What do greenhouse gases do that causes global warming?
Greenhouse gasses heat the planet–without them, Earth would be freezing cold. This is because the sun is much too far away from us to give us any heat directly–much like a flashlight that is across the room, we cannot feel the heat from it, but we can easily receive the light from it. Light is just one of many types of “radiation”. Different greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere absorb different kinds of radiation, all of which come from the sun. They then turn this radiation into heat (exactly how they do that is a bit harder to understand, but I can try if you’d like.
