The Charcoal Project

Black Carbon

Video animation of black carbon emissions over Asia

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

This short YouTube video shows how tiny air pollution particles known as black carbon move throughout our planet. We reported on Asia’s Atmospheric Brown Clouds earlier.

Though global distribution of soot remains difficult to measure, NASA researchers use satellite data and computer models to better understand how these short-lived particles influence Earth’s climate, cryosphere, and clouds.

This scientific data visualization uses data from the GEOS5 GOCART climate model to show black carbon’s atmospheric concentration from August to November in 2009.

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Can The Hartwell Paper bring biomass & energy efficiency out of the development wilderness?

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

OPINION I almost cut myself shaving this morning while listening to a BBC News story about The Hartwell Paper, which I’d only heard about en passant. The Hartwell Paper was drafted by a group of academics in an attempt to offer a radically different way of framing the issues raised by climate change, and hence a different set of approaches for tackling them. I’m writing about this now because, if the ideas put forward gain traction, they have the potential to place energy poverty and unsustainable biomass dependence where it belongs: out of the sustainable development wilderness and into the Continue reading→

MONGOLIAN Capital grapples with smog problem from IAP

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

At two to 10 times above Mongolian and international air quality standards, Ulaanbaatar’s PM rates are among the worst in the world, according to a December 2009 World Bank report. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimates that health costs related to this air pollution account for as much as 4 percent of Mongolia’s GDP.

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