地球大气尘埃减少，利弊并存

LEVELS of dust in the atmosphere have dropped significantly over the past two decades. This is good news for our lungs, but could contribute to increased global warming. To get an accurate picture of dust across the planet, Ashok Gupta at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues collated information from four satellites collected between 2003 and 2023, and three atmospheric aerosol databases, before checking the information against ground-based stations. The sources agreed that it has become less dusty, with the team’s estimates suggesting dust had declined by about 10 per cent globally over this period. …