What exactly is the science? I know green house gasses heat us up but in layman’s terms what happened, and why did it happen? I live in a rural area, and work a blue collar job. My coworkers all think it’s fake, even though I point out current world events. I don’t exactly understand it myself exactly but I know it’s real. Explain like I’m five please
In: 4268
Fossil fuels are a huge reservoir of carbon. When we extract this carbon and put it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide through burning it we change the composition of the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is generally transparent to solar radiation. So what happens is sunlight travels through the atmosphere and smashes into the surface which causes the surface atoms to vibrate and release that energy as heat.
Carbon dioxide is opaque to infrared radiation (heat) so the sunlight is unobstructed on entry but the resulting thermal radiation is now being blocked more than it was previously due to the presence of more carbon dioxide.
The effect of this is that the effective altitude where heat is radiated into space is raised which lowers the efficiency of the process because the temperature is colder at a higher altitude. The net result of this is that temperate of the atmosphere has to increase to balance the reduction in radiative cooling and there’s your global warming and increased weather instability due to there being more energy in the atmosphere.
Oil companies actively fought against banning lead in gasoline, despite knowing that it’s neurotoxic, because it was so profitable.
Food companies happily advertise fat, salt and sugar despite the health problems, because it’s so profitable. Up to 100 years ago we died of bacterial, viral or fungal infections. These days the big killers are heart disease, cancers and obesity complications, all caused by unhealthy lifestyle.
So why shouldn’t the oil companies lie again to preserve their profits?
Science? Well, half the world’s climate experts say that we are heading for a tipping point, beyond which it’s too difficult to model what the consequences might be, and the other half **completely agree with them**.
Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is like a “blanket” over the earth that warms things up.In terms of coral reefs a lot of the excess Co2 gets absorbed by the oceans, increasing acidity. There already is a great example. The planet, Venus’s run away greenhouse effect makes it the hottest planet in the solar system despite being the 2nd closest from the sun. Venus’s atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide.
>I learned about coral reef deaths in 7th grade, I’m now 30
That’s how – by doing little about it after we learned that we need to do something
The most important part of the science is human behaviour and global politics. Humanity has known this would be a problem for over a century, and has had the solutions for 50 years or more. But the shifts in industry required would make a different set of people rich to those who got rich off exploiting fossil fuels, so they used some of their vast wealth to bribe politicians and pay media to brainwash the public. Thus the issue is clouded in deliberately poor education (as shown by the fact that you don’t know how it works and your coworkers think it’s fake…), nonsense “scientific controversy” or “it’ll be too expensive to fix” or “we need to do something but not like that”, etc etc etc.
Very long, because I like explaining through metaphor, but I promise there’s no scientific jargon so bear with me:
CO2 is one carbon atom + two oxygen atoms. Oxygen is easy to find. So is carbon. *Every time you burn something* what you’re *really* doing is adding oxygen to carbon and creating CO2. The oxygen comes from the air. The carbon comes from the ground.
Every living thing is made of carbon. Trees are carbon. And when trees and other living things die and spend a long, long, long time getting pressed by the earth, they turn into oil–and that oil is made of carbon too.
But where did that carbon come from originally? Funny enough, it came from the air. Plants breathe CO2. They breathe *out* oxygen. So what did they keep? They kept the carbon. And they used that carbon to grow.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Others have explained it better in the comments, and there are many YouTube videos explaining the greenhouse effect, so I won’t go into it here. What confuses many people is that everything we’re doing has always been there, so why is it bad *now?*
It’s bad because plants spent hundreds of millions of years collecting carbon from the atmosphere through CO2 and putting it into the ground. Think of it like money. Imagine an immortal billionaire starts collecting money, slowly, forever. And then one day that immortal billionaire decides they’re sick of the money and they dump it all into the economy. They give everyone their money. What would happen? Easy: chaos. The worth of everything would become fucked. The value of money would become fucked. The relation of our money to everyone else’s money would become fucked, and what even is the point of working anymore if everyone is rich? But if no one’s working then who’s making the things we’re buying?
Everything became fucked because the economy, although incredibly complex, is sensitive–in fact, it’s sensitive *because* it’s complex. It requires a delicate *balance* where everything works as it should with only the kind of minimal upsets that it’s used to. Eventually, in this scenario, the economy will rebalance. But that balance will be different. Maybe, after everything is said and done, bananas will be $50 a bundle and the US will have twice the number of people and farming won’t exist as a job, it’ll be outsourced to Ukraine. It’ll look different, but it’ll rebalance.
What we’re doing is the same thing as that billionaire. We’re releasing a massive reservoir of CO2 (and methane, and other greenhouse gases) to a very well-balanced planet–that is to say, economy–and fucking it all to kingdom come because *that balance cannot handle it.*
Just like an economy with a sudden flood of money will compensate to a *new normal,* so will our climate. But that new normal will be *devastating* to us. Everything alive requires the balance we’re used to. The new balance that the Earth will eventually achieve will cause the death of everything, except for the few organisms that adapted fast enough. But we probably won’t be one of them (EDIT: this is my opinion, developed as a non-climate scientist who studied climate change when I was a student–agree or disagree, I don’t care). New life will rise again, adapted to that new normal, and we probably won’t be part of it, and the world will never look the same again.
P.S.: This didn’t fit anywhere else, but this process, once it gets going, is very difficult to stop. It feeds itself (which is why the term is “positive feedback loop”). For example: when things decay, they release CO2, which warms the earth, which causes things to decay faster, which causes things to release CO2 faster, which causes… That’s what the runaway part of the runaway greenhouse effect describes.
Disclaimer: not an economist
There is an interesting aspect to point out. The CO2 content of the atmosphere is actually very **low**. It’s now 421 parts per million (ppm), or about 0.042%.
In pre-industrial times, it was 280 ppm (0.028%)
By 1950, it had only risen to 310 ppm
Those making climate denial arguments in bad faith will try to tell you “CO2 has only increased by **0.14%**”. Do not be fooled by this idiocy. The increase is **50%**.
A point I habemt seen touched on yet is that the greenhouse effect also heats up the water on our planet.
The oceans absorb so much of the excess heat our planet puts off and distributes it elsewhere. We are at a point now where our oceans are having a really hard time recycling that heat because the places that were once permanently frozen are much,*much* smaller now…due to the excess heat in the atmosphere that cannot be absorbed by the already warm oceans.
We are fucked, and there’s not much we can do that will provide a visible change in our lifetimes. Maybe our children will see change if we act right now
Oil is basically liquid carbon, coal is carbon in solid form. Using it in engines burns it, burning causes it to attach to oxygen, making CO2. Up until the Industrial Revolution the process of removing and adding CO2 to the atmosphere was pretty balanced, but once the human race invented steam engines powered by burning coal we started pumping CO2 into the air at ever higher concentrations. Once we found out we could use oil to build even better engines, we went absolutely BERSERK on building things that burned oil and pumped out CO2, just because it were very efficient ways of producing energy.
Doing that has REALLY messed up the balance of gasses in the atmosphere to a level were the CO2 is starting to form a bigger blanket of molecules that traps heat inside our atmosphere.
Let’s take a step back to explain that: our planet is habitable to our current needs because of the mix of gases giving us breathable air at sealevels (up to a few thousand meters high). At the same time, at higher altitudes, there’s gases that trap in the heat that radiates into us from the sun. Less “greenhouse gasses”, and our planet could be a lot colder, and inversely, a lot more and it’ll trap in more heat. These gasses are literally a blanket around the planet, and the CO2 is the down.
So when we started pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere starting from the Industrial Revolution we started adding more and more down into our blanket. At first we didn’t know what effect it could really have, then we didn’t really know how long the effects would last.
After THAT though… Well, we started getting wise to the effects of burning massive amounts of carbon based fuels, but by then we had built enormous economies based on the selling of oil and gasses. And what happened was that the Oil Companies started literally paying scientists to produce studies that would say that climate change was fake, that people were overreacting, that it was all a hoax,… ANYTHING to protect their income.
And that’s about how we ended up where we are now. We’re STILL pumping massive amounts of fossil fuels out of the earth just to burn them, because it’s “easy”, because many people believed the lies of “personal responsibility” that BP forced on the public. We’ve known for decades already, certainly since very concerted efforts in the ’70s and ’80s, that fossil fuels had to stop being used ASAP, but big money has caused many governments to just ignore the problem, because without oil money they’d lose a LOT of money and power.
I learned “the bathtub metaphor” to better conceptualize greenhouse gases and global warming. The planet is like a bathtub and holds a certain amount of CO2. Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the tub. Trees contribute to the amount of CO2 that drains from the tub at a steady rate. The amount of CO2 in the tub determines the rate at which the planet’s temperature rises or falls. When the amount of CO2 entering the tub matches the amount that is being drained, we’re at net zero carbon emissions.
We’re not at net zero yet, so the amount of CO2 in the tub is continuing to rise. Once we’re at the break-even point, then the magnitude of our warming will stabilize. So once we do finally reach net zero, now we will continue to have global warming at that rate. The only way to slow it is to start draining the tub.
The sobering reality of this metaphor is that even reducing our carbon emissions to net zero doesn’t magically make all that CO2 in the tub disappear.
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