Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [97]
Winds travel. We know this from the global models. Longdistance winds govern the health of our planet, but wind's longdistance travels aren't always benign, and some of the things we humans are doing to them makes their ill effects worse. It's not hard to collect examples. It is harder, in fact, to ignore examples, since so many of them turn up in news reports, most of them in some way "true," though often reported out of context.
In the late summer of 2002 I had been filming a documentary about water in north China, on the fringes of the Gobi, and had noticed that the air overhead seemed curiously opaque, even milky; there was no blue, even on clear days. This was more evidence of China's inexorable desertification and consequent dust storms. Alas, Chinese efforts to correct the problem may be making it worse—in mandating that marginal land must be used for farmland, the government simply encouraged practices that caused the newly plowed soil to blow away. In 2001 NASA had tracked a massive dust storm originating in north China big enough to briefly darken skies and cause hazy sunsets over North America as little as five days later; a month after I left to return home, NASA's satellites once again picked up an immense dust cloud, more than a mile thick, moving eastward over Korea and into the Pacific. Clouds like it seemed to be becoming part of the Chinese calendar. Similarly massive dust clouds had occurred in 1997, 1998, and again in 2000; in fact, the Chinese Meteorological Agency counted twenty-three major dust storms in the 1990s, a substantial increase over previous decades. Chinese dust—heavily tainted by pollutants such as coal-combustion aerosols, ozone, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and heavy metals such as mercury—has inflicted itself on Korea and Japan for decades; in Korea it is sometimes called spring's gatecrasher. Chinese dust may have been the origin of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease on Korea's west coast.
The same summer, 2002, a United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) study confirmed the existence of another pollution cloud, two miles thick, over much of southern Asia. Klaus Topfer of UNEP said in Vijay Vaitheeswaran's Power to the People: "The haze is the result of forest fires, the burning of agricultural waste, dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers burning wood, cow dung and other biofuels . . . There are also global implications—not least because a parcel like this can travel halfway around the globe in a week." Every year in developing countries, at least a million people die from outdoor air pollution. "Disaster is not something for which the poorest have to wait; it is a frequent occurrence," Cambridge University professor Partha Das-gupta is quoted as saying in Power to the People.2
Indian researchers have studied the high concentrations of black carbon (a.k.a. soot) over the Indian Ocean, and traced it back to biofuels, mostly cattle dung, used for cooking fires by millions of people in the subcontinent. Only by changing the way India cooks, the study suggested, could the country help mitigate climate change. They acknowledged that change was less than likely3
Even such mundane human byproducts as dandruff have been found in the pollution clouds. A study in 2005 found that "particles injected directly from the biosphere" are a major component of atmospheric aerosols. Examples given were fur fibers, dandruff, skin fragments, plant fragments, pollen, spores, bacteria, algae, viruses, and protein crystals. All these, the study suggested, have a substantial impact on climate through cloud formation—they attract water and make excellent ice nuclei, which triggers rainfall and removes water from the atmosphere.4
A 2003 UN. study on the North American environment, which tiresomely predicted,