"IT seems to have gone virtually unnoticed, but the world leaders at the weekend's G8 summit look as if they have taken the biggest step in years in tackling climate change. And it's quite apart from anything to do with carbon dioxide.
"The summit's final communiqué, the Camp David Declaration, supports; comprehensive actions' to reduce “short-lived climate pollutants”. These substances – including black carbon (soot), methane, ground-level ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons – are responsible for about half of global warming...
"More important still, the measures would save some 2.4 million lives a year, mainly by cutting the inhalation of soot, chiefly emitted by vehicle diesel engines and by the inefficient wood and dung burning cook stoves used by most of the world's poorest people – and increase grain harvests, at present hit by pollution, by 52 million tons a year. While the international climate negotiations drag on, these pollutants can be reduced through existing national laws and regulations, using technologies that are already available...
Read more here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geoffreylean/100159272/g8-leaders-open-up-vital-new-front-in-the-battle-to-control-global-warming/
G8: Leaders open up vital new front in the battle to control global warming by Geoffrey Lean @ The Telegraph, May 22, 2012
Real pollution has measurably bad effects. Saving 'some 2.4 million lives a year'? I think by that they mean 2.4 million people live one year longer and not people becoming immortal. I'd like to see the mathematics behind that wild guess. Factoring the effects of burning dung for cooking vs. cooking with coal-fired electricity would be interesting. Could well be that coal-fired electricity saves more than 2.4 million lives vs. the control group burning biomass on a personal basis.
Currently in the US there's a big controversy over particulate pollution. The US EPA actually did an experiment, exposing actual human adults to levels of particulate 'pollution' which it considered to be 'swiftly fatal' and they all survived.
Aynsley,
unfortunately they have tied continued suppression of GHG's with the soot issue. If I complain about the stupidity of limiting methane emissions they will respond that I am against controlling soot, which our EPA has given an exagerated health effect.
This is more of the same from these morons.
Carbon black could have been effectively and significantly reduced years ago, except for the CO2 profiteers and hypesters and their AGW obsessions.