Ted Audio Collective. Welcome back to Ted Health. I'm your host Dr. Shoshona Ungerlighter.

What if I told you that a gray stormy sky could hold the key to tackling one of the biggest challenges of our time, climate change.

In an intriguing twist, it turns out that our global efforts to clear the air of aerosols

might be warming the planet even faster.

Enter the fascinating world of cloud brightening where tiny sea salt particles could be

superheroes in disguise.

Join atmospheric scientist Sarah J. Doherty as she

unveil a bold experiment that could cool our planet using one of nature's most common yet overlooked

resources, the clouds.

So I'm a climate scientist and based on that I bet you think I'm here to tell you about all the ways that we're making the climate warmer.

But I'm not actually going to do that today because I think you already know that part of the story. I want to tell you instead a story about unintended consequences.

For many of us, it's really easy to forget that in addition to emitting a lot of

greenhouse gases, humans have been adding a lot of particulate pollution to the

atmosphere. These small particles, which we scientists call aerosols, are responsible for the death of

between 4 and 10 million people a year around the globe.

For much of the world, this remains a major public health crisis and because of that

there are significant efforts underway to clean up the source of these emissions

which is fantastic but here's the thing. The unintended

consequence of doing that is that we might actually be accelerating climate

warming.

And that's because most of these aerosols actually cool climate.

I spent my career as a climate scientist studying how aerosols in the atmosphere around the globe absorbed sunlight in the atmosphere and increase the reflection of sunlight

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