Removing the black carbon can help

Placing strict limits on a handful of common air pollutants could pay big dividends for efforts to limit climate change, improve public health and increase agricultural productivity, according to a new U.N. report. These are aerosols like black carbon, and methane and ozone. Additionally, limiting emissions of black carbon and chemicals that react with sunlight to form tropospheric ozone could prevent 2.4 million premature deaths and the loss of 1 to 4 percent of the global output of maize, rice, soybean and wheat each year, the analysis found.

Now that's a huge benefit to be ignored!

Cuts in these emissions could be made with existing technology, the report says, and would "have immediate and multiple benefits for human well-being." Possible strategies for reducing black carbon, methane and ozone include capturing methane produced by landfills and fossil fuel extraction, introducing cleaner-burning cookstoves, installing particulate filters on diesel engines and banning the practice of burning fields of agricultural waste.

Black carbon is produced by the burning of fossil fuels as well as biomass like wood and dung.

Researchers expanded the analysis to look at chemicals like methane and precursors to ozone because they are emitted by the same processes -- like biomass burning -- that produce black carbon. Like black carbon, methane and ozone are potent, even if short-lived, greenhouse gases. Black carbon, for example, lingers in the atmosphere for weeks, compared to CO2, which can last for centuries to millennia.

All three can damage human health, while ozone can lower crop yields. Meanwhile, black carbon acts in several ways to accelerate climate change. It absorbs heat from sunlight, warming the surrounding air. When particles of black carbon fall from the atmosphere on ice or snow, they hasten melting. Earlier work suggests that black carbon emissions caused half the total warming in the Arctic between 1890 and 2007.

Perhaps governments of developing nations will pay attention and do something fast about the burning of biomass in unhealthy, unhygienic cookstoves, etc.