Greenhouse Gas Effect Cross-Section (2D)

This 2D companion draws a side-on cross-section of Earth's atmosphere: sunlight streams down from a corner sun and warms a strip of ground, which re-radiates that energy upward as infrared heat. A band of greenhouse-gas molecules above the surface, whose density tracks the CO₂ slider, intercepts a growing share of that infrared and bounces it back down to reheat the ground, while the rest escapes to space. Live readouts compute the radiative forcing and equilibrium surface warming from the same logarithmic CO₂ formula climate scientists use, so raising the slider from the 1750 pre-industrial baseline to today's concentration — or doubling it beyond that — shows exactly how much extra heat is trapped and why each doubling adds roughly the same increment of warming.