Climate change and the greenhouse effet : What should we understand?

Climate science, like other scientific subjects, helps to set up the basis of the climate context  in which human beings evolve and how their actions impact the meteorological contex, as well as the induced social and environment impacts. From the preindustrial era to the present day, discussions on climate changes and related topics, such as global warming and related have multiplied within the scientific panel. 

In 1998, considered to be one of the hottest year, a temperature rise of 0,68°C was recorded (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series/globe/land_ocean/ytd/12/1850-1998). This shows that global warming is no longer a theoritical subject, but is creating real environmental hazards such as floods, sea rise, temperature changes and extreme events that affects not only the human systems, but also the earth systems. This is where adapatation and mitigation coud play their part as means of regulating the impact of human activities on climate. By adaptation, we mean the reduction of the effects of climate change by the affected populations, while mitigation involves influencing the causes of climate change through a genuine change of habits and lifestyles.

To achieve the goal, we need to understand how greenhouse gases work and the role of human activies in the global warming. One of the key concepts is the greenhouse effect, which can be defined as a process in which the earth's surface and the lower athmosphere warm due to the inefficiency of the convection process. In other words, when the infrared radiation, coming from the sun is no equally re-emitted out the earth after being absorbed by the earth and due to the unbalanced thermal radiation, this stress causes the athmosphere to heat up as a desperate action of the earth to regulate the temperature. As this is a natural process, human activities since the preindustrial era and the resulting emissions of greenhouses gas in the athmosphere have caused a blanket that blocks the normal re-emission of the  thermal radiation outwards from the earth. This is known as the enhanced greenhouse effet. 

Unlike other terrestrial planets such as Venus or Mars, which are experiencing the  runaway greenhouse effect, which occurs when a planet's athmosphere contains greenhouse in sufficient quantity to prevent thermal readiation from leaving the planet and prevent it from cooling and having liquid water on its surface, the Earth would, throughtout its history, have managed to achieve a balance between the surface and an atmosphere saturated with water vapour.