Jasper F Kok , Trude Storelvmo, Vlassis Karydis, Adeyemi A Adebiyi , Natalie M. Mahowald, Amato Tomas Evan , Cenlin He, Danny Leung

Mineral dust aerosols impact Earth’s energy budget through interactions with radiation, clouds, atmospheric chemistry, the cryosphere and biogeochemistry. In this review, we summarize these interactions and assess the resulting impacts of dust, and of changes in dust, on global climate and climate change. We find that the total effect of these interactions on Earth’s global energy budget—the dust effective radiative effect—is -0.2 ± 0.5 Wm-2 (90% confidence interval). Compared to pre-industrial times, global dust mass loading is 55 ± 30% higher in the modern climate, leading to changes in the Earth’s energy budget. Indeed, this increase in dust has produced a global mean effective radiative forcing of -0.07 ± 0.18 Wm-2. Current climate models and climate assessments do not represent the historical increase in dust and thus omit the resulting radiative forcing, biasing climate change projections and assessments of climate sensitivity. Climate model simulations of future changes in dust diverge widely and are very uncertain. Further work is thus needed to constrain the radiative effects of dust on climate and to improve the representation of dust in climate models.