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Show Notes

Carbon emissions account for about 50% of warming, yet carbon overwhelmingly dominates the climate change discussion. On Episode 19 of Not Cool, Ariel is joined by Ilissa Ocko for a closer look at the non-carbon causes of climate change — like methane, sulphur dioxide, and an aerosol known as black carbon — that are driving the other 50% of warming. Ilissa is a senior climate scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund and an expert on short-lived climate pollutants. She explains how these non-carbon pollutants affect the environment, where they’re coming from, and why they’ve received such little attention relative to carbon. She also discusses a major problem with the way we model climate impacts over 100-year time scales, the barriers to implementing a solution, and more.

Topics discussed include:

• Anthropogenic aerosols
• Non-CO2 climate forcers: black carbon, methane, etc.
• Warming vs. cooling pollutants
• Environmental impacts of methane emissions
• Modeling methane vs. carbon
• Why we need to look at climate impacts on different timescales
• Why we shouldn't geoengineer with cooling aerosols
• How we can reduce methane emissions

References discussed include:

• Complements to Carbon: Opportunities for Near-Term Action on Non-CO2 Climate Forcers
• Rapid and Reliable Assessment of Methane Impacts on Climate
• Unmask Temporal Trade-offs in Climate Policy Debates

And we look at annual emissions of methane from human activities and we look at how those will affect warming of the planet over the next 10 years, we'll actually have 30% more warming coming from methane emissions than we will from annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.

~ Ilissa Ocko