Fighting real pollution - finally some (partially) good science in Science

Finally some - partially - good science from sources close to the global warming establishment. A new study published in Science focuses on what could be done to decrease real air pollution:

Buses spew clouds of black exhaust fumes in Mexico City while, in India, wood burnt in rudimentary stoves fills houses with sooty smoke. Methane leaks from gas pipelines in Russia and rice paddies in China, eventually breaking down in sunlight and contributing to the production of smog and ozone. In each of these cases, simple steps to curb air pollution would promote public health.

By 2030, these reduction measures could prevent anywhere from 700,000 to 4.7 million premature deaths from air pollution annually, the study found. And because ozone is toxic to plants, such measures could boost global crop production by 1–4%.

It is only when the scientists behind the study start speaking about the benefits of the above measures in preventing bogus human caused global warming that things begin to go wrong:

We’re in a gridlock over carbon dioxide, and we’re losing time,” says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and a co-author on the Scienceanalysis. “This is one way to buy back some of that time, and the co-benefits are huge.”

What Ramanathan calls "the co-benefits", are quite obviously the only real - but valuable - benefits of fighting "black carbon".  However, if there is support among warmists for these kind of measures, it should not be impossible to find common ground with global warming sceptics. At least for this blogger, it does not matter if the warmists - wrongly - think that fighting real pollution will be useful in promoting their beliefs. The main thing is that something is done in order clean the air in some of the worst polluted regions of the world.

But this may be too good to be true. Die-hard warmists, like Kevin Trenberth have already began to put down the new findings:

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, credits the study with building scientific consensus on the issue, but warns that it should not detract from the main agenda on carbon dioxide. “The fundamental problem with long-term climate change is CO₂, and anything that takes us away from addressing that doesn’t really solve the problem,” he says. “It just puts it off.”

Read the entire article here