Canada Free Press -- ARCHIVES

Because without America, there is no free world.

Return to Canada Free Press

Brown Clouds, toxic clouds, Asia

Al Gore's head in wrong kind of clouds

By Judi McLeod

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Bubba's buddy Al Gore's got his head in the wrong kind of clouds.

While Gore works to rid the world of Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb, while leaving his well-lighted Tennessee mansion looking like the proverbial you-know-what, a giant toxic cloud in Asia may bring floods and droughts to some two billion people.

There are storm clouds gathering around Gore's contention that greenhouse gases are the main culprits in destroying earth, as we know it.

While Gore has Democrat friends like Senator Barbara Boxer leading delegations of 10 senators on a late-July trip to Greenland "for a first-hand look at the devastating effects of global warming", it's unclear whether the Inconvenient Truth celebrity even has an inkling about the massive Asian cloud.

Al Gore, Brown Clouds "Words like "awesome", "majestic" and "incredible" don't go far enough to describe what we saw as our boat rode alongside icebergs as large as coliseums. These icebergs--average age 9,000 years--have broken off an ice stream and are now melting at an astonishing rate. The entire Greenland ice sheet is 1,200 miles long by 500 miles wide and, unless we act now, this melting will lead to a catastrophic rise in sea levels," Boxer wrote in a recent press release.

Experts say some of the rivers of polluted air coming from the Asian cloud are "wider than the Amazon" and "deeper than the Grand Canyon".

"Scientists have already observed that two thirds of the 46.000 glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking leading to increasingly severe floods downstream and eventually, to widespread drought. Greenhouse gases were previously thought to be the main cause of the problem, which threatens the sources of Asian's nine main rivers--including the Indus, the Ganges and the Yangtze. (Timesonline, August 3, 2007).

"A research team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California says that the Asian Brown Cloud--made up of gases and suspended particles known as aerosols--is just as much to blame."

Barbara Boxer and the team of politicians she recently led on a fact finding global warming mission to Greenland, need to do their homework in Geography.

"They call it the Asian Brown Cloud. Anyone who has flown over South Asia has seen it--a vast blanket of smog that covers much of the region.

"(Scientists) say that it is causing Himalayan glaciers to melt, with potentially devastating consequences for more than two billion people in India, China, Bangladesh and other downstream countries.

"In a study published yesterday by Nature, the British journal, they say that black soot particles in the cloud are absorbing the Sun's heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers.

"My one hope is that this finding will intensify the focus of Asian scientists and policy makers on the glacier issue," Veerabhdran Ramanathan, who led the research, told The Times. "These glaciers are the source for major river systems, so at least two billion people are directly involved in this."

The cloud is an enormous plume of smoke from factories, power plants and wood or dung fires that stretches across the Indian subcontinent, into SouthEast Africa.

The professor said that some aerosols in the cloud reflected sunlight, cooling the earth beneath in a process known as "global dimming" that is also worrying climate change experts.

Others absorbed heat radiation from the Sun because of their dark color.

As long as the toxic cloud with its black soot particles are absorbing the Sun's heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers, Gore and company should stop measuring cow burps and blaming John Travolta's fleet of jets.

When Professor Ramanathan put his data into a computer model for climate change, it estimated that Himalayan temperatures had risen 0.25C (0.45F) a decade since 1950--twice the average rate of global warming. "If we continue to use outdated technology to achieve industrialization, this is going to get worse," Ramanathan said. "But there is some good news." Unlike greenhouse gases, which can stay in the atmosphere for 200 years, aerosols drop to the ground after two to three weeks.

"Asian countries can therefore tackle the problem relatively quickly if they find alternatives to fuels such as coal, diesel, wood and dung, which account for the majority of aerosols in the air."

"The main cause of climate change is the build-up of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels," said Achim Steiner, the United Nations under-secretary-general and the executive director of UNEP. "But brown clouds, whose environmental and economic impacts are beginning to be unraveled by scientists, are complicating and aggravating their effects."

Meanwhile, Al Gore has his head up in the clouds, but still doesn't acknowledge Asia's destructive brown one.

Made-in-China massive air pollution ignored by global warming gurus Al Gore & Maurice Strong

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


Pursuant to Title 17 U.S.C. 107, other copyrighted work is provided for educational purposes, research, critical comment, or debate without profit or payment. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for your own purposes beyond the 'fair use' exception, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Views are those of authors and not necessarily those of Canada Free Press. Content is Copyright 1997-2018 the individual authors. Site Copyright 1997-2018 Canada Free Press.Com Privacy Statement