Climate Change Series Part 2: What is the "Greenhouse Effect"?

So you're too lazy to do your own research? Or maybe you don't trust the information on wikipedia? (You should, for most cases that is). Well, here comes the Jsaltblog to save you from your looming curiosity.

First of all, why do we call the pollution we create "greenhouse gases"? Well, let's look at what pollution we are talking about specifically. I'll focus on the major one in this post, carbon dioxide.

So what is carbon dioxide? Well, if you take a deep breath in, and feel the air enter your lungs, carbon dioxide is what you're breathing out!

But this isn't the only source of CO2 (that's how I'll be denoting carbon dioxide, and I'll explain why in a few seconds). CO2 is also produced in combustion, like when you have a bonfire! Combustion is basically just taking something that burns, interacting it with oxygen (which is in the air) and then producing steam (which is just water in gas form) and CO2. Yeah, that's the "explain like I'm 5 years old" version of combustion.

As you may know, CO2 is a molecular formula, which says to us science types that this "thing", or this gaseous substance, contains one carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms. Water has one as well! H2O, which means two hydrogen atoms attached to one oxygen atom. Simple right?

On Earth, we have this thing called the carbon cycle. It takes CO2 from the air and makes oxygen for us to breathe. When we breath, we produce more CO2 in the air and thus the cycle continues. I mean there is more to it than that but that's all we need to know for now.

So, if this carbon cycle takes care of our CO2 pollution, why are we so worried about greenhouse gases then? Well, since humans started making stuff in big industrial factories, we had to find a way to produce energy. When we produce energy, a lot of times we are heating something to very high temperatures, using that combustion thing I mentioned earlier. Then, the steam or energy we create from combustion is used to turn some mechanical stuff to create electricity! Electricity is why we have what we have today! It's awesome.

But by burning (combusting) all that stuff to make energy, CO2 is also made, as a by-product. For a long time, when we didn't know about the greenhouse effect, we would just shoot all that CO2 out of the factories and into the atmosphere, where it mixed with all the other stuff up there (like air). We still do that, but its regulated now. But now we have discovered that with all the CO2 we're putting up in the atmosphere, Earth's natural adaptation (nature) cannot keep up! We are overloading the carbon cycle!

As a consequence, we have more of this big, bulky CO2 molecule in the atmosphere. So what? Gas is transparent, what does it matter?

Well, first, let's look at what a greenhouse does. A greenhouse is a big glass building with plants in it. Greenhouses trap heat from the sun inside so that the plants have a warmer environment to grow in.

That's interesting, because you can think of our atmosphere as a big window, or a greenhouse for earth! It retains heat from the sun so life can, well, stay alive. We also have ice on Earth. A lot of it, especially at the north and south poles. That ice is responsible for reflecting a lot of the sun's light back out to space. If the Earth retained all the heat from the sun, our planet would look like a desert, without any life on it. We couldn't survive such a harsh environment. So the ice helps regulate the temperature of the air in our atmosphere by reflection.

Make sense so far?

Well with so much CO2 in the atmosphere, the sun's light is getting in, but all that reflected light (that helps us from not burning alive) isn't all getting sent back to space anymore. The more stuff we put in the atmosphere, the less light can leave it. CO2 is the major contributor because we produce SO MUCH OF IT globally. I won't bore you with numbers but it's quite shocking when you see the amount we shoot out now versus less than 100 years ago.

This is why we call it the greenhouse effect. Over time, a long time, the climate of the earth will change due to the added heat that wasn't there before. That's natural, because the sun gets hotter as it gets older, but as I talked about in the last post, the rate at which the heat it increasing it much too fast due to the greenhouse gasses. This has effects like melting the polar ice which causes rising water/ocean levels leading to mass flooding, and hurricanes.

I hope this gives you a little better of an understanding as to what a greenhouse gas is and why they are dangerous.

Next time, I will explore some of the things we can do to slow down our greenhouse gas contribution and reduce the overall effect of greenhouse gases!

Thanks for reading!
Please don't hesitate to comment any questions or points I may have missed!