This is not another article about heat. It’s July: we all know it’s hot. However, there is a reason behind these high temperatures that we do not usually discuss and, for many people, is very surprising: that the skies over Europe are much cleaner than they have been in the last half century.
As the popularizer Jorge Alcalde explained at COPE, the increase in temperatures in Europe is accelerating “at a rate of 0.56 degrees per decade since the 1990s, almost double the world average of 0.27 degrees.” And this is interesting because, “although the climate is warming globally, it is crucial to understand why some regions like Europe are more affected.”
In that sense, Mayor pointed out that “sending less pollution into the atmosphere contributes to the increase in temperatures on the continent, there is a greater amount of solar radiation that impacts the ground.”
It’s not that the air generates heat, of course. It is that the particles that we release when burning fossil fuels (especially sulfur sulfates) reflect sunlight and make the clouds whiter. That is, they cool.
The data is crystal clear: in a series in the northeast of the peninsula, in Girona, the solar radiation reaching the ground has increased by about 2.5 W/m² per decade since the late 1980s, especially in summer. And that is largely due. wing improvement of regulation against polluting aerosols.
It is not the only thing that cools, it is not even the main cause. Copernicus attributes this to several things at once: atmospheric circulation, less snow reflecting light, proximity to the Arctic, falling pollution and, of course, greenhouse gases (which alone explain half of the increase in European heat waves). However, it is one of the most striking.
And it is important to explain it well… because stated like this it may seem that the reduction of pollutants is warming the climate in Europe and that is not the case. What the pollution did was hide that warming. The conditions behind the rise in temperatures were there, it’s just that the sulfur didn’t let us see them.
We were cooler, but the cost of that was paid by our lungs. We must not forget that lowering fine particles to the levels recommended by the WHO would prevent some 182,000 premature deaths per year in the EU alone.
Furthermore, while aerosols last a few days in the atmosphere, CO2 lasts for centuries. We were covering up a huge problem that was very difficult to solve.
Dirty the world again. I insist on this idea because when the effect was discovered in the Atlantic, many proposed intervening again in the atmosphere to lower the temperature. The problem is that, as we can see, this doesn’t solve anything. Clean air is the first good news and, at the same time, what forces us to look squarely at the second: how much we have already warmed up.
Imagen | Chris LeBoutillier
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