Cooling Effect
The unprecedented Australian bushfires of 2019-2020 burned more than 18 million hectares of land and killed an estimated one billion animals, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
They also had a bigger impact on last year’s climate, even surpassing the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, the Hill reported.
A new study found that fires cooled down the Earth’s Southern Hemisphere so much that they ended up lowering average surface temperatures across the globe.
Lead author Richard Fasullo and his team wrote that sulfates and other smoke particles from the wildfires interacted with clouds to make their droplets smaller. This in turn reflected more incoming solar radiation back to space, which subsequently caused the planet to cool down by about 0.06 degrees Celsius within six months.
On the other hand, the lockdowns resulted in slightly higher temperatures because reduced emissions led to clearer skies over many cities. Fasullo’s team also suggested that about 0.05 degrees Celsius of warming may have resulted globally from last year’s shutdowns and will continue until the end of 2022, according to the Washington Post.
Researchers explained that the fires’ disruptive impact stems from a large amount of sulfates and other particles injected into the atmosphere: This can cause various phenomena, such as tropical storms to move northward from the equator.
“What this research shows is that the impact of regional wildfire on global climate can be substantial,” Fasullo said in a statement. “There are large-scale fingerprints from the fires in both the atmosphere and ocean.”
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