Claim
A Twitter User @_ClimateCraze on May 5, 2023 wrote that greenhouse gases do not trap heat and that climate change is constant.
The tweet reads: “#1. Greenhouse gases do not trap heat – otherwise earth would have been toast billions of years ago. #2. There is no such thing as a balanced climate – as climate CHANGE is constant. #3. #ClimateScam is junk science advanced by propaganda..”
The tweet had 78 retweets, 2 Quotes, 196 Likes and 2,861 views.
Verification
What are Greenhouse gases?
According to Britannica, greenhouse gas is “any gas that has the property of absorbing infrared radiation (net heat energy) emitted from Earth’s surface and reradiating it back to Earth’s surface, thus contributing to the greenhouse effect”.
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The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines greenhouse gases as “gases that trap heat in the atmosphere”. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, and water vapor. Their concentrations are measured in parts per million, parts per billion, and even parts per trillion.
There are two types of greenhouse effects; the natural greenhouse effect and the enhanced greenhouse effect. The natural greenhouse effect is “caused by the natural amounts of greenhouse gases and is vital to life while the enhanced greenhouse effect refers to the additional radiative forcing resulting from increased concentrations of greenhouse gases induced by human activities”.
Greenhouse gases retain heat in the atmosphere because they trap some of the Earth’s outgoing energy. This trapping of heat “causes changes in the radiative balance of the Earth—the balance between energy received from the sun and emitted from Earth—that alter climate and weather patterns at global and regional scales”.
Is Climate Change constant?
Climate change is the “significant variation of average weather conditions becoming, for example, warmer, wetter, or drier—over several decades or longer”.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Earth’s climate varies considerably over seasons, years, and decades, largely due to natural cycles, as temperature trends across the entire globe are not constant due to the planet’s diverse geography.
The Earth’s climate is changing, and this change is forecast to be witnessed even beyond this century. While weather changes are observable within hours, climate changes over longer periods of time.
The pace at which the global climate is changing far exceeds the natural climate variations that have taken place throughout the history of the Earth. Evidence gathered from various climate variables such as trends in globally averaged temperature, sea level rise, upper-ocean heat content, land-based ice melt, arctic sea ice, and depth of seasonal permafrost thaw, consistently indicate a planet that is experiencing warming. These changes are primarily attributed to human activities, which alter the atmospheric composition either through direct emissions of gases or particles or indirectly through atmospheric chemistry.
Rating
False – Greenhouse gases are gases in the atmosphere that trap heat within the Earth.
This fact-check was produced by Justina Asishana, a Journalist with The Nation Newspaper with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck and African Fact-Checking Alliance network.