Air purification from pollutants And in the long term lead to global droughts and floods.
A group of scientists from Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway conducted a study in which they found that the efforts of authorities around the world to clean the air can cause an increase in temperature on the planet, as well as other climatic effects. The article was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Scientists have conducted a series of experiments and have established reliably that eliminating the emission of aerosols - tiny, air polluting particles often emitted by industrial activities - can lead to additional global warming in the range of 0.5 to 1 degree Celsius.
According to the authors of the work, world leaders have set themselves an ambitious goal - to maintain global temperatures in the range of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius from their pre-industrial levels. But research shows that the world has already warmed by about 1 degree, and the situation is worsening.
Scientists have suggested that aerosol removal could have dramatic regional consequences, causing major changes in precipitation and other weather conditions in some parts of the world. Aerosols do not stay in the atmosphere for a very long time; they do not have time to spread around the world, as carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases do. Their impact is usually most significant in the regions where they were released into the atmosphere.
This means that places with the most severe air pollution will suffer serious consequences if this pollution disappears. East Asia, where aerosol emissions are among the highest in the world, are likely to see strong increases in precipitation and extreme weather events. To a certain extent, these effects can be transferred to other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, which are connected with Asia through large atmospheric currents.
“We also see the effects of these aerosols on temperatures in Asia are carried north to the Arctic, Northern Europe, Norway, the northern United States,” said Björn Samset, scientist at CICERO, Norway's Center for International Climate Research and Lead Author research.
Scientists have long known that certain types of pollutants help cool the climate. Some sulfate aerosols, for example, can reflect sunlight from the Earth. As countries around the world have begun to tackle air pollution, scientists have become interested in figuring out the reasons for how much additional heat will increase when they disappear.
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The new study was based on four global climate models that the researchers used to model the effects of removing all anthropogenic emissions from major aerosols, including sulphate and carbon-based particles such as soot. According to their results, global warming will be between 0.5 and 1.1 degrees Celsius.
In addition, global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are likely to have side effects on aerosols, as air pollution is often a by-product of the same industrial sources that generate carbon emissions.
“Although aerosols are emitted from many CO2-emitting activities (coal combustion, deforestation), there is no individual match. You cannot assume that net zero CO2 emissions should also imply zero anthropogenic aerosols,”said climatologist Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Space Research Institute.
Scientists hope the new study will help "analyze the next generation of climate scenarios."
GRIGORY PUSHKAREV