East Asian aerosol cleanup has likely contributed to global warming
107 comments
·July 14, 2025ImaCake
swed420
Further reading for the curious
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to...
hammyhavoc
Anything from somewhere more credible than Medium?
maxglute
Queue China cleans the air, but at what cost articles.
bluefirebrand
Nit: You probably mean Cue, as in "That's your time to go on stage" not Queue as in "that's your place in line"
dr_dshiv
… this points to the importance of studying the effects of deliberate atmospheric aerosol injections… I think calcium carbonate is very promising—but we need to start doing tests asap to learn the effects.
modo_mario
And you're going to do this for the rest of the forseeable future? Way more than anything else it sounds like a cop out to avoid dealing with the long term consequences of what we put out there now and to keep pumping oil
dr_dshiv
Yes, I think it will be taking place for the remainder of our lifetimes.
Solar growth is likely to remain exponential for the next decade or so, which will create a number of new opportunities. Other energy sources will also come online. But fossil fuels are unlikely to be regulated away, globally. We are also likely past some serious tipping points— so I prefer to figure out ASAP whether stratospheric aerosol injections are a viable tactic for preventing the melting of permafrost, for instance.
red-iron-pine
nice em dash -- how do I generate that in the text box?
but you're burying the lede: "We are also likely past some serious tipping points—" == we're doomed, just slowly, and we desperately need to be doing something to slow down or stop this metaphorical bus before it falls off a cliff
NeutralCrane
I think the idea is to do it as a stop gap while we catch up on renewable energy production/integration.
matthewdgreen
The red states have begun banning geoengineering and even small-scale tests. It seems to be spreading across these states, which suggests that we'll soon see similar laws being proposed at the Federal level.
blueblisters
the uproar over minor, localized cloud-seeding (which had nothing to do with the Texas floods) is probably a death knell for aerosol injection.
we are going to see countries going to war over unilateral solar radiation management efforts
ACCount36
If countries prefer that nothing would be done about climate change, they can go get bombed for all I care.
matthewdgreen
I don't see this as a truly organic reaction. When I see the same laws popping up in multiple states, my suspicion is that it's driven centrally by right-wing think tanks, probably to benefit the fossil fuel lobbies. You don't need aerosol injection if there's no climate change, so we need to make it illegal (just as we need to defund Earth sciences, fire climate scientists, etc.) Similarly, if we need aerosol injection, then climate change is real. It's all one big package.
doctorhandshake
This is the plot of the Stephenson novel Termination Shock. Not endorsing the book but the hypothetical it poses is interesting.
scotty79
Does it fix ocean acidification? Does it fix the decline in human mental performance with raising CO2 levels in the air?
If not its a distraction, not a solution.
goku12
Looking at the wiki, the effects of long term exposure to CO2 under 0.5% of partial pressure (5000 ppm) are not known. The current concentration is close to just 430 ppm (though that's more than enough for the greenhouse effect). What sort of mental decline do you suspect? And any references?
cubefox
The short term effects are known though (bad indoor ventilation causes decreased intelligence due to increased CO2 concentration), and a permanent short term effect would arguably be a long term effect.
aesh2Xa1
Yes, it does fix acid problems.
The calcium carbonate dust is reflective (the aim of the engineering is to reflect sunlight away from the Earth's atmosphere in the first place). However, it doesn't contribute to acid rain or oceans like the sulfate dioxide does (the aerosol that East Asian scrubbers are removing).
The CO2 (a greenhouse gas) amount isn't increased in this engineering effort. It increases because of burning fossil fuels, though. In the East Asian countries, they are producing/using more energy (via burning fossil fuels), but only removing the reflective aerosol; they're still emitting the CO2.
If cost was no object, we'd probably need to use the calcium carbonate immediately (to prevent the sunlight from entering the atmosphere immediately), we'd scrub existing carbon from the atmosphere (CO2), and we'd convert power plants to non-emissive technologies (and also install scrubbers onto existing ones for as long as they're needed).
dr_dshiv
The key point here is that we should be researching this stuff as fast as possible.
adrianN
If you’re optimistic, it is a means to buy time to implement a solution.
booleandilemma
Maybe it will help with heartburn, if nothing else.
n1b0m
The findings highlight the complex tradeoffs involved in air quality and climate policies.
Overall, the findings suggest that the unintended climate consequences of reducing aerosol pollution in East Asia are a mixed bag - they help reveal the true scale of the climate challenge, but also accelerate the pace of climate change in the near-term. Careful management and mitigation of these effects will be important going forward.
jakobnissen
I don't really think so. Areosol pollution is short-lived and kills a ton of people. So you get enormous downsides in the short run (WHO estimates 2 million people die of air pollution in China alone), and in the medium term, you don't gain anything in terms of warming. The underlying CO2 accumulation happens anyway, and as soon as the short-lived areosols and suphur dioxide rains down to Earth, the accumulated warming kicks in.
gitanovic
But the killing a ton of people is very long term /(dark) s
lotsofpulp
I don’t understand why this comment is downvoted. The options to reduce total energy consumption were always humans voluntarily accepting lower quality of life (not just among the top 1 million or 100 million, but top 2 billion at least, so this was obviously not going to happen), or reduce total number of humans.
PicassoCTs
Reducing geo-engineering reveals already far gone global warming, which is percieved as a speed up.
infecto
What concerns me the most is India. China has done a good job advancing its population through better jobs and education. India on the other hand has barely scratched the surface, no company wants to migrate manufacturing there and the coming generation has a high chance of lead poisoning their faculties since the government has done nothing to combat the tainted goods in the country.
toast0
> India on the other hand has barely scratched the surface, no company wants to migrate manufacturing there
I don't think that's true. India has a large domestic market, high tariffs, and relatively low labor costs. It makes a lot of sense for products for the domestic market to be manufactured (or at least assembled) inside the country, and you see many manufacturers doing that. Some of them have success in manufacturing and go on to build for the export market in India; many have less success and accept the tariffs.
okdood64
> no company wants to migrate manufacturing there
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/cons-products/...
coldtea
It's optimism, mixed with getting some local (Indian) goodwill, mixed with pretending you diversified your production (while parts can still come from China), mixed with slow progress and mostly bad results
infecto
I don’t think that disproves much? They have been trying to move since 2017 and it’s been filled with nothing but troubles for them. I am sure it will happen as the cost of labor is cheap and they will be making US phones here without risk of Chinese tariffs.
India is a difficult challenge for most manufacturing operations, the government has done little to educate the population and pollution both in the air and food I fear will have a lasting impact. Some of the last reporting I saw had some insanely high number like 90% of tested children have lead poisoning. China has had their problems but they excelled at the growth stage.
HPsquared
Local and global pollution reduction are often in conflict. Classic example is the rush to diesel passenger cars.
Muromec
Somewhere, someone named Deep is getting ready to carry his backback, but doesn't know it yet.
whatsupdog
Wait... We need to bring back pollution to cool down the earth?
userbinator
Depends what you define as "pollution". Everything seems to have its place...
tzs
Some pollutants do have a cooling effect and there are circumstances where purposefully increasing those pollutants could be worth it, but only if we can be sure it is temporary.
The nightmare scenario would be something like we start releasing sulfates into the upper atmosphere to induce cooling to counter the warming from greenhouse gases but do not reduce the growth in greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases would continue growing and so the amount of sulfates we have to release to counter that also would keep growing.
There are two big problems with that.
#1. The greenhouse gas emissions are a side effect of numerous useful and important activities. People make a lot of money from those activities. They happen unless we make a concerted effort to reduce them.
The sulfite emissions on the other hand would be specifically to counter the effects of greenhouse gases. Whoever is paying for them would be losing money doing this. All it takes is an economic downturn to make budgets tight and funding might go away.
#2. Greenhouse gases can affect climate for a long time. It takes hundreds to thousands of years in the case of CO2 for today's emissions to be no longer affecting the climate.
Sulfates in the upper atmosphere clear out in months to maybe a couple years.
Let's say then we go down the sulfates path, don't reduce greenhouse gas growth and this goes on for decades. Then something stops or disrupts the sulfate releases for a couple years and the sulfites leave the upper atmosphere.
The greenhouse gases are there still there and we rapidly get most of the warming that had been held off for decades by the sulfates.
This would likely be disastrous. Getting all that warming spread over several decades at least gives people time to adapt. Getting it all over a few years would be way to fast for people to deal with.
I think probably the only way purposefully emitting pollutants like this might be acceptable would be after we've got greenhouse gas emissions under control and are on a path we are sure is going to get is to net zero in some specific timeframe, but it will still take a few years to reach peak greenhouse emissions and we've identified a tipping point that we will hit before that. Then maybe countering that with emitting pollutants just until greenhouse gases peak and then come down to where we are below that tipping point might be reasonable.
MSFT_Edging
There was a period during covid where cross atlantic shipping slowed, and the reduced sulfur in the air caused some increased warming. Basically things are a lot worse than we assume but there's certain accidental keystones holding things back, like pollution combating the global warming by blocking the sun.
ksynwa
This study concerns a specific type of emission (sulfate emissions). Reducing other types of emissions should still reduce global warming.
pfdietz
Pollution was masking some global warming, which is worse than had been thought. This pollution cannot mask it forever, since CO2 accumulates while it does not.
scotty79
Yeah, if you spread a bunch of sulfates in the air it gets cooler. But oceans don't get less acidic and the air doesn't get more breathable.
FranzFerdiNaN
No, we need to stop using oil and gas and such.
MangoToupe
Short of the wealthy paying the poor to not use oil and gas, that's obviously not gonna happen. What's plan b?
ZeroGravitas
That seems like a cynical though broadly accurate description of carbon pricing, which are in place around the world and shown to be one of the more effective interventions.
They are technically also paying the rich (and crucially the companies that supply things for both the rich and poor) to not use oil and gas too.
nrjames
India seems to be converting to solar without external pressure.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indias-solar-boo...
adrianN
I suppose the alternative is making the alternatives cheaper. For example wind and solar for electricity are quite cheap.
Scarblac
Any alternatives are way further into fantasy land than plan A.
justinrubek
Yes, it can happen.
newsclues
What are the trade offs for that?
The entire point is that the global climate is a complex system and changing things may have unintended consequences.
null
noiv
> changing things may have unintended consequences.
Proved by reality, that's why they propose to reduce or even undo human emissions.
adornKey
Or we should start reading books about atmosphere physics. Taking a look at the infrared spectrum and checking out what's really going on there is worth it...
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/VW-and-H...
csomar
I mean if you explode all of our nuclear bombs, we’ll probably take the earth to a winter. And it’ll still be livable, just a bit more cancer all around.
perihelions
> "Figure 1a shows changes in aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrieved by MODIS Terra and Aqua"
The US wants to immediately defund these satellites and halt their observations.
https://www.science.org/content/article/dozens-active-and-pl...
jimkleiber
I don't know why some people celebrate strength with fear of knowledge. Maybe they're just equally as afraid of knowledge and don't want to look weak and puff out their chests to pretend to be strong. As an American, it really frustrates me to see such bravado celebrated as bravery.
derbOac
> afraid of knowledge and don't want to look weak
I've come to the conclusion this is basically it, aside from corruption.
Intellectual weakness and cowardice, avoiding what you can't actually do or don't understand.
In the case of anything space related though, I'd look to corruption, trying to cut public resources to reduce competition with private equivalents, shifting money from something publicly owned to something privately profited from.
roenxi
A counterargument is they might just not think it is worth funding? If it is necessary to spend however many million on orbiting these satellites that is actually well within the amount of cash a lower level of government can fund or even a private society. Then the people who generally think it is important can pay for it, and everyone else doesn't have to.
Starlink suggests that there might not even need to be public money involved. Although it is a bit complicated because maybe it is some sort of disguised US military project, but it certainly suggests that maintaining satellites is something that can be done at a profit in the private sector.
I'd like to see more funding of free-market based education for youths. People not funding that doesn't make them scared of knowledge, they just don't put a lot of priority on making the world better in the ways I want to.
jimkleiber
I'd be fine with that as a counterargument if that were the counterargument such people made. I think that's a healthy debate and dialogue, where we could learn from each other. I often think the case is they say climate change is fake and that experts are lying and everyone who has a PhD is lying to you, and those ad hominem attacks often say to me someone who feels insecure about their knowledge or has some vested interest in, say, the oil industry, for example. That was more of my outburst.
With regards to whether a private company could maintain satellites (probably with government regulation and maybe subsidy), I'm open to that. I just worry sometimes that many of these decisions are made in the "Uh oh, this public knowledge might destroy my private profits, so let us get rid of the public knowledge."
red-iron-pine
you're assuming this is because of perception of weakness, and not an explicit, decade-long aggressive effort by foreign money + US billionaires to dismantle the US government.
just happens that oil barons & Putin happen to have views that are aligned, and that Trump + his cronies are willing to play ball with the fellow travelers.
jimkleiber
i think a decades-long aggressive effort to dismantle the US government might also be from such a place of fear of knowledge or at least, fear of others having control over their right to make profit. I guess I'm just tired of us celebrating the ones who appear strong but really are just acting out of deep fear and wish they (and us) had the courage to see it as fear and express it as such.
londons_explore
Don't pay money to give your political opponents facts to help oust you.
politics 101.
matthewdgreen
They're already going to be ousted. This is about temporarily propping up the price of fossil fuel assets that will never practically be monetized. Even an extra 5-10 years could allow vast sums of fake-wealth to be dumped onto other bagholders.
throwaway915
Need the money to pay for moving the retired, defunct Shuttle Discovery to Houston in order to lie to the people that space is being funded.
potato3732842
There are three kinds of satellites that do this sort of earth observation right now. I'd look up the acronyms but frankly it's been weeks since the news dropped and I don't care to educate anyone anymore, you can google it if you want. There's one kind they've been launching every now and then since the 00s and there's only a couple of it's type up there due to short-ish life (like a decade and a half) last few being problematic resulting in a very low (like count on one hand) number of its type in service of which most are at or beyond end of life. Those are being defunded. The programs that maintain the other two types will remain.
It's like the air force saying they're killing the F15C but keeping the F15D and F15E only with space and different acronyms.
Really speaks volumes about the community that news that's basically the space equivalent of the army or navy retiring a class of craft in favor of others that do that jobs is being portrayed like it's the end of the world. If the EOLing were an actual degradation in the organization's capability it would not have gone out of the mainstream so fast.
perihelions
No; the budget cuts the Earth Science division (encompassing MODIS et al.) in half[0]. You need only query at the budget request itself[1] to see it does so with wilful malice, under the rationale that climate science is "woke" and a "radical ideology"[1].
[0] https://www.space.com/science/climate-change/as-nasas-budget... (.... It called for a 24% overall cut to NASA's budget, including a 47% reduction in Earth science funding...")
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...
> "The recommended funding levels result from a rigorous, line-by-line review of FY 2025 spending, which was found to be laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life."
transcriptase
You didn’t address what they said though.
afh1
China.
Seems like a deliberate effort not to mention it in the title and abstract, despite the text clearly defining "East Asia" as "mainly China".
Also major contributor to plastic pollution in the ocean (from rivers) and #1 in CO2 emissions. All the while western economies hurt themselves and consumers in vain efforts instead of being serious about the issue and confronting its major contributor.
Al-Khwarizmi
It's a scientific paper, they need to be precise with language. Saying "East Asia" in the title and then specifying in the paper that most of the impact comes from China is precise. Saying "China" in the title would be misleading, saying "mostly China" would be incomplete and imprecise.
2OEH8eoCRo0
If they put China in the title it'll be flagged
swed420
China is currently the one setting a good example on the global stage:
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a...
Meanwhile, US leadership is on team "Drill baby, drill"
budududuroiu
Who is China producing FOR tho? Doesn’t seem like a fair assessment
__rito__
Per capita consumption is a much better metric for deciding who is more responsible for the pollution, which will point the finger right back to... the West [0].
India: 1.2 tonnes CO2/person/year.
China: 7.2 tonnes CO2/person/year.
Russia: 10.1 tonnes CO2/person/year.
Canada, Australia: 12.9 tonnes CO2/person/year.
USA: 16.5 tonnes CO2/person/year.
aesh2Xa1
I disagree entirely. The total emissions are absolutely important, and our planet doesn't care about whether one ton of emissions served 1 or 1,000 people.
A complete picture of blame absolutely should include per-capita, ultimate use (who buys the end product of China's emissions), and historical contributions. However, to ignore China's absolute , ongoing contribution as the world's largest emitter (by far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...) is clearly an error.
2023 totals:
China: 11.90 billion tons, trending up
USA: 4.91 billion tons, trending down
pasc1878
Pollution is not CO2
Your figures are for who produces CO2 and nothing to do with pollution
sanp
This is a case of China trying to reduce pollution. Reduce aerosol emissions. The impact of this is lower cooling (aerosol interaction results in atmospheric cooling)
Aunche
What exactly has the US done to hurt their economy? They have subsidized green energy, but China does that to a much greater extent.
Cordiali
The article is about reducing pollution, so in this context, they're doing a good thing.
It's a well known "dirty" secret that aerosols drive (short lived) cooling effects and that this effect is very significant [0]. In fact, the climate models used in the OP nature paper would not be useful if they didn't account for these aerosols in a meaningful way. Scientists measure aerosols using a mix of different tricks (optical density sensors - AERONET, satellites with hyperspectal sensors, local air pollution sensors, etc).
In my work in industrial air quality we occasionally joke that we are doing a good job if we exacerbate global warming.
0. https://skepticalscience.com/images/Radiative_Forcing_Summar...