How big a deal is reducing black soot?
There’s been a small tidal wave of news items lately (e.g. Study finds black carbon implicated in global warming and Best hope for saving Arctic sea ice is cutting soot emissions, says Stanford researcher) about two papers addressing the possibility of reducing black soot emissions from various forms of combustion as a relatively quick and easy way to lesson climate change. The abstract of the Nature Geosciences paper, Warming influenced by the ratio of black carbon to sulphate and the black-carbon source: Black carbon is generated by fossil-fuel combustion and biomass burning. Black-carbon aerosols absorb solar radiation, and are probably a major source of global warming. However, the extent of black-carbon-induced warming is dependent on the concentration of sulphate and organic aerosols—which reflect solar radiation and cool the surface—and the origin of the black carbon. Here we examined the impact of black-carbon-to-sulphate ratios on net warming in China, using surface and aircra
