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I don't know how much greenhouse gases are on our planet but what would happen to Mars if we could contain the gases on Earth somehow and transfer it to the surface of Mars?

Ignoring the fact that solar winds would strip away progress made if any, would all the greenhouse gases on Earth be enough to warm Mars considerably? I've look around google but no questions of mine have been asked apparently...

Robb Hirano
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    First effect would be a horrible extinction of all plant species (which thrive on carbon dioxide) shortly followed by extinction of majority of life on Earth. We NEED CO2 in air, just not in the current excessive amounts! – SF. Dec 26 '16 at 01:40

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The total mass of Earth's atmosphere is about $5.1480 \times 10^{18}$ kg. The carbon dioxide portion of that is about 0.058% by mass. Of that, about 40% is "excess" carbon dioxide, above the pre-industrial average. So that all comes to be about 1.2 trillion metric tons ($1.2 \times 10^{15}$ kg), which getting that to Mars would represent a significant challenge in and of itself.

The atmosphere of Mars is about 25 trillion metric tons ($2.5 \times 10^{16}$ kg), so in fact that would increase the atmospheric pressure of Mars by about 5%, which isn't that signficant. I'm not an expert in the math, but I believe that would be not be enough to trigger a "Runaway greenhouse effect" that would melt a large part of the Martian polar ice caps, which would in turn cause more running away of the temperatures.

Note there are much cheaper ways both to get rid of carbon dioxide on Earth and to bring greenhouse gases to Mars. See this article, which proposes manufacturing greenhouse gasses on Mars which are much more potent than Carbon Dioxide.

PearsonArtPhoto
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  • You forgot to mention that while Earth's atmosphere's CO$_2$ content is about 0.058% by mass, Mars' atmosphere's CO$_2$ content is about 95.9% by mass. :-) – user Dec 23 '16 at 13:31
  • Related: http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12556/if-mars-had-more-atmosphere-how-warm-would-it-be?rq=1 – Russell Borogove Dec 23 '16 at 14:25
  • @MichaelKjörling That is true, I'm not sure how much of an effect it has for the benefit of this question. – PearsonArtPhoto Dec 23 '16 at 17:23
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    +1 Nice answer to a rather nonsense question. Merry Xmas. – Ginasius Dec 23 '16 at 18:52
  • Have you dropped some orders of magnitude somewhere? I don't think that 0.023% of Earth's atmosphere would increase Mars' atmosphere by 50%. While Mars's area is smaller than earth, the scale height is larger, so Mars' total atmosphere mass should be something like 1% that of Earth's. Your link says 2.3E+16 which has three more zeros than 25 trillion does. At least in the US we'd call it a quadrillion, but if a British billion is a million million... Anyway, check again! – uhoh Dec 24 '16 at 11:05
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    I switched to metric tons along the way, which drops 3 zeros. – PearsonArtPhoto Dec 24 '16 at 11:10
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    I added specific numbers for the metric tonnage to hopefully reduce the confusion. Hopefully I got the exponents right. – user Dec 24 '16 at 19:41
  • That said, you might want to double-check your calculations at the beginning of this answer. Either I'm too tired to think properly, or 1.2e16 kg is an order of magnitude too much. – user Dec 24 '16 at 19:46
  • Yeah, I think you are right... Not sure how that happened, but, well... – PearsonArtPhoto Dec 24 '16 at 20:19