the.com/greenhouse effect
Earth wrapped itself in a gas blanket and now can't find the zipper
means The process by which gases in the atmosphere trap heat from the sun, warming the planet's surface rather than letting it radiate back into space.
from Named for the literal greenhouse, where glass panes let sunlight in but block the resulting heat from escaping — a 19th-century scientific comparison. The phrase became common in climate science during the 20th century, even though real greenhouses mostly stay warm by blocking convection (stopping warm air from mixing out), not by the glass trapping infrared the way atmospheric gases do. The name stuck anyway, metaphor outliving its mechanism.
- not actual greenhouses
- real greenhouses trap air, not infrared radiation
- discovered by
- a woman, Eunice Foote, in 1856, uncredited for decades
- without it
- Earth's average temp would be about -18°C
- main culprit
- water vapor, not CO2, traps most heat naturally