Word: soot
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...from the Arabian peninsula to the western Pacific Ocean - has long captured the curiosity of scientists. A report released in the Jan. 23 issue of Science breathes fresh air into that ongoing study, confirming that the mass, nicknamed the 'Brown Cloud' but comprised of several small, local clouds, is soot from human burning of wood, dung and crop residue, as well as industrial processes and traffic pollution...
...rjan Gustafsson, the study's lead author, and his colleagues at Stockholm University conducted research with Indian scientists from January to April 2006 to determine that two-thirds of the cloud's soot particles come from biomass combustion like household cooking and slash-and-burn agriculture. The researchers confirmed that the layer of haze - which many have blamed for the world's increasingly extreme weather patterns - makes rain both more rare during the dry season and more intense during monsoons. And in South Asia, the cloud's net effect on climate change, says the study, rivals that of carbon dioxide...
...Program, for instance, warned that 340,000 people in China and India alone die annually from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to human-induced emissions of combustible particles in these atmospheric brown clouds. It concluded that regional pollution's impact can go global since winds blow soot across the world within weeks, and it, too, noted that brown clouds exacerbate deadly flooding and droughts...
...summer." It followed the Tambora Volcano eruption in Indonesia in 1815. It was sudden climate change on a similar scale, and it resulted in a severe famine in Europe, food riots and mass emigrations. Volcanic aerosols have a lifetime of about a year in the stratosphere. The lifetime of soot from nuclear fires is about five years. It's obviously much harder for a society to recover from such an extended cooling...
...another fire lapped ravenously, unforgivingly against the inner walls of her being, threatening to consume her. A rafter fell with an explosion, and Roxanna lifted her hands to shield her face. But then she stilled, staring down with horror at her once ethereally white hands. They were black with soot...