Dark days!

If you happen to be one of the privileged to view your city’s skyline from your workplace or home, the smog at 10 am in the morning today must have puzzled you. It’s probably due to the ‘atmospheric brown cloud’.

Cities from Beijing to New Delhi are getting darker, glaciers in ranges like the Himalayas are melting faster and weather systems becoming more extreme, in part, due to the combined effects of man-made Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs) and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These are among the conclusions of scientists studying a more than three km-thick layer of soot and other manmade particles that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean.

The report says that 'dimming' of between 10-25 per cent is occurring over cities such as Karachi, Beijing, Shanghai and New Delhi. Around 13 megacities have so far been identified as ABC hotpots. Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran where soot levels are 10 per cent of the total mass of all human-made particles.

ABCs are made of small fine particles of black carbon, soot, aerosols, etc arising from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass. These particles shield the surface from sunlight by reflecting solar radiation back to space and by absorbing heat in the atmosphere. Actually the ABCs act in an opposing direction from greenhouse gases and if removed from the atmosphere could lead to a 2 deg rise in global temperatures. But the two effects combined could be having a negative impact on health, agricultural productivity, monsoon precipitation and the climate, says the report.

The study was first done in 2002 when research experiment Indoex had noted the cloud across Asia. But there has been much debate on their origins and impact. The latest report seems to somewhat end the debate. The cloud has since been sighted over Africa and South America.
But how can one prevent the burning of biomass which still happens to be the only fuel available to a large section of the poor in these countries?

That is where, as the UNEP says, it is necessary for developed nations to transfer technology to the developing world so that healthier practices can be taken up. Considering the cloud can impact areas as far away as the Americas shows it is not a confined phenomena.

The question we like to ask is: how much of such technology has been transferred? What are these? Do let us know.