Global Warming For Dummies

Q: I might believe in Global Warming if it was not happening before there were cars. I do mean man made of course.

A: If we were burning plant based fuels, you would have a valid point. But by burning fossil fuels we are introducing carbon into the system that had been locked up since the Permian Extinction.

We are increasing the total amount of CO2 in the system by about 22 billion tons each year. That doesn't seem like much compared to the Earth's 5 million trillion kg atmosphere, but it doesn't take much CO2 to generate a greenhouse effect.

You might think that plants would absorb the excess, but meanwhile we've been deforesting the planet at an increasing rate as well.

So now we have about 30% more CO2 in the system than we did before the Industrial Revolution, and that's why we've seen a rapid increase in AVERAGE global temperature since that time.