Come on, China and India. Get your act together! I know it is unfair for industrialized nations who created lots of pollution during their rise to ask you to keep it clean, but technology is much more advanced nowadays compared to the Industrial Revolution over a century ago. With the huge populations you must support long into the future, you need to think about the cascading consequences of your actions today. As an American, it would be hypocritical of me to ask that you reduce your greenhouse gas emissions while my country spews out a disproportionate amount of the world's emissions. However, you can relatively easily reduce the amount of soot and toxic chemicals you release into the environment. Don't do it because we said you should. Do it for your people.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ONLINE:
U.N. Report Sees New Pollution Threat
By
ANDREW JACOBSPublished: November 13, 2008
BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and
toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions
of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia,
according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.
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 they
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, say a team of more
than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.
Combined with mounting evidence that greenhouse gases are leading to a
rise in global temperatures, the report's authors called on governments
both rich and poor to address the problem of carbon emissions.
"The
imperative to act has never been clearer," said Achim Steiner,
executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in
Beijing, where the report, titled "Atmospheric Brown Clouds: Regional
Assessment Report With Focus on Asia," was released.
The
brownish haze, sometimes more than a mile thick and clearly visible
from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea.
During the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan.
Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.
The
report identified 13 cities as brown-cloud hotspots, among them
Bangkok, Cairo, New Delhi, Seoul and Tehran. In some Chinese cities,
the smog has reduced sunlight by as much as 20 percent since the 1970s,
it said.
Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black
grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan
glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China,
India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the
Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow rivers are absorbing more sunlight
and melting more rapidly, researchers say.
According to the
Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent
since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by
another 75 percent by 2050.
"We used to think of this brown
cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much
greater," said Prof. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United
Nations scientific panel. "When we see the smog one day and not the
next, it just means it's blown somewhere else."
Although their
overall impact is not entirely understood, Professor Ramanathan, a
professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of
California, San Diego, said the clouds might be affecting rainfall in
parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been
decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating
floods have become more frequent.
He said that some studies suggest that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.
For
those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning
Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University,
estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from
cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the
emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and kitchen stoves
fueled by twigs.
"The impacts on health alone is a reason to
reduce these brown clouds," he said, adding that in China, about 3.6
percent of the nation's annual gross domestic product, or $82 billion,
is lost to the health effects of pollution.
The scientists who
worked on the report said the blanket of haze hovering over Asia and
other parts of the world might be mitigating the worst effects of
greenhouse gases by absorbing solar heat or reflecting it away from the
earth. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, tend to trap the warmth of the
sun and lead to a rise in ocean temperatures.
Mr. Steiner, the
head of the United Nations environment program, said the findings
complicated the global-warming narrative. The brown clouds mask the
impact of the greenhouse gases, he said: Without the blocking effect of
the smog, he said, climate change would be far worse.
"All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to take on emissions across the planet," he said.
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