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Go to linode.com/scishow to learn more and to get a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. [♪ INTRO] The average global temperature has  risen by about one degree Celsius since the start of the Industrial  Revolution in the 1800s. And it’s still going up.

The ten warmest years on record  have happened since 2005, leading to everything from more  extreme weather to wildfires. But one of the nuances of  the climate crisis is that the planet isn’t warming  at the same rate all over. Like, some parts of the world are warming  up faster at night than during the day.

It’s part of a phenomenon  called warming asymmetry. And the reason it happens has to do with… clouds. One study on this came from  the University of Exeter, and was published in 2020  in Global Change Biology.

In it, the team looked at climate  change data from 1983 to 2017. They found that both days and  nights got hotter on average, but for more than half the Earth’s  land area, nights got hotter faster. In these places, nighttime temperatures  went up by more than an extra quarter of a degree Celsius over the 34-year  period, compared to daytime temperatures.

The team also found a trend: In places  where nighttime temperatures went up half a degree compared to daytime temps, there was also more cloud cover,  humidity, and precipitation. For example, in the Tibetan  Plateau, nighttime temperature lows increased an average of 1.2 degrees  Celsius more than daytime highs. And sure enough, the Plateau  now sees more than your average amount of cloud coverage during the day and night.

Meanwhile, areas with less  cloud coverage tended to see higher temperature  increases during the daytime. Like, in East Africa, daytime  highs increased by an average of about 0.4 degrees Celsius  more than nighttime lows. As for why clouds are such a big deal…  Well, during the day, white, fluffy clouds can act as an umbrella, reflecting the  Sun’s warming rays away from the planet.

But when the Sun goes down, clouds  can have the opposite effect. They turn from an umbrella into a blanket. At night, all the heat that the ground absorbs during the day radiates out from Earth’s surface.

If there’s a lot of cloud  coverage, that heat gets trapped, which then causes the air  temperature near the surface to rise. This is likely why cloudy areas are  seeing those bigger increases in nighttime temperature: That radiative  heat just doesn’t have anywhere to go. Meanwhile, this also explains why  places without clouds are warming more during the day: At night, radiative  heat can escape into space, but during the day, these places  are getting blasted with sunlight.

On its own, this isn’t necessarily bad. But when you add the climate crisis to the mix, it can create a vicious warming cycle. Like nighttime clouds, greenhouse gases also prevent heat from escaping into space.

They absorb heat coming from  Earth’s surface and radiate it back into the atmosphere, which  turns up the temperature even more. And since a warmer atmosphere also holds  more moisture, humidity tends to rise. This can create more cloud coverage, which then traps more radiant  heat at night, and so on.   And this cycle doesn’t just lead  to muggier sleeping conditions: It could significantly impact plants and animals.

Like, the Exeter study suggests that  since nighttime warming typically leads to the environment getting wetter,  it could make it harder for nocturnal animals to get  food, mate, and communicate. In areas where it rained more, plant growth  was limited, potentially because more clouds during the day kept the plants  from getting the sunlight they needed. So herbivores in those areas  ended up with less available food.

Shifts in temperature patterns like  this can also change when and how plants bloom, and could allow invasive  species to expand to new areas, all of which could further affect how  much food is available for animals. Meanwhile, in regions that  see more warmth during the day and have less cloud coverage, more  animals could suffer from heat shock. When outside temperatures get so hot that  animals can’t regulate their body heat, their immune systems become compromised, and they have trouble metabolizing food.

That said, there is some nuance here. Even these trends aren’t exactly  the same all around the world. Like, the effects of nighttime  warming on plants can vary widely with the season and region.

This warming can even have opposite  effects on different types of plants, which could be both helpful  and hurtful for food supplies. For example, a study from Nanjing  Agricultural University in China found that yields from the wheat crops they looked at actually went up by about 18%  with extra nighttime warming. Meanwhile, rice yields shrank by about 4.5%.

Still, the overall theme is that  neither more nighttime nor daytime warming is great for animals and plants. Even what seem like minor changes can make  it harder for life to grow and survive. And we’re already seeing some of these effects.

Right now, drought conditions are  growing more intense in places that experience extra daytime heating,  like East Africa, which is causing crops and livestock to die and leading  to food insecurity for millions. And as the climate crisis  triggers more warming asymmetry, events like this will become more severe, and disproportionately affect  poorer or lower-resource nations. Still, something to remember is  that there’s time to change things.

If governments, big businesses, and  communities come together to limit greenhouse gas emissions, we can still  bring about meaningful and just change. You can also lend support to local,  grassroots efforts working to help agricultural communities  adapt to their changing landscapes. So, this cycle of increased  clouds and increased warming is one more effect of the  climate crisis we can observe.

And knowledge is power,  but it’ll take action, too. One way to connect with like-minded  people to take action against the climate crisis might be through online forums. And there’s a forum for everything these days.   If you’d like to connect with  people who also love SciShow, you can become a SciShow Patron  and join our Patreon discord.

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