Abstract

Greenhouse gases (GHGs), primarily CO2, are well known to everyone and are designated as the cause of the greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change. This is what emerged from the various United Nations COPs following the IPCC’s advice. Hence the need for decarbonization, the energy transition to renewable energies, and carbon neutrality by 2050, the date from which we will no longer manufacture combustion-engine cars in favor of electric mobility. The number one oversight relates to a component of the greenhouse effect itself, which is a natural phenomenon. The goal is to trap infrared radiation emitted by habitable land, which averages +15°C. However, the excess infrared radiation emitted by artificialized soils creates a significant imbalance, capable of creating a greenhouse effect that overheats the entire Earth in both summer and winter. Artificialized soils include paved roads (bitumen, asphalt, and pavement layers), buildings and urban expansion, as well as vehicles exposed to direct sunlight, fixed and floating solar power plants... All of this artificialization is of a more or less dark color, with a low albedo coefficient, and a high solar radiation absorption coefficient. The overheating of artificialized soils and their thermal inertia due to their mass means that they store the heat collected during the day and release it at night; this is what I am actually experiencing and observing during the summer of 2023 in Djerba, Tunisia. The second oversight concerns the heat generated by the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, as well as by wind turbines (friction of the blades in the air: shear phenomenon). GHGs, artificial soils, and combustion heat combine to activate global warming and allow temperature records to be broken in many regions of the world, especially in recent years.

Keywords

Greenhouse effect; Infrared emissions; Greenhouse gases emissions; Global warming, Artificial soils; Soil albedo