Bad vibrations
Bad vibrations? A brief explanation of the heat trapping properties of CO2
I'm pickin' up good vibrations She's giving me the excitations Brian Wilson / Mike Love / The Beach Boys
Basic mechanism for the absorption of radiation
When radiation (visible light, infra red, ultra violet …) impacts an atom or a molecule, if the frequency of that radiation matches the natural resonant frequency of the molcule energy it is momentarily absorbed, 'exciting' the molecule into a higher energy state. After a short time the same amount of energy is re-radiated and the molecule returns to its normal or 'ground' state. Although the radiation is only 'borrowed' this capture/release is nevertheless an absorption mechanism, because the re-radiation occurs in a random direction so in the simplified 1-dimensional case there would be a 50% probability the radiation were sent back in the direction it came from. It can be understood that for a sufficiently deep and concentrated layer of molecules, this scattering and attenuation could amount to absorption.