Improving Air Quality By Scrubbing Aerosols from the Atmosphere Ended Up Accelerating Global Warming, Study Finds!

Now, it seems we have reached a similar point where corrective climate action requires a band-aid rip-off that will sting us before allowing us to finally operate on the festering wound underneath.

An unlikely ally against climate change

Most of us are familiar with aerosols as the evil masterminds behind the ozone tragedy. However, like most things, there is an unspoken side to this story as well. In fact, you might be shocked to know that most types of aerosols actually help in cooling the planet to a certain degree.

This is due to a fairly well-known characteristic called albedo. Simply put, this refers to how well materials can reflect light back from the Sun, thereby reducing the amount of heat trapped on our planet. And since we have been pumping extraordinary amounts of high-albedo aerosols into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, it has actually given us a few years of fighting chance in our deadly climate battle.

In fact, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), aerosols acted as guardian angels in 2019, helping the climate remain 0.5°C lower than it would’ve been without their intervention. Considering we are globally pumping lakhs of crores of rupees annually into mitigating the climate tragedy enough to restrict warming to just 1.5°C, even this 0.5°C is absurdly insurmountable assistance we could never be too prideful to decline.

Does this mean aerosols are actually good?

No! While we are certainly lucky that aerosols exhibit this cooling property, they are extremely poisonous to us and can lead to complications like lung cancer, asthma and bronchitis. Additionally, they have the potential to change rainfall patterns over large areas (especially seen in India and China), which can have exceedingly detrimental effects on food production.

Therefore, it became imperative that we got the substance out of our breathing air, and so we did! The world has scrubbed the air as clean as it could since 2000, whose effects could clearly be seen especially around North America, Europe and East Asia, according to the paper. However, as you can expect, this also reduced the effects of aerosols’ cooling property on the planet.

A double-edged sword

However, the authors of the study repeatedly stress that this does not mean the solution is to revert back to old practices.

"Our study should not be interpreted to mean that we should now be emitting more aerosols to cool the climate. On the contrary: aerosols are harmful to human health and the environment, which is why we need to keep reducing emissions," Johannes Quaas from Leipzig University has urged.

The only way forward is to treat this as a win for health and well-being, and focus on other methods to anchor ourselves against the global warming tsunami, especially through global rapid reductions in GHG emissions. Similar to working out, the only way forward is to break ourselves down and endure the pain before we can achieve new levels of strength and resilience.

The findings of this study were published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and can be accessed here.

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