Arctic Nations Order Investigation of Black Carbon, Blamed for Significant Ice Melt

Governments around the world are beginning to take action on a newly recognized climate threat that has been right in front of our eyes for decades: the soot that spews from diesel engines and that forms hazy blankets over villages using wood- and dung-burning cook-stoves and areas where forests have been cleared by burning.

Soot, or black carbon, is believed to be responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, an impact that wasn't well understood just two years ago when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report.

“Black carbon is now commonly believed to be the second most important climate forcing agent after carbon dioxide,” says Erika Rosenthal, an international program attorney for Earthjustice.

At a meeting of the Arctic Council today in Norway, the United States, Russia, Canada and other Arctic nations took the first step to begin reducing that danger by establishing a task force that will examine ways to decrease the global production of soot.

In the United States, an unlikely coalition of U.S. senators – including both Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and chief climate change denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.) – recently introduced a bill to similarly look into ways to curtail black carbon emissions. The U.S. stimulus package also contained money to decrease soot, and other projects in Europe and developing countries around the world have begun to address the problem.

The Arctic Council's action today was spurred by a recent study that determined black carbon was the cause of half of the warming in the Arctic in the last 120 years.

Wind currents carry soot from North America, Europe and Asia to the Arctic region, where the particles darken the ice and absorb heat. The melting of the Arctic carries multiple climate dangers, from rising sea levels to the release of greenhouses gases such as methane frozen in the permafrost.

The task force will recommend actions to be taken and will report to the council, which is composed of Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States, at their next meeting in 2011.

The Boxer-Inhofe bill in the U.S. Senate would give a similar task to the EPA: In the next year, define black carbon, find its sources and ways to reduce it, and determine funding for such solutions. (Inhofe's support was prompted by the health dangers tied to soot.)

One key to begin solving the problem of black carbon in the Arctic is developing standards for the diesel engines of marine ships the enter the area, Rosenthal says. Last month, the EPA applied to the International Maritime Organization to establish standards for all international ships that enter U.S. territorial areas. However, it did not include the Arctic waters.