Who Is Making These New Brown Clouds?

This doesn't sound promising:

A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

First global warming, now global browning?

One of the challenges of the environmental movement is to convince developing nations to skip the quick and dirty industrialization the west enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries and do it in a greener, more sustainable, and expensive way. That's why any "global" environmental pact that excludes China, India, etc. just doesn't make any sense.

Better ask a philostopher.