Soot's impact on climate change underestimated

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”. The work was led by researchers from the the University of Leeds, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois. Read more on the BBC website; in the Guardian. The full paper: T.C. Bond, S.J. Doherty, D.W. Fahey, P.M. Forster et al. “Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: A scientific assessment,” is published online at the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, and can be accessed at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50171/abstract