A greenhouse on your farm or in your back yard keeps your plants warm in winter time. It is designed to keep them warm so they stay alive until you can plant them outside when it’s warmer in spring time. Or you could just let them keep growing in the greenhouse because they love the warmth. If you’ve been inside a green house you’ll know it feels a lot warmer inside than outside.
A permanent greenhouse around the earth has the same effect except that the earth isn’t used to it. The problem with carbon dioxide is that if there is too much of it our tree and plant life can’t absorb enough and grow into larger trees and plants. Carbon dioxide then stays in the air and is a gas which is very good at absorbing the heat we get from the sun. Carbon dioxide prevents heat from escaping from the earth’s atmosphere and back into space like it used to. So the earth just keeps getting warmer. This is called the greenhouse effect.
What happens next is our north and south poles start melting and don’t stop. The glaciers on our highest mountains keep melting and pretty soon all this melted water starts to cause problems for people living by the sea. Remember how the earth is 70% covered in water? That doesn’t include the ice.
A warming planet also means we need to run our air conditioning a lot more to keep ourselves cool and airconditioning consumes a large amount of power. This in turn causes power stations to burn more coal to power our aircon. This adds even more carbon dioxide to the air, causing more greenhouse effect and causing us to turn up the aircon even more.
Greenhouse effects are also felt in the sea with sea life unable to go anywhere to cool down and not having the benefit of airconditioning. Mass fish deaths are becoming common and much of the worlds coral has already died or is now dying off around late 2019.
Many other greenhouse effects are being felt but it is too depressing to write them all down here. Here is some further reading : <reading>
