Many of us assume the only real climate challenge is reducing CO_2.  

 If only that were true! But it isn’t.

There is an even more important challenge—especially in the short term—that can help buy us the time required to reduce CO₂ as much as we need: 

We have to reduce short-lived climate pollutants or SLCPs, otherwise known as super pollutants.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls SLCPs “near-term climate forcers”: greenhouse gases and other climate pollutants that have short atmospheric lifetimes compared to CO₂ but per molecule have a much stronger warming effect than CO₂.

This means that reducing them has a stronger impact on near-term warming. In fact, reducing SLCPs could slow the planet’s warming by about half a degree by 2050!

Super pollutants include methane, black carbon, HFCs and tropospheric ozone, and they are the most under-appreciated but dangerous contributors to climate change: While CO₂ increases temperatures over 50-100 years, and 20% of emissions remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years, short-lived climate pollutants do their damage over much shorter periods and then disappear—the damage done. 

In that short lifetime lies our opportunity: We must aggressively reduce new emissions of these super pollutants, which are atmospheric gases that decay and disappear quickly, taking their warming power with them.

A new report released by the Climate Center and written by Daniel Kammen, Manuel Pastor, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Tom Steyer and others concludes that climate change is occurring at a faster, more destructive rate than previously known, and we are expected to pass the 1.5 degrees C threshold of dangerous warming as early as 2027!

Drew Shindell, Professor of Climate Sciences at Duke University and a lead author of a 2018 IPCC report on SLCPs, says no scenario exists where the world can get to 1.5 degrees without reducing these super pollutants alongside CO₂.

Join us to talk about this problem with SLCP, climate and clean air experts at Zoom #1—Reducing Short-Lived Climate Pollutants—the first in a 5-part Climate and Clean Air series beginning on June 24, 10am-12pm. REGISTER HERE.