Focus on carbon dioxide, not soot or methane, to ease climate change, new research says

November 6, 2014 | By Dibya Sarkar

A focus on reducing pollutants such as soot and methane overestimates the impact on climate change without also reducing carbon dioxide emissions, new research says.

According to a study (pdf) published Nov. 4 in the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pollutants like soot or black carbon are short-lived while carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for centuries or millennia. But both substances are typically emitted by common sources.


"As climate policy is looking at options to limit emissions of all these substances, understanding their linkages becomes extremely important," the study continues. "Measures reducing short-lived climate forcers are complementary to CO2mitigation, but neglecting linkages leads to overestimating their climate benefits."


In other words, while reducing some pollutants like soot and methane could help reduce some global warming in the short term, it's still insufficient to address the issue over the long term.

"Stabilizing climate at any temperature means that, at some point, global CO2 emissions have to become zero," said study's lead author Joeri Rogelj in an interview with Climate Central. He's a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and ETH Zurich, a Swiss technical university.


It's important not to delay "stringent action" on CO2, says the study, adding that reducing carbon dioxide now will help control long-term climate change.


Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a study that said scientists have a "very high confidence" that climate change, which results in heat stress, storms, flooding, landslides, air pollution, drought, sea-level rise and storm surges, threatens the safety and security of people, economies and ecosystems.


For more:
- read the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis study (pdf)


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