Rajan K Chakrabarty

Correction to: Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02620-1, published online 4 May 2026. In the version of this article initially published, there was a citation error in the legend to Fig. 2b, which has now been amended to cite refs. 2,12,13,20–23,35–43; a citation error in the Methods “Calculation of optical properties of MNPs” section, where in the sentence “We calculated the dielectric function from S(E) using Kramers–Kronig (KK) analysis with HyperSpy49,” ref.

Abstract Wildfires emit large quantities of brown carbon, a class of light-absorbing organic aerosols whose climate effects remain poorly constrained. Brown carbon displays a broad spectrum of absorptivity, ranging from weakly absorbing chromophores in the near-ultraviolet to strongly absorbing species that extend into the visible spectrum—yet its optical properties, global distribution and radiative influence remain largely uncertain.

Abstract Microplastic and nanoplastic particles (MNPs) are pervasive in the atmosphere, yet their direct radiative forcing (DRF) remains poorly constrained. Using a radiative transfer model combined with experimentally derived optical properties and simulated atmospheric distributions, we show that coloured MNPs exhibit strong light absorption, with a mean refractive index of 1.49–0.22i at 550 nm and absorption coefficients 74.8 times higher than those of pristine particles.