The Heat is on

Earth’s climate is the product of a delicate balance of energy inputs, chemical process and physical phenomenons.  According to scientists, a human being’s blood would boil in Venus.  A person would instantly freeze to death in Mars.  The difference in temperature, they contend, is largely due to the widely varying chemical compositions of each planet’s atmosphere.“all three planets receive huge quantities of solar energy, but the amount of energy that is radiated back into space in the form of heat depends on the gases in the atmosphere,” says Dr. Christopher Flavin, a staff researcher of the Washington-based World watch Institute. Some gases like carbon dioxide and methane tend to absorb the heat in the same way that glass traps heat in the greenhouse and allow temperatures to build up.

The scorching temperatures of Venus are the product of an atmosphere that is composed largely of carbon dioxide which leads to an uncontrolled greenhouse effect,” says Flavin.  “Mars has too little carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases to support above-freezing temperatures.” 

Scientists say planet Earth has a nitrogen-based atmosphere with only 0.3 percent carbon dioxide – a share that has varied only slightly over the past several million years.

It was Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius who first suggested that human activities would affect global climate by producing an “enhanced greenhouse effect.”  But Arrhenius didn’t consider it a problem.  Said He: “By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy for ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth.”

In 1957 a study by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California suggested that half of the carbon dioxide  released was being permanently trapped in the atmosphere.  Humanity, said the study, was “engaged in a great geophysical experiment.”

The following year, a young graduate student named Charles Keeling set up a carbon-dioxide measuring station on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa to test the pollution-free air in the middle of the Pacific.  From 315 parts per million (ppm) in 1998, Keeling has measured an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of 10 percent – to 349 ppm.

Global warming.  On June 23, 1988, Dr. James Hansen of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration declared:  “Global warming has begun.”