Is greenhouse effect offset by tiny air pollution particles?
Upton, NY – The Earth’s climate may be more vulnerable to humankind’s influences than we think, warn a scientist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and a German colleague. Then again, it might not. In either case, they argue, major policies on global climate change are being considered with incomplete information. In a scientific commentary published in the May 24 issue of Science, Brookhaven atmospheric chemist Stephen Schwartz and biogeochemist Meinrat Andreae of Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Chemistry report that uncertainty runs high when scientists attempt to predict how tiny air pollution particles, known as aerosols, influence the Earth’s climate. They also criticize a recent National Research Council (NRC) report for not recognizing the urgency of reducing this uncertainty, especially in the face of widespread resistance to limits on emissions of greenhouse gases based on limited evidence of their climatic influence. Atmospheric aerosols, su
