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Friday, August 20, 2010

Suiting Up to Up-Root Soot

This is obviously not adequate in itself, it is obviously not a quick-fix, it is obviously not a substitute for more difficult, long-term, wide-ranging efforts to regulate carbon emissions and legislate renewable building standards and bootstrap renewable energy economy alternatives to petrochemical modernity. But I think this proposal may represent one among many actually-possible interventions legible within the existing institutional terms of accountable democratic governance that seem to be discounted as impossible by "geo-engineering" enthusiasts deranged on the one hand by the terror discourse of "the ticking time bomb" and on the other hand by the power-mad profit-mad hyberbolic science-fictional wish-fulfillment fantasizing of futurological discourse.

WIRED:
A massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most of the last century’s temperature change. Compared to the larger, longer term task of getting greenhouse-gas pollution under control, limiting soot wouldn’t be hard. Unlike new energy technology and profound changes in lifestyle, the tools -- exhaust filters, clean-burning stoves -- already exist…

"It will take some decades to phase down fossil-fuel emissions, so reducing dirty aerosols [soot] while we are doing that may help retain Arctic sea ice,” said NASA climatologist James Hansen, one of the first researchers to study soot dynamics. But he emphasized that soot control is only a stopgap measure. “We should reduce soot for several reasons, especially its health effects, but it is only a modest help in controlling global warming,” he said.

Nevertheless, soot could ease the delay between controlling greenhouse gas emissions and cooling. It might also help “avoid tipping points -- nonlinear, abrupt and potentially irreversible climate change, especially in the Arctic,” said Erika Rosenthal, a climate policy expert at the progressive nonprofit Earthjustice…

[C]limate policymakers have paid little attention to soot. Compared to well-studied greenhouse gases, its climate role is new and unfamiliar. “There are international efforts to limit greenhouse gases, but they completely ignore soot as something to control from a climate perspective,” said [Stanford University climate scientist Mark] Jacobson.

The draft international climate treaty negotiated last year in Copenhagen doesn’t contain soot-specific provisions, but the United Nations Environmental Program is meeting in February to discuss policy options on soot. A relatively little-known U.N. effort called the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution has also established a black-carbon working group.

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