Simple solution for 3rd world greenhouse

Researchers the world over are looking for 'magic pill' solutions to climate change. Sometimes the simplest solutions are right under their noses...

Science Alert reports that a Phillipino engineer Alexis Belonio and US physicist Steve Garrett have combined efforts to develop a simple inexpensive little cooker that uses waste biomass such as rice husks to produce a clean burn.

This in turn would do away with many millions of polluting cookers and open fires that are a major source of "black carbon". This is the soot from fires and fuels that goes into the atmosphere and is some 600-700 times as damaging as CO2, because the dark colour aids heat absorption.

The kicker is that black carbon only persists inn the atmosphere for around 10 days. So real reductions in warming could be seen very quickly after rolling out the cookers to impoverished areas.

Then there's the reduced indoor air pollution, reduced expense of other fuels like kerosene or gas, and so the benefits roll on.