Day Two: Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in Thirteen Days

"2) One of the properties of CO2 is that it creates a greenhouse effect and, all other things being equal, an increase in its concentration in the atmosphere causes the Earth’s temperature to rise. This is just physics. (The amount of other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as methane, has also risen steeply since industrialization, which has added to the impact of higher CO2 levels.)"

I like this statement, because it is just so simple.  CO2 holds heat.  Here's a simple experiment showing that very effect:



More CO2; more heat.  Simple.  We humans are adding many millions of tons of CO2 to our atmosphere each day, so it's not a hard stretch to expect that eventually our world would retain more heat.  Which it has.  It's about 1 degree Celsius warmer now than at the beginning of the twentieth century.

[This one of a series of daily posts I am drawing from Jeremy Grantham's Summer 2010 Investment letter.  Mr. Grantham is on the Board of Directors of GMO LLC, a global investment firm with over $100 billion under management.  Mr. Grantham takes a large, worldview perspective on investments--with an eye toward long-term trends.  He is right-on about the impact of global warming.]