No good deed goes unpunished. That includes efforts to slow climate change. By reducing greenhouse gas emissions, humans can reduce the emissions of aerosols (tiny particles of pollution that act like tiny umbrellas that bounce some of the sun’s energy back into space) that cool the planet.
“Even more important than this direct reflection effect is that it changes the properties of clouds,” says climate researcher Øyvind Hodnebrog of the International Center for Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “Essentially, the clouds become brighter and the clouds reflect sunlight back into space.”
Therefore, if governments better regulate air quality and introduce renewable energy and electric vehicles, fewer insulating gas emissions will be released into the sky, which will reduce global warming, but to some extent reflective pollution will This will lead to further warming.New to Hodne Blog the study This suggests that this aerosol effect already contributes to a significant amount of heating.
The most important component of fossil fuel pollution is gaseous sulfur dioxide, which forms aerosols in the atmosphere and lingers for only a few days. Therefore, unlike carbon dioxide, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries, reducing environmental pollution has an almost immediate effect.
This is a troubling and unavoidable Catch-22, but it is no reason to continue polluting indiscriminately.fossil fuel aerosol millions of people are killed annually by It can cause respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and other health problems. Decarbonizing therefore improves both the planet and human health. The urgency is increasing day by day.Last year was the hottest on record, but this year he said March was the hottest on record. 10 consecutive months To record an all-time high. Meanwhile, ocean temperatures, raised by El Niño, a band of warm water that periodically occurs in the Pacific Ocean, and also adding heat to the atmosphere, have risen for more than a year and remain at record highs. This has surprised scientists.
“The sheer dominance of these records and the scope for them to be broken were striking,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior researcher at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “Unless society does something to stop the greenhouse effect from increasing, record events like 2023 will become more common, even without the boost from El Niño.”
The growth slowdown of that insulation blanket has already begun. “Apparently we Flattening greenhouse gas emissionsThat’s a good thing,” says Berkeley Earth researcher Zeke Hausfather. “But we are also uncovering some of the warming that has been hidden until now by pollution. So our models predict some evidence that the rate of surface warming will accelerate, and that ” This is known in climate science as acceleration.house father Points to data display Since 1970, the warming rate has been 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade, but has increased to about 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade over the past 15 years.
In his new paper published in the journal Communication Earth and Environment, Hodnebrog et al. set out to quantify the extent of the aerosol suppression effect. First, they collected measurements from 2001 to 2019 from clouds and the Earth’s radiant energy system, a satellite instrument that detects the difference between the sun’s energy reaching Earth and the energy reflected back into space. This is a global “energy imbalance” that is increasing as the world warms.