Not only is black carbon terrible for human health, but ever-fiercer wildfires are covering the Arctic with the dark particles, accelerating melting.

Once again, vast expanses of Canadian wilderness are on fire, threatening towns and forcing thousands to flee. It appears to be a breakout of “zombie fires”: wildfires from last year that never actually went out completely but carried on smoldering underground, reigniting ground vegetation again this year. They’ve been pouring smoke—once again—into northern cities in the United States. That haze is loaded with a more obscure form of carbon, compared to its famous cousin CO2: black carbon. By May 16, the fires’ monthly carbon emissions surpassed 15 megatons, soaring above previous years.

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CO2 and methane (CH4) get all the attention as planet-warming gases. And rightfully so: Humanity has to massively cut its emissions as fast as possible to slow climate change. At the same time, we’re neglecting easy ways to reduce emissions of black carbon.
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The other major sources of black carbon are heavy industries burning coal and the transportation sector—think of the black clouds spewing out the back of old buses. So the uniting factor here is fossil fuels: Decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible will stop emissions of greenhouse gases and black carbon, simultaneously improving public health. By reducing global temperatures, we’ll keep wildfires from getting even worse and jettisoning ever more black carbon into the Arctic, hastening its rapid decline. “Climate change is the ultimate driver of this,” says Ekwurzel. “So that needs to be the first-and-foremost solution: fossil fuel reductions.”

Read the whole article at wired.com =>