Efforts to reduce air pollution in Eastern Asia, particularly in China, may have unintentionally accelerated global warming over the past decade and a half, a new study by the CICERO Centre for International Climate Research has found.
According to the study, East Asian aerosol cleanup has likely contributed to the recent acceleration in global warming, which was published in the Nature Communications Earth and Environment journal, countries in East Asia have made ‘strong efforts’ to clean up air pollution, particularly in China, where air pollution is responsible for about one million deaths a year.
In the process, however, the removal of certain pollutants, such as sulfate aerosols – which reflect sunlight away from the Earth’s surface – may have led to an increase in global warming.
‘Global warming acceleration’
“We have been able to single out the climate effects of air quality policies in East Asia over the last 15 years,” commented Bjørn H. Samset, lead author and senior researcher at CICERO. “Our main result is that the East Asian aerosol cleanup has likely driven much of the recent global warming acceleration, and also warming trends in the Pacific.”
The study used a comprehensive set of simulations across eight different climate models, with the researchers estimating that a 75% reduction in East Asian sulfate emissions is linked to this warming acceleration.
‘Short-lived’
“The climate effects of air pollution are short-lived, while the impact of carbon dioxide emissions can be felt for centuries,” added Dr Laura Wilcox, contributing author and associate professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) at the University of Reading. “This means that the acceleration of warming due to reductions in air pollution is also likely to be short-lived.
“We will see an acceleration of warming while the unmasking takes place, and then a return to a greenhouse-gas driven rate of warming as air pollution stabilises.” Read more here and here.
