23/08/2020
How the greenhouse effect plays a role
The main driver of today's warming is the combustion of fossil fuels. These hydrocarbons heat up the planet via the greenhouse effect, which is caused by the interaction between Earth's atmosphere and incoming radiation from the sun.
"The basic physics of the greenhouse effect were figured out more than a hundred years ago by a smart guy using only pencil and paper," Josef Werne, a professor of geology and environmental science at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science.
That "smart guy" was Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist and eventual Nobel Prize winner. Simply put, solar radiation hits Earth's surface and then bounces back toward the atmosphere as heat. Gases in the atmosphere trap this heat, preventing it from escaping into the void of space (good news for life on the planet). In a paper presented in 1895, Arrhenius figured out that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide could trap heat close to the Earth's surface, and that small changes in the amount of those gases could make a big difference in how much heat was trapped.
