Word: blackly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That soupy brown air is the result of so-called black carbon expelled into the atmosphere in and around the Indian capital, from the burning of biomass for cookstoves and of black coal for electricity, and the incomplete combustion in the old diesel engines that propel most of the cars and trucks in the city. Breathing here isn't all that good for you - there's a reason the city is home to the "Delhi cough" - and now scientists are discovering that the sooty air isn't good for the climate either. According to some estimates, black carbon...
...Black carbon and CO2 each contribute to global warming in different ways. CO2 intensifies the greenhouse effect, allowing sunlight from space to enter through the atmosphere, then trapping the sun's energy as it bounces off the surface of the planet - like a greenhouse. (Of course, without some greenhouse warming, the earth would be a cold, dead place, but too much CO2 accelerates the effect and could make the earth too hot to be habitable. The temperature on Venus, for instance, where the atmosphere is 96% CO2, is over 400°C, or 750°F.) By contrast, black carbon...
Unlike CO2, which can hang around in the atmosphere for centuries - CO2 that was emitted by the first coal-powered train is probably still in the air, warming the planet - black carbon has a relatively brief life span. It remains just a few weeks in the air before it falls to earth. That's key, because if the world could reduce black carbon emissions soon, it could help blunt warming almost instantly. "You can wait a week or a month and the totals in the atmosphere can be significantly different," says Eric Wilcox, an atmospheric scientist with NASA. Meanwhile...
...there's much less burning of biomass and any diesel combustion tends to be much cleaner, as the clearing skies over major U.S. cities demonstrate.) Though India is responsible for less than 3% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, according to Ramanathan it is responsible for about 6% of global black-carbon emissions, give or take a significant margin of error. India and other developing countries rightly argue that rich nations are responsible for the majority of carbon already in the atmosphere, and should therefore take the lead on cutting emissions, but if black carbon is definitively proven to play...
...science is evolving - it's so new that black carbon wasn't even listed as a warming agent in the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - but it cannot be ignored. Black carbon is already having an impact on the ice atop the Himalayas, the massive glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia when they melt each spring. Thanks to global warming, these glaciers are receding, threatening the long-term water supplies for the region. Ramanathan, Wilcox and an Indian glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain are working to figure out the impact of black carbon...