Scientists were stunned in early 2020 when bush fires that spread across Australia generated their own extreme weather patterns, including thunderstorms — and a study published last Thursday revealed the blazes had an even greater climate impact than previously known.
Researchers at University of Exeter in England found that aerosols from the smoke created by the fires caused the highest temperatures in the Earth’s stratosphere in decades and likely created a hole in the ozone layer over most of Antarctica.
With global fossil fuel extraction and the global heating it causes showing few signs of slowing down, extreme weather events like the bush fires are likely to continue, said the authors of the study — and with them could come more damage to the ozone layer.
“Under global warming, the frequency and intensity of wildfires is expected to increase, which would lead to more” stratospheric warming and depletion of the ozone layer, study co-author Jim Haywood told The Washington Post.
Generally, volcanic eruptions like that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 are the only phenomena on the planet which change the temperature of the stratosphere.
During the bush fires of early 2020, though, the temperature of the Earth’s second atmospheric layer reached 3°C over Australia and 0.7°C across the globe.
As Tessa Koumoundouros explained at ScienceAlert, the heat-induced weather systems — called pyrocumulonimbus — caused by the fires “pumped the smoke into remarkably high altitudes, with the sun’s rays heating the dark particles and causing them to rise further, in a process called self-lofting.”
“Over the period of a month, the aerosol plume drifted across the South Pacific and was clearly detected in the stratosphere by [NASA instrument] CALIOP as well as surface-based lidars and sun-photometers operating from the southern tip of South America,” the report, published in Scientific Reports, reads.
Unusually high temperatures in the stratosphere persisted for the first four months of 2020, and the continued heating likely caused changes in atmospheric circulation and chemical reactions on the surface of the smoke particles — depleting the ozone layer.
The impact of Australia’s bush fires on the stratosphere were “unprecedented as far as the observational record goes,” Olaf Morgenstern of New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research told the Post.
The research shows that continued global heating — and the wildfires that have been linked to the climate crisis — could reverse the success of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which pushed the global community to end its production of ozone-damaging chemicals.
“It is plausible that the good work carried out under the Montreal Protocol,” Haywood told the Post, “could be undone by the impact of global warming on intense fires.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 182 new monthly donors in the next 24 hours.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy