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by mutated_quant 842 days ago
Part of the dramatic rise occurring after the 1970s is a direct response to the clean air / pollution legislation that started getting passed in western countries. Pollution seeds the air with potent cloud condensation nuclei, creating a higher average cloud cover, and reflecting more shortwave solar radiation. We've got cleaner healthier air, but less cloudy.

I believe there was also a noticeable effect from the pollution decrease when global shipping dropped during covid, you had less cloud cover from ship trails, and more solar radiation reaching the surface.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05122-0

2022 Nature article on the phenomena.

1 comments

Not surprisingly, deliberately polluting it again is a proposed method of reducing global warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Yeah, I mean, wasn't the worst year to be alive some year after a volcano eruption? So, let’s geo engineer this against global warming and hope our calculations pan out…
This mitigation strategy is so obvious I'm surprised that this isn't implemented already.