The global warming community has been so obsessed with limiting CO2 emissions from sources in western nations that the explosive expansion of dirty burning coal in China and India has been largely ignored. What will they do now with yet another in your face report? This time about the soot.
Not only are these coal plants pumping out massive amounts of CO2, but soot and a toxic soup of other hazardous emissions spew from these plants at rates that make the CO2 contribution from western nations look downright clean in comparison.
My fear is we will all be suffering the effects of toxic poisoning long before the CO2 causes any oceans to rise by dangerous levels.
I will fire up the old responses for you to kick things off right.
CO2 is far more dangerous than any other pollutant and the US is the worst offeneder.
These are lies. China is the worlds leader in green technology.
China is a poor undeveloped nation that cannot be held responsible for trying to survive the American economic and war machine onslaught. Leave them alone.
The US and its massive consumerism will destroy the world with global warming. The wealthy US should pay for cleaning the world.
Please continue from there.
The result of a 4-year, 232-page climate assessment is in. Dirty burning, it turns out, is the second most important man-made contributor to global warming, behind carbon dioxide.
In fact, soot appears to be warming the world twice as much as previously thought. And since these fine particles cause heart and respiratory problems, the same soot-reducing actions would also improve the health of billions of people.
Neither new observations nor new climate model runs were made for the study, ScienceNOW reports. Instead, thirty-one scientists from nine countries looked at data from ground-based sensors, satellite observations, and global emissions inventories.
- Atmospheric soot particles 100 nanometers or so in diameter are absorbing enough solar energy to warm the atmosphere with about 1.1 Watts per square meter.
- That’s double most previous estimates of the warming that occurs when fine carbon particles absorb radiation from the sun.
- Black carbon’s impact on climate is about two-thirds that of the principle greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. Methane from landfills and other sources comes in third.
- Although carbon dioxide dominates the long-term effect, Nature News explains, reducing black carbon gives you immediate cooling.
Major sources of soot (pictured below) are diesel emissions and agricultural fires in industrialized countries, and biomass burning and wood-fired stoves for cooking and heat in developing countries. The study points to two leading targets for policymakers: diesel engines and wood and coal burning in small industries and homes.
“If we did everything we could to reduce these emissions,” says study coauthor Piers Forster of the University of Leeds in a statement, “we could buy ourselves up to half a degree (Celsius) less warming — or a couple of decades of respite.”
Reducing emissions, he adds, “is a no brainer, as there are tandem health and climate benefits.”
The report was published online by the Journal of Geophysical Research today.
[Via ScienceNOW, Nature News, Washington Post]
Image: Above, diesel smoke from EPA via Wikimedia. Below, black carbon processes and sources from Bond et al., 2013
