Soot almost as bad as CO2 for global warming  Smoke gets in eyes
of climate boffins  Providing a secure and efficient Helpdesk
US scientists have said switching anti-global warming efforts to
tackling the production of soot would offer a quicker return
than cutting CO2 emissions.  According to US scientists,
enormous damage is being done by soot, which is being created by
the combustion of fossil fuels and as an indirect result of
deforestation, among other factors.  They claim that soot - or
black carbon to give it the scientific name - is the second
biggest cause of global warming behind CO2, causing 60 percent
of the warming effect of CO2.  Professor Greg Carmichael, of the
University of Iowa and Professor V Ramanathan, of Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, argue that tackling the emissions
of soot offers a far quicker chance to address global warming
than trying to reduce CO2 emissions. They said this is because
soot has a much shorter lifetime than CO2, which can hang about
for around 100 years.  The