The Cooling Conundrum: What CO2's Odd Behavior Tells Us About Climate Change The latest research from Columbia University's climate scientists has shed light on a long standing puzzle: how carbon dioxide (CO2) can simultaneously contribute to global warming while cooling part of our atmosphere.
This discovery, which finally explains the "strange way" CO2 cools Earth's upper atmosphere, raises more questions than answers about the intricacies of climate change.
For decades, scientists have observed that as the planet's surface and lower atmosphere warm up, the stratosphere – a region between 11km to 50 km above Earth's surface – has been rapidly cooling.