Black Carbon: A Major Cause of Global Worming

Rahim Salhi

I have always found enormous delight in nature. Growing up in Malaysia, my sibling and I were often immersed in nature, trekking, discovering new pathways, canoeing, and looking for the fish below in Penang National Park's deserted beaches (a town in the far northwest of the country). These encounters with our wonderful surroundings changed the way I saw the world. I learned to look for the beauty all around me and the great pleasures that come with exploring nature. But as I've gotten older it becomes depressing for me to learn about issues that our beautiful world is facing and specifically the issue of global warming and its causes. For many years we have struggled to figure out the real cause of global warming. We often bounce between blaming it solely on nature or attributing it to our society's disregard for the environment. However, there is zero controversy within the scientific community that global warming is occurring. The only people that doubt that are either in the pocketbooks of petroleum companies or have zero credentials to seriously judge the myriad evidence that it's occurring.

There has been a ton of data supporting global warming, so much so that the majority of experts now accept it as truth. According to a study conducted by the Hong Kong Observatory, it shows that the global surface temperature rose by 0.85°C on average between 1880 and 2020, with each of the last 30 years being warmer than the preceding one. Statistics also suggest that the period from 1983 to 2020 was most likely the warmest four decades in the Northern Hemisphere over the previous 1,400 years [3]. You actually don’t need to take my word for it, someone can readily download mean annual temperature maps for the entire Earth (at a fairly coarse resolution) and simply calculate the mean value. Or we can do this over many past years and see whether a trend exists. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lets you do this fairly easily from their temperature databases.

The classical theory has been that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is the main contributor to global warming along with other greenhouse gases. However, there are still other major contributors that are as much as harmful to the environment as CO2. It is called Black Carbon (BC), which I come to learn about during my time doing research with Dr. Steven Chillrud from Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), at Columbia University. The study took place during the summer of 2019 and continued up until the spring of 2020 just before the pandemic hit.

My research with Dr. Chillrud’s team investigated the impact of BC on reducing albedo (surfaces' ability to reflect sunlight and heat from the sun) when deposited on snow and ice. BC is a very tiny particle, sometimes referred to as soot, and is created when biomass, biofuels, and fossil fuels are burned insufficiently. Emissions from diesel engines, wood burning, cook stoves, coal-fired power plants, and forest fires are primary sources of BC soot. Although it remains in the atmosphere for just a few days or weeks compared with a century or more for CO2, it is a major short-term contributor to global warming [1].

The in-situ tests we conducted have shown that snow-covered areas are the most sensitive to the warming impacts of black carbon, and any particles that reach there should be avoided if they are darker than snow, since they can diminish reflectivity and hasten melting. BC has a far negative effect not just on the weather but also on the health and respiratory system [2]. There is strong evidence that BC has contributed largely to glaciers melting in places like the Andes, Rocky Mountains, Canadian Rockies, Alps, Himalayas, and other parts of the planet. As glaciers melt and recede, the ice melt that feeds rivers that serve irrigation systems during the dry season will diminish. Hence, reducing BC, or soot, in the atmosphere is a possible climate change mitigation approach before exposing the effect of CO2 reduction since BC absorbs solar and infrared radiation and has a shorter lifespan than CO2. Many earlier investigations have found that BC has a substantial positive radiative force in the atmosphere [4].

Although global warming is a worldwide issue, it is still one of the many other phenomena associated with the bigger problem which is climate change. Humans are always seeking new ways and ventures for the betterment of our lives, but this comes at a cost. We all bear responsibility to manage wisely the resources available to us from nature to avoid a possible catastrophe. According to oceanographer Dr. Phil Orton from Stevens Institute of Technology, the US has turned the corner on its emissions of BC and some greenhouse gases, but there is still a lot of work that has to be done locally and by the rest of world economies. 

I feel very optimistic that we will eventually be able to overcome the challenges in the long run, given the efforts that we have started in the last few decades to combat climate change, as Dr. Orton said: “there is a lot of momentum to change, and I feel some optimism that we are going to avoid the worst-case scenario.” And this can be only possible with both engineering and responsible exploitation of our planet. It has the potential to provide enormous benefits to both nature and humanity. 


Work cited:

[1] Salhi, A. (n.d.). How Can We Determine the Sources of Black Carbon in the Air? REU Site: Interdisciplinary Cutting-Edge Research Through the Analysis of Global Data. Retrieved from https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1757602&HistoricalAwards=false. 

[2] Salhi, A., & Chillrud, S. N. (2019). AAAR 37th Annual Conference. In Quantifying Exposure to Second Hand Tobacco Smoke in the Presence of Black Carbon via DualSpot Corrections to MicroAeth Data: Results from Chamber Experiments. Portland, Or; AAAR. Retrieved from https://www.aaar.org/AAARORG/assets/File/meetings/2019/Program_Final.pdf. 

[3] Superadmin02. (n.d.). Global response to climate change. Hong Kong Laureate Forum. Retrieved November 5, 2022, from https://hklaureateforum.org/en/climate-change 

[4] Takemura, T., & Suzuki, K. (2019). Weak global warming mitigation by reducing black carbon emissions. Scientific Reports, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41181-6 


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