Diminished monsoon rains in South Asia due to aerosol pollution

The International Business Times (Australia) via Reuters: Monsoon rains in South Asia have suffered considerable cut backs over the past four decades, according to new research findings released on Thursday, which put much of the blame to aerosol particles spewed by human activities.

In a study published by the journal Science, researchers concluded that at least 10 percent of monsoon rains that normally soak the South Asian region, specifically the central and northern parts of the Indian subcontinent, were lost from 1950 through 1999 due to increasing consumption of fossil fuels.

Rainfalls from the month of June to September saw significant declines in the region during much the observed period, the study showed, as they were dried up by particles and carbon dioxide emissions that experts said not only warm up the planet but also cause health problems such as asthma complications, heart ailments and lung cancers.

Yet according to study co-author Yi Ming of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, while aerosol particles generally brings about harmful effects to Earth's regular climate cycles, they also contribute in delaying the onset of planet warming.

Ming told Reuters that concentrates of aerosol particles could actually send back into space significant amounts of sunlight which then generates some sort of cooling mechanisms that negatively affects the air circulation between the Northern and Southern hemispheres....

A monsoon rain in Jaura, India, shot by Yann, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported