What will earth be like without the greenhouse effect?
Answers
The greenhouse effect describes Earth's ability to trap heat within the atmosphere.
Without the greenhouse effect, Earth would be a solid ball of ice and rock. Life as we know it would not be able to exist without greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Without these heat-trapping gasses, our planet's average temperature would plummet to around zero degrees Fahrenheit!
Talk of climate change and global warming often paints greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane as the source of the problem. The problem is not that these gasses exist in the atmosphere, because we need them to maintain our average global temperatures. Issues do arise, however, when extra greenhouse gasses are added to the atmosphere through human processes like burning fossil fuels. This surplus of gasses increase the warming greenhouse effect, causing global average temperatures to rise.