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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

16/01/24 06:42 AM IST

2023- Warmest year

In News
  • 2023 was the warmest year since records began in 1850, beating the previous record of 2016.
Greenhouse gases
  • Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are those gases in the Earth’s atmosphere that trap heat.
  • They allow sunlight to pass through the atmosphere but prevent the heat that sunlight brings from returning into space.
  • Essentially, GHGs act like a blanket that envelopes our planet and insulates Earth from the cold of space. This process of maintaining a warmer temperature is called the greenhouse effect.
  • The most notable GHGs are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, and nitrous oxide.
  • These gases occur naturally and are a boon for the planet — in their absence, there wouldn’t be the greenhouse effect without which there wouldn’t be liquid water and any form of life.
Emissions by human
  • At the heart of the problem are not greenhouse gases but their concentration, meaning their amount in the atmosphere.
  • For about a thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, the GHG concentration remained relatively constant. Since then, there has been a constant rise in the amount of some of the GHGs.
  • For instance, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has spiked by around 48% since the pre-industrial era.
  • The main driver behind the increase is human activities, like burning fossil fuels and deforestation.
  • There are three types of carbon-containing material. Some consist of light carbon, or carbon-12. Some comprise heavy carbon or carbon-13 and others contain radioactive carbon-14.
  • carbon dioxide emitted over the last century will remain in the atmosphere for centuries — will still be warming the planet and causing sea levels to rise.
  • Humans have also added GHGs in the atmosphere that don’t occur naturally.
  • This includes chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — once widely used as a refrigerant in air conditioners, freezers and refrigerators, these chemicals damage the ozone layer and are really potent GHGs.
  • Compared to carbon dioxide, CFCs can produce more than 10,000 times as much warming, pound for pound, once they are in the air.
  • This unprecedented increase in GHG levels in the atmosphere is responsible for the rapid warming of Earth. In 2023, GHG concentrations reached the highest levels ever recorded in the atmosphere.
Source- Indian Express

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