Air quality research: perspective from climate change modelling research

A major component of climate change is a manifestation of changes in air quality. This paper explores the question of air quality from the climate change modelling perspective. It reviews recent research advances on the cause-effect relationships between atmospheric air composition and climate change, primarily based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of climate change over the past decade. There is a growing degree of confidence that the warming world over the past century was caused by human-related changes in the composition of air. Reliability of projections of future climate change is highly dependent on future emission scenarios that have been identified that in turn depend on a multitude of complicated interacting social-economic factors. Anticipated improvements in the performance of climate models is a major source of optimism for better climate projections in the future, but the real benefits of its contribution will be closely coupled with other sources of uncertainty, and in particular emission projections. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.