Science Daily: Increasing the ratio of black carbon to sulphate in the atmosphere increases climate warming, suggests a study conducted by a University of Iowa professor and his colleagues and published in the July 25 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.Black carbons -- arising from such sources as diesel engine exhaust and cooking fires -- are widely considered a factor in global warming and are an important component of air pollution around the world, according to Greg Carmichael, Karl Kammermeyer Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in the UI College of Engineering and co-director of the UI's Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. Sulfates occur in the atmosphere largely as a result of various industrial processes.
…In order to conduct their study, the researchers made ground-level studies of air samples at Cheju Island, South Korea, and then sampled the air at altitudes between 100 and 15,000 feet above the ground using unmanned aircrafts (UAVs).
They found that the amount of solar radiation absorbed increased as the black carbon to sulphate ratio rose. Also, black carbon plumes derived from fossil fuels were 100 percent more efficient at warming than were plumes arising from biomass burning.
"These results had been indicated by theory but not verified by observations before this work," Carmichael said. "There is currently great interest in developing strategies to reduce black carbon as it offers the opportunity to reduce air pollution and global warming at the same time."…
A cooking fire in Khyrghizstan, shot by Firespeaker, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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