G8 new front in climate has nothing to do with CO2, focus now on black carbon, long ignored by scientists and green groups-G. Lean

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5/21/12, "G8: Leaders open up vital new front in the battle to control global warming," UK Telegraph, Geoffrey Lean

"It seems to have gone virtually unnoticed, but the world leaders at the weekend's G8 summit look as if they have taken the biggest step in years in tackling climate change. And it's quite apart from anything to do with carbon dioxide.

The summit's final communiqué, the Camp David Declaration, supports “comprehensive actions” to reduce “short-lived climate pollutants”. These substances – including black carbon (soot), methane, ground-level ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons – are responsible for about half of global warming. Straightforward measures to address them, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme concluded last year, would delay dangerous climate change by more than three decades, buying crucial time for the much more difficult process of slashing carbon dioxide emissions.

More important still, the measures would save some 2.4 million lives a year, mainly by cutting the inhalation of soot, chiefly emitted by vehicle diesel engines and by the inefficient wood and dung burning cookstoves used by most of the world's poorest people – and increase grain harvests, at present hit by pollution, by 52 million tons a year.

While the international climate negotiations drag on, these pollutants can be reduced through existing national laws and regulations, using technologies that are already available. And many climate sceptics agree on the importance of doing so: Senator James Inhofe, who pioneered Republican rejection of action to curb carbon dioxide, supports it on black carbon, while Canada – which caused controversy this winter by quitting the Kyoto Protocol – has been in the forefront of countries urging an assault on such the short-lived agents of climate change.

The G8's endorsement of action at the weekend is a triumph for the small Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), which has been campaigning for action on the pollutants while most climate scientists and green pressure groups have ignored them. In just a few short years it has brought the issue from invisibility to the agendas of the world's most powerful leaders. In February six governments – including the US, Canada and Mexico – launched a five year programme to tackle them, and the rest of the G8 has now signed up to it. And it commissioned the World Bank to produce a report on how it can integrate ways of reducing them into its activities.

The leaders also reaffirmed their commitments to limiting the increase in the world's temperature to less than two degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels and phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels – and welcomed December's Durban climate summit as “a significant breakthrough” towards reaching international agreements on cutting carbon dioxide by 2015.

It will remain important to continue this international effort. But as Durwood Zaelke, the IGSD president puts it “the solution-orientated approach” of the programme to address the short-lived pollutants can “show the world it is possible to start meeting the climate challenge.”" via Tom Nelson

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Ed. note: Much damaging soot comes from activity in Communist China and Southeast Asia:

Between 1980 and 1995, "BC (black carbon) emissions from developed countries have declined and aircraft are apparently not to blame. However, during this time BC emissions from China and India have nearly doubled."

2/25/2005, "Distant origins of Arctic black carbon: A Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE experiment," Dorothy Koch and James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Journal of Geophysical Research

p.1 "Black carbon (BC) particles, derived from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, may have a severe impact on the sensitive Arctic climate, possibly altering the temperature profile, cloud temperature and amount, the seasonal cycle, and the tropopause level and accelerating polar ice melting. We use the Goddard Institute for Space Studies general circulation model to investigate the origins of Arctic BC by isolating various source regions and types. The model suggests that the predominant sources of Arctic soot today are from south Asia (industrial and biofuel emissions) and from biomass burning.

These are the primary global sources of BC (approximately 20% and 55%, respectively, of the global emissions), and BC aerosols in these regions are readily lofted to high altitudes where they may be transported poleward. According to the model the Arctic BC optical thickness is mostly from south Asia (30%) and from biomass (28%) (with slightly more than half of biomass coming from north of 40 N)."...

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Southeast Asia reference:

5/18/12, "CO2 Not to Blame for Southwest Droughts?" World Climate Report

"According to Allen et al.:

“Our analysis strongly suggests that recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion is driven mainly by black carbon and tropospheric ozone, with greenhouse gases playing a smaller part.”...

The authors argue that there is a good likelihood that black carbon emissions have been underestimated—especially those arising from Southeast Asia....

The bottom line is that the primary influences on a major component of the earth’s atmospheric circulation and thus general weather patterns turns out to be, on further examination, not atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration changes, but rather black carbon (soot) and tropospheric ozone. And one impact from the forced atmospheric circulation changes is a tendency for more aridity across the Southwestern U.S.

So, the EPA can try all they want to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but no matter how successful they are, they will have little impact, if any, on the future of drought in the Southwestern U.S., as drought there is a complex interaction between natural variability and human climate alterations—of which, as shown by Allen et al., greenhouse gases play only a minor role.

So much for the “robust” signal that human greenhouse gases will lead to more drought in the Southwest."...

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