Researchers Find Soot Has Impact on Global Climate A team of
researchers, led by Columbia University and NASA scientists,
found airborne, microscopic, black-carbon (soot) particles are
even more plentiful around the world, and contribute more to
climate change, than was previously assumed by the
Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). The
researchers concluded that if these soot particles are not
reduced, at least as rapidly as light-colored pollutants, the
world could warm more quickly. The findings appear in the latest
issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It
is authored by Makiko Sato, James Hansen and others from NASA’s
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the Earth
Institute at Columbia University, New York; Oleg Dubovik, Brent
Holben and Mian Chin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md.; and Tica Novakov, Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif. Sato, Hansen and colleagues used
global atmospheric measurements taken by the Aerosol R