Warming due to cleaner air rippled across the ocean, modeling suggests
In 2015, a blob of warm water off Alaska led to marine die-offs. Did pollution cuts in China supercharge the event?struck the north Pacific Ocean near Alaska. Temperatures in these warm “blobs,” which have occurred four times in the past decade, sometimes reach more than 2°C above normal.
Aerosols can act like tiny mirrors, reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing the amount that reaches Earth’s surface. Eliminate them and the world warms. Scientiststhat cleaner air might be responsible for 40% of the increase in heat driving global warming between 2001 and 2019. The researchers partly relied on a quirk in different iterations of the project. The models participating in CMIP5 assumed that aerosol pollution over East Asia would flatten, but not drop. The CMIP6 models, however, more closely mimic the actual decline in aerosol pollution. When the researchers ran the models to recreate the climate up to the year 2020, both generations moved in tandem until 2007. Then they diverged.
The study covers a relatively short time span and a small number of heat waves in a complex, dynamic ocean, cautions Maria Rugenstein, a Colorado State University scientist who studies interactions between the atmosphere and the tropical Pacific."It’s kind of statistically not very substantial,” she says of the number of events. “But their physical argument is very solid.”
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