I can agree with Roderick Taylor that the earth’s surface gets most of its heat from the sun. But that heat arrives only during the daytime.
He doesn’t address the question of what happens at night.
That’s when heat tries to escape into space. If it were completely successful, we’d wake up freezing every morning! That doesn’t happen because something gets in the way. Sometimes it’s cloud, but what happens on cloudless nights shows there’s something else: a layer of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
What happens if the composition of that layer changes over time because carbon dioxide is continually being added to it? I reckon we should know the answer.
It’s what’s happened in Marlow, in Dawlish, in the Philippine city of Tacloban. It’s what’s happened wherever there’s been unusual flooding, or strong winds; or abnormally high temperature, drought and wildfires; or even exceptionally low temperatures or high snowfall.
It’s usually called global warming. If there’s a better name, can you come up with it? — Eric Alexander, Dovecot Road, High Wycombe
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