What is meant by greenhouse effect?
The term ‘greenhouse effect’ is meant to convey the notion that excess production of CO2 by fossil fuel burning and other so-called GHGs like methane and water, and their accumulation in the troposphere, results in a radiation imbalance; the GHGs retain reflected or incident photons associated with solar radiation, decreasing the amount of heat that the Earth releases to space, and releasing it at ground level as IR during nighttime. This supposedly creates a thermal anomaly, ie ‘man-made global warming’. 2.2. What really is a greenhouse? A greenhouse is an enclosed environment for plant growth, where the enclosure blocks air circulation and serves as a filter for photons associated with solar radiation, blocking most UV and thus ‘letting through’, so to speak, some visible and IR photons. These photons and that filtered radiation transfer their energy to a water vapour-saturated enclosed air volume, or to photosynthetic plants that, by absorbing them (ie in their presence), fix CO2 an
