A dirty brown haze sometimes more than 1km thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns and threatening health and food supplies, the UN reported.
The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as “atmospheric brown clouds.”
When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth’s atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, a report commissioned by the UN Environment Program and released on Thursday said.
PHOTO: AP
“All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet,” said Achim Steiner, head of Kenya-based UNEP, which funded the report with backing from Italy, Sweden and the US.
Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals that come from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by the report’s lead researcher in 1990, the clouds were depicted on Thursday as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known.
Perhaps most widely recognized as the haze this past summer over Beijing’s Olympics, the clouds have been found to be more than 1km thick around glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountain range. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions.
“All these have led to negative effects on water resources and crop yields,” the report said.
Health problems associated with particulate pollution, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, are linked to nearly 350,000 premature deaths in China and India every year, said Henning Rohde, a University of Stockholm scientist who worked on the study.
Soot levels in the air were reported to have risen alarmingly in 13 cities: Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.
Brown clouds were also cited as dimming the light by as much as 25 percent in some places, including Karachi, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing.
The phenomenon complicates the climate change scenario because the brown clouds also help cool the earth’s surface and mask the impact of global warming by an average of 40 percent, the report said.
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