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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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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