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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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.
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