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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It’s amazing that so many people think man-made climate change is fake. For literally OVER 100 years (long before anyone was getting research grants from the government – can’t believe some people are dim enough to believe that is a driver) scientists have known and made public the fact that adding carbon to the atmosphere creates climate change. For anyone to believe that this is some sort of conspiracy is an incomprehensible level of ignorance about how the world works.
“… plants spent hundreds of thousands of millions years…”
This answer is great, but the above number is too big. You may have just meant it as a turn of phrase. In reality the Great Oxygenation event (caused by blue-green algea) was 2.4 billion years ago. Hundreds of thousands of millions is hundreds of billions.
Ok, I am a petroleum engineer,my dad has been in oil and gas for 30 years and I am in oil and gas for 10 years now. So I’ll speak about oil and gas only, for an idea about coal mining multiply that by x10.
Here’s my 2 cents
Most people think that oil is only used for fueling cars and planes, but Oil is basically in everything around you from your plastic straw to the airplanes. Roughly 80% of the world energy is from fossil fuels ( Including coal). All the wishy woshy statistics try to make it look greener, but renewables are actually responsible for less than 5% of the energy generated world wide. Statistics focous on Europe,United States of America and maybe Australia (because data are easliy obtained), what about Africa, Asia and Russia ?
So now, that doesn’t look so bad so why fossil fuels are actually screwing the planet at every turn? From the drilling to consumption fossil fuels are causing all sort of environmental damage that is beyoned repair.
Drilling for oil and gas is done by literally breaking the underground layers to thousands of meters. That means that you dug a whole in earth so deep you destabilized that area for good ( you can’t build on it). We use mud in drilling (to cool the drill bit and lubricate the ground and other reasons), where do you think that mud is thrown ? yup you’re right buried beside the site. some minor damages including but not limited to, Any animals or sea creatures within the area of operations are either killed or moved if they are lucky. The pollution of the area is a given, once the area is explored , the camp remains is left there if it’s less economical to retrieve items.
Is that the worst ?
Noooo, that’s the best case scnario, that’s if you didn’t have an accident. look up deep water horizon oil spill environmental impact.
So we did all that damage, is that it ?
not even close, let’s transport the oil and gas. Well , oil is easy to transport, gas however cost a lot to transfer and to treat sometimes. If transfering the gas isn’t economical it’s BURNED on platform. Yes, you read correctly 24 hours of gas burning on the platform because it’s not an profitable to transfer it. It varies from one country to an other how much gas you can burn, but it’s roughly in Million Square Cubic Feets.
So the gas is burned if it’s not a huge amount (which is 70% of the cases), the oil is transferred to GOSP (Gas Oil Separation Plant). It’s treated and gets desalinated by injecting fresh water into it to decrease salinity, so fresh water is injected to decrease salinity (wasted tons of water). Then, guess where that water is disposed of ? yup, either in the sea killing all the sea life in the area and normally it contains residue of oil (there is a limit in PPM to be fair which is committed to while there is any environmental inspection in some countries, any other time it’s a luck game).
Is that’s it ?
almost there, so we’re lucky enough and we got gas, the high pressure gas is treated and still the low pressure gas is burned 24/7. Most of the time it contains Hydrogen sulfide ( Poisionus explosive gas) and other lovely gases to get rid of.
That’s only the environmental impact of extracting the fossil fuel, not transporting and consuming it.
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.
The damnation is this: there is enough oil in the ground to make the earth uninhabitable. What happened: we discovered oil’s usefulness and started building our modern world around this until we are very dependent on it. Why it’s happening: a great amount of money. power, and convenience comes from use of oil; no one wants to give that up and it seems we are willing to slowly boil ourselves rather than show some restraint.
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