This new study led by Yuan Wang and published in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) presents a global multiscale perspective of the climatic effects of pollution outflows from Asia.

Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "Summary for Policymakers" make for alarming reading about the global warming phenomenon. How bad climate impacts will be beyond the mid-century depends crucially on the world urgently shifting to a development trajectory that is clean, sustainable, and equitable, a notion of equity that includes space for the poor, for future generations and other species.

The effect of anthropogenic aerosols on cloud droplet concentrations and radiative properties is the source of one of the largest uncertainties in the radiative forcing of climate over the industrial period. This uncertainty affects our ability to estimate how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gas emissions. Here we perform a sensitivity analysis on a global model to quantify the uncertainty in cloud radiative forcing over the industrial period caused by uncertainties in aerosol emissions and processes.