Industrial pollution coming from Asia is having a wider effect on global weather and climate than previously realised, research suggests. The ‘Asian haze’ of soot is boosting storms in the Pacific, scientists find. It is also enhancing the growth of large clouds, which play a key role in regulating climate globally. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers say impacts may be felt as far away as the Arctic. ‘It’s a complex picture,’ observed study leader Renyi Zhang from Texas A&M University in College Station, US. ‘But the bottom line is that the aerosols actually enhance convection and increase precipitation over a large domain,’ he told the BBC News website Hot water While clean air legislation has reduced production of industrial aerosols – fine particles of dust, soot and sulphur – in Europe and North America, the opposite trend is seen in Asia. Here, rapid industrialisation has led to the formation of a pollution haze which is especially marked in winter as coal burning increases. Sulphur emissions have increased by more than one-third over the last decade. These aerosols drive cloud formation, as […]