what is green house effect?

Answer 1

yeah yeah yeah ..they can give you all the media scientific hype they want but the honest to god truth is that mother nature changes everything every oh...10 or 30 or 50 thousand years or so sometimes waits as long as millions.. then the earth tilts and major things happen like earthquakes and hurricanes and storms and ice melting and then reforming and then another species bites the dust and then a new species dominates the earth..its like a child with growing pains.. just keeps changing and sometimes its turmoil.

Answer 2

The greenhouse effect is a naturally occurring process that aids in heating the Earth's surface and atmosphere. It results from the fact that certain atmospheric gases, such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane, are able to change the energy balance of the planet by absorbing longwave radiation emitted from the Earth's surface. Without the greenhouse effect life on this planet would probably not exist as the average temperature of the Earth would be a chilly -18° Celsius, rather than the present 15° Celsius.

While the earth's temperature is dependent upon the greenhouse-like action of the atmosphere, the amount of heating and cooling are strongly influenced by several factors just as greenhouses are affected by various factors.

In the atmospheric greenhouse effect, the type of surface that sunlight first encounters is the most important factor. Forests, grasslands, ocean surfaces, ice caps, deserts, and cities all absorb, reflect, and radiate radiation differently. Sunlight falling on a white glacier surface strongly reflects back into space, resulting in minimal heating of the surface and lower atmosphere. Sunlight falling on a dark desert soil is strongly absorbed, on the other hand, and contributes to significant heating of the surface and lower atmosphere. Cloud cover also affects greenhouse warming by both reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface and by reducing the amount of radiation energy emitted into space.

Scientists use the term albedo to define the percentage of solar energy reflected back by a surface. Understanding local, regional, and global albedo effects is critical to predicting global climate change.

Answer 3

A greenhouse is a glass chamber which allows solar energy to penetrate inside the chamber, but once there, the energy gets trapped and is unable to radiate outside the chamber, thereby considerably raising the temperature above the surrounding area. This arrangement can be used in the cultivation of vegetables and flowers, for example in temperate climates. Our planet Earth also exhibits this greenhouse effect. Gases like carbon dioxide and methane produced by various human activities travel into the upper reaches of the atmosphere and remain suspended there. The layer of these gases then acts like a sheet of glass which allows solar radiation to reach the surface of the earth, but prevents radiated energy from the earth from passing through into the upper atmosphere beyond this layer. The resultant effect may be the overheating of the earth, if these gases are present in abnormal quantities, a phenomenon now referred to as global warming.

Answer 4

Green house effect is basically the trapping of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere.See,everyday the earth produces a whole bunch of carbon dioxide coming out of cars,factories and power stations.The large amount of carbon dioxide gas produced will increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.These carbon dioxide eventually traps heat coming from the sun from being reflected back into the outer space.Thus,green house effect occured.This also leads to global warming that would melt the ice at both poles and increase the sea level and,flood every area on earth.Which mean its the end of our world.See?

Answer 5

It's when energy enters a space in the form of light, strikes an object and is dissipated into heat, then the heat is unable to escape due to some sort of containment.
One example is when you leave your car out in the sun, the light pours in through the windows but the heat does not escape out them. Another example is the earth: water vapor and CO2 form an insulation layer in our atmosphere which allows energy to enter as light but prevents it from leaving as heat.

Answer 6

the heat form the sund enters the earth but cannot be radiatedback into space due to the cover of co2 layer in the atmosphere.thus temp keeps on rising.

Answer 7

The greenhouse effect, first discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824, and first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, is the process in which the absorption of infrared radiation by an atmosphere warms a planet. Without these greenhouse gases, the Earth's surface would be up to 30° C cooler. The name comes from an incorrect analogy with the way in which greenhouses are heated by the sun in order to facilitate plant growth. In addition to the Earth, Mars, Venus and other celestial bodies with atmospheres (such as Titan) have greenhouse effects.

In common parlance, the term "greenhouse effect" may be used to refer either to the natural greenhouse effect, due to naturally occurring greenhouse gases, or to the enhanced (anthropogenic) greenhouse effect, which results from gases emitted as a result of human activities (see also global warming, scientific opinion on climate change and attribution of recent climate change).

The basic mechanism
The Earth receives energy from the Sun in the form of radiation. To the extent that the Earth is in a steady state, the energy stored in the atmosphere and ocean does not change in time, so energy equal to the incident solar radiation must be radiated back to space.

Radiation leaving the Earth takes two forms: reflected solar radiation and emitted thermal infrared radiation. The Earth reflects about 30% of the incident solar flux; the remaining 70% is absorbed, warms the land, atmosphere and oceans, and powers life on this planet. Eventually Earth, as a warm object, radiates this energy into space as black-body radiation, which maintains a thermal equilibrium. This thermal, infrared radiation increases with increasing temperature. One can think of the Earth's temperature as being determined by the requirement that it produces the infrared flux needed to balance the absorbed solar flux.

The key to the greenhouse effect is the fact that the atmosphere is relatively transparent to visible solar radiation but strongly absorbing at the wavelengths of the thermal infrared radiation emitted by the surface and the atmosphere. The visible solar radiation heats the surface, not the atmosphere. Whereas most of the infrared radiation escaping to space is being emitted from the upper atmosphere, not the surface. The infrared photons emitted by the surface are mostly absorbed by the atmosphere and do not escape directly to space.

The reason why this results in a warming of the surface is most easily understood by starting with a model of a purely radiative greenhouse effect, in which one ignores the fact that a large part of the energy transfer in the atmosphere is not in fact radiative, but associated with 1) convection, (sensible heat transport), and 2) the evaporation and condensation of water vapor, or latent heat transport. In this purely radiative case, one can think of the atmosphere as emitting infrared radiation both upwards and downwards. The upward infrared flux emitted by the surface must balance not only the absorbed solar flux but also this downward infrared flux emitted by the atmosphere. The surface temperature must rise until the surface generates enough thermal radiation to balance the sum of these two incident radiation streams.

A more realistic picture taking into account the convective and latent heat fluxes is somewhat more complex. But the following simple model captures the essence. The starting point is to note that the opacity of the atmosphere to infrared radiation determines the height in the atmosphere from which most of the photons emitted to space are emitted. If the atmosphere is more opaque, the typical photon escaping to space will be emitted from higher in the atmosphere, because one then has to go to higher altitudes to see out to space in the infrared. Since the emission of infrared radiation is a function of temperature, it is the temperature of the atmosphere at this emission level that is effectively determined by the requirement that the emitted flux balance the absorbed solar flux.

But the temperature of the atmosphere generally decreases with height above the surface, at a rate of roughly 6.5 °C per kilometer on average, until one reaches the stratosphere 10-15 km above the surface. (Most infrared photons escaping to space are emitted by the troposphere, the region bounded by the surface and the stratosphere, so we can ignore the stratosphere in this simple picture.) A very simple model, but one that proves to be remarkably useful, involves the assumption that this temperature profile is simply fixed, by the non-radiative energy fluxes. Given the temperature at the emission level of the infrared flux escaping to space, one then computes the surface temperature by increasing temperatues at the rate of 6.5 °C per kilometer, the environmental lapse rate, until one reaches the surface. The more opaque the atmosphere, and the higher the emission level of the escaping infrared radiation, the warmer the surface, since one then needs to follow this lapse rate over a larger distance in the vertical. While less intuitive than the purely radiative greenhouse effect, this less familiar radiative-convective picture is the starting point for most discussions of the greenhouse effect in the climate modeling literature.

The term "greenhouse effect" is a source of confusion in that actual greenhouses do not warm by this same mechanism.

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