Vocabulary development: word building:

Exercise 1. Translate the original and derivative words:

verb	noun (abstract)	noun (person)	adjective
contaminate	contamination	-	-
irritate	irritant irritation	-	irritable irritative
emit	emission	-	emissive
disrupt	disruption	-	disruptive
evaporate	evaporation evaporator	-	evaporative
precipitate	precipitance precipitation	-	precipitant
interfere	interference	-	-
-	avail availability	-	available
implicate	implication	-	implicit implicitly (adv)

Text Air contamination

Haze and airborne dust – the visible portions of air pollution – were once seen as minor irritants, but they are gathering force like a coming storm. In August 2002, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released “The Asian Brown Cloud: Climate and other Environmental Impacts”, which describes a “new scenario” of air pollution in South Asia, involving haze, smog, ozone and global warming. A little later the Asian Brown Cloud was ranked in terms of its implications for health, business and politics.

The term “Asian Brown Cloud” originally referred to a brownish soup of pollutants and particles over India from forest fires, the burning of farm wastes, and huge increases in emissions from vehicles, industries, and wood-burning cookstoves. But new satellite data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show that the Asian Brown Cloud is part of a much larger-scale pollution event encompassing most of East and Southeast Asia. The haze is heaviest between December and May, the main home – heating season, but is getting worse year round.

The UNEP report was based largely on the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), conducted by scientists in the United States, India and Europe. INDOEX examined the movement of aerosols specifically over South Asia (comprising India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka). An INDOEX report suggested that aerosols in the haze could seriously disrupt the Earth’s cycle of evaporation and precipitation. By interfering with sunlight’s breakdown of hydroxyl radicals, the haze could affect water availability and crop production.

The UNEP report draws preliminary conclusions about air pollution effect on the South Asian environment and the implications for human health, agriculture, and climate change. For example, the report states that the haze reduces natural solar energy levels by about 10 %, with significant consequences for farm yields, namely for rice. The report also cites figures for deaths worldwide related to air pollution.

Indian scientists do not consider the Asians to be blame for pollution, Western countries have polluted the air for decades at far higher rates.

The most scientists agree that the report’s importance lies in the public recognition that it has stimulated, and say the problem of transboundary pollution is likely to grow. The director of observatories for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory says that this phenomenon is an international, integrated problem.