Pollution Cleanup May Speed Global Warming

European researchers say cleaning up smokestack pollutants may accelerate global warming.

Researchers, led by Meinrat Andreae of Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, said pollution control efforts remove tiny particles in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight back into space.

The team, reporting in the journal Nature, said that could lead to a global temperature increase even greater than the 10 degrees forecast by 2100 in United Nations-sponsored research.

Researchers said as particle pollutants have less impact on the environment, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide will have even more.

Scientists must pay more attention to this issue as they do more complex modeling, and the public needs to be aware of the implications, Andreae told the Christian Science Monitor.