Green House Effects

We all know the carbon dioxide gas present in the atmosphere performs an important function in the atmosphere and produces the greenhouse effect. There is a protective layer of ozone gas, high up in the atmosphere and then a blanket of carbon dioxide gas in the lower atmosphere. When sunlight consisting of ultraviolet rays is visible and infrared rays on the top of the atmosphere then the harmful ultraviolet radiation is absorbed by the ozone layer.

The visible light and infrared rays then pass through the carbon dioxide layer and fall on the surface of the earth. The infrared rays which come down from the sun are of the short-wavelength and thus passes through the carbon dioxide layer easily, these infrared rays heat the earth and the various objects present on the earth, due to being hot the objects also start emitting infrared rays but since those objects are less hot so they emit with infrared rays of long-wavelength which cannot escape out from the carbon dioxide layer in the atmosphere since carbon dioxide molecules have the ability to absorb the long-wavelength infrared rays reflected from the earth so they heat the earth's atmosphere. The heating up of the earth's atmosphere due to the trapping of infrared rays reflected from the Earth’s surface by the carbon dioxide layer in the atmosphere is called the greenhouse effect, the name greenhouse effect comes from the fact that this effect is used in horticulture for the upbringing of green plants in small houses made of glass walls and glass roof, due to the presence of carbon dioxide our atmosphere acts like the glass roof of an ordinary horticulture greenhouse.

Those gases which can be trapped by the infrared radiation given by the sun to produce a greenhouse effect leading to heating up of the environment are called greenhouse gases.
There are three greenhouse gases:-

1. Carbon Dioxide.

2. Water vapour.

3. Ozone.

Out of these three gases, water vapour and ozone don't contributes much greenhouse effect to the earth's atmosphere, only carbon dioxide contributes largely to the greenhouse effect in the earth's atmosphere because it's much more uniformly distributed in the atmosphere.

Importance of the green house effects in nature.

• The greenhouse effect produced by carbon dioxide gas is very crucial to our existence on the earth because without the greenhouse effect, the whole Earth would be converted into an extremely cold planet making the existence of the life difficult.