Dramatic cuts in China’s air pollution drove surge in global warming
www.newscientist.com
The rate at which the planet is warming has sped up since 2010, and now researchers say that China's efforts to clean up air pollution are inadvertently responsible for the majority of this extra warming

For “normies” reading the headline this sounds like “China reducing air pollution is causing global warming”… But when you actually read the article, what you find, buried several paragraphs deep is:

It is important to note that China’s action hasn’t caused additional warming, Samset stresses. Rather, it has “unmasked” what was already there.

And:

Despite the impact on global temperatures, the action was worth taking to save lives […] research has suggested the measures have helped avoid 150,000 premature deaths per year.

So, actually, China did a very good thing. Why write such a negative headline then?

And why is it that in this entire article on the topic of climate change is there not a single mention of China’s colossal renewable energy efforts? No mention of the EV revolution that China is leading? No mention of the Great Green Wall? No mention of China’s breakthrough advances in nuclear energy? No mention of how China is the only major country on track to actually achieve its climate goals?

I’m not saying go on a huge tangent - by all means, stay on topic! - but the topic is climate change. It behooves you to at least mention some of the ways that China is actually combatting it.

I expect this sort of biased reporting and these sorts of language games from mainstream media, not from science publications. This is seriously disappointing…

China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment did not respond to a request for comment.

Yeah, cause at this point they can’t even be sure that you won’t twist their words to make China look bad!

And just to clarify, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the science in this article, my issue is with the wording, with how it’s presented!

  • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
    0·
    4 days ago

    Regarding the “Unmasking” what is already there point, this is addressed nicely by someone else. Does Lemmy let you forward/repost comments from other instances? Taken from @[email protected]

    Aerosols from China’s industrialization were blocking sunlight. When they reduced aerosol emissions, the blocking effect diminished and caused apparent warming, but this warming was already ‘baked in’, if you will, because the GHG’s keeping the heat in were already present. Something similar on a more localized level happened a few years ago when some international(?) regulation passed that reduced the aerosol emissions of cargo ships. These emissions had kept a large band of North America cooler than it would be naturally and the introduction of the regulations caused a “termination shock” that resulted in warmer weather across the affected area. This is also the premise to a number of geo-engineering proposals, with the idea being that you could seed the upper atmosphere with aerosols that would hang up there for a considerable length of time but would spread across the planet, reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface. This would certainly cool down the earth, but you also have the problem like with the shipping example, except on a planetary scale. As soon as you stop reapplying the aerosols, the planet will jump from its “engineered” temperature to its “actual” temperature extremely quickly.