Mother Jones: Greenhouse Emissions Are Messing With the Stratosphere, a New Study Reveals. It raises the worrisome question of atmospheric effects yet to be discovered.
Humanity’s enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed.
The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 meters since the 1980s, the researchers found and will thin by about another kilometer by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications.
The discovery is the latest to show the profound impact of humans on the planet. In April, scientists showed that the climate crisis had shifted the Earth’s axis as the massive melting of glaciers redistributes weight around the globe.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reached its conclusions using the small set of satellite observations taken since the 1980s in combination with multiple climate models, which included the complex chemical interactions that occur in the atmosphere.