Massive Pollution-based Weather-system Choking South & East Asia
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Related subjects: Asia / Pacific, Carbon Emissions, China, Climate Change, Denver Lessing, Environment & Ecology, Humanitarian Crisis, India Comments (1)
The cloud of soot and smog choking India and China and their neighbors is worsening. The massive brown cloud hovering over Asia now poses serious long-term health risks and environmental dangers to much of the continent, according to a new UN report. The world’s largest pollution phenomenon already drastically reduces the amount of daylight reaching ground level in many Chinese cities, and there is concern the sunlight-blocking effects could impede agricultural production.
Andrew Jacobs, writing for the International Herald Tribune, reports that:
The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, wood-burning kitchen stoves and coal-fired power plants, these plumes of carbon dust rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America but are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, says a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.
Climate scientists, including the Nobel-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and colleagues working for NASA and the ESA, are increasingly concerned that human-induced carbon-emissions are responsible for a dangerous global increase in average temperatures. Estimates suggest a “point of no return” may be nearing for any efforts to preempt the worst catastrophic results expected as a result of carbon-based climate change.
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While the US is examining ways to shift to a clean-energy economy, and new global protocols are in the works to curb carbon emissions, the combustion-based industrial boom taking root in India and China will likely remain a threat to global climate patterns. China has been experiencing aggressive soil erosion, ecosystem collapse and desertification, across the northwest, to such an extent that sands carried on the eastbound winds at times reach as far as Beijing and contribute to the air quality crisis there.
Also according to IHT, “The brownish haze, sometimes more than a mile, or 1.6 kilometers, thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea.” Much of the terrain obscured by the Asian smog front is among the world’s most hydro-scarce, raising concerns about the prospects of an accelerated global water shortage, the consequences of which could be unprecedented mass migration, tens of millions of deaths from famine or disease, the collapse of nation-states and even the risk of a global or semi-global conflict.
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