The Asian cloud has spurred a run on the sales of air conditioners
and air purifiers in Malaysia, and led to a new cocktail known as “the
haze.” Air and auto crashes were blamed on the poor visibility under
the cloud.
Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric and
ocean sciences at the Scripps Center for Clouds, Chemistry and
Climate, is co-director of the so-called Indian Ocean Experiment
(INDOEX) with Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for
Chemistry in Germany. “The local effect is well-known,” Ramanathan
says, “because wintertime haze can sometimes close airports in India
and Pakistan for weeks. But it was not known that it had spread over
the entire ocean. It stunned us to discover how pervasive these aerosols
are.”
In August 2002, Ramanathan and Crutzen released the first com-
prehensive scientific report on the phenomenon under the banner of
the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), “The Asian
Brown Cloud: Climate and Other Environmental Impacts.” Despite the
dispassionate scientific language, it was a devastating document, based
on INDOEX studies from a team of more than two hundred scientists
in Europe, India, and the United States. Nearly 700,000 deaths world-
wide are related to air pollution every year, it said, and the number
could climb to eight million by 2020. The 2-mile thick cloud of pollu-
tion may already be causing the premature deaths of a half-million
mothers and children under 5 in India each year, it added. The report
sees a particularly ominous effect on rice production, which could
decrease by 5 to 10 percent.
Dr. Ramanathan described the haze in an interview as “a compli-
cated chemical soup” of soot, sulfates, nitrates, ash and dust, generated
by emissions from coal-burning power plants, biofuel cooking and
diesel engines.” The source is not a mystery, but the effect on the
oceans is still unknown. “The haze causes a loss of sunlight striking
the surface of the sea, and we are just starting research on how that
affects photosynthesis and ocean plankton,” Ramanathan says. “One
thing we know is that it is certainly not ‘fog.’ The people who call it that
are in massive denial. This is not a natural problem—it was created by
us.”
Asia 87