The May issue of Environment & Climate News carries a helpful and informative Q&A about climate change between a middle school student and Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute. You can find the entire article here. Question #3 includes an easy-to-understand explanation of the greenhouse effect. Here it is:
3. Do you believe in the greenhouse effect? Why or why not?
I believe in the greenhouse effect because it is based on plausible, testable theories that have, in fact, been tested in laboratories as well as through observations of the Earth and other planets. It is well-understood that without heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the Earth would be much colder–probably too cold for life as we know it to exist.
But again, the greenhouse effect is only one “layer” in the way people think about the climate. Other things that happen both on the Earth and in space can increase or decrease the greenhouse effect.
Here’s an analogy for you: In your bathroom, you have heat from your home heating, from your light bulbs, and from your blow-dryer if it’s running. You also have cooling from cold water running through the pipes and carrying heat away, not to mention evaporation from standing sources of water, and maybe a draft from your window.
The overall temperature of the room is a combination of all those things, including the heat put out by your own body, and it would change as the seasons changed outside the house. The Earth is a bit like that, there are many things going on at once, including the greenhouse effect, all of which add up to create the thing we experience as weather and discuss in long-term blocks as “the climate.”
The newspaper is produced by the Heartland Institute.
You can keep track of the latest environmental and climate change news — particularly the actions of the North Carolina General Assembly’s Legislative Commission on Climate Change — at the Locke Foundation’s environmental blog, www.environmentnc.com.
