Climate Change Could Be Reduced By Cloud Formation; Can The Discovery Save The World?

The world as people know it is changing. Climate change has baffled societies from all four corners of the globe. Recent discoveries have shown that cloud formation can reduce the impact and effects of climate change. Given the case, many are wondering if this new discovery can indeed save the world.

Researchers found trees may have been putting similar aerosols into the air as burning fossil fuels, long before the industrial revolution -- meaning, humans may have had less impact on the climate than people thought. And scientists made the discovery during an experiment to create an artificial cloud that was thought could help cool Earth and reverse global warming, reports Express.

The problem stems from not knowing how cloudy the world was before the industrial era. And the fact that some of the gases produced by burning fossil fuels said to warm the plant in the long term, it actually helps cool it in the short term through cloud formation, according to the same report. Meanwhile, the new discovery about how clouds form may scale back some of the more dire predictions about temperature increases caused by man-made global warming and that is because it implies that a key assumption for making such predictions is a bit off, as added by CTV News.

"What this will do is slightly reduce and sharpen the projections for temperature during the 21st century," said researcher Jasper Kirkby. Nonetheless, he added, "We are definitely warming the planet."

The new work shows that a combination of cosmic rays from space and gases emitted by trees also creates particles, and then clouds, without man-made pollution. And the scientists witnessed this in a cloud simulation chamber and from a Swiss mountaintop observatory more than 2 miles high, as further noted by the same post.

On the other hand, "This process is only effective in pristine environments and there are very, very few pristine environments left on Earth," Kirkby said. Nowadays, the process is overwhelmed by pollution particles.

Despite this discovery, there is still a lot of things to be done, and it remains uncertain on how this new discovery can shed light to the issues pertaining to climate change and on whether the discovery can impact the world in more ways than one.