The Greenhouse Effect - What Is It?

The Greenhouse Effect - What Is It?

The Greenhouse Effect - What Is It?

The greenhouse effect is a process that can be either natural or manmade. The natural greenhouse effect keeps the Earth habitable. The climate is kept relatively warm when the atmospheric greenhouse gases absorb thermal radiation from the Earth's surface and re-radiates it in all directions.Because one of the directions the energy is re-radiated is towards the Earth's surface (and the lower atmosphere) the temperature on our planet is higher than it would have been if we were only heated by solar radiation.Although it is called the greenhouse effect this natural mechanism is actually different than what happens in a greenhouse. In that kind of a physical structure the inside air is isolated so that heat isn't lost by convection.However, when most people talk about the greenhouse effect they are referring to what has happened to our planet due to the manmade addition of gases to the atmosphere. These gases were released by the burning of fossil fuels such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal. These additional gases have trapped some of the aforementioned radiation that would otherwise have escaped from our planet. In so doing they have made our planet warmer than it would have been.It's as if a blanket was thrown over the planet. That blanket is now keeping the upper layers of the atmosphere colder and the lower layers warmer.Water vapor is responsible for approximately eighty- to ninety percent of the natural greenhouse effect. The balance is caused primarily by carbon dioxide and methane, along with a number of minor gases.Over the past 150 years our planet has been getting warmer. Many scientists believe that this has been caused by the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has been the result of fossil fuels being burned, cement being produced, and the rainforests being burned.In 1960 the Mauna Loa observatory measured a 313 ppm concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 2010 it had soared almost 20% to 389 ppm. As a point of reference, ice core data shows that the maximum level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been less than 300 ppm. Over the eight hundred thousand years prior to the Industrial Revolution the level of carbon dioxide varied from 180 ppm to 270 ppm.The fundamental factor effecting climate variations over those 800,000 years, according to peleoclimatologists, has been the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.Venus, the second planet from our sun, has experienced a runaway greenhouse effect. That involves water vapor and carbon dioxide. It led to the evaporation of all greenhouse gases on that planet.

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