--- title: "Earth Screams in Agony as Microplastics Found to Increase Global Warming" description: "New research that microplastics absorb more sunlight than they reflect, significantly heating the Earth's atmosphere." date: "2026-05-05" modified: "2026-05-05" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/science-energy/microplastics-global-warming" categories: - "Climate Change" - "Environment" - "Pollution" - "Science & Energy" --- # Earth Screams in Agony as Microplastics Found to Increase Global Warming ![A colorful arrangement of plastic bottle caps forms a globe at the bottom with blue and green caps, surrounded by a white ring of caps, and topped with a flame-like burst of caps in yellow, orange, and red hues against a pink and red gradient background.]() *Getty / Futurism* The Earth simply can't catch a break. Those [microplastics]() that have invaded every corner of the globe — and [even the insides of our bodies]() — may also be heating the planet, research suggests. In a [new study]() published in the journal *Nature Climate Change*, the authors found that microplastics are absorbing more sunlight than they reflect in the atmosphere, resulting in net heating. Its effects aren't as powerful as greenhouse gases, but they're significant enough to take notice of. "We can say with confidence that overall they are warming agents," study coauthor Drew Shindell, a professor of earth science at Duke University, [told *The Washington Post*](). "To me, that's the big advance." Until now, the impact that microplastics have on the climate has largely been overlooked, and current climate models don't even account for them. It's a nascent avenue of research, and scientists are still grappling with their environmental toll and their potential harmfulness to human health. In the study led by researchers at Fudan University in China, the team focused on an aspect of the pernicious particles that you likely never considered: their color. Color determines how much a material absorbs or reflects light, and therefore heat (beware black leather car seats on a hot summer day.) By testing how microplastics of different colors and sizes absorb heat in a lab setting, and simulating how this would play out in the atmosphere, the researchers found that microplastics could be generating up to one-sixth the warming as black carbon, or soot, with black, yellow, blue, and red particles in particular absorbing more sunlight than white ones. It's not a "trivial" amount, Shindell told *WaPo*. He calculated that a year's worth of heating from microplastic pollution is roughly equal to 200 coal-fired power plants running over that same time period. But this doesn't account for the long-term impact as the particles decay over decades and persist in the environment, the newspaper noted. "We still have a lot to learn about exactly how many of these are in the atmosphere and how they're distributed, both horizontally and vertically," Shindell [told *Scientific American*](). "This is not the final word." This isn't the only research to focus on airborne microplastics. Another study found evidence that they [could be affecting the formation of clouds](), and as a result influencing the weather. The floating particles provide a surface for liquid water droplets to cling to, [forming ice crystals in clouds](), the work found. **More on climate change:** [*Climate Change Is Getting So Bad That It’s Making Food Less Nutritious*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()