Barry Rabe, Brookings: "If we’re thinking about this long-term century or multi-century issue, that’s a CO2 problem and it’s a huge one. But when we look at these short-lived climate pollutants, the impacts for a molecule or a ton of methane or HFCs compared to carbon dioxide is much, much greater in those first years or decades. That’s why this is increasingly begun to get the attention of scientists, policymakers, and the like because we recognize that this warming process is already accelerating much more rapidly than we would all like. I tend to say somewhere between a quarter and a third of all the global warming that’s already occurred is linked to, broadly defined, short-lived climate pollutants."
