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Albedo is the total reflection of incoming solar radiation by Earth. Its a great question, but the warming effect from heat-trapping gases far outweighs the cooling effect from industrial aerosols. Important questions are still being sorted out Climatescientists are still trying to figure out what exactly made 2023 and 2024 so warm.
In an unchanging climate, the random fluctuations would lead to warming in some parts of the world and cooling in others. In a world with just random local fluctuations but no climate change, about half the weather stations would show a (more or less significant) warming, the other half a cooling. I could go on.
As climatescientists we tend to look at the IPCC reports a little differently than the general public might. Here are a few things that mark this report out from previous versions that relate to issues we’ve discussed here before: Extreme events are increasingly connected to climate (duh!) 1981) which can be seen here.
Tiny particles of plastic in the atmosphere can affect Earth’s climate, according to Laura Revell at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and colleagues. Although the threats these microplastics pose to natural ecosystems are now being studied extensively, their influence on Earth’s climate is still virtually unknown.
In this, he is in violent agreement with Isaac Held, his colleague at GFDL, and indeed most climatescientists. He makes a eloquent argument for a hierarchy of modeling where simpler, functional, models can contribute a lot to understanding in advance of the more complete and more detailed versions turning up.
Extreme heat is not just an abstract notion: if we can’t cool our bodies enough, we’re in danger of neurological failure, organ failure and even death, with the risks highest for children and the elderly. On balance, clouds nearer the stratosphere warm us, whereas low-lying clouds tend to cool us because their greenhouse effect is smaller.
For example, Antarctica acts to cool our planet by reflecting solar radiation back to space by virtue of the brightness of its snow surface. The danger is that the Antarctic sea ice is starting to behave like the Arctic, with sustained loss of ocean cover and consequent absorption of solar radiation.
Student in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University Most people remember the water cycle they learned in school: water evaporates from lakes, rivers, and the ocean, air carrying this moisture rises, cools, condenses, and forms clouds, and these clouds precipitate water back down to the surface.
Climatescientists at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) have dubbed the six-month stretch from May through October the “ Danger Season.” Not only has much of what climatescientists have been warning about come to pass, many of the extreme weather events the planet is now experiencing are worse than they expected. “To
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