Expert: Rob Gibson - 4/4/2011

Question
Hello Mr Gibson; I am a 12 year old six grader from Tegucigalpa,Honduras, Central America. I have noticed that our city is covered with smoke during the last two months, we are now in the dry months of the year, a lot of forest fires are going on right now, also sugar cane plantations are burned and that also contributes greatly with smoke, I have noticed that smokes goes away when the rainy season (6 months) starts in May, but I wonder: What effect does this smoke has on the long term weather? Older people say our city is now a lot drier and warmer, could this be caused in part by all the smoke covering our city?

Answer
Dear Tamar

Apologies for not responding before now and thank you for your question.

I have taken a look around the Internet and it seems that burning biomass (plant material)emits a substance called black carbon.  This in turn causes global warming / climate change.  Here is a link to an article which explainse this.


http://pressrepublican.com/0800_special_sections/x511770118/Black-Carbon-Impact-...


If as you say this has been happening for a long time it is likely that this will contribute to man made global warming.


A couple of things to note.

The smoke from the burning is not the only cause of man made global warming so if people were to stop doing this the drying and warming will still occur.  Even so this could be one of the practices your government could examine if it wanted to make a contribution to stopping man made climate change.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, you might want to consider the health effects of this burning which are also touched on within the article.  

If you want to look into this further may I suggest you type "black carbon" into your favorite search engine.

I hope this helps.

Rob Gibson