbons โ absorb outgoing infrared radiation and re-emit it in all directions. The net effect is that radiation to space originates from higher, colder layers of the atmosphere, so the surface must warm to drive enough upward radiation to restore balance.
Why some molecules absorb infrared and others do not
Symmetric diatomic molecules (N2, O2) have no permanent or changing dipole moment during vibration, so they do not absorb or emit in the infrared. Polyatomic molecules (H2O, CO2, CH4) have vibrational modes that change the dipole moment and therefore couple to IR radiation. This is why 99% of the atmosphere (N2 + O2) is transparent to outgoing longwave, and a few hundred parts per million of CO2 dominates the outgoing radiation budget at specific wavelengths.
Current contributions
Of the 33-kelvin natural greenhouse effect, roughly 50% is water vapor, 25% is clouds, 20% is CO2, and 5% is other gases (CH4, N2O, O3). Water vapor is the largest contributor but is a feedback, not a forcing โ its concentration depends on temperature (Clausius-Clapeyron: saturation vapor pressure rises exponentially with temperature). CO2, CH4, and other long-lived gases are : their concentration is set by sources and sinks that operate largely independently of the year-to-year temperature.
