asian brown cloud [not SUVs] causing global warming?

Question

check this out ... Indian researcher Veerabhadran Ramanathan from Scripps talks about the Asian Brown Cloud that he (and others) discovered in 1999. Latest measurements as reported in the journal Nature on Aug 2nd [see link below] suggest that burning biofuels for cooking, etc. by the poor people of Asia is a greater source of global warming than buring fossil fuels by the developed nations.

{This is because uncontrolled burning of this sort creates a huge amounts of soot per energy unit which modern fossil fuel burning does not.}

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This suggests that what the world needs is less of Al Gore and more economic development in poor countries.

We could help that by giving free trade to every country whose GDP per worker is less than 1/5th of ours.


What do you think?


[link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7153/edsumm/e070802-01.html]

i'm sorry the link did not work; I do not know why. It is the August 2nd edition of Nature. Only a limited summary is available online unless you pay 18 USD for the whole thing.

Dr. R's earlier papers are not relevent to this since the new research he did refuted his earlier conclusions, according to the summary/analysis I read elsewhere. {ie: his new conclusion is that the Asian Brown Cloud is causing widespread temperature increases in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.}

I believe, but am not certain, that an attempt was made to scale up the local research to other areas {Indian Ocean, etc.}.

We have to account for the population explosion in underdeveloped countries over the past two generations. Nearly all underdeveloped peoples cook with and heat with very primitive open fires -- soot producers -- simply because they can afford nothing else.

This would describe much of Africa and underd'd Asia, including much of earth's population.

Answer 1

Where there's more Capitalism, there's less pollution.

Compare countries like China, India, Russia to countries like France, Canada, and the USA. The more capitalism there is in a country, the less smog produced.

Answer 2

I t (the "brown cloud" is certainly a contributing factor. But--this is a fairly recent phenomenon--those countries wern't using all that much fossil fuel until recently--and global warming started previously to large scale use in those countries.

By now--it might be a bigger factor. Personally I doubt it--the key variable is the quantity of CO2 released, and auto emissions are still the largest source of excess CO2. But this is certainly an area that should be better researched and understood.

And--to give them credit, the Indians are doing a better job of taking action than we are. They are moving rapidly toward shifting much of their energy production to solar power--which will help--and given the new technologies in that area that are in the pipeline, they should be able to afford the changeover. I hate to say it--but they're ahead of us on this.

BTW--you didn't mention it--but one concern is that the kind of fossil fuel use that's common there is worse in another way--unlike ourcars, this uncontrolled burning releases a lot of other pollutants. That's why China is already getting a lot of the acid rain that was a problem years ago in the US before we started using technologies like catalytic converters to. Unfortunately, there's no equivalent technology to keep gasoline engines from emitting CO2--so we need alternatives to that basic technology. Fortunately, that's doable--either hydrogen or electric. And, really, it stime. The gasoline engine is basically a 19th century technology--there's better and cheaper available (cheaper in large-scale use, that is--right now the limited volume makes alternnatives expensive to produce). But fossil fuel is really obsolete. We need to move on to the better alternatives, global warming or no global warming, simply for economic reasons.

Answer 3

Your link didn't work so I found a similar paper by Ramanathan (linked below), and you seem to be misunderstanding his conclusions:

"The additional heat trapped by the increase in greenhouse gases from the late nineteenth century to the present time should have committed the planet to a global warming in the range of 1ºC to 3ºC (see Ramanathan, 1988 for an explanation of the term committed warming). The observed global surface warming is only about 0.6 K, i.e., only about 20% to 60% of the committed warming (depending on whether we use 3 K or 1K for the committed warming). Some of this warming has been masked by the dimming due to brown clouds and the remaining heat is stored in the depths of the ocean to be released in the coming decades to centuries."

He's not saying the brown cloud is causing global warming, he's saying it's slowing global warming by blocking sunlight and causing global dimming.

*edit* I found an article that mentions what you're talking about, but he's just referring to an increased warming in Asia, not globally:

"The conventional thinking is that brown clouds have masked as much as 50 percent of the global warming by greenhouse gases through the so-called global dimming," said Dr. Ramanathan.

"While this is true globally," he said, "this study reveals that over southern and eastern Asia, the soot particles in the brown clouds are intensifying the atmospheric warming trend caused by greenhouse gases by as much as 50 percent."

Answer 4

The chinese brown cloud has to do with contamination from China coming into the United States and affecting our health. I believe our businesses should be held responsible for the contamination coming out of other countries (like the brown cloud in china).

For example the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It basicly sends all US and Canadian factories and businesses south of the border into Mexico. Since Mexico isn't that strict on pollution, these factories and businesses are free to pollute as much as they want. The same applies to China.

So the problem isn't China, it's the international treaties which allow businesses to bypass strict rules and regulations that only apply in their countries that have to do with pollution, security, and human rights.

Answer 5

Makes a lot of sense to me.