UN: Thousands of miles wide “brown clouds” threaten to destroy Himalayan glaciers

Articles — By forcechange on November 14, 2008 12:00 am

The UN Environment Program (UNEP) released a report on Thursday warning of the health and environmental dangers stemming from a phenomenon called Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABC).  ABCs are formed by the burning of fossil fuels, biofuels, and biomass.  These massive clouds can be 2 miles thick, thousands of miles wide, and absorb sunlight and deposit black soot on the ground.  There are currently three massive brown clouds suspended over Asia, which threatens to destroy that region’s glaciers.

The Himalayan glaciers supply drinking water for millions of people living downstream.  The major rivers of South Asia, including the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra are all fed by these frozen water supplies. 

However, due to a combination of greenhouse gas emissions and ABCs, the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly retreating.  Some estimates believe that they could be mostly gone by 2035.  If this were to occur, the effects on over a billion of the downstream residents would be disastrous.  The glaciers currently act as a type of reservoir– allowing a steady stream of water to flow into the population areas year round.  However, if the glaciers were to disappear, the rivers would turn into a volatile flood-drought cycle.

Last year alone, one of the biggest glaciers in the Himalayas, the Kolhai in Kashmir, retreated 22 meters.  According to the UNEP report, there are 13 megacities in the world that are hotspots for ABCs:  Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.  Pollution from these cities account for 10 percent of the total mass of all carbon particles in the atmosphere resulting from human activities.