THE brown haze that hangs over southern Asia during the winter is largely the result of burning biomass for cooking and heating.
Örjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden and his team studied the proportion of carbon-14 in soot particles collected from the top of a mountain at Sinhagad, India, and from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. As its half-life is about 5700 years, most of the carbon-14 in fossil fuels would have decayed long ago. So the high levels of carbon-14 found in the soot show that wood stoves must be the source of two-thirds of the haze (…
