Black Carbon Showdown!

This is something that we can treat right away. Black carbon is a huge contributor to global warming, and the increase of green house gases. Black carbon is formed during the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, biofuels or biomass, which primarily occurs because of forest deforestation and savanna clearing, diesel engine emissions, biofuel and coal burning, and power generation from small boilers. Just last year it was discovered that black carbon had a stronger global warming effect than any greenhouse gas besides carbon dioxide.

Though unlike carbon dioxide, which can linger in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, black carbon has a much shorter lifespan, which makes cutting its emissions the most efficient and fastest way of preventing Arctic warming that is known. And the good news is that technology already exists for drastically reducing black carbon emissions throughout the world.

Black carbon is particularly instrumental in Arctic and glacial warming because its particles, after already warming the atmosphere, eventually fall back to the Earth and darken the usually reflective snow and ice. Thus, instead of having a positive cooling effect, those white, reflective surfaces end up absorbing sunlight, which accelerates melt and runoff. In the Himalayas, for instance, the overall warming effect of black carbon soot is at least equal to that of carbon dioxide.