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
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
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