Material from dry landscapes has surged since the 1800s, possibly helping to cool the planet for decades
Dust that billows up from desert storms and arid landscapes has helped cool the planet for the past several decades, and its presence in the atmosphere may have obscured the true extent of global heating caused by fossil fuel emissions.
“We’ve been predicting for a long time that we’re headed toward a bad place when it comes to greenhouse warming,” said Jasper Kok, an atmospheric physicist who led the research. “What this research shows is that so far, we’ve had the emergency brake on.”About 26m tons of dust are suspended in our atmosphere, scientists estimate. Its effects are complicated.
But after they tallied everything up, it seemed clear to researchers that the dust had an overall cooling effect. Limited records from ice cores, marine sediment records, and other sources suggest that dust overall had also been increasing since pre-industrial times – in part due to development, agriculture, and other human impacts on landscapes. But the amount of dust also seems to have been decreasing since the 1980s.
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