The research is getting fast and furious in dealing with the urgent crisis of climate change.  Scientists predict that we only have a few years to turn our situation around to prevent tipping points which will lead to unreversible climate change with extreme weather, loss of biodiversity and prevalent food insecurity due to frequent floods and droughts in traditional farming areas.

Most actions for mitigating climate change and slowing global warming temperatures have relied on reducing C02 emissions.   C02 emissions remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years,  so even if we went completely C02 neutral today, there would still be the damaging remains of the past use of C02 lingering in the atmosphere preventing us from stopping the most damaging effects of Climate Change.

As I wrote yesterday the research which was used for our team proposal at the MIT Climate CoLab on the reduction of short lived climate forces to prevent the worst effects of climate change has just been published in The International Journal of Climate Change

Talk about fast and furious.  Right on the heels of the publication in The International Journal of Climate Change comes the news of more new evidence just published from Nature The International Journal of Science which strengthens the case for the reductions of the short-lived climate forcers of Black Carbon and tropospheric ozone.  The new research states that recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion is primarily driven by black carbon and tropospheric ozone.   This is significant.  Scientists are realizing that we don't have the time to focus on primarily reducing C02 and that we need a short term solution to buy us the time to reduce C02.   Evidence is strongly pointing to reducing the short-lived climate forcers of Black Carbon, Methane and tropospheric ozone as a crucial action.

This is not to say that we should stop with our efforts to transition to clean energy which will reduce the amount of C02 and other GHGs entering our atmosphere as that is a very important component to stabilizing our future climate.  But in order to prevent the worst and irreversible effects of climate change we need to rapidly reduce the short lived climate forcers as they are the primary agents of warming in the short term.

The good news is that we still have some time to prevent the worst effects of climate change...it's in our hands.

   Albert Einstein

    Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act.