One Day Breathing In Mumbai Equivalent To Smoking One Pack Of Cigarettes

[hatrack]

"The Indian city of Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is home to one of Asia's largest slums and endures among the worst air quality on earth. Half the city's population lacks running water or electricity, and the smoke from countless wood-burning cooking fires joins with the acrid haze from two-stroke auto rickshaws, diesel buses, and coal-fired power plants to all but choke the city. Breathing Mumbai's air, reports the Lonely Planet travel guide, is equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. Comparable air quality wraps New Delhi, Bangalore, and 69 of India's 70 principal cities year-round, according to a 1997 study by India's Central Pollution Control Board.

But the nation's air-pollution problem doesn't stop at street level -- or, for that matter, at the level of city, region, or even nation. U.S. military pilots flying over the Indian Ocean in the 1980s were the first to detect a large, dense cloud of soot floating far above Asia. Since then, the so-called Asian Cloud has shown up regularly in satellite photographs.

In 1999, a team of scientists funded by the National Science Foundation began a $25 million surveillance of the Indian Ocean. The team discovered that the Asian Cloud hangs at an elevation of one to two miles above the earth's surface and covers 10 million square miles -- about the size of the continental United States, and only slightly smaller than the ozone hole at its peak in 2000. The cloud floats over the northern Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea west of Mumbai, and the Bay of Bengal. The source is air pollution from India and China, produced by hundreds of millions of wood, coal, and oil fires -- a dense haze blown out to sea during the winter monsoon season.

EDIT

The political response to revelations about the Asian Cloud by Ramanathan and others has been largely hostile. Ramanathan's studies of the phenomena were made public in the summer of 2002, and his future, and the future of Asian Cloud research, has since been threatened by Indian politicians who were incensed that their country was being singled out. India's environment and forests minister, T.R. Baalu, even defended the Asian Cloud with a rather twisted bit of environmental-justice illogic. He claimed that India's stupendous emissions are a "necessity" because its people are poor and have no choice but to burn animal dung, wood, and charcoal. True enough -- but it hardly explains why the minister stayed silent regarding India's lack of rigorous auto-emission controls and the related health problems stemming from poor air quality and borne largely by the poor. The political outcry has thus far resulted in turning a blind eye to the cloud -- and in a loss of funding for the U.N.'s INDOEX work. Some United Nations research will likely continue, but the U.N. has cautiously replaced the term "Asian Cloud" with the generic phrase: "Atmospheric Brown Cloud" so as not to implicate any nation -- or even continent -- as the source."

EDIT

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2004/09/28/motavalli-cloud/index.html

[KurtNYC]

1. So whichever programmer over there has my job will need

my health benefits too.