It's all because of the clouds. Scientists have found an unexpected cause of global warming

Last year was the hottest year on record, with oceans boiling and glaciers melting at an alarming rate. This forced scientists to look for explanations and answers as to what was going on.

The researchers say they have solved the climate riddle. According to them, the rapid surge in warming was exacerbated by a lack of low-level clouds over the oceans, CNN reports.

By analyzing satellite data and meteorological records, a team of climatologists from Germany found that the reason is fewer clouds at low altitudes – below about 3000 meters. Clouds play a crucial role in keeping the Earth cool by reflecting sunlight into space, and clearer skies mean more sunlight reaches the Earth.

The lack of low clouds has previously gone unnoticed because studies that relied on satellite imagery could not distinguish low clouds from high clouds.

Scientists are now concerned that this trend toward clearer low-level skies could be the result of global warming itself, meaning the Earth could enter a feedback loop that would further accelerate warming, Astronomy writes.

As Helge Goessling, the author of the report and a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, explained, the decrease in bright low clouds means that the planet has "darkened," allowing it to absorb more sunlight.

This phenomenon is called "albedo" and refers to the ability of surfaces to reflect the sun's energy back into space.

According to the researchers, the Earth's albedo has been decreasing since the 1970s, in part due to the melting of light snow and sea ice, exposing darker land and water that absorb more solar energy, heating the planet. Low clouds also contribute to this effect as they reflect sunlight.

Scientists analyzed NASA satellite data, weather data, and climate models and found that last year's decrease in low cloud cover lowered the planet's albedo to a record low. The study found that areas, including parts of the North Atlantic, experienced a particularly significant drop.

Low-level clouds tend to thrive in the cool and humid lower atmosphere. As the planet's surface heats up, it can cause them to thin or dissipate completely, setting up a complex feedback loop where low-level clouds disappear due to global warming, and their disappearance then contributes to further warming.

"If this happens, future warming projections may be underestimated, and we should expect quite intense warming in the future," Goessling said, adding that clouds may seem simple, even mundane, but they are infinitely complex, and scientists are far from unraveling their behavior. In his opinion, clouds are one of the biggest headaches in climate science.

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