When talking about climate change I’ve started to incorporate a quick physical explanation on the basics before getting into it, like “CO2, a molecule that absorbs heat like a black t-shirt,…” or “carbon dioxide, which is opaque to infrared light,…”
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
I tried arguing with a climate change denier, doesn't work they'd rather believe a politician who wants to sell fossil fuel over the entire scientific community
I think a fundamental thing that’s so frustrating about climate denialism and… pretty much everything else that the maggots fall into (vaccine misinformation, not knowing what tariffs are & how they work, etc) is that it comes down to people thinking that any kind of schooling is “brainwashing” (1
2) and by extension, believing that kneejerk contrarianism means they’re “thinking for themselves”. It’s a “Ha! I must be smarter than this expert because they’re only regurgitating what they were taught in school. *I* can think outside the box!”. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect + arrogance.
Couldn't agree more, you just need to add a little sprinkle of "Main character syndrome" thinking that everyone is some kind of brainwashed zombie while they are the hero who "escaped the matrix"
…& to be a bit transparent: I fell into that trap a bit when I was a teenager (like 15-ish). I was able to get out of it quickly, though. Idk exactly what the contributing factor was that made me snap out of it, but it happened. I feel like a lot of people fell into that and weren’t able to get out.
I also like to ask them why it gets cooler at night. It's a simple question and they'll usually say that the sun went away, but then you respond with "well where does the heat go". The idea of cooling off due to infrared radiating into space is surprisingly quite novel to most people.
One way in is the water cycle; most people learned about the water cycle at school. eg "Heating the oceans supercharges the water cycle". The reading age is often very low, so they wouldn't even know what opaque means. I like the black T-shirt idea.
That is a good way to put it. My sister and brother in law were trying to convince their elderly Republican landlord the other day that dems do not in fact control the weather and we were not attacking people with hurricanes.
China must be laughing. The democracies are sinking under crazy nonsense (which is reaching government level) while China churns out science graduates.
I type 'explain CO2 as a greenhouse gas to an 8 year old' into Microsoft copilot. Works with a lot of things but it depends on your audience. I'm 58 but a layman.
The majority of Americans read at a grade school level so you gotta make it relatable. Remember in “Philadelphia”, when Denzel Washington’s character says, “Now, explain it to me like I'm a four-year-old.” That stuck with me.
I get that you're trying to make it approachable, but this is not my understanding of CO2. It's not particularly opaque to IR, it's just more opaque than N2 or O2. Like going from clear glass to the weakest car window tinting. Sure, less IR gets through, but it's still most of it.
There's a very simple experiment one can do: put inside a transparent airtight container a thermometer and a) air vs b) carbon dioxide. Then expose both to the sun for a couple of hours
It's so crazy ppl can deny climate change when it's based on the simple physical propertyheat absorption, but I think this belies a deeper problem that science as a concept is not well understood because they hear "climate change theory" and think it's a guess rather than an explanation
…and that’s a problem with people’s knowledge of avg terminology vs. science terminology. There are a loooot of things in science that have completely different meanings than their everyday uses. The sad part is, I know for a fact that most people learned the difference at some point in school (1
Idk I feel like a lot of schools still teach a theory as "an educated guess" I know that's how I learned it growing up, plus it doesnt help that ppl never learn that fundamentally science is an iterative process and is constantly changing as we know more, which makes ppl see as science lying sometim
I remember when elementary & middle school teachers used the “educated guess” comparison. The public school system I went to (southern state) stopped doing that in 9th grade Biology, though. We actually talked about the differences between a scientific theory and a law… and it was in the textbook.
I went to school up north, I mean it happened like that in hs but it was never very emphasized and usually never really revisited as the year went on which is a shame idk i feel like the history and philosophy of science should be like a whole unit and not like something just kind of sprinkled in
Yes, it's that bad, but most people learned about the water cycle at school, so saying "heating the Earth has supercharged the water cycle, which is why we get so many huge rain events" might be a way in.
Yes Dave, sadly it is. The disparity in quality of public education varies to such an extreme degree in the USA that it’s hard to believe it’s the same country. A good deal of it is intentional. To run a country and economy like ours you need a lot of very easily exploitable labor. One big factor
is making it so students leave grade school barely able (or completely unable) to learn for themselves. It’s why book bans are so popular now, as are attempts to bring Christian chaplains into schools. Parents are too busy working multiple jobs to be home to raise their kids and supplement where
school might be failing them. Even just to advocate for them at the school if they need an IEP. Our country can’t even bring itself to stop actively supplying genocide. You think we want our kids to learn to think critically? No Sir, not in the good ole US of A. 🤦🏻♀️
I teach a climate-adjacent class to graduate students. One of my lectures presupposes understanding of the greenhouse effect—I always start by asking how many people know what it is (they all do), and then how many *actually know how it works* - the number of hands that drop is ~half.
The average person indeed has no idea that co2 is opaque to heat energy, in part because no one ever says it like that. But we should. The average person doesn’t know that the electromagnetic spectrum exists.
Great question. It enters a visible light that we can see. The visible light arms the earth. The earth then radiates that warmth out in the form of infrared/heat
The infrared/heat is what co2 keeps in. It's a balance. More co2 keeps more heat in upsetting the balance.
Infrared (IR) is one one side of the visual spectrum, think of it as heat. Ultra Violet is on the other side of the visible spectrum.UV is what hits your skin, also can cause cancer, but what you feel as heat is the IR reflecting,so the wave changes from one side of the visual spec to the other
average person voting shouldnt NEED to know those things in order for effective climate policy to be implemented, democracy is a bad way to solve societal scale problems for precisely this reason. An informed electorate is a slow reactive electorate to problems which need fast proactive solutions
Maybe we have more of a curiosity issue vs a learning/education issue. Why don’t more people WANT to know and understand the world they rely on for life?
As a climate person who's often around climate laypeople, a quick 101 level-set helps greatly with a) people who know it's a thing but don't realize how bad it is, b) with people who are around deniers who they know are wrong, but aren't quite sure why. It creates the right frame moving forward.
As someone who feels like I have a pretty basic understanding of the very very basics of climate change, yes. I really don’t know very much, but it seems like I know more than 90% of people sometimes.
Admittedly, didn't really know the details well myself. Like, I know CO2 is up there, and I can't see it, which would IMPLY it's not visible to our spectrum... but I never thought of it like that.
I was only passingly interested in science in school, so in adulthood, this is so good to know!
I have my degree in environmental science, you would be shocked what "basic" stuff people really just do not know. I try my best not to judge but sometimes it can be hard
Uh… yes. Yes, it’s incredibly bad. Basic literacy and numeracy are also not where they need to be.
I’ve said before, and I’ll keep saying it, that part of the reason people don’t understand wealth inequality is that they can’t do basic math. They think they’re just “bad with money,” not exploited.
Unless you're a teacher, i can't remember the last time i spoke to a child in-depth enough to begin explaining the opaqueness of a gas across the electromagnetic spectrum.
I have an absolutely radical idea that may sound idiotic but hemp is the most carbon hungry commercial crop topping in at 16% more efficient at carbon capture than an acre of trees. Not only can it be used as an air filtration system it can be repurposed into many products.
It's better than oil, but it's only carbon neutral. We need to go carbon negative. Like compress enormous heaps of hemp into a black goo and pump it back to the depths of earth.
The most important for now is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That's where our mindset should be.
Not denying it, more wondering why ppl think my gov & taxes are the solution. I understand and support regulation, but do we really think the public sector will provide the solution? Private sector much more efficient & innovative imo, plus I’m not forced to fund it.
That’s not the right mindset we gotta break the problem down and monetize in chunks. Like how EVs are a thing now, also seeing nuclear getting privatized, there’s gotta be ways to keep momentum like that and carry over to efforts I’m ignorant of.
Evs are only a marginal improvement over combustion engine personal vehicles and still require carbon intensive infrastructure to operate, not to mention the other environmental problems associated with car dependent sprawl. “Privatized nuclear” means nothing if LNG is cheaper.
I honestly don't see the point. Most americans are clearly very enthusiastic about making us hit 10C. I don't see any reality where we stop that in the next 12 years. They either don't care or know and are lying to everyone else.
People will get interested in climate change when they experience the disasters that are already affecting many parts of the planet. Only when it’s in everyone’s backyard, will we have a consensus about curtailing fossil fuels.
I hate to be a downer but experiencing climate disasters does less than nothing to make people believe in climate change. My county has had multiple disastrous fires but the majority remain climate change deniers. People prefer their group identity to reality.
they won't. but you'd expect at least the govts around the world to build consensus and take action. The only time I remember any collective action was back in the Montreal Protocol.
Yes! As a teacher we learn that many students need reteaching. Especially for infrequently encountered or new info! And aren’t we all students? Thanks for the work you do!
I love doing this! I’m someone who has a colourful vocabulary, and many of my friends aren’t native English speakers, so I often restate myself in different words. “I was flabbergasted! Like, I soooo shocked”
So not only have we removed our exposure to NIR by spending more time indoors, we've added NIR reflecting eco-glass to our windows and switched all our bulbs to LEDs with zero NIR emission. Now we have to factor in the atmosphere not letting as much NIR through. https://youtu.be/AST9s42LBg8?si=SplTlKch_K76JZOz
Education is now politicized which, under the Citizens United decision, means that it's corporate sponsored. I live where climate change is downplayed under the authority of the State Department of Education.
Hello from Florida (btw, one of the leading canaries in the coal mine)!
He could always do a quick explanation of the electromagnetic spectrum and point out where infrared light is (and use microwaves as a starting point - people can understand that).
The most important facts I've had to pull out are the dates of the science. A lot of people seem to think science from the 1850s happened in the 1990s.
I think the issue is that we're trying to address people who wouldn't run a basic Google search in the first place, and who think that anything beyond a 5-year-old's understanding of physics is either woke or false.
See, you're overestimating the average lay person. Google is too much effort, otherwise they'd understand it already. Saying 'greenhouse effect' is too much. The average person is wildly science illiterate. Why else is there a huge wave of anti-vaxxers and people taking horse medication?
co2 is actually more like a black tshirt than a greenhouse 😅, it just absorbs different wavelengths of light than black fabric. Greenhouses trap heat mostly by trapping hot air inside of a building rather than by absorbing infrared light (though they do also do that.)
More people are probably going to relate to and understand the “black t-shirt” analogy than a greenhouse. I guarantee you, most people don’t know what a greenhouse is or how it works. Part of science education is meeting people where they are.
"A t-shirt, doesn't let light in, but traps a thin layer of air which your body heats. But if it was white the light would be reflected back to space. But your body would still be warm"...
Those words still might be too complex for them, try “CO2, a little ball that gets hot like a fire(they’re cavemen so..) or “carbon dioxide, the no breathy chemical”
A lot of climate talk got so theoretical that I think it made more people susceptible to misinformation.
1. GHGs trap heat.
2. We're pumping out more in our atmosphere than at any other point in human history.
3. Record-breaking weather events are increasing alongside the increase of GHGs.
I don’t think they mean climate change itself is theoretical. They mean the *discussion* about climate change to the general public has been watered down to where it seems like it’s theoretical.
I like the ... opaque to infrared ...
Query is C02 opaque to ultra violet or x-ray? lol I'm on the Internet I suppose I could look it up. Mind jumps. Thanks.
The UV is the entering solar radiation, the frequency of the waves in the transition from UV to to IR is the visual spectrum. Radiated exiting waves are IR. UV waves are not effected by GHGs.
The world is literally on fire and we are going to have a president who will make it worse because his base thinks the natural sciences are a form w witchcraft.
I feel like climate change can feel a bit mystical because the earth is, y’know, pretty complex as a system. But just tossing a, “CO2 is transparent to visible light but absorbs infrared light” in there just says “this isn’t that complex — climate deniers are denying /physics/…which is cringe.”
You're good at communicating with a good attitude. I bet you could go convince Elon Musk and his pal Trump in a concise and pithy way about climate change. Even the Young Turks guy is applying for a job at the Pentagon. Shouldn't the internet make dialogue easier? What is going on Hank?
Exactly this. I always challenge climate change deniers to explain to me how it's physically possible to add as much carbon to the atmosphere as we have and NOT have a warming effect. Explain to me how warming is magically not happening.
?? for climate experts? As sea level rises from melting ice caps, won’t water level of entire planet rise, so any low elevation will also flood; like when you throw a brick into a bucket, inland water levels will rise too, not just the coast?
The most important thing I’ve learned about communicating in an age of lots of lies is that pre-bunking is basically the only thing that works. Give people ammunition against misinformation, but do not tell them that you’re doing that.
🙏Why not communicate with our leaders? Give it a shot. You must have a huge Twitter account laying around somewhere. Use that. I deleted my Twitter account but they keep it for you. You don't think it's weird that in the age of information, communication stays on sides?
I absolutely agree. It's a highly effective debate tactic as it immediately puts your opponent on the back foot when you state and defeat their own argument before they even have a chance to make it.
I feel like a very important component for skepticism to work is that you need to teach people it’s OK to be wrong. Otherwise people will just use skeptical-sounding language to barricade themselves in their existing biases.
Most of my circle who I’m willing to engage in such convos with are my parents and family. Who are deeply evangelical. So their point is usually that humans can’t be responsible for changing something so significant as the whole planet
It’s the same with the young earth thing. Why is God so all powerful yet you squeeze him in to this 5000 year box? Is he huge or can you just decide his size based on your point in the moment.
I like to describe a pot of water on a burner when talking to skeptics. The idea being that as the water warms up, convection currents become more volatile. The atmosphere is like the pot of water, becoming more volatile and unpredictable as it heats up, changing established weather patterns.
Don't lose hope! I was down the rabbit hole on a lot of topics climate included, and really did find my way out thanks to lots of helpful science videos!
You just have to find out what MOTIVATES people to educate them!
I think it’s important to emphasize that the burden of proof shouldn’t be on scientists to prove that there is warming caused by CO2 emissions. The burden of proof should be on those who want to argue that measurably rising CO2 levels are safe.
This is exactly what I’ve found works too. Explaining that the physics is pretty straightforward and that we understand global warming on the small lab scale but also the global measurement scale seems to help. A lot of people seem to appreciate learning there’s a logic behind it.
We're taught more what to think in school, less how to think. It leaves a lot of people vulnerable to hucksters who push flat earthism or young earth creationism with "hey, did you science isn't an immutable truth finding machine and is based on assumptions? and models??"
Absolutely. People have to change their own mind. Don’t give them your conclusion, expose them to the facts and fundamentals. Once it all sinks in, they will eventually convert or stay in denial.
Problem is when they’re bathed in propaganda all the time, they never get a chance to think.
Having filed for bankruptcy six times and been credibly accused of sexual assault more than 26 times, Donald Trump is neither a good human being or a successful businessman who will help the economy.
Which raises the issue to trying to tackle the "we'll just tech our way out if the issue" problem. It's already assumed that carbon capture solves all our problems.
In California ballot measure campaigns we have something like this called inoculation.
It typically happens a few months before the big flood of ads near election, and involves warning people of what the opposition's argument will be and why it's wrong.
I feel this, but I also feel that sometimes I spend so much time pre-bunking bad faith arguments that I never can actually put my arguments down in a succinct message that people would bother to read.
Pre-bunking works in public (secondary) education. When one is teaching adolescents with emotional resistances to learning whatever subject, one can usually get around those barriers by providing both 100% consistency and out-loud step-by-step modeling of critical thinking and logic.
We really need talented people to sell the public on the basics of some many good policies while being adept at avoiding judgements and buzzwords. All the short-hand is mired in toxicity, but the meat of proposals are very popular. More people need to understand how to detect the BS from politicians
I feel like 90% of the actual content I’m writing is just preemptively heading off right-wing nonsense so it can’t be used to shut down or derail the topic immediately
Hank, if climate change is real, how come I'm so cold in the winter when I forget to wear my coat and my shoes get wet because I'm eating a frozen smoothie and not looking where I'm going and step in a slush puddle? Scientists can't explain that!
I love that children have no concept of racism and stereotypes. Racism is a learned thing. It's great taking my kids to parks and such, and they play with whoever will play with them, no matter what they look like. They just have no concept for racism, it's completely foreign.
Not necessarily true. Yes, toddlers have no concept. But teens in JH & HS do have concepts. The schools I work at are divided. That doesn’t mean the kids can’t learn about what racism is or what it does.. & attempt to demagnetize & break their own biases
It’s human nature to go toward people similar to you. We do it by way of how people look unless we’re mature & so it byway of how people are in community with you / talk to you / interests, etc. so I think you’re wrong. We should and do see race— that’s humanness. What we can not do is..
And teenagers are not an example of an impressionable child, for they have already been nurtured by that point in their life. If the echo chamber of their home had never been challenged as a child, it’s not a lost cause but definitely more difficult to reverse any inhumane thinking
Because at that point they've been exposed to extensive bias and misinformation by hundreds of sources, whether from family, the media, or just by existing in a system built on WS.
I find it works - where you explain the science but also explain how deniers use sleight of hand (cherry-picking etc.) to mislead. This arms them with the right info, but also the knowledge of how deception is being used against them and to therefore not trust orgs who rely on denier talking points
When a person has an incentive to believe something their brain will invent an explanation. If they don't deny physics they deny the magnitude, or they deny it's bad "CO2 is good for vegetation, it's actually going to be great for agriculture and for biomass which actually takes CO2 from atmosphere"
I teach 6th Grade Science and this is such a great strategy. CO2 is just a molecule that does things. When there’s a lot more of it than there used to be, big things can happen, like melting sea ice, etc
I also like to use food as analogy, if you increase by 30+% your intake of a key food group and do not change rest of diet lifestyle. You cannot expect not to gain weight. Here is example filmed at 2015 AGU. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh07q0JHIFw
My freshman intro to envi-sci class had us do an experiment where we filled one bottle with CO2 and another with normal air and put both under heat lamps. We then proceeded to watch how much faster the CO2 one warmed up. Incredibly clear and simple experiment.
My favorite bit of “how climate science works” science is the fact that we know how much of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from fossils fuels the same way we know the ages of the fossils that turn into fossil fuels - carbon dating. If the C is too old, it had to come from a fossil.
Radio-carbon dating can only go back 60,000 years. It cannot be used to date fossils. They use uranium-235/238 or potassium-40 dating for things in the millions/billions year range, but most are dated by common strata identification.
honestly i thought it was that it reflected infrared light but that the amount of infrared emitted by earth is more than the amount of infrared from the sun that reaches earth and then it reflects it back down to earth
thanks for letting me know it's absorption though, makes a lot more sense tbh
Saying it absorbs heat like a black t-shirt is too simple. How is it like a black t-shirt if invisible?
Saying it absorbs infrared is better but misses key pt: CO2 absorbs specific bands of IR that water vapor *does not* absorb. See my pink annotation on plot from link: https://www.randombio.com/co2.html
In contexts in which there is space to do so, I'd love an even more complete explanation.
The fact that CO2 heats up earth by "slowing down light as it tries to leave earth", rather than by taking up more incoming solar energy, is little known, and this ignorance is often abused by disinformation.
Is it light? It's outside of the visual spectrum. It's Infrared, so it's essentially heat. CO2 keeps IR radiation in, and IR waves are heat. It literally keeps heat in.
There are definitions of 'light' that only refer to the visible spectrum, and definitions that use it synonymously to all EM radiation.
But the character limit per post is less ambiguous 😅
Venus has a higher surface temperature than Mercury (Mercury's varies quite a lot, but even the max surface temperature is cooler than the Venusian mean).
Mercury has a higher blackbody temperature, though, by over 200K.
whats going to happen though? it cant get much worse for so many humans on earth already? i wish we would figure ourselves out before we saved the world
That's all fine and good until you find yourself having to define "opaque" and "infrared" to every other person. Of course that's assuming half of the population are Trump voters.
I was about to say I JUST heard this somewhere ... and I did, on the Dear Hank & John podcast. definitely a memorable turn of phrase that I will probably repeat while explaining climate stuff
That’s nice but more than half of the US adult population either did not graduate or graduated in the lower half of their class. You need to draw pictures with crayon, and they might be able to recall a somewhat related tidbit of misinformation.
I found one of the best explanations for the effect of more CO2 blocking a higher proportion of the infrared radiation escaping to space, but being a small percentage of the atmosphere, to be the humble space blanket. It only weighs 40 grams, yet can warm someone up quickly in emergency situations.
And sea level rise is caused by 1. The melting polar ice, but also, 2. Heat is basically molecular agitation, when molecules are agitated they don't want to be close to eachother so the DENSITY decreases and the MASS increases, this raises sea levels. Cold increases in density so cold water falls.
'Global Warming' is the type of 'Climate Change' we are facing. It is the overall trend. Climate is not weather, it is the long overall trend. Polar ice is melting because increased greenhouse gassed (mainly CO2) are keeping in more Infrared (IR) solar radiation, aka heat.
The planetary temperature must surely influence the climate.
The greenhouse gasses are causing the 'global warming' which must cause the changes in climate
The long term changes must have a trigger.
Surely the greenhouse gasses are causing global warming which then changes the climate?
I'm not sure what you are asking. Weather = inches
Climate = meters.
Natural levels of GHGs changes slowly over VERY LONG periods of time, but since the industrial revolution humans have increased them by using fossil fuels
Changes in terminology show this, too. Global warming, while scientifically proven, was easy for folks to dismiss with a snowball. Climate change, though, allowed people to incorporate more hurricanes, tornadoes, and erratic weather within it. Not all of course. Some minds are more opaque than CO2.
Agreed, but not as widely or commonly accepted as they are now. The 80s were just beginning to realize how humans depleted the ozone layer. The concept of global warming also wasn't as discussed until then, & is still argued against. Talk of global change, though, is now common and mostly accepted.
A key expression that shows someone does not know how greenhouse gas warming works is something like "CO2 is only a trace gas at 0.04% of the atmosphere." I like the idea of pre-empting this with a brief comment on why non greenhouse gases don't dilute the mechanism of greenhouse warming.
In my waste class, i discuss the cyclical nature of earth systems (water cycle, soil/rock cycle, and carbon cycle, etc) and how earth seeks balance. Then show how extraction of fossil carbon and destruction of carbon sinks, puts the system out of balance. Very simple graphics. It seems to stick
This is actually a more effective way of communicating important information. People want to understand, and many will shut down or get defensive if they can’t understand what you’re saying or they feel talked down to. We need more of this energy to help change things.
CO2 is also essential plant food. Do you explain that? Do you explain that its proportion of the atmosphere has varied naturally over time and that now we are at the low end of that variation.
My understanding of the molecular physics of it is that greenhouse gases have one or multiple hinges in them, so they can vibrate at the hinges and thus trap heat. If you're looking for that angle in the future.
Comments
This would have been a good way to explain it.
That is Plymouth rock and it will remain that way til the creator destroys this planet
Stopped being fooled into being taxed 😂
🤡
Is the general science level THAT bad? It's hard for me to know being steeped in it always.
I talk to some people sometimes where even "opaque to heat energy" would probably not register.
The infrared/heat is what co2 keeps in. It's a balance. More co2 keeps more heat in upsetting the balance.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgRoK-eyLjomkPmes7u9Bv1j914MgroAn&si=woHqoaFvFzedyT9E
No, it just catches more heat like a black chair in the sun.
I was only passingly interested in science in school, so in adulthood, this is so good to know!
I’ve said before, and I’ll keep saying it, that part of the reason people don’t understand wealth inequality is that they can’t do basic math. They think they’re just “bad with money,” not exploited.
Homeowners should get it! And it is called the “greenhouse” effect
The most important for now is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That's where our mindset should be.
A lot of people aren't clear on what "opaque" means or how it is relevant to what you're saying.
No, I'm not joking.
To be comprehensible to most people pitch as low as possible.
And please keep fighting the good fight.
I know people who lost homes in Hurricane Harvey and people who lost homes in Paradise.
They doubled down on climate change denial:
I think this does make the CO2 balance so much more fragile.
https://youtu.be/5YV_iKnzDRg?si=Zw47HkbNS_ctY4YM
https://youtu.be/AST9s42LBg8?si=SplTlKch_K76JZOz
Hello from Florida (btw, one of the leading canaries in the coal mine)!
And scientifically pretty inaccurate too
CO2 works nothing like a black t-shirt
Even a basic google search will give you a ten times better explanation
So it actually is very useful.
Why is that?
Please go listen to some expert science communicators
You're making the problem worse with such terrible analogies
Yeah, well .. ^that's^ what we're up against and we're losing. I don't think the problem is lack of nuance
Them:
"A t-shirt, doesn't let light in, but traps a thin layer of air which your body heats. But if it was white the light would be reflected back to space. But your body would still be warm"...
1. GHGs trap heat.
2. We're pumping out more in our atmosphere than at any other point in human history.
3. Record-breaking weather events are increasing alongside the increase of GHGs.
That's the sphere we've built
We've created this our plight
And we're all gonna get kil't.
Query is C02 opaque to ultra violet or x-ray? lol I'm on the Internet I suppose I could look it up. Mind jumps. Thanks.
https://youtu.be/DC2SWg1HwvA?si=rsXeSKJdd8nL2bya
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgRoK-eyLjomkPmes7u9Bv1j914MgroAn&si=0awUDLGiP_6GPZtF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
You just have to find out what MOTIVATES people to educate them!
Problem is when they’re bathed in propaganda all the time, they never get a chance to think.
How’d I do?
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/misinformation-and-disinformation-both-prebunking-and-debunking-work-fighting-it-2024-10-25_en
A 3C temp increase doesn't seem like much, but a 5.4F increase, well if that were your thermostat you'd be panicking.
It typically happens a few months before the big flood of ads near election, and involves warning people of what the opposition's argument will be and why it's wrong.
This also works when educating children about racism and stereotypes.
Everything is taught.
If you come in first with the truth, it’s going to be a lot harder for that person to shake that.
Kids have no prejudice until they are taught.
Systemic racism is like the atmosphere: it's everywhere but you can't quite see it.
thanks for letting me know it's absorption though, makes a lot more sense tbh
Saying it absorbs infrared is better but misses key pt: CO2 absorbs specific bands of IR that water vapor *does not* absorb. See my pink annotation on plot from link: https://www.randombio.com/co2.html
Adding CO2 decreases the output.
Everything else is just figuring out what the consequences will be.
Come back in a couple of hours. The CO2 jar will be hotter.
(*) cheap thermometers aren't that accurate. Use 3 and take the median.
Too many people react to words based on what they've been told rather than what, erm, they are.
The fact that CO2 heats up earth by "slowing down light as it tries to leave earth", rather than by taking up more incoming solar energy, is little known, and this ignorance is often abused by disinformation.
But the character limit per post is less ambiguous 😅
My dad uses to make it, bunch of Lipton in a jug on the deck. Cooler than the deck at first, then warmer after.
Also Venus is hotter than Mercury. I've seen the doom dawn on some faces.
Mercury has a higher blackbody temperature, though, by over 200K.
Surely the melting ice caps and rising sea levels aren't due to a change in the weather
The greenhouse gasses are causing the 'global warming' which must cause the changes in climate
The long term changes must have a trigger.
Surely the greenhouse gasses are causing global warming which then changes the climate?
Climate = meters.
Natural levels of GHGs changes slowly over VERY LONG periods of time, but since the industrial revolution humans have increased them by using fossil fuels
Maybe you'll find your answer in here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL69bBhmsrgfsrmP8tcKVcQtSTb9su1oe5&si=U2zjGbDZg4e7cI5a
Both terms are still used as they both have been for decades.
Debunking misinfo under the radar.