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Heat traps

black carbon aerosol pollution, produced by humans, can impact global climate as well as seasonal cycles of rainfall shows new research based upon satellite data and a multi-national field experiment.

Aerosols that contain black carbon both absorb and reflect incoming sunlight, therefore they can exert a regional cooling influence on Earth's surface that is about three times greater than the warming effect of greenhouse gases. But even as these aerosols reduce by as much as 10 per cent the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, they increase the solar energy absorbed in the atmosphere by 50 per cent

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