How is human society causing climate change?
1. What is global warming? Global warming is the name given to a phenomenon caused by changes in the Earth’s atmosphere. Light from the Sun travels through the atmosphere to the Earth as light waves. Under normal conditions, some of that energy warms the Earth and the oceans; the rest is re-radiated back out into space in the form of infrared waves. The Earth’s atmosphere traps a certain portion of those infrared waves, which creates a comfortable average temperature of 15C (59F), generally conductive to life on this planet. And over eons of time predictable patterns of weather have developed around the relative surface temperature of the planet. But the atmospheric bubble surrounding the Earth is very thin, and vulnerable to interference. Human society and its consumption of fossils fuels have significantly altered the composition of the atmosphere by overloading it with carbon dioxide and various other greenhouse gases. Global warming occurs because the greenhouse gases, while they a
