Air pollution and climate change both reduce Indian rice harvests

摘要

An ever-changing mix of anthropogenic pollutants alters the chemical and physical properties of the atmosphere and thereby causes potentially negative impacts on human society. To establish a robust cause-and-effect chain, all the way from a particular kind of emission to its economic and/or social impacts, remains a transdisciplinary tour de force with several risks of failure along the way. The first major link along such a chain, that between increased aerosol loads ("atmospheric brown clouds," or ABC) over the Indian subcontinent, globally increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, and regional changes in temperature, rainfall, and surface-near radiation, requires consideration of chemical and physical processes, ranging in scale from microscopic particles to atmospheric flows across the entire continent and its surrounding oceans.