• The most recognized contributing factor to climate change is greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect they create.
   

 

• These gases trap heat in the atmosphere and in turn warm the climate. While they are all created by natural processes, humans have played the biggest role in releasing them into the atmosphere by daily activities involved with work, school, and leisure.
   

• Once in the atmosphere, the gases mix and can be found in the same concentrations around the globe, even though some countries produce more gases than others. Every country in the world contributes in some way to greenhouse gas emission, so everyone is responsible for curtailing it.
   

 

• Greenhouse gases do have a purpose – heating the earth, which would be very cold without them. However, in overabundance, the gases are proving to be detrimental.
   

 

• The actual process in which the gases heat the earth is known in technical terms as the “greenhouse effect” 

 

• With overproduction from human activities, an inflated “greenhouse effect” is created. When the sun heats the earth, the surface absorbs a lot of the energy and cools down by giving off infrared radiation. Some of that radiation is caught by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before escaping past Earth’s upper layer atmostphere, the exosphere, and out into space. This process is what heats, and increasingly overheats, the climate.
  
   

Percentage of some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere1:
 

Nitrogen (N) – 78 percent

Oxygen (O) – 21 percent

Argon (Ar) - .93 percent

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - .038%