Anyone who’s ever been in a car with children will know that when they’re not crying, pulling each other’s hair or stuffing bit of fruit behind the car seats, they’re asking endless, unanswerable questions. Why is that cup blue? Why is France so far away? How long is it since you’ve been in an elevator? Why do the god people think that Jesus died for us, didn’t he just die? Did he die for Jewish people too? And why does that do me any good? Can I have a biscuit? Why do I have to have a sister anyway? Why is leaving a light on going to make the world warmer? Will the greenhouse effect thing mean we get more tomatoes?

Mostly all these conversations do for me is prove how little I know about light refraction, geography, comparative theology, linguistics and the art of saying no. But the climate change one threw me a curvier than usual ball, because I thought I did know about it. Not only did I study it at university, but I regularly get into shouty conversations at the local about climate change, how much more evidence do I need of my all knowing brain than a science elective and some late-night, wine-fuelled table thumping?

Half an hour of interrogation by a fourteen year old destroyed all my illusions. But if greenhouse gas stops heat getting out why doesn’t it stop heat getting in? If water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas why is carbon the one everyone is worried about? What doesn’t the carbon just float off into space? If cities are producing the most carbon does that mean it all floats above the cities and doesn’t make the bush warmer? If the oceans are reflecting sunlight why are they getting warmer? How do you know that carbon is the problem? What if it’s something else that we don’t know about yet? Who is Lord Monkton and why did you make that noise when I said his name? And on and on and on. And on.

As well as being embarrassed and slightly horrified by how little I really knew about how the greenhouse effect works, I was also curious. Was it just me, or do most people only have a vagueish I-sort-of-but-not-really-understand-it idea of climate change? So I asked around and, apart from an engineer (which doesn’t count) most of the people I asked don’t know much more than I did. One of the people I asked, however, told me that it doesn’t matter. Scientists understand science so that we don’t have to. They tell us what the science means and then we do things like stop smoking, step on the accelerator to make the car go forward, pick the apples up off the ground when they fall and install solar panels to reduce carbon emissions.

Is he right? Do I need to know exactly how tobacco gives me emphysema to believe that smoking is bad for me? Do I need to understand what radiative forcing is to know that when 1300 scientists say it’s a problem they’re most likely correct? How much of it do I need to understand? Enough to explain the theory to a 14 year old boy? Enough to earn me a place on the IPCC board? The science of climate change is incredibly complicated, it would be presumptuous and arrogant of me to think I could understand it all after skimming a few Wikipedia articles, but if I’m going to tell my son that it’s real don’t I have an obligation to understand enough of it to be confident that I’m right?

The answers, like most things, probably vary from person to person. My friend doesn’t need to question the science because he trusts the scientists who have said that climate change is real. That’s enough for him. In the same way the people who believe Lord Monkton trust him enough to not question the evidence he relies on to make his arguments.

Maybe it’s just not enough for me because I hate having to say “I don’t know” in response to yet another teenage interrogation.

I am not a climate scientist but I have now read enough science to be able to answer the questions my son has about the greenhouse effect and believe that what I’m telling him is reliable and based on work by credible people who have spent years researching and understanding things so that I don’t have to. My thanks to NASA, University of Colombia, IPCC, Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia of Earth.

This article on the Encyclopaedia of Earth is one of the better explainations of the way the Greenhouse Effect works if anyone is looking for something to make a 14 year old stop asking questions for a few minutes.

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Jane Shaw is the editor of The King’s Tribune. Follow her on twitter @JaneTribune

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