Life in a hotbed
If you like to search guilty can consider as them British. This is because they have in the middle of the XVIII century began the industrial revolution. A hundred years later it had already covered the whole of Western Europe, North America and spread to Japan. Factories tirelessly knocked weaving machines, blast furnaces belched streams of metal, panting steam locomotives, dragging cars with people and cargo, and plied the seas are not romantic sailing, and smoking steamers.
All the necessary things have begun to make a man machine. Muscular power of humans and animals was not enough - and the energy of the machines in motion, began to take from the Earth. First, burning wood and coal, and then switched to oil and gas. To be at the dawn of the industrial revolution occurred to me that using such combustible material, the man released the genie from the bottle? Now, at the beginning of the XXI century, the genie called carbon dioxide - CO2 - threatens global changes in living conditions.
In 1824 the French mathematician Jean-Batiste Fourier realized that the atmosphere holds heat radiation of the Earth. Scientists compared the effect with the effect of the glass walls of a hotbed.
At the end of XIX century swede Svante Arrhenius discovered that this effect is due to the presence of certain gases in the atmosphere - including carbon dioxide. Arrhenius calculated that if the content of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, it would increase the temperature by 4-6 ° C.
At first it all seemed pure theory, mind games, because emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were relatively small. They began to grow promptly since second half XX century.
This was first proved the American climate scientist Charles David Keeling. In 1957, he found that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere was 315 ppm (parts per million, ie one million liters of air containing 315 liters of carbon dioxide), whereas in the XIX century the figure was 280 ppm. It turned out that about a hundred years of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 12%.
Measurements Keeling showed: in the era of industrialization, the active concentration of CO2 has risen steadily at 1,5 ppm per year. Carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere as a product of burning oil, gas and coal. Human activities have changed the composition of the atmosphere.
With the increase of CO2 content increases the so-called greenhouse effect. Its mechanism is known to any owner of a greenhouse: the sun's rays, penetrating through the glass windows, heated soil. It gives the heat back into the air. However, the glass "Conserve" is radiation - it remains in a greenhouse in the form of heat.
That's the carbon dioxide of almost seamlessly transmits visible sunlight (resulting in heated land and water) - but it absorbs some of the incoming heat radiation from the earth rather than letting it dissipate into space. Then CO2 molecules transmit absorbed energy to neighboring molecules and thus heat the surrounding air. That carbon dioxide - and even some gases - like the panes of a hotbed does not give the planet to cool…