All About Global Warming

You've often heard about global warming and how it's damaging the planet on the news but do you really understand what's going on. If not then keep reading to find out.

Global warming is essentially the gradual longterm warming of the earth's surface. Simply put; when we talk about global warming we're referring to the fact that the earth's average surface temperature is slowly but surely rising and the mechanics behind global warming lie in the greenhouse effect.

The principle of the greenhouse effect is that the amount of energy absorbing gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor and ozone, in the atmosphere, determine how much of the sun's energy will be trapped within the confines of earth's atmosphere therefore maintaining or rising the average temperature of the surface, or how much will escape back into space.

Our neighbor Venus is at the high end of this scale with so much greenhouse gas-namely carbon dioxide- that the average surface temperature is 860° F. Most of the sun's infrared energy is trapped.

Mars on the other hand has very little greenhouse gases. So the majority of the sun's energy is lost. Therefore Mars surface temperature can be very low at times.

But according to data gathered by the NASA Earth Observatory, Earth's average temperature has been rising steadily since 1880 and we attribute this to the fact that the concentration of green house gases in the atmosphere has risen dramatically since then, hence global warming.

The greenhouse gases' ability to alter climates was suspected to have been a major factor in the list of causes that brought about the end of the ice ages. In 1859 an English scientist by the name of John Tyndall of the 1800s ice age debate found that the most important green house gases were water vapor and second most CO₂. Then in 1869 Svante Arrhenius calculated the amount of decrease in CO₂ needed to reinstate an ice age. Reversing this figure would mean global warming instead which is what's happening.