With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

importance for a country entirely dependent on just a hundred days of
monsoon rains to water the crops that feed a billion people. A wider collapse
of the monsoon in South Asia would be a global calamity of immense
proportions. It could happen.
East Asia could be in the same boat—a situation that would threaten food
production for the world's most populous nation, China. North of the
Himalayas, there is a similar intense brown haze in winter, though it is
composed less of the smoke from burning cow dung and more of the sulfur
dioxide and other fumes from burning coal. And it is interrupting the sun's
rays. When Yun Qian and Dale Kaiser, of the U.S. government's Northwest
National Laboratory, in Richmond, Washington, studied the records of
Chinese meteorological sunshine recorders over the past fifty years, they
found a decline in sunshine since 1980 of 5 or 6 percent in the most polluted
south and east of the country.
And this decline is lowering temperatures. While global warming is
evident across much of China, daytime temperatures in the most polluted
regions have fallen by about 1°F. That, in turn, is altering rainfall patterns. In
the south of the country, the monsoon rains are becoming stronger, with
flooding in the great southern river, the Yangtze; whereas farther north, in
the catchment of the Yellow River, there is now less rainfall. Chinese records,
which are among the most meticulous in the world, suggest that this shift is
the biggest alteration in the country's rainfall patterns in a thousand years.
To some extent, links between the rainfall trends and the increasing brown
haze are conjecture. But when climate models are programmed to include a
strong Asian brown haze, many of them produce extra rainfall in southern