Daily Science Dose

You may have heard something about India and China and the threat of their current industrialization and how that industrialized pollution in the way of increased emissions of greenhouse gases will affect the world’s climate. It is true that this is and will be a huge problem for all of us, but another issue with industrialization is the more localized pollution that comes with it.

Image by Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation

India and China are playing catch-up with the rest of the industrialized world. That is one of the Bush’s administrations sticky points when it comes to not signing on to the Kyoto Protocol for all these years. Why should the US and Europe bother to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions when China and India are just starting to pump millions of tons of carbon into the air (and water) via new yet inefficient coal-fired power plants? I know, the admin’s attitude is mind-boggling and childish, but I didn’t vote for him, so it’s not like I can apologize for him and his handlers here. Instead of the US perhaps leading the innovation and technological boom in green industries and then exporting that technology and equipment to India and China, both the US economy would be doing well and China and India could go “green.” But no matter, I don’t have the space here to ruminate on the topic today.

India and China are currently heavily reliant on coal (so is the US, if you care to know). The problem with coal is that it is very dirty in addition to releasing tons of carbon upon being burned. Coal creates “brown clouds,” that is localized pollution of tiny soot particles that collect and act like their own mini-greenhouse.

Last year, National Geographic News covered a new study on these brown clouds.

But the latest study suggests that aerosols can be responsible for regional warming. Specifically, the clouds of aerosols over India enhance atmospheric warming there by 50 percent.

“We found this brown cloud can cover the entire North Indian Ocean, an area the size of the continental United States,” said lead author Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

The haze of brown clouds over the region can be up to two miles (three kilometers) thick, Ramanathan said.

And the haze touches the lower parts of the glaciers in the Himalaya mountain range, said study co-author David Winker, principal investigator of the CALIPSO satellite at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

This suggests that the brown clouds may be contributing to glacial melting in the Himalaya.

Now there are differences in aerosols. Some are light colored and some dark. It is the dark aerosols that are the contributors to these brown clouds.

Brown clouds contain dark aerosols such as soot that are released into the atmosphere by burning organic matter.

These particles absorb solar energy and then release it to the surrounding air as heat.

Natural forces such as forest fires can create soot, but so can human actions such as burning fossil fuels.

…

But unlike greenhouse gases, light and dark aerosols are not distributed uniformly throughout the globe, said Peter Pilewskie, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who was not involved in the study.

Averaging the effects of aerosols worldwide masks regional processes that “we need to truly understand when we put all the pieces of the planet together,” Pilewskie said.

Why does this all matter? The Himalayan ice cap is vital to the survival of China, India, and all their neighbors. And this ice cap, a network of thousands and thousands of glaciers, is melting, and fast.

The 15,000 Himalayan glaciers that create the “Water Tower of Asia” — the largest block of fresh water outside the Polar Ice Caps — have been melting forever. But they are suddenly melting so fast that they are drying up. It will take decades, but at the rate the earth is warming, they may simply disappear.

“Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world,” the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year. “If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

If you are bothered by the “oil wars” we see today, just wait for the “water wars” of the future.

India, China, global warming, climate change, pollution, brown clouds, aerosols, greenhouse gases, industrialization, coal, power, energy, air pollution, soot, National Geographic, National Science Foundation