Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, heatwaves at sea – 2023 set a number of alarming new records.
Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, heatwaves at sea – 2023 set a number of alarming new records. The global mean temperature also rose to nearly 1.5 degrees above the preindustrial level, another record. Seeking to identify the causes of this sudden rise has proven a challenge for researchers. After all, factoring in the effects of anthropogenic influences like the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, of the weather phenomenon El Niño, and of natural events like volcanic eruptions, can account for a major portion of the warming. But doing so still leaves a gap of roughly 0.2 degrees Celsius, which has never been satisfactorily explained. In the journal Science, a team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute puts forward a possible explanation for the rise in global mean temperature: our planet has become less reflective because certain types of clouds have declined.
“In addition to the influence of El Niño and the expected long-term warming from anthropogenic greenhouse gases, several other factors have already been discussed that could have contributed to the surprisingly high global mean temperatures since 2023,” says Dr Helge Goessling, main author of the study from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI): e.g. increased solar activity, large amounts of water vapour from a volcanic eruption, or fewer aerosol particles in the atmosphere. But if all these factors are combined, there is still 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming with no readily apparent cause.
Read more at: Alfred Wegener Institute
Photo Credit: makabera via Pixabay
