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twoeleventhere's an unfortunate emphasis on reducing carbon dioxide concentrations as the way of slowing/preventing global warming. while i have a certain interest in wholesale conversion of the power industry to methods that generate no carbon dioxide, there's simply not the money available to do it. so, we're fortunate that there are other ways of reducing warming, and they have valuable secondary effects besides.
a new paper in science proposes a short list of methods for reducing greenhouse warming and simultaneously improving human health. the trick for doing that is to reduce methane (which reacts to increase surface ozone) and black carbon (soot, which screws up our lungs all by itself).
the authors apply some apparently-standard methods to identify 14 specific measures which will reduce 90+% of the global greenhouse warming attributed to methane and soot, improve human health, and are cheap enough to implement. most of the ones for reducing methane try to trap it at the source (coal mines, pipeline leaks, and biodegradable waste). OTOH, most of the solutions for soot simply prevent it, by getting rid of the worst cars and trucks and requiring the rest to have better filters, and in the developing world, replacing wood- and dung- fired stoves with ones burning gas.
because the model is globally-optimized, most of the effects are in india and china, simply because they have lots of people and lots of pollution. i was going to throw the paper on the "interesting but not immediately useful pile", but stopped when i looked more closely at the global warming maps.
this is part of the author's figure 2, lightly edited. (i added the map legends and changed the color-coding in map D so that it would make sense with map C.)
so... yeah, most of the effect of warming is in africa and central asia and at the poles. but looking at the us reveals two things their country-by-country analysis missed.
first, from maps C and E, reducing soot appears to go a long way to preventing warming over the rocky mountains. this is vitally important for the southwest, as they're dependent on water from rocky mountain snowmelt. the warmer the mountains are, the more seasonal the water will be: more flooding in the spring and more thirst in autumn. preventing the snowpack from getting all dirty is a big help.
second, while the health and pollution effects of reducing soot are low on a national basis, it looks like that masks a lot of soot around the northeast sprawl (map C). depending on where the boundaries of the worst of it lie, that's between 10% and 20% of the us population. so, new yawkers and bahstonians would benefit rather a lot from the reduction.
between the two effects, it seems rather a lot of the american population would benefit from the pollution reductions the authors propose... and they weren't even selected for greatest effect on americans. i suspect with a little tweaking, say tighter controls on soot from coal-fired powerplants, we could get even greater health and warming benefits with relatively few -- and relatively cheap -- changes in how we do things.
a new paper in science proposes a short list of methods for reducing greenhouse warming and simultaneously improving human health. the trick for doing that is to reduce methane (which reacts to increase surface ozone) and black carbon (soot, which screws up our lungs all by itself).
the authors apply some apparently-standard methods to identify 14 specific measures which will reduce 90+% of the global greenhouse warming attributed to methane and soot, improve human health, and are cheap enough to implement. most of the ones for reducing methane try to trap it at the source (coal mines, pipeline leaks, and biodegradable waste). OTOH, most of the solutions for soot simply prevent it, by getting rid of the worst cars and trucks and requiring the rest to have better filters, and in the developing world, replacing wood- and dung- fired stoves with ones burning gas.
because the model is globally-optimized, most of the effects are in india and china, simply because they have lots of people and lots of pollution. i was going to throw the paper on the "interesting but not immediately useful pile", but stopped when i looked more closely at the global warming maps.
this is part of the author's figure 2, lightly edited. (i added the map legends and changed the color-coding in map D so that it would make sense with map C.)
so... yeah, most of the effect of warming is in africa and central asia and at the poles. but looking at the us reveals two things their country-by-country analysis missed.
first, from maps C and E, reducing soot appears to go a long way to preventing warming over the rocky mountains. this is vitally important for the southwest, as they're dependent on water from rocky mountain snowmelt. the warmer the mountains are, the more seasonal the water will be: more flooding in the spring and more thirst in autumn. preventing the snowpack from getting all dirty is a big help.
second, while the health and pollution effects of reducing soot are low on a national basis, it looks like that masks a lot of soot around the northeast sprawl (map C). depending on where the boundaries of the worst of it lie, that's between 10% and 20% of the us population. so, new yawkers and bahstonians would benefit rather a lot from the reduction.
between the two effects, it seems rather a lot of the american population would benefit from the pollution reductions the authors propose... and they weren't even selected for greatest effect on americans. i suspect with a little tweaking, say tighter controls on soot from coal-fired powerplants, we could get even greater health and warming benefits with relatively few -- and relatively cheap -- changes in how we do things.