Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
Nat Commun. 2018 Aug 17;9(1):3289. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-05838-6.
The distribution of anthropogenic aerosols' climate effects depends on the geographic distribution of the aerosols themselves. Yet many scientific and policy discussions ignore the role of emission location when evaluating aerosols' climate impacts. Here, we present new climate model results demonstrating divergent climate responses to a fixed amount and composition of aerosol-emulating China's present-day emissions-emitted from 8 key geopolitical regions. The aerosols' global-mean cooling effect is fourteen times greater when emitted from the highest impact emitting region (Western Europe) than from the lowest (India). Further, radiative forcing, a widely used climate response proxy, fails as an effective predictor of global-mean cooling for national-scale aerosol emissions in our simulations; global-mean forcing-to-cooling efficacy differs fivefold depending on emitting region. This suggests that climate accounting should differentiate between aerosols emitted from different countries and that aerosol emissions' evolving geographic distribution will impact the global-scale magnitude and spatial distribution of climate change.
人为气溶胶气候效应的分布取决于气溶胶本身的地理分布。然而，许多科学和政策讨论在评估气溶胶的气候影响时忽略了排放地点的作用。在这里，我们展示了新的气候模型结果，这些结果表明，对于模拟中国目前排放的气溶胶数量和成分相同的气溶胶，从 8 个关键地缘政治区域排放时会产生不同的气候响应。当气溶胶从影响最大的排放区（西欧）排放时，其全球平均冷却效应是从影响最小的排放区（印度）排放时的 14 倍。此外，辐射强迫是一种广泛使用的气候响应代理，在我们的模拟中，它不能有效地预测国家尺度气溶胶排放的全球平均冷却；全球平均强迫冷却效率因排放区而异，相差五倍。这表明，气候核算应该区分来自不同国家的气溶胶，而且气溶胶排放的不断变化的地理分布将影响气候变化的全球规模和空间分布。
