At least it is interesting in so far as it is complicated story of rampant pollution with complex impact on the living things here on the small blue planet.

The AP has [1] carried a story this past week about the Asian brown cloud and UN concerns that this toxic cloud of pollutants could cause more problems with our food production on this little world.

This is really an old story.  The smog of Los Angeles a generation ago was probably not very different from the Asian brown cloud.  Brown clouds are also reported with regard to [2] Phoenix and [3] Denver. The Denver link goes into how the brown cloud was reduced and that’s a good story.

The real lesson of the Asian Brown Cloud is that there really is no such thing as my backyard and any attempt to control growth and industry that does not see the world in it’s reality as one ecosystem, an amazing environment that has the capacity to support an amazing diversity of living things, really a Gaia organism of unimaginable complexity, is doomed to failure.

You can’t live in a pristine environment and consume products made in China and not be intimately connected to the Asian Brown Cloud.  There is no free lunch.

The brown cloud is a complex story.  Clouds of soot can offset global warming by letting less sunlight reach the ground and then less heat builds up in our troposphere.  That’s a good thing, right?  Well, maybe.

If the clouds of soot are composed of particles that cause many people to die due to pulmonary and cardiac disease, then maybe this is not the solution to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It’s just a different paradigm of death and toxicity related to unsustainable human activities.