Killer Smog Cloud Smothers Sunlight Across Asia
by Alex Pasternack, Beijing, China on 11.13.08
Tiananmen Square, December 27, 2007. Oded Balilty / AP
Asia's Airborne Toxic Event
Don't adjust your monitors: Natural light has become 10 to 25 percent dimmer in cities such as Beijing, Karachi, Shanghai and New Delhi as 3-km thick "brown clouds" of pollution spread across Asia and elsewhere, according to a new UN report.
As the picture above (and this alarming satellite photo we previously shared) indicate, countries like China are plagued by a vast Atmospheric Brown Cloud (ABC) made of "more than three-km thick layer of soot and other man-made particles that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean," the result of burning fossil fuels and biomass. This may not be news to many, but the UN report makes vividly clear just how murky things have become.
"We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater," Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the UN scientific panel, said. "When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it's blown somewhere else."
How Far and How Dark?
The smog cloud stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. During the spring, it sweeps across Asia past North and South Korea and Japan, and sometimes drifts as far east as California and Oregon.
According to the report, India as a whole had become darker by about two percent per decade between 1960 and 2000, while China had lost its natural light by about three percent to four percent per decade from the 1950s to the 1990s.
At least 13 major cities in Asia and other regions, including Beijing and New Delhi, get less sunlight because of the pollution. The other cities are Bangkok, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Teheran. The regions affected most are eastern China; the Indo-Gangetic plains stretching across parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar; and Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Effects of the Cloud
Just yesterday, reports the People's Daily, heavy smog was blamed for the deaths of six people in car accidents in Jiangsu province.
In subtler ways, the smog cloud is killing many more people across the region. Worsening air quality and agriculture in Asia poses "increasing risks to human health and food production for three billion people."
The Times continues:
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 World Bank puts the deaths due to pollution in China alone at 750,000, according to a report last year. The figure was not released in the final draft after Chinese authorities protested, clearly worried about the impact such a number would have on the public. Not that they need a report to tell them: the country sees tens of thousands of pollution related protests each year.
The Climate Change Connection
In some cases the smog cloud is exacerbating the impact of global warming on Asia's already shrinking glaciers due to both darker aerosols that have a warming effect and pollution that ends up clogging the rivers fed by the glaciers.
"One of the most serious problems highlighted in the report is the documented retreat of the Hind Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the head-waters for most Asian rivers, and thus have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia," said lead scientist Ramanathan, of the US-based Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
And as we reported previously, warmer temperatures due to warming make it harder for smog over cities to get dispersed.
Silver Lining?
In other cases, lighter-colored aerosols may be actually deflecting heat back into space, causing a cooling effect. That sounds good -- if you like sticking your head in the clouds.
"One of the impacts of this atmospheric brown cloud has been to mask the true nature of global warming on our planet," United Nations Environment Program head Achim Steiner said.
"We believe today's report brings ever more clarity to the ABC phenomena and in doing so must trigger an international response - one that tackles the twin threats of greenhouse gases and brown clouds and the unsustainable development that underpins both," said Veerabhadran.
But here's the upshot: could this sun-and-people-killing super smog be the global equivalent of the Donora "killer smog incident" that many credit with motivating US politicians to pass the Clean Air Act? Could this put more pressure on Asian governments to step up enforcement of pollution laws, and raise the consciousness of business and political leaders around the world to invest time and money in developing Asia's promising clean energy sector?
Let's *cough* hope so.
UN Environment Program via New York Times
Also on TreeHugger:
Asian Pollution
Soot Prints: The Latest Export From China
"Brown Clouds" Over India Just as Bad as Greenhouse Gases
Effects of Smog
Anniversary of Killer Smog Event That Sparked US Clean Air Movement Commemorated in Pennsylvania Museum
A Match Made in Hell: Excess Carbon Dioxide and Air Pollution
Pollution Estimated To Cause 750,000 Premature Deaths Each Year In China
Huge Drop in Chinese Birth Defects After Local Coal Plant Closes
Alternative Energy in Asia
China Will Be the Biggest Wind Power Equipment Manufacturer by End of 2009
China Launches $3 Billion Fund For Clean Projects
I got a feeling that we will be seeing a lot more of these mysterious "fog clouds" in various places as time passes.
jess
www.internet-anonymity.net.tc
Hi, I'm presently rearsching global warming for my second book, But this article has scared the daylights out of me.
Thank you for giving such great knowledge of these events and the picture says it all.
Dee Rule
I lived in Wuxi, a small city (of 8 million) right beside shanghai, for about a year. When I came back home my doctor told me I'm lacking vitamin D. I don't know if it was the diet or the fact that I had probably had about a week's worth of proper sunlight during my stay, but I have never had this problem.
The air is almost as bad as the water.
So sad. All their land spoiled so that we can have cheaper sneakers.
It's a race now... will we be destroyed by global warming from pollution putting holes in the ozone, or will all the pollution blot out the sun and sink us into an ice age? Can't wait to find out!
that is not right, we should do more... save something, drive less... it's not here jet so we have time
I was there the time picture was taken. The square was nice and the fact it was gray - it was winter, guys.
Thats happens when you have such an uncontrolled expansion, and when you have rediculous amounts of people burning rediculous amounts of coal. Think dickensian london times a flobbity-jillion
It seems it is just a trailor of a horrible future . If we don't do anything to stop polluting our region then it will bring destruction of our envirenment and
will destroy living things on our earth . Let us reduce loading atmoshphare with smoke in our regions and spread the message all around the world to save our envirement.
You see what the problem is??? let me ask you who have posted here and future posters if ever you read these comments.... WE are great at writing how bad the smog is, how we should do something about it, how sad we are, all our sob stories about no vitamin D, smokers lung from trying to breath regular air, blah blah...
here's the twister.. what did you do after writing the post?? let me tell you what most of you did... you forgot about it in a few minutes, took your car / bike that burns petrol/ diesel and drove home or else where.. the point is A huge no. of people who talk green are hypocrites.. we talk green and are just as black as the next man/ woman is...
I tried to make a difference.. so do others in my company actually... we cycle to work and everywhere except the really long distances or if we're needed in a hurry someplace far away...
stop talking about going green and go green!!
Just want to add in that we have been getting some pretty thick haze these days over here in Japan.
It was very nice in the neighboring prefecture a couple days ago though. Seems to be a day by day thing here.
I recall descending through this cloud once in an airplane, Chinese air pollution is very very real, and the thing is - we all breathe the air that comes out of their smoke stacks. About time their Politburo decided to clean it up.
If the picture of the guy flying a kite in Tiananmen Square isn't a vision of post industrial apocalyptic hell, I don't know what is. Lovely colors in the kite, but I'd leave the Kodachrome at home.
I excerpted this at my place this morning, ironically enough it was just after I posted an editorial about limiting snowmobiles in Yellowstone: http://worldwide-sawdust.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2998
Some days its hard to wrap your head around the follies of men.
Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
Sid:
How do you or the people at your company know how to be "green"? How are you able to distinguish between the eco-wise actions and those that just appear to be that way when in fact they are not? How did you learn about ecological problems where you live and anywhere else on the planet? How do most discover when a well written post is factually incorrect?
Let me tell you how you did... You read about it somewhere. Written by people you call "hypocrites".
By all means, keep doing the good things, but please don't encourage people to stop spreading the knowledge around. There are still so many who have no clue or are just misinformed.
Karsten
http://www.polluteless.com
This is so scary! Maybe we should all carry around personal air filters i.e. face masks?
There are farmer's whose lives depend on those crops which are being affected by ABC. They will be forced to work in the cities, only risking their health further!
-Dillon
http://www.Greenhome.com