Asian pollution is a global problem. Millions of tonnes of soot, sulphur dioxide and other pollutants are fast-tracked into the stratosphere each year by the summer monsoon.
Beleaguered climate scientist Phil Jones from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, yesterday answered his critics during questions from a British parliamentary committee.
Ever since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report on the impacts of climate change was discovered to contain a major error - that the Himalayan glaciers will be largely gone by 2035 - there has been a media feeding frenzy to find other mistakes. But it misses the point to focus on individual errors sprinkled through the report's 1000 or so pages.
Glaciologists are arguing over how a highly contentious claim about the speed at which glaciers are melting came to be included in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Climate scientists are reeling from the discovery that someone has hacked into the email archive of one of their most prestigious research centres, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK, custodian of the most respected global temperature record.
Two-hundred-and-fifty billion tonnes. That's the bottom line. If we are serious about avoiding dangerous climate change, 250,000 megatonnes is the maximum amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere. Keep going at current rates and we will have used up that ration in 20 years.
