Science / Medicine : Pollutant May Offset Warming
<i> From staff and wire reports</i>
An industrial pollutant responsible for acid rain may be reducing Earth’s warming from the “greenhouse effect,” especially in the Northern Hemisphere.
In research published last week in the journal Nature, a British climate expert said his calculations show the effects of man-made sulfur dioxide are large enough that they “may have offset the temperature changes that have resulted from the greenhouse effect.”
In his study, T. M. Wigley of England’s East Anglia University created a computer model and determined that the pollutant’s cloud-forming potential may be capable of reducing the warming impact of other man-made gases.
