ON THE NO. 2 CONTRIBUTOR TO GLOBAL WARMING

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

The New York Times has a piece reminding us that developing nations also have significant contributions to make when it comes to dealing with global climate change.  It's not just on the shoulders of developed nations. 

The piece takes us thousands of miles away to India, visiting a village with barely any electricity or emission spewing automobiles:

"As women in ragged saris of a thousand hues bake bread and stew lentils in the early evening over fires fueled by twigs and dung, children cough from the dense smoke that fills their homes. Black grime coats the undersides of thatched roofs. At dawn, a brown cloud stretches over the landscape like a diaphanous dirty blanket.

In Kohlua, in central India, with no cars and little electricity, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, are near zero. But soot — also known as black carbon — from tens of thousands of villages like this one in developing countries is emerging as a major and previously unappreciated source of global climate change.

While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming — especially in the short term, climate experts say. Replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

In fact, reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies — often called “low hanging fruit” — that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming."

What's surprising about all this is the next bit:

"But the awareness of black carbon’s role in climate change has come so recently that it was not even mentioned as a warming agent in the 2007 summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that pronounced the evidence for global warming to be “unequivocal.” Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of environmental engineering at Stanford, said that the fact that black carbon was not included in international climate efforts was “bizarre,” but “partly reflects how new the idea is.” The United Nations is trying to figure out how to include black carbon in climate change programs, as is the federal government."

The piece is worth reading in it's entirety, if only to understand better what the whole global village can and must do to deal with this problem together.

Comments

[Kasi]

These guys are best comedians of next century... what do they know about globe which is billions of years of history and these guys are talking about data with 60-years...

Hope this does not finally boil down to CO2 exhaled by individuals...

The calculation can be as funny as this....
people who jog (to make it more funny we can include other activities which required more inhaling and exhaling :-) )everyday for 30-minutes exhale 300% CO2 during this period and 10% of total population goes for jogging... which amounts to 30% of the toal population CO2 emission for 30minutes... which boils down to 3-million peoples life exhale equivalent per day etc.,etc., :-).

Let us try and stop high-in-hale and high-ex-hale activities.

[Alex Tolley]

Not just carbon, but N2O is a problem.

However, I will have to say that burning wood and dung is as about a renewable, carbon neutral approach as you can get. Smogs are tropospheric and thus wash out very quickly, which is not true of CO2 emissions that reside in the full atmospheric column and in a huge ocean reservoir.

I would still focus on major fossil fuel burning nations, which does include India.