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The Next Front on

Climate Change
How to Avoid a Dimmer, Drier World
Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Jessica Seddon,
and David G. Victor

A
fter dithering for decades, governments finally seem to be pay-
ing serious attention to the problem of global climate change.
Late last year, at the Paris climate conference, they adopted a
major new agreement to limit global warming, beginning a process to
strengthen commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over time.
For many observers, the promises of the Paris conference offer too little,
too late, because emissions are high and still rising and because there will
be major disruptions to the climate even if countries meet their emissions-
reduction pledges. Nevertheless, it had been 18 years since the world’s
governments left a major climate summit with an agreement in hand, so
just getting to yes in Paris has offered climate diplomacy fresh credibility.
Until now, governments have focused on limiting the greenhouse
gases that cause global warming and its attendant hazards, such as rising
sea levels and stronger storms. But there is more to climate change than
higher temperatures. Many of the activities that cause greenhouse gas
emissions—burning coal for power, diesel for transport, and wood for
cooking, for example—also yield ultra-small particles known as aerosols,

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and

Climate Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California,
San Diego.
JESSICA SEDDON is Founder and Managing Director of Okapi Research and Advisory
and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Technology and Policy at the Indian Institute of
Technology Madras.
DAVID G. VICTOR is a Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the
University of California, San Diego, and the author of Global Warming Gridlock: Creating
More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet.

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Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Jessica Seddon, and David G. Victor

which blanket vast areas in a haze that blocks and scatters sunlight. By
reducing the solar energy that reaches the earth’s surface, aerosols
reduce evaporation and slow the water cycle that governs where, when,
and how much rain falls.
For years, climate scientists have believed that a warmer world would
be wetter, because higher temperatures hasten evaporation and increase
rainfall. But even when these higher temperatures are accounted for, a
world dimmed by aerosols will in fact be drier in many places—including
some areas, such as the Sahel and other regions in sub-Saharan Africa,
that have long suffered from drought because they rely on rainfall to
sustain subsistence agriculture. According to many of the most reliable
models, such as those produced by the National Center for Atmospheric
Research and Princeton University’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
Laboratory, China, North America, and South Asia are also in danger
of more frequent and severe droughts owing to aerosols. Indeed, for
much of the world, aerosol-induced dimming and drying are among the
most immediate dangers posed by pollution.
The good news is that swift action on aerosols is possible, with huge
potential benefits. Many of the tools needed to make rapid cuts to aero-
sol emissions are already available, and policymakers around the world—
notably in Europe and the United States, and also in East Asia—have
shown how to use them. Since aerosols have a short atmospheric life
span, the climatic benefits of emissions cuts would appear quickly, within
only a couple of decades. What is more, speedy action on aerosols would
bring huge global health benefits: roughly seven million people die each
year from causes related to particulate pollution, and cutting down on
aerosols would dramatically reduce the death toll. In light of these
potential benefits, governments around the world should ensure that
aerosols play a central role in their environmental policies by encouraging
the development and deployment of cleaner technologies for power gen-
eration, transportation, and household cooking, heating, and lighting.
Measures to limit aerosol pollution tend to receive less public attention
than the broader campaign against greenhouse gases, but they, too, should
be an essential component of global action against climate change.

DIMMER AND DRIER

Climate scientists have known about the dimming effect of aerosols
since at least the 1970s, but most research has focused on their effects
on temperature. Darker aerosols, such as diesel soot and other kinds

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Throwing shade: a farmer burns paddy husks in Chandigarh, India, October 2003
of black carbon, absorb sunlight and accelerate warming. But lighter
aerosols, such as the sulfates and nitrates formed from coal, gasoline,
and other fuel emissions, cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back
into space. That explains, in part, why the world hasn’t seen more of a
temperature increase from the greenhouse gases already present in
the atmosphere. (This masking effect is powerful enough that some
advocates of geoengineering have proposed injecting more reflective
aerosol particles into the atmosphere in order to cool the earth.)
Focusing on how aerosols affect temperature, however, has distracted
policymakers from the important and distinct effects that aerosols
have on the water cycle. These effects are most pronounced in the
Northern Hemisphere, which is the source of most of the world’s
aerosols and thus suffers the most dimming from these pollutants.
But because air currents tend to carry pollution, water droplets, and
water vapor far from their origins, aerosols produced in one region
can also affect rainfall far afield.
REUTE RS / KAMAL KISHO RE

Since the 1880s, when reliable record keeping began, global tempera-
tures have increased by about 0.9 degrees Celsius. And as the planet
has warmed, rainfall at latitudes above 45 degrees has generally
increased. But twice since the mid-twentieth century, surges in aerosol
emissions have significantly disrupted this pattern, reducing rainfall
in a number of regions.

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The first disruption was the result of the sulfur dioxide emissions
produced by the massive combustion of coal and other fuels across
Europe and North America in the mid-twentieth century, driven by
rapid industrial growth after World War II. From the 1950s to the late
1980s, global emissions of sulfur dioxide
In 2010, China and India (which in the atmosphere becomes
sulfate, a reflective aerosol) nearly dou-
received between ten and bled, reducing the amount of sunlight
15 percent less sunlight than reaching the earth’s surface by about
they did in 1970. two percent, on average. As a direct
result of this dimming, average rainfall
in the Northern Hemisphere declined by
between three and four percent over the same period. Indeed, there is
strong evidence that sulfur dioxide emissions in the United States and
western Europe contributed to the Sahelian megadroughts that began
in the 1960s and continued through the 1990s, a period during which
precipitation in the Sahel and some other parts of sub-Saharan Africa
fell by between 25 and 50 percent relative to twentieth-century averages.
Thanks to stringent air pollution laws introduced in the 1970s and
strengthened steadily in the following years, the blanket of aerosols
over Europe and North America has thinned since the 1980s. From 1980
to 2000, the average amount of sunlight that reached the earth’s surface
in these regions increased by about four percent—enough to lift average
annual precipitation on land areas in the Northern Hemisphere by a
similar magnitude.
A second surge in aerosols is now playing out in East Asia and
South Asia. These regions, which have rapidly industrialized over the
past four decades, have seen a two- to fourfold increase in sulfur dioxide
and black carbon emissions since the 1970s. As a result, in 2010, China
and India received somewhere between ten and 15 percent less sunlight
than they did in 1970. As the wind has carried sulfates and black carbon
over thousands of miles, the dimming effect has extended to the atmos­
phere over the Indian Ocean, reducing the evaporation of seawater and
thus weakening the monsoons that bring much-needed water to East
Asia and South Asia every year. From 1950 to 2002, the most recent pe-
riod for which estimates are available, there was a seven percent decrease
in average annual rainfall over the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the fertile belt
of land crossing eastern Pakistan, northern India, and Bangladesh that
is home to more than one billion people, many of them dependent on

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rain-fed agriculture. Over the same period, summer monsoon rainfall

in parts of northern China decreased by more than ten percent.
The desiccation of China’s north and the region’s recent drought, in
2010 and 2011, have affected not only agriculture but also other water-
dependent activities, such as hydroelectric power generation. The
consequences have worried Chinese authorities to such a degree that
they are building canals and pipelines that will eventually divert some
1.6 trillion cubic feet of water to the region each year. Some of China’s
repressive policies toward water-rich Tibet are motivated by the
Chinese government’s desire to maintain control over the nation’s
fragile water supplies and their hydropower potential.
China has the capacity and the financial means to protect itself from
erratic precipitation by investing in water infrastructure. So do other
relatively wealthy countries, which can also respond to droughts by
importing more water-intensive products and refocusing domestic eco-
nomic activity on crops and industries that are less dependent on
precipitation. Strategies such as these, along with aggressive measures
to improve water-use efficiency, have allowed California, for example, to
grow its economy even as it suffers its worst drought in modern history.
But things are different in much of the developing world, where
water infrastructure and state capacity are more limited and a higher
proportion of the population depends on locally sourced food pro-
duced on rain-fed land. In South Asia, for example, 60 percent of the
agricultural land is rain-fed. That proportion reaches 90 percent in
Latin America and 95 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries
in these regions can’t easily turn to infrastructure and trade to solve
their food production problems because of limited budgets and
because they lack the capacity to rapidly shift production to new crops
and industries. And many of these countries are particularly dependent
on agriculture: nearly half of all employment in India is in farming,
and even in richer Brazil, agricultural laborers account for 15 percent
of the work force. All told, more than 400 million farmers, along with
their dependents, count on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods.
Countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, which
rely on hydropower for between 60 and 80 percent of their electricity
generation, face additional risks from the dimming.
Forty percent of the world’s population is already expected to live
under severe water stress by 2050. That proportion will likely increase
as aerosol-induced dimming further disrupts the water cycle. And as

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governments around the world are beginning to realize, water scarcity

is not only an economic and humanitarian challenge but also a geopo-
litical one: as supplies of fresh water dwindle, states will begin to
jockey for access to them, as they already have, for example, in north-
eastern Africa, where Egypt has squabbled with Ethiopia over its
construction of a massive hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile.

CLEANING THE AIR

Although the costs of aerosol-induced dimming are high, the policies
needed to reduce the pollution that causes it are relatively clear. Cutting
aerosols will require action in three main sectors: electric power gen-
eration, transportation, and household energy services for the poor.
With regard to electric power generation, most of the concern
about aerosols centers on burning coal, which is responsible for more
than 70 percent of the world’s sulfur dioxide emissions. Given its
environmental and health impacts, conventional coal power is in-
creasingly hard to justify. So if coal is to remain part of the global
energy mix in the coming decades, coal-fired power plants will need
to become more efficient and include equipment to remove sulfur
dioxide and other pollutants from their emissions. As the technology
to do so improves, new coal plants will also need to capture and store
carbon dioxide emissions—an expensive prospect. At the same time,
governments and firms will have to invest more in other energy
sources. Natural gas, which emits much lower levels of most pollutants
(including aerosols) than coal does, is one option, and in North
America, the shale boom has dramatically cut the cost of supplying
it. Making gas friendlier for the climate and the water cycle will
require more work to plug leaks in the natural gas supply and trans-
mission system (since those leaks release methane, a potent green-
house gas), and it will require greater frugality in the use of water to
drill and frack shale gas wells. Of course, there are also many options
beyond natural gas, such as nuclear, solar, and wind power.
Regulators in California and the European Union, meanwhile, have
already pioneered policies that cut aerosol emissions from transporta-
tion. They have mandated cleaner fuels and combustion technologies,
such as low-sulfur diesel and exhaust systems equipped with efficient
particulate filters and catalytic converters. Officials elsewhere should
follow their lead, and they should pair these regulations with rigorous
compliance regimes, which are currently lacking in many countries.

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Eliminating combustion altogether, perhaps through electric vehicles,

could be a next step. In the meantime, subsidy reforms can help limit
the use of some of the dirtiest fuels. Changes to India’s fuel-pricing
regime, for example, have encouraged car buyers there to shift from
diesel to gasoline engines, which emit far fewer aerosols. Transition-
ing large commercial and public-transportation vehicles to natural
gas could also help.
Cutting aerosol emissions produced by burning dirty fuels in the
world’s poorest households is another way to reduce global dimming.
Just over one billion people, most of them in the developing world,
rely on kerosene to light their homes, and three billion use solid fuels,
such as crop residue and dung, for cooking and heating. Burning these
fuels with traditional technologies generates aerosols that damage
lungs along with the climate: the particulates emitted by biomass-
based cooking and heating are responsible for about a third of the
dimming in South Asia. Cleaner technologies for cooking, heating,
and lighting, such as energy-efficient cookstoves and solar lanterns,
are readily available, and making them universally accessible would
offer huge health and environmental benefits to the world’s poor. En-
suring such access by 2030 would cost up to $50 billion per year—a
high price, but one that should be manageable if it is shared among a
number of states, including rich countries, which would themselves
benefit from lower aerosol emissions in the developing world.
Since aerosols have a short atmospheric life span, pursuing policies
such as these could significantly reduce global dimming within ten
or 20 years. That would dramatically limit the risk of droughts and
irregular monsoons. It would also heat up the planet by reducing the
atmosphere’s reflective aerosol “mask,” however, so any effort to reduce
global dimming must be accompanied by significant cuts to carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

ACT FAST
As governments build on what they achieved at the Paris climate confer-
ence, they must set politically feasible targets for future action. Focusing
on aerosols could help. Whereas greenhouse gas emissions will bring
about relatively distant and diffuse dangers, aerosols cause immediate
and localized harm. That should raise the incentives for governments to
act against them, and it should raise the willingness of their constituen-
cies to accept such action. Indeed, in the case of aerosol reductions, the

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Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Jessica Seddon, and David G. Victor

parochial interests that have so often stymied broader climate diplo-

macy need not hinder progress. That is why some countries that have
long been reluctant to do much about global pollution—from China and
India to Brazil and the United States—have pursued bolder policies
when it comes to pollutants that have localized effects, such as aerosols.
As states sharpen their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
in the coming years, they should also make distinct pledges to cut
aerosols. (So far, few states have done so: of the 186 emissions-reduction
pledges submitted before the Paris climate conference, only a handful,
including Chile’s and Mexico’s, mentioned aerosols.) And they should
broadcast the promise of these reductions to build public support for
the policies needed to achieve them. As such policies take hold, they
will generate rapid, tangible benefits, encouraging even more progress
on the changing climate’s other challenges.
Unfortunately, even the most effective climate diplomacy will leave
the world’s poorest states exposed to the higher temperatures, rising
sea levels, and disruptions in rainfall caused by industrial pollution. As
a result, governments will have to work to adapt. Today, the countries
with the highest emissions—among them, China, Japan, the United
States, and the members of the European Union—are on track to raise
around $100 billion per year by 2020, much of which will be used to
help vulnerable states adjust to the dangers of a changing climate.
As for how to spend these funds, a variety of efforts will be needed,
and states should be willing to experiment to determine which programs
work best, sharing the know-how they gain with one another. As
they do so, they should invest in infrastructure and technologies that
address the effects of both warming and dimming, such as irrigation
methods that can better protect farmers from erratic rainfall and
new kinds of drought-resistant crops. Indeed, innovation in water-
conservation technologies remains massively underfunded, despite
their huge promise. Finally, governments should remove protectionist
policies in their countries’ agricultural sectors, which limit the ability
of consumers to access foreign sources of food when erratic rainfall
and higher temperatures harm local production.
The dimming caused by aerosols has already made the world’s water
supplies less secure. It is both economically and technologically feasi-
ble to reverse this process. Doing so will require a concerted global
effort, but failing to do so will compound the risks of drought and
poverty already in store as a result of the world’s changing climate.∂

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 REVIEWS & RESPONSES
There is plenty to learn from
the Romans—if we have
the courage to entertain the
possibility.
—Michael Fontaine

What Rome Can Teach Us Today A Feminist Foreign Policy

Michael Fontaine 144 Suzanne Nossel 162
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Hunger Games Recent Books 168

Douglas Gollin 150
Letters to the Editor 192
Diplomacy Disrupted
Cameron Munter 156