One of my favorite movies of all time was Spaceballs. That’s probably because I was a young boy when I saw it, and have not watched it since. In any case, remember MegaMaid? You can imagine she can serve some very important climate functions. If we could construct carbon scrubbers for our atmosphere that would be one solution to the global warming concern. Or, if we could somehow eject carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that would be cool too.
Well, maybe we are one step closer to implementing something like that! This new paper from Geophysical Research Letters demonstrates that not all CO2 across the globe causes warming in the same way. While the greenhouse effect is typically thought of as CO2 “trapping” radiation by preventing longwave radiation from going back out into space, the effects are not the same across all of the earth’s landscape. In fact, in Antarctica, larger concentrations of CO2 are the cause of … global … cooling.
That is a pretty stunning result. More CO2 leads, directly, to a cooler planet. Incredibly, more longwave radiation in Antartica is radiated back out into space than there is long-wave radiation emitting from the surface of the earth. Three points worth considering here, some more serious than others: