Taking the shine off: albedo and global temperatures

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0:33The Economist

0:38Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

0:43Rosie Blau:And I'm Rosie Bloor.

0:49Today on the show, West Africa becomes a global node in the cocaine trade and America's stubborn scarcity of female red winners.

1:03First up, though.

1:19The surface temperature of the oceans between 60 North and 60 South has been at a record for the time of year all through July, and almost all through June. and so the seas of the world are very hot at the moment.

1:33Rosie Blau:Oliver Morton is our Planetary Affairs Editor. The heat in the oceans is the biggest store of heat on the planet and it's driven by how much heat the planet absorbs from the sun and how much it gives off as infrared radiation and the Earth is absorbing considerably more heat than it used to be absorbing. Part of this is an effect of global warming. There are fewer clouds, scarcer ice caps. And that means that the Earth absorbs more energy. And then there's a second issue, which is that also the Earth is being made less reflective because we're putting less of particular sorts of pollutant into the atmosphere.

2:16Rosie Blau:So the Earth's reflecting less energy back. Explain what role that really plays. Yeah, that's right. If you were standing outside the Earth and looking at it, it would just at the edges of human capacity to see, it would be getting just a little bit dimmer over the decades. And this leads to more sunlight being absorbed. And that means that there's more energy coming into the system. The amount of energy leaving the system is also going up, but not as quickly. And so you get basically a buildup of energy in the system. Olly, we know about global warming. What's new here and what you're talking about?

2:51There are two things going on here. One is you say we know about global warming and we know about it in general. 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 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.

3:20And 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.

3:59And this means that the Earth again reflects away less sunlight, so absorbs more.

4:03Rosie Blau:You're saying that less energy is reflected back. 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. And what impact does that actually have? 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. And how do we measure how much impact it's having?

4:37We 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. it's really hard to calibrate satellite measurements. And although they do a brilliant job of it, I think the thing that really convinces people that those measurements are true is that we have a completely different set of measurements that back it up, which is most of the energy that's absorbed by the Earth is absorbed by the oceans. And since about 2000, the world's had a really rather good, I think, under-remarked way of measuring the heat content of the oceans.

5:15And this is a set of little boys called Argo. They float along at a certain depth and they change their depth and they record the temperature and the salinity and various other things and they come up to the surface and they send a message to a satellite saying here's what this bit of the ocean looks like and there are thousands of these things doing this on a regular basis and this means we have a much better picture of how the temperature of the ocean is different at different depths and how that's changing over time. And it turns out that what they call the heat content of the ocean is changing very much in step with the energy imbalance as measured by the satellites.

5:52Rosie Blau:So what you're saying is that we tried to deal with one health problem, smog and pollution, and in doing so we've actually unleashed another problem. Different nations have done different things about air pollution, but recently, particularly, China has got very serious about it. And in the actions that followed on from the 2012 Olympics, the amount of sulfur emitted in China has plunged quite dramatically. The International Maritime Organization spent a lot of the 2010s planning ways to reduce the amount of sulfur emitted by cargo ships. Those rules came in in 2020. And there's a measurable effect of reduced reflectivity as a result of those rules.

6:34The IMO had no institutional way of thinking about the fact that it was also slightly warming up the Earth. I don't think that's in itself culpable. I do feel somewhat, though, that they should have thought about developing that capacity, and they really didn't think about that very much.

6:48Rosie Blau:If what we want is for the Earth to reflect more energy back, how can that happen? Well, there are two ways. One is we can reduce the amount of greenhouse gas warming. That takes a long time, mostly, because it would mean actually not just stopping putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but taking some out. and that is a very, very long-term project. The other thing you can do is directly look at making the Earth reflect away a little more sunlight and this was the insight of a paper by the great Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, one of the first people ever to win a Nobel Prize for environmental work and Paul wrote a paper in 2006 saying, what if you could keep the cooling effects of having little bits of sulphate in the atmosphere while drastically reducing the health effects.

7:38And he said, well, maybe if you put the little particles higher up in the atmosphere where they last longer, you can get the same cooling effect with fewer particles. And this is an idea that's normally discussed as solar geoengineering, and people get very hot under the collar about it. But that was the anatomy of Paul's proposal. And 20 years on, we are actually seeing what he warned about, which is, as the nations of the world have in various ways saved people's lives by reducing sulfur emissions, they have also contributed. It's not the only cause, but they've contributed to a further warming.

8:13Rosie Blau:Olly, not everyone's a fan of geoengineering. What happens if nothing is done? Well, I should add that I'm not a fan of geoengineering. Vanishingly few people are fans of geoengineering, but I should disclose an interest in that I am a trustee of a charity that works in this sector. If nothing is done along those lines, without any intervention, the effect of aerosols will diminish to a lower level than they are today. There are still places in the world with terrible air pollution problems which will want to get rid of them. So that will happen. And climate change driven by greenhouse gases, both directly and through feedback mechanisms like a loss of clouds, those will continue.

8:55And some aspects of the way people have measured the feedback effects suggest that they may be a bit stronger than had previously been thought. So some people are saying 10%, 30 % more warming in the next few decades than you might otherwise expect. And that will continue until the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is stabilised. And at the moment, that looks like a world that's considerably warmer than today's and a world in which today's record sea surface temperatures become, you know, just the way it used to be back then.

9:27Rosie Blau:And Oli, if you haven't depressed us enough and people want to hear more about this, where can they hear about it? Yes, if I haven't depressed you enough with this already, you can hear more about this on the Babbage podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rosie.

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10:40Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:In June, there was a march in Liberia's capital of Monrovia, and the government's goal was to make it visible that they're cracking down on drug abuse and the broader trafficking of narcotics throughout the West African country. Just a few weeks ago, police raided a bungalow in between the country's main airport and the capital, and they found hundreds of suitcase-sized packages of cocaine stacked up to the ceiling. Put together, the entire hall was worth over$300 million. Ori Ogunbiyi is an Africa correspondent for The Economist. It's not the first big bust that Liberia or even West Africa has seen this year.

11:19Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:In May, a ship was intercepted off the coast of the Western Sahara, carrying nearly 31 tonnes of cocaine, more than the total amount of the drug seized in West Africa in the whole of 2025.

11:35So, Ori, what's behind this uptick?

11:37Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:Because of Africa's location as a midpoint between South America, where most of the world's cocaine is produced, and Europe, where a lot of the global market is, it's been a convenient trafficking point for many decades. But in recent years, there's been more and more cocaine traffic through this part of the world, partly because the police in Europe are cracking down on the packages that are coming directly from South America. And so cartels are getting really innovative and circumventing them by coming through West Africa instead. Their shipments are getting harder to intercept, and that's becoming a really big problem.

12:10So how big a problem? Give me a sense of scale here.

12:13Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:West Africa as a whole has now become one of the biggest hubs for cocaine flows to Europe. So talking numbers, between 2019 and 2025, the volume of cocaine seized has gone up by 50 % each year. And the size of these shipments have gotten bigger as well. So in 2025, the average haul weighed over five tons. That's more than twice the weight of the previous year. The traffickers are bulk shipping this cocaine to West Africa, where the ports and the airports are much more lax. Shipments are getting repackaged there and then loaded onto these massive ships called mother vessels. The mother vessels hover around the high seas, around North Africa, the Canary Islands, and they're met there by smaller boats, really fast boats called go-fasts.

12:56Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:And in the middle of the high seas, they're transferred from these mother vessels to the go-fasts and sent straight to Europe, sometimes bypassing the major ports entirely and going to private jetties. So I spoke to Paolo Silva from the EU's Maritime Analysis and Information Centre, which is a multinational enforcement body that's based in Europe and looking into this. Every time we let one kilo of cocaine reach West Africa, it corrupts everything. It's a problem for us. If one of those states become anarcho-states, it will be definitely a problem. So in West Africa, it's complicated. He says that the cartels are sending their shipments to West Africa because there's a crackdown on cargo coming directly from places like Brazil.

13:37There was, I think, a big shift in the past years from Suriname, mostly. So we've been seeing vessels getting loaded with cocaine off Suriname. Some of them they head directly to Europe. Some of them they go to West Africa, which basically creates two points of departure, which makes it much harder for us in Europe to just check.

14:00Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:And this crackdown has forced cartels to get a little bit creative with how they move drugs. So in the past we used to see more like old fishing, local fishing vessels that went out to collect these drugs. and our organized crime groups are investing more in use of very powerful go-fasts, which can go very far. And it's very dangerous to intercept them. It's a risk. People are dying from both sides. But coming back to the structural reasons why this is happening, it is mostly about the geography. So because of how much of the world's cocaine is made in South America, the geography is the most important reason why it is West Africa.

14:35Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:But it's also a story of the limited law enforcement capacity they have there and corruption. When it comes to corruption, there's a well-known example with Sierra Leone. So there's a man called Joss Leideckers, and he's a Dutch man. He should be serving a 24-year prison sentence in the Netherlands, but he's hiding out in Sierra Leone. Because of him, shipments coming from Sierra Leone are now under heavier scrutiny in Europe, and so drug kingpins like him and his peers have had to diversify their trafficking routes, and they're now sending their cocaine through neighbouring countries like Liberia, but even countries a bit further away that have been seen as relatively stable, like Ghana.

15:15And you went to Liberia and spoke to officials about this big shift. What are they saying about what they're doing about it?

15:22Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:Yes, I did. So at a recent press conference, journalists had lots of questions about the details of the raid. The authorities explained that they'd arrested a Spanish-Colombian man and a Serbian man. The thing is, Jason, there's lots of fanfare when it comes to these big drug busts. But the things that people are most concerned about is corruption within the authorities.

15:48Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:Later on, I spoke to a man called Gregory Coleman, and he's the inspector general of the Liberian police. Public trust is very low, and rightfully so. We're up against a very, very dangerous and powerful cartel. At this point in time, we have state actors that we've identified, have been working with them. We have officers that are being charged just up to yesterday, able to infiltrate and try to bribe a high-level officer. It's about dismantling the entire cartel network in Liberia and make it very, very emphatically clear to them that this place is not open for cartel business. Clearly, this is a tricky battle to fight, especially since some of the bad elements are actually within the fighting system.

16:31do you think they've got what it takes to crimp this back down?

16:34Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:Unfortunately, I don't think so. They're paid so little, so they're easy to pay off. And the governments we're talking about here are largely powerless against this entire trade. They don't have the kind of high-level security tech that it would take to protect not just their ports, but their maritime borders way out in the high seas. They don't have the tech that it would require to chase after those tiny, super-fast, go-fast boats. A lot of these countries don't even have sniffer dogs at their airports. we're dealing with really outdated security technology and the cartels are way further ahead.

17:04Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi:And then you add the layer of corruption. Then you also add the fact that there is so much demand for cocaine in Europe, which means that the profits in this industry are so high. That means that even when there is the occasional bust, even a multi-million dollar bust like the one we saw in Liberia can just be rounded off as a cost of doing business. Thanks very much for your time, Ori. Thanks so much for having me, Jason.

17:48The marriage of pop star Taylor Swift and NFL star Travis Kelsey this summer was dubbed America's Royal Wedding.