How does carbon dioxide cause the atmosphere to trap more heat from the Sun?

Question

I want to know the mechanics of it. Why does increasing CO2 cause the atmosphere to warm up?

Answer 1

The molecules of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases effectively form a blanket around Earth - more heat enters than is able to escape.

The heat we receive from the sun (solar radiation) has a very short wavelength and is able to pass through the atmosphere unimpeded.

The sun heats the ground, oceans and everything on the planet's surface and this heat is radiated back into the atmosphere as thermal radiation. This has a longer wavelength than solar radiation and some of the heat energy is unable to escape through the blanket of greenhouse gases.

There is more or less a natural equilibrium but in the last 250 years the levels of greenhouse gases have been increasing through the burning of fossil fuels, agricultural activities, deforestation etc. The result has been an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations - effectively a thickening of the blanket.

By analysing ice core samples stretching back over the last 650,000 years we know that natural levels of CO2 vary between 190 and 310 parts per million by volume. In recent years levels have risen to 385 ppmv and are still rising.

So, in a nutshell, solar radiation enters the atmosphere and thermal radiation is prevented from escaping, the more greenhouse gases there are the less thermal radiation escapes.

See these sites for more info: http://www.uic.com.au/nip24.htm and http://profend.com/global-warming/pages/causes.html

PS, the previous answerer has photosynthesis the wrong way round - trees and plants absorb CO2 and release oxygen.

Answer 2

It doesn't, at least not at the tiny levels in our atmosphere. Imagine you have a big room full of balloons bouncing around. Let this represent our atmosphere. You have 9,896 white balloons, which represent the amount of the three gases that make up the most of our air - Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Argon (about 99%).

Now you have 100 blue balloons that represent the amount of water vapor in our atmosphere (this varies, but averages out to less than a percent). Water vapor is another greenhouse gas.

Last, you have three black balloons that represent the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere (only 0.003%!). Actually, that represents the amount of CO2 estimated in our atmosphere before we started making cars, electricity, steel, etc.

Add a fourth black balloon - slightly smaller than the others - and this represents how much CO2 we've supposedly added by making our lives simpler and easier.

So tell me how that one balloon does so much damage? How does it do more damage than the 100 or so blue water vapor balloons? The answer is, it doesn't.

There is no "blanket" of CO2. There is no "greenhouse" effect because a greenhouse has to be nearly air tight to work. The Earth is not. What do you think would happen to a greenhouse without walls? Matter of fact, if you take a sheet of printer paper and draw four black circles on it about the size of an "O" in this text, that would be a cross section of our atmosphere, with the four small dots representing CO2 There is just no way the four small dots could trap anything.

The true answer is: you've been lied to.

Answer 3

The answer to your question is imbedded in some of the comments above but it is mixed in with some serious misinformation. The correct answer is:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is transparent to visible electromagnetic waves (light) but opaque to longer wavelength infared radiation (heat). Most of the energy from the sun that reaches the earth is in visible spectrum (that is it is light). When this radiation falls on the earth, much of it is absorbed by the surface (if it didn't, the earth would look like a white ball). The energy some of the energy absorbed by the surface is reradiated, but this reradiation is in the infared spectrum. Since CO2 is opaque to these waves, it absorbes this energy and heats up. As the CO2 heats up, it also heats up other gases in the atmosphere (by conduction) so the net effect is a general warming.

This is what is known as the "green house effect" because it is exactly the same mechanism that warms a green house, ony in a green house, it is the clear glass (or plastic) that is transparent to visible light, but opague to infaread radiation.

The atmospheric green house effect has existed for almost as long as the Earth has been in existance. In fact, without this effect, the Earth would be far to cold for life as we know it to exist.

Answer 4

Right, well i study geography and in this subject i have been taught that:

The ozone layer made up of many gases is essential for earth to stay at a certain temperature, and this is because when the suns rays come through the ozone layer, some of them reflect on the earth back out of the atmosphere, but the gases that make up this layer insulate some of the suns rays, keeping the earth at its naturally warm climate.

So, if there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then this means the gaseous layer surrounding the earth, the ozone layer, becomes thicker and lets out less of the suns rays, insulating the earth more than necessary and therefore increasing the temperature of earth.....

Hope that is helpful! :)

Answer 5

Because global temperature itself is not uniform. There are dynamics of materials that increase heating and cooling... and your assumption that normal local weather patterns explain conditions all by themselves is, to be quite frank, an uninformed assumption that seems to be founded solely on feel-good ignorance. Look, experiments have been done, the chemistry is solid, and CO2 has been shown, without any conflicting data, to be an insulator. The only model that matches the current temperature trends and explains temperature rise over the past 100 years is the one that includes global warming. You seem to be looking at global warming as separate from the normal weather pattern - this is incorrect, it becomes part of the weather pattern. We're not short-circuiting nature... we're simply increasing the load of specific chemicals. To put it bluntly, you don't understand the topic. The fact that you're asking this question is good... where you're going wrong is that you're assuming that because you don't understand how meteorology works, that what you don't understand about global warming must be wrong. You're already drinking the kool-aid... it's just that you've convinced yourself that you're not. What we're saying is not "drink the kool-aid"... it's get an education and look at the actual data. The data is not ambiguous. Shapeshifter: I really hope you're right... I really do. Sadly, you're not right and you really don't understand the topic or you wouldn't have asked the original question. There's nothing wrong with ignorance, we're all ignorant about some things. Though it seems kind of silly to openly profess ignorance and then try to lecture the people answering you, as you've done here. Thanks for trying, though.

Answer 6

People, search for the lady that is a member of the UN that states, on video, that GW was made up intentionally to help pass a carbon tax.

Now, ask yourself how is a carbon tax going to stop this so called, Global Warming.

Answer 7

CO2 is a greenhouse gas; that means it allows short wavelengths from the sun into our atmosphere and doesn't allow long wavelength bouncing back into the atmosphere to escape , hence why its a greenhouse gas; also a temperature inversion may occur, which stabilizes the air and then it wont be allowed to rise out of atmosphere, ( ex. san fernando valley, california).

Answer 8

trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen.....im just sayin

Answer 9

Trees and plants give off carbon dioxide....lots of it, so should we cut down all the trees to lessen the effect that carbon dioxide has on the planet?