What is the Greenhouse Effect?

Table Of Content

• Acidification of Water Bodies
• Metrics for the greenhouse effect
• Which of the following is not a greenhouse gas: methane; nitrogen; carbon dioxide; nitrous oxide?
• List gases which are responsible for the greenhouse effect.
• Methane
• Bodies other than Earth
• Fossil Fuel Combustion and the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect

If enough greenhouse gas emissions could be generated, the atmosphere might start to thicken enough to retain more heat and allow plants to live on the surface. Greenhouse gases, or “GHG” for short, are atmospheric gases that trap heat from sunlight reflecting off the Earth’s surface. This is a naturally occurring phenomenon and helps keep our planet at a suitable temperature for life. However, since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have been releasing additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, altering the gas composition of our air. The greenhouse gas effect is caused by certain gases called greenhouse gases. The molecules of greenhouse gases absorb and reemit thermal radiation, much like a tuning fork absorbs and reemits sound waves tuned to its frequency.

Acidification of Water Bodies

Oil and gas extraction, coal mining, and waste landfills account for 55 per cent of human-caused methane emissions. Approximately 32 per cent of human-caused methane emissions are attributable to cows, sheep and other ruminants that ferment food in their stomachs. Manure decomposition is another agricultural source of the gas, as is rice cultivation.

Metrics for the greenhouse effect

Solar for All will expand existing low-income solar programs and launch new ones. The 60 selected applicants will serve households in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and territories, as well as increase access to solar for Tribes. EPA has selected 49 state-level awards totaling approximately $5.5 billion, six awards to serve Tribes totaling over $500 million, and five multistate awards totaling approximately $1 billion.

Which of the following is not a greenhouse gas: methane; nitrogen; carbon dioxide; nitrous oxide?

A climate driver with a positive RF value indicates that it has a warming effect on the planet; a negative value represents cooling. Water vapor is actually the world's most abundant greenhouse gas, but it is not tracked the same way as other greenhouse gases because it is not directly emitted by human activity and its effects are not well understood. Similarly, ground-level or tropospheric ozone (not to be confused with the protective stratospheric ozone layer higher up) is not emitted directly but emerges from complex reactions among pollutants in the air.

List gases which are responsible for the greenhouse effect.

Graphic: Major Greenhouse Gas Sources, Lifespans, and Possible Added Heat - Science@NASA

Graphic: Major Greenhouse Gas Sources, Lifespans, and Possible Added Heat.

Posted: Thu, 22 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Even burning all of the planet’s fossil fuel resources, according to some scientists, would not necessarily take us down the road toward a climate meltdown. By studying why Venus’s climate went in such a different direction with regard to habitability, we can probably learn valuable lessons about climate change – and avoid reaching the point of no return. The good news is that we have the ability to rein in runaway greenhouse gas emissions.

Indeed, the GWP for these gases can be in the thousands to tens of thousands, and they have long atmospheric lifetimes, in some cases lasting tens of thousands of years. Since the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s and early 1800s, people have been releasing larger quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect happens when certain gases, which are known as greenhouse gases, accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), ozone (O3), and fluorinated gases. NASA has observed increases in the amount of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

Some of the heat from the sun is absorbed by the seats, the dashboard and the carpeting and floor mats. Atmospheric CO2 levels have increased by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, from about 280 parts per million (ppm) in the 1800s to 400 ppm today. The last time Earth's atmospheric levels of CO2 reached 400 ppm was during the Pliocene Epoch, between 5 million and 3 million years ago, according to the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. At our current pace, the world will blow its entire “carbon budget” by around 2030.

Bodies other than Earth

The greenhouse effect, which influences Earth’s average temperature, affects many of the processes that shape global climate and ecosystems. This model shows some of the other parts of the Earth system that the greenhouse effect influences, including the water cycle and water temperature. In agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, the world has begun to take action to try to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. It remains to be seen whether these efforts will succeed in averting disaster or will prove to be too little too late. We often hear about the "greenhouse effect" in the negative context of global warming — it's why the glaciers are melting and climate patterns are undergoing dangerous shifts. But the greenhouse effect is not actually a bad thing in itself — it's a crucial and positive part of Earth's energy balance.

Fossil Fuel Combustion and the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect

In this case, the rate of thermal radiation emission to space is greater than the rate at which thermal radiation is emitted by the surface. Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas as it cannot absorb heat and contribute to the greenhouse effect. However, excess nitrogen in the environment in a reactive form – which comes from the use of synthetic fertilizers, the discharge of wastewater or the combustion of fossil fuels – pollutes land, water and air. The compounds created when nitrogen reacts with other substances, for example nitrous oxide, also exacerbate climate change. By increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’re amplifying the planet’s natural greenhouse effect and turning up the dial on global warming. However, human activity is resulting in the increased emission of so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs) which, unlike other atmospheric gases such as oxygen and nitrogen, becomes trapped in the atmosphere, unable to escape the planet.

Speaking up is one way to multiply impact and create change on a much bigger scale. Over the course of the 20th century, precipitation increased in eastern parts of North and South America, northern Europe, and northern and central Asia. However, it has decreased in parts of Africa, the Mediterranean, and southern Asia.

Saturn's distant moon Titan, which has a thick nitrogen atmosphere with about a thousand times greater concentration of methane as Earth, is also subject to the greenhouse effect. As the planet's surface heats up, it releases some of the infrared energy that it had absorbed, but that energy doesn't make it back out of Earth's gaseous atmosphere. Instead of shooting back out into space, the infrared energy closely hugs our planet and, therefore, raises Earth's overall temperature. This is similar to how a human-built glass greenhouse works, trapping heat from the sun to keep plants warm in the winter. The atmosphere near the Earth's surface is largely opaque to longwave radiation and most heat loss from the surface is by evaporation and convection. However radiative energy losses become increasingly important higher in the atmosphere, largely because of the decreasing concentration of water vapor, an important greenhouse gas.