Friday, May 04, 2012

Global warming

The planet Mercury cools to -300F at night. But the earth, which is twice as far from the sun, is warm at night. The atmosphere acts like blanket, or a greenhouse. It scatters heat, making it harder for heat to escape, just as during the day it scatters sunlight, making the sky blue. In space, beyond the atmosphere, the sky is black.

Many molecules scatter heat. Water scatters heat as does carbon dioxide. Because of the burning of coal and oil, carbon dioxide concentrations have been increasing much faster than have concentrations of other compounds. One ton of coal creates three tons of CO2, and we have burned truckloads and trainloads and mountains of coal recently.

An increase of average temperature of a few degrees corresponds to a large increase in energy in the atmosphere.
I believe in global warming. Do you?

2 comments:

Benjamin Ady said...

yep. My geology prof explained it so beautifully. He said that basically we're taking a closed system, the earth, and trying out a really massive large scale experiment--what happens is we dump X amount of CO2 into the atmosphere of this closed system? Turns out, fascinating and potentially quite painful and deadly things happen

Veriuska said...

In the last few years I have seen glaciers melting in Alaska, Iceland, Mt. Everest, New Zealand and the Antarctica. With my eyes. I heard a speech by the Director of The Mountain Institute in Nepal about the effects of Global warming on the Sherpa community. My final answer is YES: Global Warming is a reality!