Containing Climate Change With Black Carbon Reductions: A Grand Challenge Field Experiment

The manmade greenhouse gases that are now blanketing the planet is thick enough to push the system beyond the tipping point for several elements of the climate system such as the arctic sea ice and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers, to name a few. Even with a targeted reduction in CO2 emission of 50% by 2050, we would still be adding more than 50 ppm of CO2 and thicken the manmade blanket by another 30%. Fortunately there are scientific ways to contain the warming and these will be outlined. But these need a truly transformational and interdisciplinary approach that brings together social scientists, natural scientists, energy experts and engineers to develop effective mitigation pathways. Towards this goal an interdisciplinary team of academics, NGOs and intergovernmental organizations from US, Europe and India have developed Project Surya to drastically decrease emissions of the major non-CO2 climate warmers (soot, methane, ozone precursor gases) from rural areas in India and China. Surya will undertake the most comprehensive data collection, to-date, on the impact of reducing biomass burning on climate forcing, health and the wellbeing of rural inhabitants most of whom live under a dollar a day. The experiment thus offers the opportunity to field test our ideas and hypotheses about the impact of black carbon and brown clouds on dimming, the Asian monsoon and the melting of the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers. The data from this soft ‘geo-engineering’ experiment is also anticipated to lead to a sustainable way of energy consumption for the roughly 4 billion who are forced to use solid bio-fuels for all of their energy needs.