Cleaning Up Air Pollution May Strengthen Global Warming

Source: Scientific American | January 22, 2018 | Chelsea Harvey

Pollution in the atmosphere is having an unexpected consequence, scientists say—it’s helping to cool the climate, masking some of the global warming that’s occurred so far.

That means efforts worldwide to clean up the air may cause an increase in warming, as well as other climate effects, as this pollution disappears.

New research is helping to quantify just how big that effect might be.

This would virtually ensure that the planet will warm beyond the most stringent climate targets outlined in the Paris climate agreement.

These results are in line with other studies that have investigated the cooling “mask” of aerosols. A 2016 paper published in Nature Geoscience found that up to a half-degree Celsius of the warming that has been observed in the Arctic—the most rapidly warming region on the planet—since 1980 was caused by pollution reductions in Europe. Like the new study, those findings speak to both the considerable cooling effect aerosols have had on the climate and to the atmospheric linkages between different regions of the Northern Hemisphere.

Other research has also supported the idea that aerosols have influenced global temperatures as a whole. Another 2016 paper, also published in Nature Geoscience, suggested that about a third of all the warming that occurred over land areas over the past 50 years was masked—temporarily covered up, in other words—by aerosol pollution.

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  • Woodcutter #21093

    Pollution causes Global Warming…
    No! Pollution MASKS Global Warming ….
    No! Global warming causes “warming” ???
    No! Global warming causes blizzards…
    Ahhhhh ?????

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