Glaciers lost to Asian pollution

The report triggered an appeal from UN Environment Program chief Achim Steiner, who urged the international community "to ever greater action" on tackling climate change.

Researchers led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, used an innovative technique to explore the Asian Brown Cloud. The plume sprawls across South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. It spews from tailpipes, factory chimneys and power plants, forests or fields that are being burned for agriculture, and wood and dung which are burned for fuel.

Emissions of carbon gases are known to be the big drivers of global warming, but the role of particulate pollution, such as brown clouds, is unclear.

Particulates, also called aerosols, cool the land or sea beneath them because they filter out sunlight, a process known as global dimming. But what they do to the air around them has been poorly researched. Some aerosols absorb sunlight and thus warm the atmosphere locally, while others reflect and scatter the light.

Professor Ramanathan’s team used three unmanned aircraft fitted with 15 instruments to monitor temperature, clouds, humidity and aerosols. The remote-controlled craft carried out 18 missions in March 2006, flying in a vertical stack over the Indian Ocean.

The planes flew simultaneously through the Brown Cloud at heights of 500m, 1500m and 3000m. They discovered that the cloud boosted the effect of solar heating on the air around it by nearly 50 per cent because its particles are soot, which is black and thus absorbs sunlight.

The researchers crunched data from greenhouse gases and from the brown clouds in a computer model of climate change.

The simulation estimated that, since 1950, South Asia’s atmosphere has warmed by 0.25C per decade at altitudes ranging from 2000m to 5000m above sea level — the height where thousands of Himalayan glaciers are located.

As much as half of this warming could be attributed to the effects of brown clouds, Professor Ramanathan said. "It is frightening, but I also look at the positive side, because it shows a way out of the conundrum," he said.

Roughly 60 per cent of the soot in South Asia comes from biofuel cooking and biomass burning, which could be eased by helping the rural poor get bottled gas or solar cookers, he said.

Professor Ramanathan’s data has been validated with measurements taken on the ground and in space by NASA

Perfecto referred to the idea that people would go hungry if farming went organic as “ridiculous.” She blames corporate interests in agriculture and research for the widely held assumption that you need to have these inputs to produce food.

Catherine Badgley, a research scientist in the Museum of Paleontology is a co-author of the paper. Badgley and Perfecto decided to look more deeply into organic farming when they were visiting farms in Southern Michigan and were struck by how much food organic farmers were producing. The researchers set about compiling data from published literature to investigate the two chief objections to organic farming – low yields and lack of organically acceptable nitrogen sources – objections that now seem invalid.

According to Perfecto, organic agriculture is ideally suited to the developing world because farmers in developing countries often do not have access to the expensive fertilisers and pesticides that farmers in developed countries use to produce high yields. Perfecto argues that a switch to organic farming in developing countries could rapidly improve yields.

The research used a global data set of 293 examples to compare the yields of organic versus conventional or low intensive food production. The researchers then estimated the average yield ratio of different food categories for the developed and developing world. This data was used to model the global food supply that could be grown organically on the current agricultural land base.

The results from the scientific modelling indicates that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population – and potentially an even larger population – without increasing the agricultural land base. This shows that organic farming could contribute significantly to the global food supply and at the same time reduce the negative environmental impact currently associated with agriculture.

The study joins an increasing body of research highlighting the benefits of organic farming. Last year another report had a similar message. After studying more than 280 projects in 57 of the world’s poorest countries, researchers found that organic farming could increase crop yields by 79 per cent.

Co-author of the 2006 report, Professor Jules Pretty from the University of Essex, told the BBC that methods without an adverse affect on local biodiversity allowed farmers to benefit from growing crops in healthy soil. It also reduces water useage.

“Soils that are higher in organic matter are better at holding water” Professor Pretty said. “If you have diverse and higher soil quality then it is better prepared to deal with drought conditions when access to water becomes a critical issue.”

Conventional farming is far more damaging to the environment – exacerbating soil erosion, greenhouse gas pollution, pest resistance and loss of biodiversity. The essentials of a healthy environment such as a stable climate, and clean air and water, are being lost through unsustainable farming practices.

Organic farming is less harmful to the environment, produces food with greater nutritional value and, as mounting scientific evidence shows, can triple yields. This could create dramatic changes in the developing world, where malnutrition and hunger are rife. As New Scientist commented back in 2001:

"Low-tech ‘sustainable agriculture,’ shunning chemicals in favour of natural pest control and fertiliser, is pushing up crop yields on poor farms across the world, often by 70 per cent or more…
A new science-based revolution is gaining strength built on real research into what works best on the small farms where a billion or more of the world’s hungry live and work… It is time for the major agricultural research centres and their funding agencies to join the revolution."

More support is needed in the developing world to empower communities to make the switch to organic methods and reap the benefits.

More information on the study can be found here.

The list of hazards: The effect on the capital’s complacent intelligentsia was akin to Moses’ descent from Sinai. In this eco-correct core of the national capital, that was no small feat. He made no bones about the hazards:

• infections by virulent pathogens, the ones we know about and a lot of new ones;

• possible contamination with oestrogen, which was almost impossible to break down, and antibiotic drugs; and

• ultimately the worst-case scenario, the possible catastrophic effects of system failure.

Indicator bacteria take time to be detected: "If coliforms (for example, E. coli) are present in the treated water, this implies faecal contamination and thus a failure of the system," he says. "Around the world, numerous outbreaks with water contaminated with viruses and cryptosporidiosis have occurred despite low or zero coliform counts. These indicator bacteria take one or two days to grow and identify." Because of this factor, Collignon was also worried there was no plan in the ACT for storage of the treated sewage water in aquifers, as in California.

‘Contaminated water would be in dams already’: "Presumably the water will be pumped directly back into our dams after treatment," he says. "This will mean that even when we detect with our treatment system, there will be little we can do about it because the contaminated water will already be in our dams."

The Australian, 21/7/2007, p. 29

This bottled water issue brings to light the apparent deceptive practices of some of the largest suppliers of bottled water products. By avoiding the honest labeling of the source of their water while relying on snow-capped mountain imagery, these companies quietly mislead consumers into thinking their water products are from a pristine, natural source such as a mountain spring.

CAI pressures PepsiCo to tell the truth

PepsiCo only agreed to tell the truth on their bottled water labels after being pressured by Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a non-profit organization that helps protect consumers from corporate abuse. See their website at http://www.stopcorporateabusenow.org

Reluctantly admitting a small part of the truth

Even then, the phrase "public water source" isn’t very descriptive. To some people, the phrase simply implies that Aquafina is itself a public water source. It’s not the same as admitting, "Aquafina comes from tap water," which would be a far more honest way to label the product. But PepsiCo seems to have no interest in advertising the source of their Aquafina product, and my guess is that the "public water source" text on the label will be really small and difficult to read. It’s much like the labeling of side effects of prescription drugs: They bury the bad news somewhere that most consumers won’t ever look.

Bottled water vs. public water infrastructure

The widespread shift towards bottled water products is increasingly causing consumers to lose faith in public water infrastructure, which ultimately leads to public reluctance to support investment in public water supplies. This concerns many cities who are worried that a lack of public support will cause funding for water infrastructure to erode.

My view on PepsiCo

Since this story has much to do with PepsiCo, I thought I would offer my personal opinion on this corporation. In my opinion, PepsiCo is a highly destructive corporation that is partially responsible for obesity, diabetes, depression and bone disorders among hundreds of millions of people around the world. Through its aggressive (and deceptive, in my opinion) marketing campaigns, lack of corporate ethics and ready willingness to exploit human beings for profit, PepsiCo has risen to be one of the most financially profitable yet ethically bankrupt organizations on the planet.

And as far as Pepsi’s water brand goes, I think it should be renamed to AquaFib.