TRADITIONAL fuels such as wood and crop waste are the prime cause of climate change in south Asia. Burning them produces the bulk of the soot that now hangs in a cloud, along with other polluting particulates, over the region for much of the year.
A 3-kilometre-thick brown haze blankets much of south Asia and the northern Indian Ocean from October to May. As a result, surface temperatures in the region have fallen, and there is less evaporation and summer monsoon rainfall. “Black carbon [soot] is the most insidious component in the soup,” says Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution…
