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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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.
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