Scienceblogtwo

The planet's surface can be either warmed or cooled by clouds, a radiative effect that makes a significant contribution to the global energy budget and can be changed by pollution brought on by humans. The world's southernmost ocean, appropriately called the Southern Ocean, is free of human pollution but is nonetheless exposed to a lot of marine gases and aerosols. About 80% of it is obscured by clouds. What role does this body of water's interaction with the clouds have in the global climate change? Due to an international partnership that discovered compensating faults in commonly used climate model protocols known as CMIP6, scientists are now one step closer to understanding it. Today, September 20, they published their findings in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. Through the trapping of emitted longwave infrared radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere, clouds can function as a greenhouse gas component to warm the Earth. By reflecting shortwave solar rad...

Just over 250 million years ago, at the conclusion of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic, reptiles enjoyed a huge coming-out party. Their rates of evolution and diversity started to soar, resulting in an absurdly wide range of skills, body types, and features. This contributed to their being recognized as one of the most prosperous and diverse animal groupings the world has ever seen, including both their extinct lineages and those that still live today. For a long time, scientists believed that this bloom was the result of reptile competitors being wiped out by two of the most devastating mass extinctions in earth history. Around 261 and 252 million years ago, these things happened. A recent study conducted by Harvard that rebuilt how the bodies of prehistoric reptiles developed and matched it to the results of millions of years of climate change has altered this theory. The research of Harvard paleontologist Stephanie Pierce demonstrates that early reptiles began to divers...