There are a number of fast, win-win-win paths for making real dents to turn the tide on Global Warming’s rising tide. A quick win-win-win, for example, would be ‘white-roofing’ (increasing the albedo) as much of the urban (man-made) landscape as possible. This can save energy, reduce the urban heat island impact, and cut into global temperature increases. Related, in a way, to that Another quick win-win-win is starting to get more attention: the challenge of Black Carbon.
Think that snow bank next to the highway in the middle of winter. All that “black snow”, blackened by particulates from automobile (mainly diesel) emissions. When the sun comes out, which snow melts more quickly: that blackened snowbank or the pristine snow in your backyard?
Think through the implications of fireplaces and cookstoves, kerosene lamps and diesel trucking globally and you might start to think of the scale of the problem. In fact, after CO2 emissions, black soot might just be the second most serious human contributor to global warming.
The good news? This is something that we can do something to change … quickly. And, that quick change can help buy the time for shifts that will massively reduce humanity’s CO2 emissions (getting off coal, learning how to sequester on large scale via (for example) bio-char, deploying renewable energy, shifting off oil for transportation). We can stop the soot, in the developed and developing countries.
If we took seriously our need to Stop the Soot, the impact could be significant. One analysis concludes that “reducing fossil fuel and biofuel soot particles would eliminate about 40% of the net observed global warming”