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Also, climate scientists had assumed that the Antarctic ice sheets would have remained intact during that long-ago warm period. Because of changes in Earth's orbit, they know there would have been more sunlight hitting the Arctic back then, which means less sunlight in the Antarctic, and so, presumably, less melting...
...flying into New Delhi - or rather, you can't see a thing. As the plane descends to the Indian capital on an ordinary November day, it is immersed in air so polluted as to be opaque, a brownish sludge that scatters any sunlight. The air clears a bit once you've deplaned, but the horizon still contracts, pollution closing off the New Delhi sky like a dome...
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...
...speed the melting of glaciers by literally turning them black - soot on snow makes the ice heat up faster. "When black carbon falls on the snow, it darkens it," says Ramanathan. "If the snow is white, it reflects 80% of the sunshine, but with black carbon it absorbs the sunlight...
...likelier explanation, he and others say, is a combination of factors, including changes in weather patterns. Fewer clouds and more sunlight would create a layer of warm air right at the glaciers' surface, which would cause some melting. But most of the ice loss, he suggests, is due to sublimation - that is, ice turning directly into water vapor with no intermediate step. That tends to happen when temperatures are cold and the air is extremely dry, which is the case at Kilimanjaro's higher-than-19,000-ft. summit (it's the same reason ice cubes slowly wilt away...