When people talk about global warming or the greenhouse effect, the fundamental scientific concept which describes the entire process is radiative forcing. According to science, radiative forcing is the difference between the insolation absorbed by the earth and the energy released back to space (Holland et al., 2019). What’s more, climate forcing initiate changes to the climate system alter the radiative equilibrium and forces temperatures to fluctuate. Climate forcing is influenced by factors ranging from solar inputs to greenhouse gases.
First, the solar inputs affect climate forcing from the interaction of the sun with land, water, and air. The earth is persistently suffused in energy from the sun. What’s more, a ratio of the energy that reaches the earth gets reflected into space ( Foster et al., 2017) . Equally, another ration gets absorbed by the atmosphere whereas the remaining ratio of energy moves through the atmosphere to the surface. Moreover, the energy from the sun heats land as well as water surfaces making them to produce heat. The heat produced offers additional warming of the atmosphere. Furthermore, the combined gases in the atmosphere keep a portion of the heat from escaping into space (Foster et al., 2017). This progression is known as the naturally happening greenhouse effect and it helps in keeping the earth warm to support life.
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Secondly, greenhouses gasses cause radiative forcing. Typically, certain atmospheric gases tend to block heat from escaping the earth (Foster et al., 2017). Also, human activities tend to alter natural greenhouse. According to Arnell (2016), over the last century, the burning of fossil fuels has augmented the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This occurs because the process of burning fuel makes carbon combine with oxygen in the air to create CO2 which leads to global warming. To a far less extent, the clearing of land for agriculture and other human activities have increased the amount of greenhouse gases which in turn has led to the greenhouse effect.
References
Holland, P. R., Bracegirdle, T. J., Dutrieux, P., Jenkins, A., & Steig, E. J. (2019). Climate Forcing of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Anthropogenic Trends and Internal Climate Variability. Nature Geoscience .
Foster, G. L., Royer, D. L., & Lunt, D. J. (2017). Future climate forcing potentially without precedent in the last 420 million years. Nature Communications , 8 , 14845.
Arnell, N. W., Brown, S., Gosling, S. N., Hinkel, J., Huntingford, C., Lloyd-Hughes, B., ... & Zelazowski, P. (2016). Global-scale climate impact functions: the relationship between climate forcing and impact. Climatic change , 134 (3), 475-487.
