What is the greenhouse effect?
Figure 1. The greenhouse effect. Available from: http://www.livescience.com/37743-greenhouse-effect.html Accessed on: 27 July 2015
The greenhouse effect is a natural event that occurs on Earth. The gases in Earth’s atmosphere has its own absorption …show more content…
The use of these gases has increased due to the use of nitrogen based fertilizers in agriculture and catalytic converters in automobiles (Sharma, 2008).
Human’s impact on the greenhouse effect:
Although the greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon and that the greenhouse gases has always been in the atmosphere, the amount of greenhouse gases is a problem as it drastically increased over the past decades. The Industrial Revolution plays a big part in the quantity of atmospheric CO2 being released. During the ice ages the CO2 fluctuated between 180 ppm and during the interglacial warm periods 280 ppm. What is significant is that since the Industrial Revolution, the quantity of CO2 increased 100 times faster than the increase when the ice age ended (Lallanilla, 2015a)
During the industrial processes, fluorinated gases (gases that includes fluorine) was created like sulphur hexafluoride, perfluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons. There are only small concentrations of them present, but it traps heat and that makes them a high “global-warming potential” (GWP) gases (Lallanilla, …show more content…
These activities includes burning oil, coal and gas thus releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. There are farming practices and land-use changes that increases the amounts of methane and nitrous oxide that’s being released. Factories produces long-lasting greenhouse gases that does not occur naturally in the environment. Deforestation contributes to the greenhouse effect as the trees that are being removed has a critical role by using the CO2 and release oxygen in the process which can form a balance in the atmosphere. Another factor is population growth, because more people will use fossil fuels for heat, manufacturing and transportation and this will just increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (West,