Dust tends to get a bad rap: It’s been known to turn skies orange in Europe, and routinely chokes millions with air pollution. But all that dust has an unexpected positive impact, too: It is helping keep the planet just a little bit cooler.
Global temperatures are currently around 2.2 F (1.2 C) higher than 1850 levels, and heading toward 2.7 F of warming, which scientists consider catastrophic. But that 2.2 F increase would be roughly 0.1 F higher were it not for an increase in global atmospheric dust, according to a peer-reviewed study published this week in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment.
"The increase in dust has likely masked some of the power of greenhouse gases to warm the planet,” says Jasper Kok, co-author of the study and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "In the future, when we’re not likely to see similar increases in dust — and might even see a decrease — greenhouse gases might warm the planet even more than climate models already predict.”