In addition to causing smoggy skies and chronic coughs, soot
– or black carbon – turns out to be the number two contributor to global
warming. It’s second only to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year
assessment by an international panel.
The new study concludes that black carbon, the soot
particles in smoke and smog, contributes about twice as much to global warming
as previously estimated, even by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.