Home Fires In
India
Melt The Arctic Ice
By Geoffrey Lean
03 April 2005
The
Independent
Poor
women cooking family meals in India are helping to melt the Arctic icecap,
startling new studies show. Soot from their fires gets wafted into the
atmosphere to fall out on the ice thousands of miles away, hastening
its disappearance.
In a vivid demonstration
of interconnectedness, Nasa scientists have found that one-third of
the soot affecting the Arctic comes from South Asia. And Indian studies
show that nearly half of the soot emitted in the region comes from cooking
fires. Last November a major study by some 300 scientists found that
the icecap had thinned by nearly half over the past 30 years. It is
expected to disappear altogether by 2070, leaving open water all the
way to the North Pole.
The scientists concluded
that the Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
Mostly this is due to worldwide pollution by carbon dioxide and the
other "greenhouses gases" that cause global warming. But Dorothy
Koch of Nasa and Columbia University, New York, says that the new research
suggests that soot may also "have a significant warming impact
on the Arctic".
Tiny soot particles
both warm up the air, and darken the surface of the ice when they fall
out in the Arctic. The darker surface then absorbs more sunlight, causing
the ice to melt faster.
The Nasa scientists
were amazed to find that only one-third of the soot reaching the ice
came from the nearby industrialised countries of Europe, and North America
and the former Soviet Union.
A similar amount
results from burning vegetation around the world, with the final third
coming from South Asia. And the Indian subcontinent provided most of
the soot falling out on Greenland. "The standard knowledge has
always been that most of the soot comes from northern Europe and Asia,"
says Dr Koch. "We were surprised to find that much of it comes
from further south." It travels that far, says Nasa, because meteorological
conditions over the Indian subcontinent readily lift it into the upper
atmosphere to be transported to the North Pole, while the pollution
from northern industrialised countries stays closer to the ground.
South Asia puts
out more soot from its industrial chimneys than anywhere else on Earth,
but even this is dwarfed by the smoke from millions of cooking fires.
Research at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay has found that
more than 40 per cent of the soot in the air comes from cooking, with
another 13 per cent from forest fires. It concluded that the warming
effect of the soot was 10 times as great as greenhouse gases over the
Indian Ocean.
Even before this
discovery, the cooking fires of the poor were known to be one of the
world's gravest environmental hazards. A cocktail of poisonous chemicals
swirling in the smoke from dung or wood fires kills 2.2 million people
a year - mainly women cooking on them and their children.
The United Nations
Environment Programme says they are responsible for 5 per cent of the
world's disease - more than HIV/Aids - and cost the world economy up
to £400bn a year in lost production through sickness and death.
Yet worldwide two
billion people have to burn wood and dung because they cannot access
or afford modern forms of energy. Soot from the fires is also one of
the main causes of the so-called Asian Brown Cloud, a vast pall, two
miles thick, that hovers over the south of the continent, reducing the
amount of sunlight that reaches the ground by up to 15 per cent.
Now the Nasa study
shows that it may also have global effects. Dr Koch says that the soot
has "potentially long-term implications on climate patterns for
much of the globe". So as the Greenland ice-sheet melts, flooding
in the Thames estuary may be caused by the cooking of sparse meals far
away in the Indian countryside.
©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.