NASA has calculated the distinct evidence that shows how humans are causing climate change. In what's described as a first-of-its-kind study, America's space agency has calculated the specific driving forces of recent climate change by means of direct satellite observations.
A CBC News report said that it might come as a surprise with the extensive body of evidence that links humans to climate change, proof of the human effect on climate change had escaped science.
More so, consistent with what climate models have presented for decades already, greenhouse gases, as well as suspended pollution particles in the atmosphere also known as aerosols coming from the burning of fuels, are all accountable for the so-called lion's share of modern warming.
Meaning, through direct observations which is a gold standard in scientific studies, NASA has proven what's driving climate change.
Human-Caused Climate Change
According to the study's co-author, Brian Soden, who's also an Atmospheric Sciences professor at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, he thinks that most people would be surprised that this little gap in their long list of evidence that supports anthropogenic or human-caused climate change hasn't been closed yet.
By now, it is common knowledge that the quick warming of the previous century is not natural. Instead, it is an outcome of the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, much of it coming from the fossil fuels' burning.
Here's what science says about why the Earth is warming. When sunlight gets into the atmosphere, some of it gets reflected back to space minus heating this planet. Meanwhile, the rest is absorbed by the surface and atmosphere of the Earth and re-radiated as heat.
As indicated in the study entitled, Observational evidence of increasing global radiative forcing, which was published in Geographical Research Letters, some of this heats leaks back into space, although the rest of the heat is trapped by certain molecules like water vapor, methane, and CO2.
This means that the more greenhouse gases there are in the atmosphere, the more heat is stuck and the higher the temperature.
Direct Evidence From NASA's Calculation
What NASA has done in this project is to calculate or measure the distinct forces gauged from specialized satellite observations to identify how much each component is warming or cooling the atmosphere.
Unsurprisingly, what the study investigators have discovered is that the radiative forces indicated by computer models for decades were warming the Earth match the changes they calculate in observations.
According to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt, sciences has long had "an overwhelming amount of indirect evidence" of the factors that warm this planet.
The projected energy imbalance that decades' worth of computer models illustrate has turned out to be apparent for all humans to see, from vanishing glaciers to more dangerous weather disasters to warming oceans.
First Calculation
Soden explained though, that observing the heat's trapping from space is certainly quite challenging. This study, then, solves that challenge.
The paper's first author Ryan Kramer, who's also a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said, this is the first calculation of the total radiative forcing of Earth that uses global observations, accounting for the impacts of greenhouse gases and aerosols.
He also said that it is direct evidence that human activities cause changes to the energy budget of the Earth. Particularly, this research has been able to measure solid numbers for the changes in heat stuck in the system of Earth from the individual contributors that impact the transfer of earth such as radiation, clouds, and water vapor for the period 2003 to 2019.
A related report about NASA's research on climate change is shown on Discovery's YouTube video below:
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