Ancient Egypt, the first greatest civilization on Earth was destroyed by change in environment in 400BC-behind the fall of many civilization, change in environment played critical role. With sharp rise in food price in South Asia, more bad news are pouring in--acidity of rain fall is increasing due to suspended CO2 aerosols in the 2 mile thick darkcloud floating on Indian subcontinent--Bangladesh and Eastern India will be worst hit by increasing acidity of rain fall.
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ACID rain will devastate the ecology of a sizable chunk of Asia within 20 years unless China invests huge amounts of money to control air pollution from its coal-fired power plants, says an international team of scientists. Experts agree that as China's economy develops, its demand for energy will increase dramatically, and much of that energy will probably come from the country's abundant coal reserves. However, coal-fired power plants and industrial boilers spew out large amounts of sulphur dioxide, one of the main sources of acid rain. This can decimate forests and kill aquatic organisms.
Gregory Carmichael, an air-quality researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and his colleagues in the US and Austria estimated acid deposition rates for eastern China, Korea and Japan from a computer model of sulphur emissions and how they travel through the atmosphere. They also took into account the alkalinity of soils throughout the region, since this will determine how they are affected by acid rain.
Their model predicts that if there is no change in emission-control policies, by 2020 the acid rain falling on vast regions of eastern and southeastern China, the Korean peninsula and Japan will overwhelm the soils' ability to cope. "We see levels of sulphur deposition that are equivalent to or greater than the levels seen in the `black triangle' of central Europe, where we've seen tremendous ecosystem impact," says Carmichael.
The researchers also tested what effect tighter emission-control policies might have on acid deposition two decades from now. Moderately stringent policies, such as installing state-of-the-art scrubbers that mop up sulphur dioxide on all new power plants and industrial smokestacks, efforts to encourage energy efficiency, and switching from coal to less polluting fuels, did little to lighten the gloomy picture for 2020.
As the team will report in the journal Ambio, only the most aggressive scenario lowered acid deposition enough to prevent severe damage. "Anything short of the best available technology is swamped by the growth of emissions," says Carmichael. This would mean combining all the above measures and fitting scrubbers to all major existing industrial plants.
This would cost China more than $23 billion per year over the next 20 years, the researchers estimate. While that kind of investment—roughly 2 per cent of China's gross domestic product—might be achievable in the West, it represents a huge jump in China's outlay for environmental protection, Carmichael says.
Even so, experts are hopeful. For one thing, the predictions did not take account of last year's economic downturn in Asia, which may sharply reduce any increase in emissions. And at the same time, Western countries may want to invest in Chinese industry, and this could provide capital for pollution controls. "A combination like that could make significant improvement, and the gloomy scenarios might not come to pass," says Ken Wilkening, an environmental policy analyst at the Nautilus Institute, a think-tank in Berkeley, California.
