Reading this was a little frustrating, as it appears to be written by authors who have never operated a wood-burning stove, and don't have a great grasp of how

Reading this was a little frustrating, as it appears to be written by authors who have never operated a wood-burning stove, and don't have a great grasp of how fire works. "In this study, we present air quality and climate effects of previously unrecognized aerosol source, i.e., kerosene-based firelighters that emit more BC than all biomass fuels put together." Black carbon is formed by incomplete combustion. When temperatures are low, and/or fuel is wet, of course there won't be complete combustion. Of course if you light just a firelighter it's going to throw off a lot of black smoke. Every fire does this when you first start it, because temperatures are low. Same goes with crude oil and coal. Fuels burn poorly and give off a lot of smoke without optimal burning conditions. This should be obvious. Firestarters work well as firestarters precisely because they are able to start and burn at very low temperatures. The way that they do this is by emitting a large quantity of organic aerosols and black carbon particles at very low temperatures. In a cold environment, the mixture won't have enough heat to fully combust. If the authors tried throwing a firestarter into a hot fire, they would have seen that it burns relatively cleanly, just like coal and oil would. Then the authors burn peat, which has an unbelievably high surface area, and think that it burns more cleanly. And of course the tests were done by igniting a cold sample, so that it would be a "controlled test", instead of a bomb calorimeter style test. What the authors are doing is reminiscent of using calories measured using a bomb calorimeter to measure how much energy the human body gets. It's garbage science that sounds plausible and has lots of pretty charts, but doesn't hold up to cursory inspection.