Environment | Whitening clouds in the US could cause heat waves in Europe, warns a new study

Climate modification for example, the United States could increase extreme weather phenomena in other parts of the world, such as Europe, it is estimated In the journal Nature in a new study published on Friday. A British newspaper reported on the matter The Guardian.

Climate modification refers to the systematic alteration of the climate by humans. Climate modification techniques generally mean either changing the reflection of sunlight or sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Department of Meteorology according to many studies suggest that the climate could be significantly affected.

In research simulated the effects that cloud bleaching, i.e. increasing the reflectance of clouds, could have across the west coast of the United States and Canada. Simulations were made simulating the climates of the Earth in 2010 and 2050.

According to the study, climate modification would have positive effects if carried out in the climate of 2010. For example, the whitening of the clouds in Alaska reduced the dangerous heat on the west coast of the United States by up to 55 percent and in Europe to some extent.

However, in the 2050 modelling, the results were different, when the global temperatures were already hotter, there were fewer clouds and the amoc ocean currents in the Atlantic had slowed down.

Although temperatures on the west coast of the United States continued to cool somewhat, in the 2050 scenario, cloud bleaching in the North Pacific would, on the contrary, increase temperatures in Europe. According to the researchers, this can be explained especially by the slowed down sea currents.

“Our study shows that cloud bleaching may be effective on the West Coast of the United States now, but it will be ineffective in the future and could cause heat waves in Europe” , a researcher at the University of California, San Diego campus Jessica Wan commented to The Guardian.

Researchers are concerned that climate modification is not currently being regulated. In the future, even individual wealthy people could modify the climate of their own place of residence.

“We don’t want to end up in a situation where regions always have to modify the climate in response to what some other Kolkka has done in their own region,” says Wan.

Meteorology the department’s website emphasizes that climate modification is not the solution to humanity’s climate problems.

It is impossible to predict all the global effects of climate change, because the Earth’s climate is very complex and there are many different interdependencies.

For the same reason, climate modification is also difficult to study. For example, some studies have shown that modifying solar radiation reduces rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, while others have not.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute warns that if humanity were to suddenly stop the already started climate modification, the global temperature could rise rapidly, which could be fatal for many ecosystems and make it difficult for all of humanity to adapt.