Causes of Regional Change—Aerosols

Abstract

This chapter starts by introducing the complex nature of atmospheric aerosols, their sources, formation and properties and describes how they interact with clouds. This is important background information for discussing how aerosols affect climate, both directly and indirectly by affecting the radiative properties of clouds. The complexity of the aerosol-cloud-climate interaction causes large uncertainty in the projections of future climate. Results from different modelling studies on the European region are presented, and these show that the large spatial and temporal variations in atmospheric aerosol concentrations and properties have large regional differences in their effect on climate. This chapter concludes with an example of a co-beneficial global air quality and climate change mitigation scenario.