Canada's Wonderland was owned by Paramount, who own the rights to a whole bunch of cartoon characters. You could see many of these characters wandering around the park. Actually, they're just park employees dressed up in big furry suits. (Omygosh!! You didn't know that? You thought it was REALLY Dino?? We're so sorry about that! Forget you read it, O.K.? Go back and don't read any more!) Anyway ... we've always wondered how the people inside those suits can stand the heat. We're wandering around in shorts and T-shirts, and sweating buckets. These guys must be cooking! In fact, they do get really hot, so they only stay in costume for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. How the heat builds up inside their costumes is a good example of the 'Greenhouse Effect' studied in Science 9, so we'll look at it here. The person inside the costume is being heated in two different ways ... The heat from the sunlight (1) is passing through the costume, and warming the air inside, and the person's body. The person's own body heat (2) is attempting to escape, and is slowed down by the costume. Both of these, unfortunately, will cause the person to warm up. If all that heat could escape as fast as it appeared, the environment inside the suit would stay at the same temperature. But it doesn't. The material of the suit won't let heat escape quickly enough. Here's a close-up of the body and the suit. The occupant will feel uncomfortably hot anyway, because there's no air circulation, so his sweat can't evaporate. He can't cool off. But there's a bigger problem. Heat from the sun can get in easily. But heat from the person's body, and heat from the air inside the suit warmed by the sun, can't get out fast enough to keep the temperature balanced. The result? The temperature inside the suit begins to climb. This diagram shows what is happening. There is a lot of heat inside the suit. Heat energy is electromagnetic radiation, whose frequency increases as the radiating body (the person inside) gets warmer. At the start, the frequency of this heat is such that it does not permit the heat to escape easily. Some of it stays inside. This makes the temperature keep going up. Eventually, the temperature inside is hot enough, and the heat's frequency is high enough, that the heat can start to escape as fast as it is being generated inside. At this point, the temperature will stop going up. Unfortunately for the person inside, this temperature is very high ... way too high for a person to survive in for more than a few minutes, and won't make the suit habitable. In fact, the person will probably have taken off the suit before this maximum temperature is even reached. This example illustrates what happens in a glass-walled greenhouse ... or the earth's atmosphere, when excess carbon dioxide prevents heat from escaping as fast as it is arriving. The earth's atmosphere warms up. Eventually the heat is able to escape as fast as it is arriving, and equilibrium is reached ... the temperature stops climbing. But the new temperature is higher than it was at the beginning. Amusement Park Physics