With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

the haze reduces the amount of solar radiation reaching the ground in India
by an average of about 22 watts per 10.8 square feet. That is a reduction of
about a tenth, and would be enough to cause massive cooling. The statistic is
literally true, but only part of the story. For only about 7 watts of that
radiation is lost entirely, "backscattered" into space. The other 15 watts is
absorbed by the soot in the aerosols and re-radiated, heating the atmosphere.
Thus, though the radiation budget is much altered, the cooling effect is much
less than it might otherwise be. Even so, in winter it is sufficient both to
counteract global warming and to cool the air across much of India by an
average of about O.9°F. In summer, when the pollution is rained out in the
monsoon and the skies are clearer, temperatures have risen in recent
decades by about the same amount, in line with the global average.
The consequences don't end there, says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, the
Indian scientist who, with Crutzen, masterminded INDOEX from the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In particular, the cooling impact of the
haze over the Indian land surface delays the heating of the land that
stimulates the monsoon winds. It thus threatens the lifeblood of India: the
monsoon rains.
There seems to be some confusion among scientists about the Indian
monsoon. Scientists investigating the brown haze all claim that the monsoon
has weakened in recent decades, and they see this as a likely effect of the
haze. But researchers investigating global warming are equally certain that it
has increased in intensity. What undisputed evidence there is suggests that
the monsoon rains have become more intense in the traditionally wetter
south of India, where the haze is thinner, but have diminished in the north,
where the haze is thickest. How those trends develop is obviously of vast