Why are the glaciers melting?
Are they melting because of CO2? Or are they melting because
of soot and other pollutants being deposited on them?
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Black Carbon a Significant Factor in Melting of Himalayan Glaciers
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/02/03/black-carbon-himalayan-glaciers/
“Our simulations showed greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt,” says Menon, a physicist and staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. “Most of the change in snow and ice cover—about 90 percent—is from aerosols. Black carbon alone contributes at least 30 percent of this sum.”
Menon and her collaborators used two sets of aerosol inventories by Indian researchers to run their simulations; their results were published online in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
The actual contribution of black carbon, emitted largely as a result of burning fossil fuels and biomass, may be even higher than 30 percent because the inventories report less black carbon than what has been measured by observations at several stations in India. (However, these observations are too incomplete to be used in climate models.) “We may be underestimating the amount of black carbon by as much as a factor of four,” she says.
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(Entire article is at the link. Zim.)
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