Oliver Morton

speaker

275 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Sep

Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Economist Podcasts · Taking the shine off: albedo and global temperatures · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

But I think a thing that's not very thoroughly appreciated is that though the warming takes place in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gases to begin with, it then spreads throughout the system in various complicated ways.

And one of the ways that it spreads through the system is

is diminishing the amount of cloud cover.

And that adds to the warming further because light that's not reflected from the clouds gets absorbed and adds to the warming.

So this is what we call a climate feedback.

And it's sort of like climate change feeding on itself.

And so the change just due to the greenhouse gases becomes a change due to greenhouse gases and this new effect of the Earth being less reflective.

But there's also a second effect, which is distinct, which is that humans put

little particles into the atmosphere all the time, and this is, by and large, rather bad for our health.

The most important pollutant in this is sulfur.

Over the past 20 years, the amount of sulfur in the atmosphere started to peak, and then it started quite quickly to decline.

And when sulfur levels decline, the level of little, what they call aerosol particles in the atmosphere also declines, and this means that the Earth again reflects away less sunlight, so absorbs more.

Yes, I'm saying that less energy is being reflected back out into space when sunshine hits the Earth.

And that means that in general, more energy is being absorbed.

And the amount of energy absorbed by the Earth, what's called the Earth's energy imbalance, has more than doubled in the last 20 years.

The impact is global warming.

It's how global warming works, but it's a more sophisticated but also more fundamental way of seeing the same effect as you see in rising global temperatures.

We measure the size of the imbalance.

The size of the imbalance is mainly measured from satellites, and in particular by a set of instruments on NASA satellites.

And that measurement is very, very complicated to make.

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