-Earth spiked a bit of a fever in 2020, partly because of cleaner air from pandemic lockdowns, a new study has found.
For a short time, temperatures in some places in the eastern United States, Russia and China were as much as 0.3 to 0.37 degrees Celsius warmer. That's due to less soot and sulfate particles from car exhaust and burning coal, which normally cool the atmosphere temporarily by reflecting the sun's heat, Tuesday's study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters reported.
Overall, the planet was about 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer for the year because the air had fewer cooling aerosols, which is pollution that you can see that normally blocks incoming sunlight, the study found.
"Cleaning up the air can actually warm the planet because that [soot and sulfate] pollution results in cooling," which climate scientists have long known, said the study's lead author, Andrew Gettelman, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research...
How pandemic lockdowns cleaned the air but resulted in a warmer planet | CBC News