Tom Grylls

And then even more interesting, through the same characteristic, they have this forcing on snow and ice.

So black carbon emissions that are coming from lots of sources, which I'll get onto later, can be deposited onto glaciers, onto oceans.

the Arctic sea ice, they darken the color of the snow and ice.

And therefore, again, they increase its capacity to warm up and therefore increase the rate of melting.

So you have this quite distinct forcing on the climate, which is actually different to how greenhouse gases are retaining heat in the atmosphere.

But it's also significant and something that generally has kind of fallen between the cracks of air pollution and climate policy.

One final story to explain just the power of how that characteristic of this particle can have a forcing on the climate is there are stories of an Arctic explorer, maybe in the 19th century, heading up into the Arctic sea ice and getting their ship stuck in the ice.

They had gunpowder on the ship and they were thinking, okay, I can use this gunpowder as an explosive, put it on the ice,

crack the ice, free the ship and return back to my home.

And they tried this and it wasn't working.

And the days were passing.

They are beginning to run low on foods and the problem is becoming more and more urgent.

So they have a brainwave and they think of a different thing to do with the gunpowder, the material they have on the ship, which is just to place it on the ice and

in a line, and again, because you're darkening the color of the snow, you're increasing the rate of which it melts.

You leave it there for a day.

The next morning you wake up and the ice has parted because of that effect that you can have by changing the color of snow and ice.

So there's this really powerful forcing on glaciers and sea ice that we can get at with black carbon, as well as all those health benefits that you can see from alongside a busy road.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think it shows that

this interesting relationship again, between air pollution and climate, but also that black carbon is a great example of like, this is a global problem, but it's also so local to home.