New research shows plants can moderate climate warming.

Temperature of earth is increasing tremendously. Many reasons (more release of green house gases, cutting of trees, pollution and population) till date are known for global warming. Scientists are trying to overcome this problem. In recent study researchers found that, plants don’t just reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; they actually create clouds that cool the atmosphere as the temperature increases. 

Scent of refreshing breath of air in middle of a jungle is so pleasant that, it can’t be described. Researchers said that the scent is made up of gases. 

According to research from IIASA and the University of Helsinki; as temperatures warm, plants release gases that help to form clouds and cool the atmosphere. The new study is published in Nature Geoscience. There is a negative feedback loop in which, when temperatures rises there is an increase in concentrations of natural aerosols that have a cooling effect on the atmosphere. Scientists are already aware of how aerosols can have a cooling effect on the environment. They can directly reflect sunlight back into space, they can accumulate on other aerosol particles to make them bigger and better able to reflect sunlight back into space, and they can also act as 'seeds' for clouds to form. However, the actual effects of these biogenic aerosols weren’t well known. Plants release gases that, after atmospheric oxidation, tend to stick to aerosol particles, growing them into the larger-sized particles that reflect sunlight and also serve as the basis for cloud droplets. “Plants, by reacting to changes in temperature, also moderate these changes,” says IIASA and University of Helsinki researcher Pauli Paasonen, who led the study.

The researchers collected data at 11 different sites around the world. They measure the concentrations of aerosol particles in the atmosphere, concentrations of plant gases, the temperature, and reanalysis estimates for the height of the boundary layer, which turned out to be a key variable. The boundary layer refers to the layer of air closest to the Earth, in which aerosol mix. The height of that layer changes with weather. They found that plants are reacting to warmer temperatures by producing more of these aerosols, which create more clouds, and thus help to reduce the amount of overall heating. A researcher says that; this phenomenon was not discovered earlier because; these estimates for boundary layer height are very difficult to do. Only recently the reanalysis estimates been improved. The study also showed that the overall global effect of this is fairly small, only reducing warming by about 1 per cent, but it has a much bigger impact, up to 30% in rural areas, where these natural aerosols have high concentrations than man-made aerosols.  That means especially in places like Finland, Siberia, and Canada this feedback loop may reduce warming substantially.

The study shows that these aerosols from plants can help to cool the planet. The overall effect that plants have on the climate isn't that simple. Plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and release water from its tiny pore known as stomata. This evaporation cools the local environment too, but when there is an increase in level of carbon dioxide in environment, leaf pores open very little and thus less water is evaporated into the local air. This may account for the low overall global effect found by this study. 

The true importance of this new work is that it adds to our understanding of how everything in the climate fits together. Paasonen says, “Aerosol effects on climate are one of the main uncertainties in climate models. Understanding this mechanism could help us reduce those uncertainties and make the models better.”