The Hindu Business Line : ‘Delhi to Beijing skies turning darker owing to pollution’

NEW YORK: Asian cities from New Delhi to Beijing are getting darker, glaciers on the mighty Himalayas are melting faster and weather system is getting more extreme, a United Nations study has warned.

This alarming phenomenon has also spread its dragnet to other cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangkok, Tehran, Cairo, Seoul, Karachi, Dhaka and Shanghai.

What common citizens perceived for long as an early onset of winter, is not so. The UN study now says this is the result of burning of fossil fuels and biomass, the Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), made of soot and other man-made particles, are more tha n three km-thick.

The report compiled by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has said that the dimming is as much as between 10-25 per cent over cities like New Delhi, Karachi, Beijing and Shanghai. But the worst hit appears to be the Chinese city of Guangzhou, where sun light in winter had dimmed by more than 20 per cent since the 1970s.

For India as a whole, the dimming trend has been running at about two per cent per decade between 1960 and 2000 - more than doubling between 1980 and 2004, it adds. In China the observed dimming trend from the 1950s to the 1990s was about 3 to 4 per cen t per decade, with the larger trends after the 1970s, says the report.

It warns that the layer that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean, are in some cases and regions aggravating the impacts of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, a team of experts drawn from research centres in Asi a, including China and India, said. – PTI

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