Greenhouse Effect

[Gamil Zirak]

Is the Greenhouse effect really happening. I mean we know that earth is getting warmer, but is it from natural causes or by man-made substances. Are we really causing the hole in the ozone layer over Antartica? What's everyone take/opinion on this?

[DGoeij]

Well, for the destruction of the ozone-layer we humans are to blame. No doubt about that. Chemicals used by us, in refrigerators and sprays(sp?, I'm not sure about the proper english) really do destroy ozone (O3) and do reach the high altitudes in our atmophere where they can do the damage. Even worse, they are only catalyst in the proces of breaking up the ozone molecules, meaning that those chemicals stay intact after the reaction. It's just recently, years after the banishment of these chemicals, that the hole in the layer is shrinking. Slowly, but it has been measured.

The greenhouse effect is a far more complicated and unclear phenomenon. The idea is, that the Carbondioxide (CO2), produced by burning fossil fuel for instance, creates a blanket around the earth, trapping the warmth and thereby increasing the average temperature on earth.
Research in the ice packs of Antarctica has shown that thousands of years ago, the concentrations of CO2 were even higher than today. There were no 6 billion humans on earth burning up a lot of fossile fuel, as far as we can be certain. So the claim that increasing temperature is to blame on human activitiy is far but proven. On the other hand, claiming that it does NO harm is impossible to prove either. We simply can't be sure, yet.

[Gloer]

the summers are getting warmer.

that means that on average we will have warm summers more often here in Finland and the usual cloudy and cool ones a bit less.
Not a major change at all.
The growth period won't change more than a week or two and not permanently so that new plant could be introduced.

But I think green house is here.

[Rangerdave]

Welcome my friends to the fun filled world of the interglacial epoch. The problem with greenhouse, global warming and other climate related phenomina is that we only have reliable climatic records for the last century at best. The warming the Earth is currently experiencing may be caused by the increase of flourocarbons (sp?), or it may be a naturally occuring change due to geologic processes. The point is we just don't a definative answer to these questions.

Having said that, the use (or overuse) or ozone depleating chemicals may have a profound effect. Since the probability of this is statistically high, it would make sense to err on the side of caution. The stakes of this gamble are far too high to allow the unregulated use of ozone depleating chemicals on the off chance that they may be harmless.

I think the bomb squad analogy is useful here. A bomb may explode, or it may not, but it still foolish to sit next to it and wait and see.


Have a day
RD

[DGoeij]

In my country the last ten years the summers have been significantly warmer and the winters a somewhat colder. But since, as RD pointed out, we are only monitering the weather for a century or so, we have no idea if it's a climate change or the Greenhouse effect.