**PRESS S TO SKIP DIALOG IN BEGINNING** CLICK HOME BUTTON (TOP RIGHT) TO CHANGE AND SEE VARIABLES -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the first of (hopefully) many projects on the basics of climate change. Greenhouse effect simulator covers one of the first core concepts of climate change: the greenhouse effect. This project also explains why climate change is a big deal and why we should care. See which affect earths climate and have fun I plan to update this eventually. Maybe to include an option to have CO2 equivalent emissions from its main drivers as an option. Also maybe include more land and water to show more ecosystems and have those be affected in a more accurate way. Note that this simulator is not scaled properly. If you put so and so CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in real life, you most likely will not get global temperature average as the game says. That's not Greenhouse effect simulator's intended purpose. Rather, I'm trying to show how different variables affect others. Also note that the description that I give of the greenhouse effect is simplified so there are some statements I say that are not entirely accurate or leave out small details. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The greenhouse effect is a phenomena where incident solar radiation is able to pass freely into our atmosphere, but can't escape as easily due to the presence of greenhouse gases. This increases earths average global temperatures which we refer to as global warming. Global warming affects earth’s ecosystems by causing rapid changes in its climate. We refer to these changes as climate change. The first question to consider when discussing climate change, or more specifically, global warming, is why should we care? Sure, the weather might get a little hotter, but so what? That's not even that hot. I can deal with a little more heat (more summer for me!). This view of thinking usually stems from a weak understanding of what global warming actually is and what it does to earth and its inhabitants (you and me). First of all, global warming does NOT mean each day will be a little bit hotter. To illustrate this, let's use the fact that the projected temperature rise by 2050 is about +3°F compared to today (according to climate.gov). This does not mean every day will be 3°F hotter than it was this year, but rather the average global temperatures will rise by 3°F. This means there will still be cold days and cold months (some that can be even colder than they are today), but on average, temperatures will be 3°F higher. A rise of 3°F may not seem like a whole lot to us, but to our sensitive planet, this change is actually enormous. To put it into perspective, for the past two millennia (up to the industrial revolution), earth's average approximate global temperature anomaly was less than 0.2°F per 500 years (ignoring the young dryas period and little ice age). Over these longer periods of time, ecosystems were able to form, species could adapt, and our agricultural practices could develop. A projected rise of 3°F in only 25 years is fifteen times hotter and twenty times shorter; a rate of temperature rise faster than any time in human history. The problems associated with this rapid change are abundant and clear. Maybe most formidable is the threat of sea level rise. As temperatures rise, the ocean, having a very high heat capacity, absorbs almost 90% of the trapped heat from greenhouse gases. This causes the ocean’s volume to increase due to thermal expansion and the melting or Arctic or Greenland ice. This extra water has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is [unfortunately :(] the coastal communities which, in total, consist of approximately 1 billion people (according to C40.org). It’s not only the flooding we need to watch out for, but also the risks of extreme weather events which become more common as global warming persists. This includes hotter and longer heatwaves, more severe droughts, and more intense storms. The hotter temperatures also affect many ecosystems which depend on narrow temperature ranges. Coral reefs, forests, and the animals who inhabit them will all be negatively affected in some shape or form. In conclusion, climate change **IS** a serious problem that affects everyone on earth, but it's a problem that we can help fix. The first step is always to learn more. For more details on the greenhouse effect specifically, see the notes and credits
So now we have an idea why global warming is so damaging, we can shift our focus to the mechanisms behind it in more detail. We will shift our focus to just the phenomena of the greenhouse effect and can talk more about other aspects of global warming as a whole in another project I make. The first step to understanding global warming is understanding the concept of radiation or more specifically, the stephan-boltzmann law. Everything emits light. The sun does, the ground does, even you are right now! Now, we can see the light the sun emits because the sun is so hot that it emits light with enough energy so your eyes can observe it. You however are nowhere near as hot as the sun so you emit much less and much lower energy light that is invisible to the human eye (specifically infrared light, the kind of light you can see with night vision goggles). So, the hotter something is, the higher the energy of light that is emitted (you can see this when you heat up metal. If the metal gets hot enough, it starts to glow orange, then red, then white!). Taking this concept into account, we can say that the sun emits higher energy light to the earth than the earth emits back out into space due to temperature difference between the two celestial bodies. That is, the energy of light the earth gets from the sun is less than the energy of light the earth emits back into space. There are some molecules in the atmosphere that treat incoming sunlight (light emitted from the sun) as essentially invisible. This is because the energy of sunlight is not the correct energy to excite the molecule (which stems from concepts outside the scope of this project). As the sunlight comes from the sun, passes through these molecules and hits the earth, the light is reemitted back out to space, but this time (because the earth is colder than the sun) at a much lower energy. It turns out this specific energy is the correct energy to excite those molecules in the atmosphere that used to treat the light as invisible! Now, the light from the ground does just pass through, it's absorbed by the molecule. After absorption, the molecule wants to get rid of the light, so it spits its back out and reemits it. The only thing though is now, the direction the molecule reemits the light is (assumed to be) completely random. The light can go back up to space where it was initially heading too, but it can also go at an angle, side to side and be absorbed by other molecules, or even back down to earth where it can be absorbed and remitted by the ground again just to go through the cycle all over again. The light eventually escapes, but it takes longer than usual and it's spending all that extra time in the atmosphere heating up the earth. So we can say that these molecules trap heat and cause earth's global temperatures to rise. These molecules that are invisible to sunlight, but interact with light emitted from earth are called greenhouse gases and the process that I just outlined for you is the greenhouse effect. This is the main driver for global warming and anthropogenic (human caused) climate change. In a later project, we can talk about natural climate change (how earth's climate varied when humans weren't around), the carbon and carbonate-silicate cycle, and other concepts to further understand climate change and the effect it has on your planet. Thanks for reading!
