BY MEGAN TAYLOR MORRISON
G8 leaders may duck serious discussions on controlling a major source of pollution that includes black soot from cooking fires, methane from dairy farms, and gases released from aerosol cans. Such talk is uncomfortable because it can appear to shift responsibility for climate change away from industrialized nations and onto poorer, have-not countries.
These hazardous emissions, called “short-lived climate forcers,” are thought to account for nearly one-third of current global warming. Discussions at the G-8 summit could be the catalyst for policy makers to address climate change and related fundamental international issues, but many scientists and government representatives believe the conversation won’t happen, because of the issue’s sensitivity and a perceived lack of immediacy.
Short-lived climate forcers first entered serious public discussion in February 2012 when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a global initiative to limit these pollutants and their negative effects on health and the environment. The international effort included the United States and its partners in The Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants: the United Nations Environment Programme, Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico and Sweden.
The reasons for eliminating these emissions go beyond the environment.
“Some of the interest in short-lived climate forcings is related to non-warming issues,” said Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University and contributor to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Reducing black soot from small cooking fires by switching to solar cookers can help the health of people who now breathe the soot,” Alley said. The World Health Organization estimates that 3 million premature deaths are caused by urban outdoor air pollution and indoor air pollution every year.
Emphasis on arctic vulnerability is another reason for action, said Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute. When black carbon lands on sea ice, the dark color causes heat retention and therefore faster melting.
These pollutants also threaten food security, as they reduce the growth rate of crops like wheat and maize, added Kaveh Zahedi, climate-change coordinator at the United Nations Environment Programme, who is optimistic about potential dialogue.
“My understanding is that short-lived climate pollutants have generated quite a lot of interest and may well come up in the G8 summit,” he said.
For discussions about these pollutants to be successful and well-received, however, the United States must emphasize the continued threat of CO2 emissions to global warming. Otherwise, the G8 host could be seen by other summit partners as a continued drag on international efforts to address climate change. Its allies in Europe, for instance, have worked hard to reduce “all kind of gases that cause climate change,” said Issac Valero-Ladron, spokesperson for Connie Hedegaard, the EU Commissioner for Climate Action.
“We are talking about the U.S. being the second largest polluter in the world,” he said “I think it’s important that they take their share of responsibility.”
After all, the short-lived nature of climate-forcers means we can deal with them at any time, Alley said. While “delaying action on CO2 now means much sharper cuts in CO2 in the future.”
Zahedi said this is well understood by coalition partners.
“We have to deal with both,” he said. “If we don’t act on CO2, in the long term we will not have made a difference to temperature increase.”
Understanding short-lived climate forcers:
To understand how these pollutants influence the atmosphere, you can think of cooking a bratwurst on a barbecue heated by matches and charcoal briquettes, Alley said.
“The matches flare up fast, but burn out fast; the briquettes last longer,” he explained. In this scenario, the matches are the short-lived climate forcers, while the briquettes are CO2. Like the matches, the methane’s influence is short-lived, while the briquettes (symbolic of carbon dioxide) last much longer.
In reality, the methane and the CO2 have much larger time scales. Short-lived climate forcers stay in the atmosphere between a few days and a few years, while carbon dioxide can influence climate for roughly 100 years.
