Good News: Clouds Less Climate-Sensitive Than Previously Thought
An airborne campaign has helped to unravel some of the mysteries of clouds.
In 2020, Dr. Raphaela Vogel and an international team from the University of Hamburg’s Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in Paris, and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg conducted a major field campaign to analyze observational data collected in fields of cumulus clouds near the Atlantic island of Barbados. Through their analysis, they discovered that the contribution of these clouds to climate warming needs to be reevaluated.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.