Here is a longer passage. Quickly skim the passage to get the main idea.

1. Buses spew clouds of black exhaust fumes in Mexico City while, in India, wood burnt in rudimentary stoves fills houses with sooty smoke. Methane leaks from gas pipelines in Russia and rice paddies in China, eventually breaking down in sunlight and contributing to the production of smog and ozone. In each of these cases, simple steps to curb air pollution would promote public health; scaled up, they may offer the only realistic way to tame global warming over the next few decades.
2. Rapid measures to reduce emissions of black carbon, which soaks up solar energy, and methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, could cut the rate of global warming in half between now and 2050, according to an analysis published last week. Such numbers have spurred political interest, and next month a small coalition of countries is aiming to launch an initiative that would target these 'short-lived climate forcers·. If successful, the effort could have an immediate impact on global temperatures while countries grapple with efforts to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas.

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3. 'We're in a gridlock over carbon dioxide, and we're losing time, says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and a co-author of the Science analysis. 'This is one way to buy back some of that time, and the co-benefits are huge.' By 2030, these reduction measures could prevent anywhere from 700,000 to 4.7 million premature deaths from air pollution annually, the study found. And because ozone is toxic to plants, such measures could boost global crop production by 1-4%.
4. The United Nations Environment Programme explored the potential gains in a detailed assessment last June. Chaired by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the assessment ranked hundreds of options for reducing black carbon and ozone pollution according to their potential to reduce warming. A follow-up report, released in November and funded by the Swedish government, further analyzed opportunities and impacts at national and regional levels. This work served as the basis for the Science study.
5. For methane, the study identified 14 control measures that would target leakage from coal mining and oil and gas operations, emissions from landfills, wastewater systems, livestock manure and rice paddies. Black-carbon reduction would focus on cleaning up diesel vehicle emissions, biomass stoves, brick kilns and coke ovens. Other measures would reduce the burning of agricultural waste and provide alternatives to wood, dung and charcoal for cooking and heating in poor countries.
6. It could take decades to slow global warming through reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, whereas cutting soot and methane would have immediate climate payoffs because they are quickly purged from the atmosphere.

Jeff Tolleson