When a team of scientists began analyzing events that influenced the world’s climate in 2020, they made sure to consider the pandemic-related lockdowns that reduced emissions and led to clearer skies over many cities.
When a team of scientists began analyzing events that influenced the world’s climate in 2020, they made sure to consider the pandemic-related lockdowns that reduced emissions and led to clearer skies over many cities.
But they found that an entirely different event had a more immediate impact on global climate: the devastating bushfires that burned through Australia from late 2019 to 2020, pumping plumes of smoke that reached the stratosphere and circled much of the southern hemisphere.
“The main climate forcing of 2020 wasn’t COVID-19 at all,” said John Fasullo, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the lead author of the new study. “It was the explosion of wildfires in Australia.”
The study is being published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, an American Geophysical Union journal.
Read more at National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
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