GardenBanter.co.uk - Kyoto Treaty & Soot From Burning Wood

Subject: Soot Apparently Unacknowledged In Kyoto Treaty
From: (Robert Cohen)
Date: 11/10/02 5:13 PM Eastern Standard Time
Message-id:

I perceive both volcanic emissions and, yes, forest fires as indeed affecting,
worrisome pollutants.

B-t-w: In this article, dated 12 Dec 2001, Professor Mark Jacobson says the
Kyoto Treaty fails to deal with soot from wood fires.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------

Scientific Alliance - challenging and informed scientific debate
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------

Home About us Membership Links Contact us

News topics

Climate Change & Kyoto
GM Foods & Organics
Transport
Biodiversity
Supplying the Nation's Power
Waste & Recycling
Planning & Development
All topics

Scientific Alliance's views

View all
News Releases

Contribute to Site

Submit a technical document
Your comments

Special Reports
The Kyoto Process

MORI Survey for Scientific Alliance (June 200)

To be kept updated by our free information service

Eliminating soot could slow global warming
December 12, 2001.

SAN FRANCISCO - Greenhouse gases are blamed by many scientists for contributing
to global warming, but at least one researcher says the real key to modifying
world temperatures is diesel soot.

"If you want to control global warming, the first thing to go after is soot,''
Mark Jacobson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at
Stanford University, said Tuesday.

Jacobson, in a presentation to the American Geophysical Union, said soot
produced by burning diesel fuels, coal, and wood has a much more severe impact
on the environment relative to its mass than do greenhouse gases such as carbon
dioxide and methane.

Eliminating all fossil-fuel soot - estimated at about 5 million tons per year
worldwide - could cut net global warming by 40 percent in three to five years,
Jacobson said. "Controlling fossil-fuel soot will not only slow global warming
but also will improve human health,'' he said.

A soot particle, made up primarily of black carbon, warms the air by absorbing
sunlight and radiating the heat into the air. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, do
not absorb sunlight but create warming by absorbing Earth's heat and then
radiating it back into the environment.

Jacobson said that while soot was widely believed to be the biggest cause of
global warming after carbon dioxide, controlling soot emissions could have a
more immediate effect on temperatures because soot does its damage to the
environment during the relatively brief time it remains in the air.

But he said that most current climate change models do not take soot into
account. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing global warming, also failed
to deal with soot emissions, he noted.

Jacobson, who reached his conclusions after developing a computer model to
include the climactic impact of soot, said controls could be improved by
tightening standards on particulate emissions, requiring industry to devise
better particle traps, and switching from diesel fuel to gasoline or hydrogen
fuel cells.

Diesel fuel powers almost all commercial trucks, buses, and tractors worldwide
and 33 percent of the passenger vehicles sold in Europe last year, according to
Jacobson.

Diesel-powered passenger vehicles are much rarer in the United States - only
about one in a thousand cars - but overall diesel emissions from all vehicles
in the United States are still about 75 percent to 80 percent of those of
Europe.

Read more on climate change
The Scientific Alliance's view on climate change and Kyoto
See Also:
The Scientific Alliance's view on climate change and Kyoto.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Disclaimer

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------

Return to top
Previous