While there is no disagreement that the temperature on the Earth has been rising, we are in need of figuring out why! We've got some questions on our DQB that are related to something many of us have heard of, and that's greenhouse gases. Using a PhET simulator on various gases in the Earth's atmosphere, we wanted to see how they interact with both shortwave and longwave energy.
After allowing all gases to experience both longwave and shortwave energy, we came to this agreement:
We agreed that gases that absorb and re-emit longwave energy (heat) are greenhouse gases. We also are thinking that the increase in these gases over time are what's causing the temperature on the Earth to increase. We update our Earth Energy Budget. Next steps? How do they actually collect all this data on greenhouse gases? Like on the Arctic?