The Hill: Climate paradox: Emission cuts could ‘unmask’ deadly face of climate change, scientists warn – One the one hand, cutting fossil fuel pollution is necessary for avoiding severe destruction over the long term. But such cuts will make the earth much hotter in the short term. …
These cuts remain one of the only examples of successful cuts to climate-warming pollution, but the new study found that those pandemic-era cuts in air pollution led to a rise in global temperatures. The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Science, unveil a stark paradox at the heart of human-caused climate change.
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Via Engineering & Technology: While reduced air pollution emissions leads to better air quality, they also enable stronger climate warming effects, scientists in Sweden have said. … It was discovered that while the concentrations of polluting short-lived air particles decreased significantly, the concentrations of longer-lived greenhouse gases were barely affected in the air mass over South Asia. The cooling effect of the aerosols comes from the fact that they reflect incoming solar radiation back into space. With a lower aerosol content, there is less cooling, and thus less ‘masking’ of the warming effect of the significantly longer-lived climate gases. …
The results show that a complete phasing out of fossil-fuel combustion in favour of renewable energy sources with zero emissions could result in rapid ‘unmasking’ of aerosols, while greenhouse gases linger. … “During a couple of decades, emission reductions risk leading to net climate warming due to the ‘masking’ effect of air particles, before the temperature reduction from reduced greenhouse gas emissions takes over.
