January 2013

A  landmark study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, states that the direct warming effect of soot, also known as black carbon, could be about twice that of previous estimates. IAGP Principal Investigator Piers Forster, a co-leader in the four-year study, commented, “there are exciting opportunities to cool the climate by cutting soot emissions.... if we did everything we could to reduce these emissions, we could buy ourselves up to half a degree less warming—or a couple of decades of respite”.