'Climate change in a shoebox': a critical review

The laboratory replication of the greenhouse effect appears deceptively simple. Using a cubic box illuminated by an ordinary lamp, one may show some of the phenomena present in the climate system. It is nonetheless necessary to use a lot of physical ingenuity to understand the complex interaction of radiative and convective phenomena which characterizes such a simple system. In this paper we introduce a critical review of some experiments in the literature and suggest a new and original experimental set up using an unusual gas; in this way we overcome some of the limitations of the typical laboratory experiment, confirming the possibility of using it in educational physics laboratories without any lack of physical plausibility.