“We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop“
By Shannon Osaka
June 25, 2024 at 6:30 a.m
WaPo Excerpt: It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming — it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.
Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases……
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Related:
It took almost a month, but I have finally shamed the @washingtonpost into reluctantly reporting that cleaner air is causing warming.
The article by @shannonosaka and @Harry_Stevens is still dishonest — stay tuned for my video on it — but it was not tenable to ignore the new… pic.twitter.com/QJl81ncPhy
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) June 25, 2024
