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Aerosols

Uncertain then, irrelevant now

Nature volume 503, pages 47–48 (2013)Cite this article

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Uncertainty in estimates of the effects of aerosols on climate stems from poor knowledge of the past, pristine atmosphere — so getting a better understanding of these effects might not be as useful as was thought. See Article p.67

Aerosol particles in the atmosphere have long been feared to be the joker in the climate system's pack of cards. Even before the greenhouse effect became a household word, scientists had begun to consider the possibility that increasing concentrations of particles in the atmosphere's lowest layer (the troposphere) were acting to cool the planet, and thus masking what would otherwise be much larger temperature changes caused by rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide1. Reporting on page 67 of this issue, Carslaw et al.2 use an innovative approach to demonstrate that most of the uncertainty in estimates of aerosol forcing — the aerosol perturbation caused by humans that induces a global surface-temperature change — that is associated with cloud-affecting aerosols can be attributed to uncertainty in the emission rate of aerosol precursors from natural sources. Their work suggests that, if there is an aerosol joker, it was probably played a century ago, and has become irrelevant to understanding present and future changes in global climate.

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Figure 1: Climate forcing by tropospheric aerosols and carbon dioxide.

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  1. Bjorn Stevens is at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, KlimaCampus, Hamburg 20146, Germany.,

    Bjorn Stevens

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Correspondence to Bjorn Stevens.

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Stevens, B. Uncertain then, irrelevant now. Nature 503, 47–48 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/503047a

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