If you’re anything like me, you enjoy taking really hot showers. I mean, showers to the point that it slightly burns your skin. I love them so much. They relax my muscles and help me fall asleep, AND I love how the bathroom turns into my own temporary steam room. The steam helps warm up the bathroom and makes the transition into my cold Chicago apartment happen when IM ready. I choose when to open the door to the cold cold living room. (…heating an entire Chicago apartment can be a bit too expensive sometimes.)
But why exactly does steam trap the heat so well? This has to do with the fact that water, the ‘triangular’ diatomic H2O molecule, is able to vibrate at lower frequencies, which then allows heat to be absorbed by the molecules. (Saying this in a science-y way: The diatomic molecule structure has low frequency vibrational modes that allow them to trap the lower frequency light that is heat. I believe this lower frequency property comes from the shape of the molecule…but that’s a post for anther time.) Now that these atoms can absorb the heat, it allows the heat to linger around instead of dissipating or being absorbed by something else in the room. But the moment you open up the door, all that wonderful heat leaves and you eventually get a cold bathroom again. But perhaps you want to make the transition a little less sudden, so you just crack the door. Then the bathroom will still loose the heat eventually…but it’ll take longer than if you open it up all the way.
This whole process of trapping heat and letting the heat escape is very similar to that of the global warming process, with a few important distinctions. Instead of a hot showerhead, we have the sun that is providing the heat. And now it’s not the sun that is providing the heat trapping molecules (i.e. greenhouse gases), but rather the earth’s climate and human activity that provides the various gas molecules that can trap heat. (Water happens to be one of these gases, but we also have CO2, CH4 and others.) And instead of a door that we get to easily open and close, we have an atmosphere that protects us from the cold cold outer space. As we add more greenhouse gases, we slowly close the door and make it easier for our atmosphere to trap the heat that is being provided by the sun. (Or, on the flipside, if there weren’t enough of these gases, our earth would just be a big ball of ice.)
While I thought that this analogy was interesting in it’s own right (Hey, Im a huge nerd after all), I think it’s a important point to show that it is absolutely indisputable that humans are contributing to the warming of the earth, just by the fact that we are adding greenhouse gases. Sure, we may not get to decide exactly how much we close the ‘door’ to outer space, there are a lot of different factors at play, but we certainly have some say. (And, yes, this heat-trapping trait alone doesn’t prove that humans are driving climate change…but I’ll get to the other details later.) Now– in the spirit of fairness – just cause most scientific evidence tells us that humans are driving global warming doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider the economic impacts of transitioning to a greener form of energy. But I’d be so freaking happy if some politicians will actually start doing their job and approach these problem in a honest manner, rather that just saying the easy thing to get the votes.