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Short-lived uncertainty?

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 587–588 (2010)Cite this article

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Short-lived greenhouse gases and black-carbon aerosols have contributed to past climate warming. Curbing their emissions and quantifying the forcing by all short-lived components could both mitigate climate change in the short term and help to refine projections of global warming.

Earth's climate can only be stabilized by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the twenty-first century. But rolling back anthropogenic emissions of several short-lived atmospheric pollutants that lead to warming — such as methane, tropospheric ozone precursors and black-carbon aerosols — could significantly reduce the rate of climate warming over the next few decades1,2,3. However, other short-lived pollutants, particularly scattering aerosols, cool the climate; reducing these will tend to increase the rate of warming4,5.

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Figure 1: Temperature anomalies, compared with the average for 1950–1980, from observations of global mean surface air temperature (black diamonds) and from climate model simulations for two values of climate sensitivity12.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 48109-2143, Michigan, USA

    Joyce E. Penner

  2. University of California, Irvine, 92697, California, USA

    Michael J. Prather

  3. University of Oslo, PO Box 1022, Blindern, Oslo, 0315, Norway

    Ivar S. A. Isaksen

  4. Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO) Oslo, PO Box 1129 Blindern, Oslo, 0318, Norway

    Ivar S. A. Isaksen & Jan S. Fuglestvedt

  5. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Schlossplatz 1, Laxenburg, 2361, Austria

    Zbigniew Klimont

  6. School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3JN, UK

    David S. Stevenson

Authors
  1. Joyce E. Penner
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  2. Michael J. Prather
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  3. Ivar S. A. Isaksen
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  4. Jan S. Fuglestvedt
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  5. Zbigniew Klimont
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  6. David S. Stevenson
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Correspondence to Joyce E. Penner.

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Penner, J., Prather, M., Isaksen, I. et al. Short-lived uncertainty?. Nature Geosci 3, 587–588 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo932

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