How does too much carbon dioxide lead to global warming?
You have described our sister planet Venus. It is so hot that if you put a pepperoni pizza outside, it would bake in about 20 seconds. What happens is the sun radiates light. Some of the light reflects off of the clouds. But a lot gets scattered down to the surface where it hit earth/venus. Light can sail through the atmosphere (air is clear, if sunlight didn’t get through it would be awfully dark). When light hits a solid object like the ground or you and me, it is absorbed and warms up the object. The ground then reradiates the light back at a lower frequency called infrared. (This is what you feel if you put your back to a fireplace.) But instead of going back up into space, Carbon Dioxide absorbs the infrared and heats up the atmosphere. (Other gases like oxygen and nitrogen don’t absorb infrared, but they can be heated by bouncing off of a Carbon Dioxide molecule). Because the heat can’t escape, the ground and the lower atmosphere just keep getting hotter and hotter. Eventually, t
SHORT ANSWER – CO2 has the ability to absorb heat. The more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more heat is retained. LONGER ANSWER – Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is one of many gases we collectively term Greenhouse Gases. These gases are so called because they have the ability to trap heat and so warm up the planet. They provide a vital role within our atmosphere as the heat they retain enables life on Earth to exist. If it weren’t for this ability to retain heat, our planet would lose it’s insulative properties and be nothing more than a lifeless ball of ice floating around in space. In fact, the average temperature would be some 18°C below freezing. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is one of the essential components that determines the temperature of our planet. To put it simply, the more greenhouse gases there are the more heat is retained. This happens because the greenhouse gases have a unique physical property, it’s this property which separates them from all other gases.
