CLIMATE scientists have been underestimating the “cooling” effect of the pollutant particles produced by human activity. As cleaner technology reduces such aerosols, global warming seems likely to speed up alarmingly.
Aerosols reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, thus keeping global warming in check. “It is like driving a car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake,” says Meinrat Andreae of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
Andreae and his colleagues used a computer model to study the cooling effect of aerosols and the warming effect of greenhouse gases.…
