Hallelujah! Cliff Harris admits Arctic warming. Of course, he attributes it to soot and not CO2 but it's a start. According to Skeptical Science on April 2, "black carbon (BC, soot) is a short term climate forcer, acting for a few days in the atmosphere and a few months on snow and ice." So the greenhouse gasses which stay in the atmosphere for decades and centuries will continue to be far more important than BC for long periods of time.

Doherty et al. "Light-absorbing impurities in Arctic Snow" suggests that over the period 1980s to 2010 black carbon has been constant or even slowly declining. That shows that the warmer Arctic can't be a result of BC. But it can very easily be the result of a long-term carbon dioxide build up.

The Integrated Assessment of Black Carbon and Tropospheric Ozone; United Nations Environmental Program, 2011 says, "Short-live climate forcers - methane, black carbon and ozone - are fundamentally different from the longer-lived greenhouse gasses, remaining in the atmosphere for only a relatively short time. Deep and immediate carbon dioxide reductions are required to protect long-term climate, as this cannot be achieved by addressing short-lived climate forcers." This directly contradicts Harris.

Our cold and wet March was due to a La Nina in the Pacific according to John Christy of the University of Alabama. Keven Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research points out that "what goes down one place, comes up another." This is true of the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is running extremely high surface sea temperatures. The Argo Project reports that since 1993, the oceans have absorbed enough excess power to light nearly 500 100 watt light bulbs for each of the world's 6.7 billion people. Thus, global warming leads to the killer storms that Harris describes.

Basically, Black Carbon doesn't last long enough to cause long-term Arctic warming. Even if it could the supply is declining so the Arctic should be cooling. Studies show that reducing BC will not stop global warming or even Arctic warming. The nation will start being hit by repeated wide-ranging killer storms.

JEFFREY E. BOURGET

Coeur d'Alene