The “most important graph in the world” now has 2025 data.

The news is worse than ever. Over just 25 years of satellite observation, the loss of Earth’s reflective cloud shield has produced a warming effect equivalent to the entire fossil fuel age.

The ocean’s cloud-making engine is failing — and Ocean Pasture Restoration remains the only intervention that can restart it in time.

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Leon Simons calls it “the most important graph in the world.” Each time NASA’s CERES satellite releases another month of data, the picture sharpens — and darkens, literally. The latest update, extending the CERES EBAF Edition 4.2.1 dataset through the end of 2025, shows absorbed solar radiation continuing its relentless climb while the clouds that once reflected that sunlight back to space continue to vanish.

The numbers tell a story that should stop every climate scientist, policymaker, and citizen in their tracks.

The Most Terrifying Number in Climate Science

Over the full 25-year CERES satellite record, Earth’s albedo — its reflective brightness —a function of how much mainly low marine clouds are present, has declined by approximately 0.5%. That may sound small. It is not. Applied to the roughly 340 W/m² of incoming solar energy, that 0.5% decline translates into approximately 1.7 W/m² of additional heating absorbed by our planet.

Now compare that to the total radiative forcing from CO₂ accumulated over the entire fossil fuel age. Atmospheric CO₂ has risen from a pre-industrial baseline of roughly 280 ppm to approximately 420 ppm today — an increase of about 140 ppm built up over two centuries of burning coal, oil, and gas. The radiative forcing from that increase is approximately 2.2 W/m².

The loss of Earth’s reflective shield — documented by a single NASA satellite instrument over just 25 years — has produced a warming effect comparable to the entire accumulated CO₂ forcing of the industrial era. James Hansen and colleagues, in their 2025 paper “Global Warming Has Accelerated,” made this equivalence explicit: the 1.7 W/m² albedo loss is equivalent to adding 138 ppm of CO₂ to the atmosphere — essentially the same 140 ppm we actually added since pre-industrial times.

We doubled our warming problem in a quarter century. Not by burning more fuel. By losing our clouds.

And in some regions the picture is far worse. The graph from Leon Simons — derived from CERES data for the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes between 30°N and 55°N, covering the North Pacific and North Atlantic — shows the net flux in that band increasing by +2.2 W/m² in just the four years from 2022 to 2025. That single region, comprising about 10.7% of Earth’s surface, is darkening at a pace that dwarfs anything in the global average. These are the latitudes where the world’s great ocean pastures once bloomed — and where the clouds they produced once kept our planet cool the clouds have vanished.

What CERES Is Telling Us

The Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System has been watching Earth’s energy budget from orbit since March 2000. Norman Loeb, the mission’s principal investigator, published a landmark paper in PNAS in September 2025 documenting what the instruments have recorded: a statistically significant trend of the Northern Hemisphere absorbing more sunlight than the Southern — a darkening of our planet’s most populated half. The NH–SH difference in absorbed solar radiation is trending at 0.34 W/m² per decade, and the sign has flipped: in the early 2000s, the Southern Hemisphere absorbed slightly more sunlight; now the North absorbs significantly more.

The mainstream narrative attributes this darkening to reduced ship-track aerosols following the IMO 2020 sulfur regulations, retreating Arctic ice, and shrinking snow cover. These factors are real. But they are not the whole story — and not the most important part.

The Story They’re Missing: The Collapse of the Ocean’s Cloud Factory

At the heart of every microscopic drop of water that makes up marine clouds lies a tiny speck of plankton — a cloud condensation nucleus (CCN). Over the open ocean, far from continental dust and industrial pollution, what makes those specks? The answer has been known for decades, yet remains stubbornly absent from mainstream climate models: it is the breath of ocean plankton.

Phytoplankton produce over a billion tonnes per year of DMSP (dimethylsulfoniopropionate). When plankton pastures are healthy and dense, the bacteria that graze among them cleave DMSP into DMS (dimethyl sulfide), which rises into the marine atmosphere, oxidizes into sulfate aerosols, and seeds the low, bright clouds that shade the ocean and reflect sunlight back to space. As I detailed in The Vital Ocean Connection, this chain of events — from plankton to DMSP to DMS to sulfate aerosols to cloud condensation nuclei — is the beating heart of Earth’s climate regulation over the oceans.

This is not a marginal process. Research from ETH Zurich has shown that roughly 10% of all ocean photosynthesis is devoted to producing DMSP — one single molecule. The biogenic aerosol system that results from it is the dominant source of cloud condensation nuclei over the remote ocean — the planetary surface that receives the most sunlight.

And here’s the critical detail that transforms this from an interesting fact into an emergency: the DMS pathway operates as a threshold mechanism. At adequate plankton densities, bacteria release DMS into the atmosphere. Below a critical density, they switch metabolic pathways, consuming the sulfur and carbon for themselves. No DMS escapes. No cloud seeds form.

A moderately depleted ocean pasture doesn’t make moderately fewer clouds. It makes almost none. The factory doesn’t dim. It shuts down.

Multiple converging lines of evidence — satellite chlorophyll data, Secchi disk transparency records going back over a century, ship-based observations — tell us that global ocean phytoplankton productivity has declined catastrophically, by 50% or more since the 1980s. The cause is straightforward: the mineral dust that once blew off continental landscapes and nurtured the ocean with iron has been declining for decades, trapped by the expanding grasslands made lush by our world’s high and rising CO2 as more grass growing means less dust blowing from the planet’s formerly arid dust-producing regions.

Without iron, the ocean pastures can’t bloom. Without blooms, the DMS pathway shuts off. Without DMS, the cloud condensation nuclei vanish. Without CCN, the clouds disappear. The CERES satellite is recording the result: our planet is going dark.

The Hansen Narrative and the Missing Variable

Hansen’s team attributes roughly 0.5 W/m² of the albedo loss to reduced ship aerosol emissions and about 0.15 W/m² to retreating ice and snow, leaving over 1 W/m² attributed to “cloud feedbacks” — a catch-all term that, in practice, means “we see the clouds disappearing but aren’t sure why.” As I argued in Publish and Perish — A Sulfurous Tale, climate science has been staring at the wrong sulfur — fixated on ship exhaust while the ocean’s own biogenic sulfur cycle collapses unmonitored.

I say the answer is staring us in the face, written in the biology of the ocean. The regions where absorbed solar radiation has increased most dramatically, as the clouds have gone missing — the North Pacific and North Atlantic mid-latitudes — are precisely the regions where ocean pasture collapse has been most severe. These are waters that once bloomed reliably with phytoplankton every spring and summer, producing the DMS that seeded the clouds that kept those latitudes cool.

Those blooms are fading, and with them, the clouds. If you don’t believe the cloud data, ask a seabird, if you can find one, as many as 80% of our seabirds have gone missing, so you will have a hard time finding one to ask. And keep in mind, no bad fishermen overfish our seabirds, the evidence is very clear, they have and are starving into extinction on their ocean pastures that have become clear blue lifeless ocean deserts!

This is not a hypothesis that requires new physics or uncertain parameterizations. The biochemistry is documented. The satellite record of declining chlorophyll is documented. The CERES record of declining albedo is documented. What is missing is the willingness to connect the dots — because connecting them leads to a conclusion that the climate establishment finds uncomfortable: that the most powerful lever we have for restoring Earth’s cooling is not in the atmosphere, not in the energy sector, and not in any carbon market. It is in the ocean.

Ocean Pasture Restoration: The Only Rapid Solution

In 2012, working with the Haida Nation’s Old Massett Village Council, we restored an iron-depleted ocean pasture in the Northeast Pacific. One hundred tonnes of iron-rich mineral dust. A phytoplankton bloom exceeding 50,000 km², visible from space. Atmospheric monitoring detected increased aerosol optical depth over the bloom region — the DMS cloud-seeding signature. The following year, the Gulf of Alaska pink salmon return was 226 million fish — more than four times the forecast, the largest return in over a century.

The ocean responded. The biology worked. The clouds came back.

That single demonstration — costing a few million dollars — produced climate benefits that rival the output of billion-dollar geoengineering proposals. A restored ocean pasture of 50,000 km² produces roughly 100,000 tonnes of biogenic aerosols during a six-month bloom cycle, seeding cloud formation over an area ten times the pasture’s size. Nature’s own 10× amplification mechanism. For the full accounting of what a single restored ocean pasture delivers — clouds, carbon, fish, rain, and more — see Nature’s Air Conditioner, the third part of my series on the ocean-cloud-climate connection.

Compare this with the proposals now being seriously discussed: stratospheric aerosol injection (spraying sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, requiring thousands of flights per day at a cost of billions annually, with termination shock risk if ever halted); marine cloud brightening with salt spray (requiring fleets of specialized vessels running continuously); or direct air capture of CO₂ (requiring gigatons of industrial infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist at scale).

Ocean pasture restoration costs mere millions, not billions, certainly not the trillions some in the climate industrial complex champion.. OPR deploys in months, not decades. It requires a ship and some mineral dust. It produces not chemical haze but living ocean — fish, whales, seabirds, carbon sequestration, and clouds. And unlike every synthetic alternative, it can be stopped at any time with no termination shock, because it works with the ocean’s own biogeochemical cycles rather than against them.

The Urgency Is Now

The CERES graph does not bend. Every month of new data extends the curve upward. The planet has added a warming impulse equivalent to the entire fossil fuel age in just 25 years — not through smokestack emissions but through the silent collapse of its own biological cooling system. Every year without action is another year of vanishing clouds, another fraction of a W/m² of additional heating absorbed by the oceans, another step toward climate thresholds from which there may be no return.

We don’t need more models. We don’t need another decade of ship-track papers while the ocean’s biological thermostat fails. We need to go to sea with the intent to replenish its vital mineral dust and restore the ocean pastures that once kept this planet in its Goldilocks Zone.

The technology is proven. The cost is trivial. The co-benefits are enormous. The hour is very late.

But the ocean is vast, and it wants to recover. Give an ocean pasture its dust back, and it blooms. When it blooms, it feeds fish, fixes carbon, seeds clouds, and cools the planet. That is the message of the CERES data — if we have the courage to read it correctly.

Here’s a link to how Alaska might just be part of the answer! https://russgeorge.net/2026/04/10/open-letter-to-governor-candidates-in-alaska/

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Sources:

• NASA CERES EBAF Ed4.2.1 data: ceres.larc.nasa.gov/data
• Loeb et al. (2025), “Emerging hemispheric asymmetry of Earth’s radiation,” PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.2511595122
• Hansen et al. (2025), “Global Warming Has Accelerated,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 67:1, 6-44. doi:10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494
• Leon Simons, CERES data visualizations: researchgate.net/profile/Leon-Simons

Graph credit: ©Leon Simons, data source NASA CERES EBAF-TOA All-sky Ed4.2.1