“A POPULATION of a billion and a half depends on this rain,” says Veerabhadran Ramanathan. Unfortunately, the South Asia monsoon that brings this rain may be losing strength thanks to global warming and the brown haze of pollution that hangs over the Indian Ocean.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. If global warming was heating the Indian Ocean uniformly, then the result ought to be increased evaporation and higher monsoon rainfall over south Asia. Instead, rainfall over India has decreased by 5 to 8 per cent since the 1950s.
Now, Ramanathan and colleague Chul Eddy Chung of the Scripps Institution of…
