Indian scientists who took a lead role in the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) on the 'Asian Brown Haze', the results of which were released in London this week, say they are keenly aware that developed nations may well use this as a smokescreen in the wrangling over who is responsible for global warming - and who should do more to curb it.

"We have been careful to emphasise that haze from aerosols (fine particles suspended in the atmosphere) is a universal phenomenon and that unlike greenhouse gases, its effect on climate is largely local," A P Mitra, one of the three co-chief scientists of the INDOEX, told IPS.

The others scientists are V Ramanthan of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the United States and the Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

Mitra, a top scientist with India's prestigious National Physical Laboratory (NPL), a government facility that took a leading role in INDOEX, says that where the developing countries could flounder is the fact that the haze over the developed countries is white while that produced by the developing Asian and African countries is brown in colour.

But even then, he adds, the Asian haze has far different effects from greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, which cause global warming.

"The darker colour of the aerosol haze over the developing countries is the result of inefficient combustion from the burning of biomass and fossil fuels such as coal," said Mitra, speaking for the team of 100 Indian scientists involved in INDOEX. "But its effects are far different from greenhouse gases, starting with the fact that the latter has long-term effects on the atmosphere." Aerosols are particles about a millionth of a centimetre in diameter, consisting of sulphates, soot, organic carbon and mineral dust and are produced naturally and by human activities. Scientists who participated in INDOEX inferred that as much as 85 percent of aerosols are of 'anthropogenic' or man-made origin.

Mitra says that although aerosols have definite effects on climate, these are readily reversed by ways such as the beneficiation of coal, a major fossil fuel that is used in India and China, by encouraging better cooking practices, and by controlling automobile and industrial emissions.

"In the case of greenhouse gases, the developing countries are at the receiving end without contributing much to the problem - but in the case of aerosols, we are also the culprits," said Mitra. He adds that while there is a need to control aerosols emissions, it should not be used shift focus away from long-lasting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), says there is no way that the "survival emissions" of the poor who burn firewood to cook can be compared with the "luxury emissions" of the rich.

"Climate change policy is about creating the ecological space for developing countries to grow by limiting the emissions of the industrialised world which is continuing to emir far beyond its share of the global atmospheric space," she said.

According to Mitra, the good news is that steps to control greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol, which binds industrialised countries to cut emission of these gases, will automatically reduce aerosol emissions - which have yet to be covered by any international regime.

In cities like New Delhi, the brown haze is nothing new. For years now, especially in the winter months, the sheer opacity of the air has disrupted international air traffic and caused many to go down with respiratory ailments or aggravate conditions like asthma.

Researchers from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, the country's largest medical facility, estimated some years ago that breathing New Delhi's air in the winter months was the equivalent of smoking 20 packets of cigarettes every day.

However, over the last two years, an activist Supreme Court, concerned by the deteriorating health of the city's residents, stepped in with drastic measures including a ban on polluting industries and replacement of diesel for all public transport vehicles with compressed natural gas.

Mitra says such localised measures are all that are needed to control the brownishness in the Asian haze, a cocktail of ash, acids, aerosols and dust that now extends over 10 million square kilometres and covers large parts of South Asia, China and Indonesia.

It would seem that developing countries are not only the culprits but also the victims of brown haze. Research carried out in India indicate that the haze, which visibly intensifies in winter, could be reducing the winter rice harvest by as much as 10 percent by blocking out sunlight.

The Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), which shares the same campus as the National Physical Laboratory, has already carried out studies on the effect of atmospheric haze on rice crops in southern India and found that it causes a drop in yield of between five and 10 percent.

"Acids in the haze may, by falling as acid rain, have the potential to damage crops and trees. Ash falling on leaves can aggravate the impacts of reduced sunlight on the earth's surface. The pollution that is forming the haze could be leading to several hundreds of thousands of premature deaths as a result of higher levels of respiratory diseases," the INDOEX report said. Mitra says the haze could have a serious effect on rainfall distribution and the timely onset of monsoon, on which millions of rice farmers on the sub-continent are dependent.

Economists are still calculating the costs of an unexpectedly delayed monsoon over large parts of India, which has resulted in droughts in large parts of the country and severe crop damage.

The non-arrival of the annual south-west monsoon in July this year has been attributed to climate change by experts such as R K Pachauri, recently elected chief of the Geneva-based Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Indian Meteorological Department says that July has been the driest in a hundred-year period. The drought over northern and western India is running into the third year, although other parts of the country and Bangladesh have abundant rainfall and even flooding.

Copyright 2002 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by IPS-Inter Press Service. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of IPS-Inter Press Service.

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