The largest elephant in the room: aerosol masking

Abstract

The aerosol masking effect, or global dimming, is a well-documented instance of our ongoing climate predicament: Efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas production by curbing industrial activity or transitioning to clean sources such as solar or nuclear inevitably and inadvertently accelerate planetary warming. This undesired outcome results from aerosols that result from industrial activity. This article describes some climate mitigation strategies destined to fail because they do not account for the aerosol masking effect. Moreover, many political and ethical initiatives emphasize the business as usual framework, thus worsening the conundrum. We suggest instead a set of ethical and policy initiatives to address the challenge of aerosol masking, and we describe how our contemporary predicament can be ameliorated in the face of these significant and often-overlooked challenges.