Pretty soon, there will be issues with:
Eggplants 
Card Sharks 
Pool tables 
I-pods 
Chat lines 
And Hillary 
Posted on 08/02/2007 6:54:22 PM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
They call it the Asian Brown Cloud. Anyone who has flown over South Asia has seen it – a vast blanket of smog that covers much of the region.
It is also what colours those sunsets at the Taj Mahal. Now a group of scientists has carried out the first detailed study of the phenomenon and arrived at a troubling conclusion.
They say that it is causing Himalayan glaciers to melt, with potentially devastating consequences for more than two billion people in India, China, Bangladesh and other downstream countries.
In a study published yesterday by Nature, the British journal, they say that black soot particles in the cloud are absorbing the Sun’s heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers.
Scientists have already observed that two thirds of the 46,000 glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking, leading to increasingly severe floods downstream and, eventually, to widespread drought. Greenhouse gases were previously thought to be the main cause of the problem, which threatens the sources of Asia’s nine main rivers – including the Indus, the Ganges and the Yangtze.
But the research team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California says that the Asian Brown Cloud – made up of gases and suspended particles known as aerosols – is just as much to blame. “My one hope is that this finding will intensify the focus of Asian scientists and policy makers on the glacier issue,” Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the research, told The Times. “These glaciers are the source for major river systems, so at least two billion people are directly involved in this.”
The cloud is an enormous plume of smoke from factories, power plants and wood or dung fires that stretches across the Indian subcontinent, into SouthEast Asia.
Professor Ramanathan’s team examined it using three unmanned aircraft similar to those used by the US military, but fitted with fifteen instruments to measure temperature, humidity and aerosol levels. The drones were launched from the Maldives island of Hanimadhoo and carried out 18 missions over the Indian Ocean in March 2006, flying simultaneously through the cloud at different altitudes. They found that the cloud amplified the effects of solar heating on the surrounding air by 50 per cent.
The professor said that some aerosols in the cloud reflected sunlight, cooling the earth beneath in a process known as “global dimming” that is also worrying climate change experts.
Others absorbed heat radiation from the Sun because of their dark colour.
When he put his data into a computer model for climate change, it estimated that Himalayan temperatures had risen 0.25C (0.45F) a decade since 1950 – twice the average rate of global warming. “If we continue to use outdated technology to achieve industrialisation, this is only going to get worse,” said Professor Ramanathan. “But there is some good news.” Unlike greenhouse gases, which can stay in the atmosphere for 200 years, aerosols drop to the ground after two to three weeks.
Asian countries can therefore tackle the problem relatively quickly if they find alternatives to fuels such as coal, diesel, wood and dung, which account for the majority of aerosols in the air.
The United Nations Environment Programme, which supported the research, urged all governments to take similar steps since brown clouds have now been observed in Africa, America and the Middle East.
“The main cause of climate change is the build-up of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels,” said Achim Steiner, the United Nations under-secretary-general and the executive director of UNEP. “But brown clouds, whose environmental and economic impacts are beginning to be unravelled by scientists, are complicating and aggravating their effects.”
Add in frogs, boils, vermin, locust, blood, snakes, lions and lambs sleeping together, and you have “Old Testament” - (”Ghostbusters”) plus the “10 Plagues” which is recited at the Passover Dinner.
Gonna be an interesting show!
Yeah....and they are burning the forests to plant rows and rows of palm oil trees to satisfy the demand for “bio-renewable-fuel”
If these alarmists were serious they’d be bugging China to quit putting 2 Coal fired plants on line every week and would have been advocating NUCLEAR POWER for the last 20 years.
But....what they really want is for industry and the population growth it aids, to dry up and blow away.
Don’t forget that Mao started all this massive, countrywide air pollution when he told the people to make charcoal briquets in their little backyard furnaces (in the 1950’s). (Photos in Life Magazine).
I think that cloud is still circling the earth.
Pretty soon, there will be issues with:
Eggplants
Card Sharks
Pool tables
I-pods
Chat lines
And Hillary
” cooling the earth beneath in a process known as “global dimming”
First I’ve heard of THIS!
I wonder if global dimming is the direct result of the Glorious March Of World Socialism? “
It sounds better to me than Global Dhimming.
” Floods and droughts?
That’s an all-purpose cloud. “
Yes, but it’s a dry rain.
OH NO! Global Cooling!
Others absorbed heat radiation from the Sun because of their dark colour.
OH NO! Global Warming!
GoreBull Warming
Click on the image to see the video
No.
I think it's just a wet drought.
Actually, it started with the end of the last "Ice-Age" nearly 12,000 years ago.
In fact, just before the Younger Dryas, the earth was warmer than it is today... yet it still managed to plunge into another ice age.
We are not in danger of warming the planet excessively, but of plunging into another ice-age.
The End of the last Ice Age
The Earth emerged from the ice age 14,000 years ago, and for a brief period1 of about 1,300 years, things actually went quite well. Forests began to grow back and magnificent creatures such as the Irish Elk and the Woolly Mammoth flourished in the rich temperate grasslands of Europe and North America. In fact, for a time, temperatures were even warmer than they are today.The Younger Dryas
Then, around 12,700 years ago, the climate across North America, Europe and Western Asia suddenly reverted to bitterly freezing conditions. This period is known as the Younger Dryas. Icecaps reappeared over high ground and the sea levels dropped. The forests and grasslands died back, and the Irish Elk and Woolly Mammoth were driven towards final extinction. Human societies, still mainly accustomed to hunting and gathering for their sustenance, faced huge challenges as the fruits, cereals and animals on which they depended disappeared. Around this time, they adopted a new survival strategy that would enable them to live year-round, particularly during the long winter periods when absolutely no food was available. This was made possible through the intensive cultivation and nurturing of selected foodstuffs and animals close to home, an activity known today as farming. In this way, modern society was born.
Any yet, oddly, the UN didn't see fit to include China in the list of countries that should sign the Kyoto Agreement.
The model they used, which specifically addresses the unique configuration of the summit's vertical ice walls, additionally provided, in their words, "a clear indication that solar radiation is the main climatic parameter governing and maintaining ice retreat on the mountain's summit plateau in the drier climate since ca. 1880."
How about clean coal, natural gas, oil, and butanol (similar to gasoline)?
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