From: Canberra Times
Published January 5, 2009 08:40 AM
Soot tops NASA's climate blacklist
Governments could slow global warming dramatically, and buy time to avert
disastrous climate change, by slashing emissions of one of humanity's most
familiar pollutants soot according to NASA scientists.
A study by the space agency shows that cutting down on the pollutant can
have an immediate cooling effect and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths
from air pollution at the same time.
At the beginning of the make-or-break year in international attempts to
negotiate a treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, the soot removal proposal
offers hope of a rapid new way of tackling global warming.
Governments have long experience in acting against soot.
Cutting its emissions has a virtually instantaneous effect, because it
rapidly falls out of the atmosphere, unlike carbon dioxide which remains
there for over 100 years. And because soot is one of the worst killers among
all pollutants, radical reductions save lives and so should command popular
and political support.
The study from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and published in
the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics concludes that tackling the
pollution provides ''substantial benefits for air quality while
simultaneously contributing to climate change mitigation'' and ''may present
a unique opportunity to engage parties and nations not yet fully committed
to climate change mitigation for its own sake''.
Black carbon, the component of soot that gives it its colour, is thought to
be the second-largest cause of global warming after carbon dioxide. Formed
through incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, wood and vegetation, it
delivers a double whammy.
While in the air, it is spread around the globe by the wind, and helps to
heat the atmosphere by absorbing and releasing solar radiation. And when it
falls, it darkens snow and ice, at the poles or high in mountains, reducing
its ability to reflect sunlight.
As a result, it melts more quickly, and exposes more dark land or water
which absorbs even more energy, and so increases warming.
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