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
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Everything on our planet is unique in the universe so far as we know because this is the only planet with fire and that is the crux of the problem, humans have been burning things in our environment for probably as long as humans have existed.
In prehistoric times (greater than 12KYA) humanity was only burning readily available biomass on the surface. Carbon dioxide comes from natural sources like volcanoes and life that takes in oxygen and releases carbon dioxide.
Now the planet has been around for billions of years and for the most part ever since blue-green algae evolved there has been a net amount of oxygen added to the atmosphere. This increased dramatically with the arrival of trees; for millions of years nothing could release the carbon bound in wood. So forests simply built up huge amounts of dead fallen wood. This became buried underground by sediment and other processes.
These deposits became coal, and the dead algae that deposited on the bottom of the ocean in thick layers became oil. Humanity learned that both of these substances could be used as energy sources and industrial consumption started about 300 years ago. This consumption resulted in carbon dioxide being generated, at first the amount consumed was minimal but as industrialization continued across the world the usage year over year began to accelerate so that each year more consumption was occurring than the previous year. As humanity consumed more a noticeable and worrying trend began to occur the amount of carbon dioxide began to build up in the atmosphere.
Now what you need to understand is that when light(energy) from the sun strikes Earth some of it is infrared, and carbon dioxide is very good at reflecting infrared back where it came from. Now the bulk of the light from the Sun is in the visible spectrum peaking close to the start of Ultraviolet, which most of the upper atmosphere absorbs. But that visible light has energy and strikes a surface which emits some light back but absorbs most of the light. Now nothing can hold onto energy indefinitely, it’s like a game of hot potato, every time light is absorbed it is re-emitted in a lesser wavelength. So the ground radiates heat back into the atmosphere as infrared light, which gets reflected back to the ground trapping that energy in our atmosphere.
This process happens day after day and while the amount of carbon dioxide has been higher, (the dinosaurs experienced an atmosphere with nearly 4 times as much carbon dioxide) the planet during those times was referred to as a hot house Earth. We should be going further into an ice age, however because there is more energy in the atmosphere, this is not the case and there is concern that Earth will transition to a hot house Earth which will see the complete lack of any ice cover anywhere on the planet, which will further warm our planet since ice, which is great at reflecting visible light will be replaced with land or ocean which is great at absorbing light.
TL:DR the more stuff we burn, the more energy is released and trapped by the atmosphere. More energy amplifies all weather to extremes, relative to the historical climate humanity had enjoyed.
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