The odds are poor that humanity will ever curtail CO2 emissions sufficiently fast against even the mid-case global warming scenarios forecast by climatologists. A possible near-term remedy, however, has been found in the form of a simple pollution abatement strategy in the mitigation of airborne soot.

Ramanathan has served on IPCC WG2 Panels, he headed the UN's INDOEX project and he's as solid a climate scientist as we have.

A black iceberg & melting snow

Airborne soot's heating effects have been found to be 60 percent of CO2's, yielding a 40/60 soot/CO2 global atmospheric heating combination. In higher altitudes soot is just as important as CO2 in melting tropical glacial packs like the Himalayas (and perhaps Kilimanjaro) while also devasting Arctic ice by making it more heat-absorbant.

INDOEX lead researcher V. Ramanathan has co-authored a paper on his team's findings that airborne soot (aka black carbon, or BC for short) plays a far greater role in atmospheric warming than the UN's IPCC reports have yet indicated.

Ramanathan and his team at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute are renown for their INDOEX work for NASA and the IPCC. In recent field studies (Aug. 2007) they collected direct airborne samples and applied the results to existing climate models. Much to their surprise they found that - contrary to conventional opinion - airborne soot has a net atmospheric heating effect (instead of a net cooling effect).

Since August 2007 Ramanathan & Carmicheal have further honed their findings and released another startling paper published March 2008 in Nature. Their findings indicate that airborne tropospheric soot contributes roughly 35 - 40 percent of all observed temperature anomalies (roughly a 37-57 soot-CO2 ratio). This is very similar to the net mix I had estimated last year.

Overturning the conventional theory that airborne soot emissions cause regional cooling it has been found that brown clouds of airborne soot can contribute up to a third of atmospheric warming anomalies in the tropics formerly ascribed to CO2 (50 percent of the atmospheric heating caused by CO2 emissions), with its effects ranging as far as the more-temperate American west coast and mountains ranges.

Easily 40 percent of the observed atmospheric warming in the Pacific is due to the shroud of soot drifting eastward from Asia. Prof. V. Ramanathan and fellow researchers are reporting that soot's 2.5 W/cu.m. green house effect is partially offset by its surface dimming effect, such that its net effect is still 1 W/cu.m. With the vast Pacific covering 30 percent of the Earth's surface, aerosol soot - black carbon particulates - plays a significant factor in global warming, potentially 12 percent of all global warming.

This westerly mid-atmospheric haze of soot is eventually depleted as it falls on North America. Up to 75 percent of the soot hitting the Western USA is from China, potentially causing 30 percent of regional warming in the Western USA. It's also believed as sooty snowfall is deposited in the American Sierras and Rockies, the dirty snow actually causes earlier snow melts and glacier loss as a result of the increased heat absorption from soot-darkened snow and ice.

Increased solar radiance and decreased snowfall have been implicated as the true culprits in Kilimanjaro's glacier loss. The temperatures on Kilimanjaro's summits almost never rise above freezing, leading researchers to look for other causes for the ongoing glacial recession on Kilimanjaro's peak. Other studies have suggested that deforestation has severely impacted the arboreal microclimates that provide recharge precipitation to Kilimanjaro's glacial packs.

With reduced snowfall the summit's glaciers suffer degraded albedo (perhaps coupled with dirty snow) that progressively furthers the ongoing glacial recession.

Links:
Kilimanjaro's receding glaciers - Increased Solar Radiance and decreased snowfall:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070611153942.htm

Kilimanjaro's receding glaciers - Deforestation & loss of microclimate precipitation:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0923_030923_kilimanjaroglaciers.htm

U.N. officials have stated that Kyoto's carbon-credit system is being subverted via cheating while contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer - counter-productive to the Montreal Protocol's goal to preserve it.