Energy Balance Climate Models

Chapter 2Global Average Models

2.1 Temperature and Heat Balance

Most textbooks on elementary physics and astronomy introduce estimates of the temperatures of the planets using the equality of the planet's solar absorption and its emitted radiation flux densities.¹ Usually, the textbook starts with the planet radiating as a blackbody according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law.

This is a convenient way to introduce this remarkable law. Stefan was the first to find the dependence by observations in the laboratory and Boltzmann was the first to show ...