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Greenhouse
Earth
 What
happens when you go into a greenhouse on a sunny day? It's hot, isn't it?
That's because the glass in the greenhouse traps the heat from the sun.
This gas carbon
dioxide does the same in the earth's  atmosphere. It acts like glass in a greenhouse, doing the same as my feathers do when
I'm swimming in the very cold sea: my
feathers keep me warm, the glass in the greenhouse keeps the plants
inside warm, and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases keep the
planet warm. Without them, we'd freeze. Too much of them means that we boil!  Because
people are burning fuels with carbon in (that's oil, gas and coal which
you use in  cars,
aeroplanes,
power stations and so on), all this carbon gets dumped into the air, combined
with the oxygen we all breathe,
and so adds to our greenhouse gas problem. And the
planet warms more than it should.
Carbon dioxide (CO 2) isn't the only 'greenhouse gas' though it is the most common. There are several others. Methane is 21 times more powerful at trapping heat than CO 2 and there are other gases made by people which can be thousands of times more powerful.
The planet Venus where a runaway greenhouse effect has made it searingly hot (NASA)
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