When talking about climate change or global warming, people often use the terms greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases. The greenhouse effect is an effect in which heat on Earth gets trapped close to the surface because of greenhouse gases. The way greenhouse gases work can be easily described as a blanked, which is wrapped around Earth. The other way to describe how the greenhouse gases work, is the same way, as in the greenhouse, where you grow your vegetables, the glass in there is acting the same way as the greenhouse gases by keeping the heat in the greenhouse. The greenhouse effect was first described by scientists in the 1800s. If there were no greenhouse gases, then the Earth would be a lot colder. The most common greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, and water vapor.
Greenhouse gases also occur naturally, and they are part of our atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere is mix of different gases. Without the atmosphere, life on Earth wouldn’t be possible. It contains the air we breathe, it protects us from dangerous ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun, it traps greenhouse gases, and it prevents the extreme temperature changes between day and night. If there weren’t an atmosphere, the Earth would be like a big “snowball,”, with atmosphere the average planet temperature is around 15 degrees Celsius. It is also called a “Goldilocks” effect on planet because the temperature on Earth is perfect for all the living creatures here. Other than the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is mostly made of nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%). So that leaves only less than 1% for greenhouse gases. In the past century, the mixture of different gases in the atmosphere has been slowly changing because humans are adding to the mixture too much carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels, and due to that, more heat is getting stuck in the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases are usually associated with human activities, and global warming or climate change is referred to as greenhouse gas emissions or climate pollution. Since the Industrial Revolution and the invention of coal-powered engines, more and more greenhouse gases have been added to the atmosphere. Also in the late 1920s, people started adding to the atmosphere a man-made gas called chlorofluorocarbon. The amount of emissions is getting higher almost every day, but there have been some events when the greenhouse gas called carbon dioxide level has dropped. For example, during COVID-19, people didn’t travel as much as they used to. Since 1750, almost 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide have been added to the atmosphere. The United States adds the biggest amount of emissions to the atmosphere (25% of the global total), followed by the European Union and the United Kingdom. China adds around 15% of emissions. African countries and other small island nations add the least amount of emissions to the atmosphere, and at the same time, they are the most vulnerable.
In conclusion, the concentration of human-caused greenhouse gases is the highest that it has been ever before, and the planet is getting warmer. The temperatures have been raised by 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, most of the heating happened in the last decades. Most of the greenhouse gases are released from the burning of fossil fuels for electricity and transportation, as well as from the growth of land usage. At the same time, we can’t forget that without the greenhouse effect, humans and all other living creatures wouldn’t be able to live on Earth.
Sources:
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/19/what-is-the-greenhouse-effect/
https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/atmosphere/what-is-atmosphere
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/greenhouse-effect-101#gases
