16.6.3 Colored airborne plastics and radiative forcing

16.6.3 Colored airborne plastics and radiative forcing

The airborne-plastics package uses source tables and maps from a study of microplastic and nanoplastic radiative forcing [ Liu et al. , 2026 ] . The registered edit holds the spatial particle distribution fixed while replacing colored-particle optical forcing by the white/pristine value. The area-weighted mean changes from \(0.03914\) to \(0.00368\, \mathrm{W\, m^{-2}}\), suppressing \(90.6\% \) of the baseline source-table forcing.

This is a clean factorized mechanism replacement: burden is fixed while optical properties change. It is not a complete atmospheric counterfactual. The adapter does not rerun FLEXPART or SBDART and does not model feedback from an actual pollution intervention.

Experiment: Prometheus substrate: airborne plastics. Executable edit: replace colored-particle optics by white/pristine optics while holding spatial burden fixed.
Result: area-weighted forcing falls from 0.03914 to \(0.00368\, \mathrm{W\, m^{-2}}\), a 90.6% suppression.
Admitted: the factorized source-table counterfactual.
Not admitted: a complete atmospheric or empirical intervention.