The Climate Change Culprits Not Addressed by Global Policy
Key takeaways
- These other emissions, unlike carbon dioxide, don’t have a direct warming effect on their own.
- A new paper published Thursday in the journal Science suggests that 15 percent of human-driven global warming has come from these indirect interactions.
- She’s now senior climate scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a nonprofit that aims to identify and mitigate sources of unmanaged climate risk.
Why this matters: environmental and climate reporting with long-term consequences.
Republish Carbon monoxide and non-methane volatile organic compounds are named as major sources of indirect contributions to global warming in a new paper. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images Related Driven by Steel Production, China’s Belt and Road Construction Carries a Heavy Climate Cost Wildfires Are Reversing Years of US Air Quality Gains, Study Finds EPA Rollbacks Could Raise AC, Refrigeration Costs Despite Promise of Lower Prices Share This Article Republish Most Popular An Old Well Gushed Waste, Not Oil, in a Small West Texas Town New BLM Grazing Rules Eliminate Tribal Buffalo From Public Lands A Water Crisis Has The ‘Poster Boys’ of Iowa Farming Ready to Talk Regulation Record-high global temperatures aren’t driven only by well-known greenhouse gas culprits.
These other emissions, unlike carbon dioxide, don’t have a direct warming effect on their own. Instead, they trigger reactions in the atmosphere that create more greenhouse gases or make the gases stick around longer.
A new paper published Thursday in the journal Science suggests that 15 percent of human-driven global warming has come from these indirect interactions. None of these pollutants appear on the international climate treaty list that forms the basis for nations’ pledges to cut back—and the authors say it’s time for that to change.