With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

The term "brown haze" was coined by scientists during the first
investigation of the phenomenon. In 1999, some two hundred scientists
taking part in the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) assembled in the
Maldives for a three-month blitz of measuring the air over India and the
Indian Ocean from aircraft and ships. The results were a surprise, even to
those who had planned the project. Every winter, from November to April, a
pall of smog more than a mile thick occupied a huge area south of the
Himalayas, stretching from Nepal through India and Pakistan, out over the
Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, and even south of the equator as far as
the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. It covered 4 million square miles, an
area seven times the size of India.
"To find thick brown smog 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, and over the
coral islands of the Maldives, was a shock," says Paul Crutzen, one of the
masterminds of the project. Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for predicting a
dramatic thinning of the ozone layer fifteen years before it happened, said
the haze had a similar potential to cause "unpleasant environmental
surprise" in India and beyond. The haze could, he said, have "very major
consequences" for the atmosphere.
The INDOEX findings proved controversial in India, which felt singled
out for criticism. Why pick on us? locals asked. Indian government scientists
issued a detailed and largely spurious "rebuttal." The INDOEX scientists
quickly switched to discussing the "Asian brown haze"—and quite rightly, for
the haze is an Asia-wide phenomenon. But when I used that term at a
meeting in India in mid-2005, I was quietly hissed. Even mentioning an Asian
haze is considered politically incorrect today. Why single out Asia? people
ask. In fact, antagonism has become so great that many Indian scientists