Climate literacy
The blanket around our planet
Pull a blanket over you on a cold night.
The blanket makes no heat of its own.
It just slows your warmth from leaving.
Some gases in the air do the same job.
They sit around our whole planet like a blanket.
Scientists call this the greenhouse effect.
Sunlight reaches Earth and warms the ground.
The ground sends some heat back toward space.
The gas blanket catches part of that heat.
That caught heat keeps the planet warm.
Imagine Earth had NO gas blanket at all. How warm would the surface be on average?
So the blanket is not a problem by itself.
It is natural. It keeps Earth livable.
Tap to switch the gas blanket on and off.
The same sunlight arrives both ways. The blanket decides how much heat stays.
The greenhouse effect is a bad, unnatural thing humans created.Tap to reveal
This is easy to get wrong because we often hear the word as a warning. But the effect is natural and old. Without it, Earth would be frozen. The real question for later is what happens when the blanket gets thicker.
This module follows that one question.
How does the blanket work, and what changes it?