Interesting point, but I wonder how such a change would come about when people often can’t afford an alternative?
Let there be clean light: Kerosene lamps spew black carbon, should be replaced, study says
By Sarah Yang, Media Relations BERKELEY —
The primary source of light for more than a billion people in developing nations is also churning out black carbon at levels previously overlooked in greenhouse gas estimates, according to a new study led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois.
Results from field and lab tests found that 7 to 9 percent of the kerosene in wick lamps — used for light in 250-300 million households without electricity — is converted to black carbon when burned. In comparison, only half of 1 percent of the emissions from burning wood is converted to black carbon.
Factoring in the new study results leads to a twentyfold increase in estimates of black carbon emissions from kerosene-fueled lighting.
The previous estimates come from established databases used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others. One kilogram of black carbon, a byproduct of incomplete combustion and an important greenhouse gas, produces as much warming in a month as 700 kilograms of carbon dioxide does over 100 years, the authors said.
“The orange glow in flames comes from black carbon, so the brighter the glow, the more black carbon is being made,” said study principal investigator Tami Bond, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “If it’s not burned away, it goes into the atmosphere.”
The findings, published online this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, are coming out at the same time that the United Nations Climate Change Conference kicks off in Doha, Qatar. While officials from around the world are seeking effective policies and guidelines for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the study authors note that the simple act of replacing kerosene lamps could pack a wallop toward that effort.
“There are no magic bullets that will solve all of our greenhouse gas problems, but replacing kerosene lamps is low-hanging fruit, and we don’t have many examples of that in the climate world,” said study co-author Kirk Smith, professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and director of the Global Health and Environment Program. “There are many inexpensive, cleaner alternatives to kerosene lamps that are available now, and few if any barriers to switching to them.”
Smith pointed to lanterns with light-emitting diodes that can be powered by solar cells or even advanced cookstoves that generate electricity from the heat produced. Such technology, said Smith, is already available in developing countries.
The researchers used kerosene lamps purchased in Uganda and Peru and conducted field experiments there to measure the emissions. They repeated the tests in the lab using wicks of varying heights and materials, and kerosene purchased in the United States as well as in Uganda.
The study authors noted that converting to cleaner light sources would not only benefit the planet, it would help improve people’s health. A recent epidemiological study in Nepal led by Smith and other researchers at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, for example, found that women who reported use of kerosene lamps in the home had 9.4 times the rate of tuberculosis compared with those who did not use such lamps.
“Getting rid of kerosene lamps may seem like a small, inconsequential step to take, but when considering the collective impact of hundreds of millions of households, it’s a simple move that affects the planet,” said study lead author Nicholas Lam, a UC Berkeley graduate student in environmental health sciences.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, U.S. Agency for International Development and Environmental Protection Agency helped support this research.
I am just speculating here but might it not have something to do with poverty? Just askin.
Roger Pielke Jr. has an article about this very subject. Poverty and access to energy.
Take a look!
Against “Modern Energy Access”
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.ca/2012/11/against-modern-energy-access.html
Re: “One kilogram of black carbon… an important greenhouse gas, produces as much warming in a month as 700 kilograms of carbon dioxide does over 100 years, the authors said.”
Obviously, as John M notes, black carbon (soot) is not a gas, let alone a greenhouse gas.
However, the claim that carbon in the form of aerosol soot in the lowest atmosphere has 700 x (12/44) x 12 x 100 = 229,091 times the warming effect of the same amount of carbon in CO2 also seems astonishing.
AFAIK, soot:
1. warms the earth only by lowering albedo, which it does to much effect only when it settles out on snow and ice (i.e., never in the tropics); and
2. settles/washes out of the lowest atmosphere very quickly – typically in a matter of a few days or weeks; and
3. cools, rather than warms, the surface of the earth while airborne, by reducing the amount of sunlight which reaches the surface.
So how on earth can kerosene lamps in Haiti or Uganda possibly have any global warming effect at all, let alone >200,000 times the warming effect of the same amount of carbon in CO2? At most, it seems that it could contribute to a locally increased UHI effect.
The journal article, unfortunately, is behind a paywall:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es302697h
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23163320
I’ve written to the senior author, Prof. Tami Bond, asking if there’s a non-paywalled copy anywhere. (I checked arXiv.org, but it’s not there.)
Here she is testifying about black carbon before a Congressional committee five years ago:
The last five seconds are the most interesting, IMO: she admits that reducing black carbon emissions can reduce warming “only in the short term.” (Note: she mentioned “climate” and “warming” four times each, but never used the word “global.”)
I wonder whether her real motivation might a humanitarian concern about the health effects of soot on the people who inhale it? Perhaps she’s just craftily trying to hitch that worthy cause to the global warming gravy train, so that some good can come from the vast sums wasted on climate concerns.
Additionally, climate scientists are 97% smarter. Settled science, don’t you know?
I learn something new every day. 🙂
Robin wrote:
Luckily back in the US, the EPA in a document mapping out its future plans laid out its adoption of Systems Theory/Systems Dynamics as laid out by Meadows in the controversial Limits to Growth in order to use “Science” to help protect public health. It was utterly delighted to now have so much power over the economy and planned to go on a hiring binge for “Scientists” with aspirations for planning with Big Data. It was also delighted that its new education People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3) student grant initiative was bringing in plenty of prospective planners captured while their idealism greatly exceeded their knowledge.
That reminds me of a project designed by Stafford Beer, a British expert on “cybernetics”, to control the economy of Chile when it had a Marxist president, Salvador Allende, in the early 1970s. The system was installed and used for a while but was abandoned when President Allende was overthrown. There is an article about it in Wikipedia.
Project Cybersyn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Coleman lanterns burn unleaded gasoline.
White gas vs. kerosene
http://www.trailspace.com/forums/camp-kitchen/topics/34228.html
“… kerosene lamps in the home had 9.4 times the rate of tuberculosis…”
So, does this mean kerosene causes tuberculosis, or does it mean that people not wealthy enough to afford electricity also have risk factors for tuberculosis, such as crowded conditions and limited medical treatment?
Correlation does not demonstrate causation.
The nonsense continues.
Excess winter deaths may rise between now and 2020. Just wait until an overcast, bitterly cold, relatively windless winter’s day over just half of the UK.
Roger Knights says:
November 29, 2012 at 9:55 am
$50 is the retail price, I’m sure that if you are buying them in bulk, you can get them for a lot cheaper.
Steven Mosher says:
There is no c02 sensitivity dial.
_________________________________________
And there you have it folks.
Steven Mosher has just admitted to the world that the CO2 sensitiviy is cast in stone in the computer models EVERYTHING else can be adjusted to make sure the model can be fudged to give the ‘right’ answer but that CO2 sensitivity is absolutely sacred.
With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk. ~von Neumann
Just don’t touch that CO2 parameter what ever you do.
The enviromentalists took away their lives (40 million I believe ) when they banned DDT, now they want to take away their light.
The green solution to this obviously is withholding electricity from these poor people while taking away their kerosene lamps because both are evil destroyers of Gaia. Instead they are to live in darkness while their green benefactors call out the industrial world for keeping them in poverty.
Save Water. Drink Champagne.
Whatever warming effect soot has on our climate is both arguable as well as being a red herring. It doesn’t matter in the slightest. It is a real pollutant (unlike C02), has very real consequences on people’s health, particularly those in 3rd-world countries, and that is why it needs to be reduced. How to do that is the big question. The Warmist cult would say carbon taxes and other transfer-of-wealth schemes.
Isn’t soot thought to be a negative feedback? Or is it another one of those things where nobody is sure of the sign?
How much reduction in lamp black production and increased light would they get from simply adding a glass chimney?
Simple and likely to producible with local labor.
MarkW says:
November 29, 2012 at 8:47 am
Don’t Coleman style lanterns also use kerosene? Since they glow with a white light, I’m guessing they would produce little if any carbon black. I’m also guessing that they are more efficient than the style of lamp shown in the picture above.
For a fraction of the money that was wasted on Solyndra, we could buy every poor person in the world a Coleman style lantern.
The fuel used in a Coman lamp is white gas, or in the “dual fuel” versions you can also use unleaded gasoline. Kerosene is heavier and somewhat less volatile. The flame of a kerosene lamp supplies the light – according to some sources by actually heating the soot to incandescence. In a Colman-style pressurized lamp, the fuel is gasified by being pressurized. Once the lamp reaches a working temperature the mantle heats up and emits visible light with a spectrum dependent on the doping agents used to fabricate the mantle. The “cloth” mantle is doped with metallic salts, typically thorium cerium oxide, that glow brightly in the visible spectrum when heated. All the flame does in a Colman lamp is heat the mantle. They are considerably more efficient than a kerosene lamp.
The technology to reduce the amount of soot produced by a kerosene lamp, or any other lamp burning a liquid fuel through a wick, has been available for at least 150 years. The version of that lamp which Coleman markets was first patented in 1868 and there has been modest improvement on that design. If those people using kerosene lamps are not using at least that version then the most economic and environmental solution is to provide them with the facilities and designs to make their own, not providing them with ‘modern’ light producing equivalents whose manufacture is too expensive for these people and whose manufacture is actually more environmentally damaging than the supposed damage they are preventing.
Last year I did a study on the availability of fresh drinkable water to third world countries. People, like the ones who conducted this study, would have them supplied with modern water purification plants which they cannot afford and which they can’t maintain because they don’t have the necessary technical expertise, when simple natural water filtration methods can provide them with that. The economic fact is that even these simple, and relatively inexpensive, filters are too expensive for villagers whose average annual income is less than $1000 (16 countries – mostly in Africa – had an average annual per capita income of less than $1000 in 2007 according to the IMF).
Were some philanthropic organization to fund the $3-4b needed to get all these kerosene lamps traded in for solar/human power LED lamps the price of kerosene would plummet encouraging even more use. I love climate economics.
How much was the grant for this research?
How many clean lamps would it have bought at the previously mentioned retail price of $50?
And the author is worried about Black Carbon??? If all of the nonsense studies into global warming had not been done, everyone the world over could have had a clean burning lamp. I am so angry.
And @Steve Mosher I always read all of your posts. I admire your tenacity. I understand your fervent belief in CO2 global warming. I know you think you understand everything about the climate sytem and the modelling thereof But:
“The first rule of holes: When you’re in one stop digging.”
A third of the world’s population tests positive for TB antibodies. It’s as high as 80% is some Asian countries. Which means these people have been infected by the TB bacteria at some stage. There are 2 reasons why most of these people don’t develop symptomatic TB. Natural resistance and environmental factors, primarily poor nutrition, other infections and factors that cause lung damage, which would include black carbon.
a) Nothing in this article is about climate models.
b) For people laughing about the tuberculosis/kerosene study not considering confounders you should – just a crazy idea here – read the abstract, heck maybe even the whole paper – to see if they controlled for those confounders. Its available here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2854735/ and yes they did control for everything you were thinking about.
c)
i) Carbon tax in developed world -> less energy consumption in developed world ->lower energy prices in developing world.
ii) carbon tax in developed world -> investment in energy saving tech and new energy sources -> that tech trickle down to developing world -> higher living standards per energy consumption in developing world.
i + ii -> carbon taxes in developed world increase living standards in developing world, before considering effects on climate. (Unless you think the developing world is highly dependent on energy intensive imports from the developed world)
Andy
One kilogram of black carbon, a byproduct of incomplete combustion and an important greenhouse gas, produces as much warming in a month as 700 kilograms of carbon dioxide does over 100 years, the authors said.
I assume this is a reference to the atmospheric scattering of solar radiation by BC. This is a highly questionable number for a number of reasons. When BC scatters incoming solar radiation the atmosphere is warmed, but this is energy that would otherwise have reached the surface where most of would have been absorbed (excepting ice and snow surfaces). Being scattered by atmospheric BC results in the energy having a shorter path to space than energy absorbed by the surface. So, BC both warms the atmosphere and cools the climate.