Yep, you read that right.
Europe is heating up much faster than climate researchers expected, and now they think they know why: air made dramatically cleaner by anti-pollution programs. With less particle pollution clouding the air, more sunlight is coming through and the continent is getting warmer.[emphasis added]
The article goes on to say that because of the efforts to cut emissions from auto exhaust and factories, there’s more sunlight reaching the surface of the earth and that causes warmer temperatures.
The dwindling clouds of pollution are apparently the reason that Europe is heating faster than other mid-latitude regions. Since 1980, the average surface air temperature between the Bosporus and the Bay of Biscay has risen by almost an entire degree Celsius -- twice as much as expected. The reasons for this were until recently a matter of heated dispute. Greenhouse gases could explain half that increase, at best. But now climate researchers in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, using data and computer simulations, claim that the rise in temperatures has been caused most directly by a decline in sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere.
The sulfates, they say, act as sunlight filters. Sure, acid rain from those very sulfates was/is damaging to plants and material structures, but the next time someone starts spouting about how man-made greenhouse gases are causing global warming, remember to consider the economic costs and ponder what just might happen to the climate should we succeed. It appears the computer modeling currently being used is, shall we say, questionable.
The findings of this particular study are:
"Our findings contradict the IPCC," said Rolf Philipona of MeteoSwiss, Switzerland's national weather service. He and his colleague Christian Ruckstuhl, who now works as a researcher in California, analyzed data from 25 weather stations in northern Germany and eight in Switzerland.
"We found that the increase in radiation on the ground is considerably greater under a cloudless sky than a clouded one,"
The IPCC questioned the effect that sulfate aerosols have on the atmosphere.
But there is good news—of a sorts:
Europe's air is not likely to get much cleaner than it is now -- neither in summer or in winter. "The concentration of aerosol is stabile," said ETH Zurich's Wild. And Philipona of the Swiss weather service, is sure that "this increase in temperature, as we saw in Europe in the 1980s, will not happen again."
So the amount of sunlight reaching the ground should not increase appreciably. (Unless, as has been suggested, the sun alters its own output.)
The article does end with what has become the standard doom-and-gloom warning.
But this is by no means an announcement that the danger has passed. Greenhouse gases are still represent a threat, and increasing and unchecked emissions will almost certainly warm the Earth's atmosphere. The German Meteorological Society (DMG) claims that the median temperature in Europe in 2040 will be 1.7 degrees Celsius higher than the median temperature before the Industrial Revolution. Frequent heat waves, severe storms and other extreme weather are a foregone conclusion.
(h/t Jungle Trader.)
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